Most basic of all- What is your system for remembering cards?

[stupid101]

I have a hard time remembering, give me a system please.

ty
Pride

[Red_Diamond]

I don't use any system. First thing I do is see if I'm live before I enter. If I enter, then obviously I've been taking a good look around...

Everything comes natural to me. Ranks & suits... I can't remember a phone number to save my life, but cards is another story.

[RubbishCards]

There are a couple of links in the FAQ to some old archive posts about this.

I try to sort the upcards into ascending order, and repeat the sequence (ignoring suits) 4 or 5 times in my head. e.g. the dead cards are J65KJ2. I just repeat 256JJK, 256JJK, 256JJK, 256JJK in my head, and hopefully I can still remember it a few minutes later. While I'm waiting for a slow player to act, I might rattle off a few more, just keep thinking 256JJK, 256JJK.

For suits, I just try to remember if one or two suits are particularly dead on 3rd, but I'm not going to remember the suit of each upcard, or my head would explode, like in the movie Scanners.

[Ray Zee]

you can do all the simple things to get a start. but if you want to be good you need to learn to know every single card exposed and also to infer some of the ones not seen.

start with a deck and roll over cards until you find what you can remember. do that until perfect then add another card. keep it up until you can do as many as needed.

[PokrLikeItsProse]

One technique that I've heard is to memorize cards as they are folded and not as they are dealt, although I get confused when players fold out of turn.

I use chunking. I don't remember a bunch of different cards abstractly, but try to form relationships between cards. I remember that the two guys to my left between them folded a six and a seven collectively on third street, or that the two older fellows both folded on fourth street and their hands included both red jacks, an eight, and a six. Most people can only remember a certain amount of short-term information and what you try to do is break it down into manageable chunks. So, if it is fourth street and a player is showing the eight of clubs and the nine of diamonds and I recall that a player folded the seven of hearts and another folded the ten of hearts on third street and no one seems to be going for a flush, I merge the information so that think that a player is holding 89 with a seven and ten dead. Not only do I compress information, but I also think about how the cards are related in the way I compress them.

I think I can generally recall most of the ranks and the colors. I am still working on getting the suits down in all cases, but I do tend to fix in my memory who is not so live if he is possibly starting with three-suited cards on third street, even if I can't always remember if he has two or three of his suit dead (if he is, in fact, going for the flush).

I still have problems differentiating between spades and clubs in the boards of players at the other end of the table, but that's eyesight rather than memory. I wish Mike Caro had been more successful in popularizing the four-color deck.

[halhal]

What about pen and paper? (I'm not being facetious here.)

Live players: do casinos have rules for Stud games not allowing this?

Presumably, on-line it's either OK or not enforceable to ban. So if you're serious about making money on-line, why not use pen and paper? Or open up Notepad on the computer, or enter the dead cards into a simulator or poker aid(not sure there are such a thing) while playing?

[Andy B]

Live, no one writes the cards down. If you start writing all the cards down while playing online, you're not going to do yourself any favors if you aspire to play in live games.

DocAZ's old posts linked in the FAQ are great. I used to organize the folded cards in my head by rank, but in the last couple of years I've found that organizing them by suit makes them stick better. I tend to compress the information as the hand goes along.

[Wetdog]

[ QUOTE ]
Live, no one writes the cards down. If you start writing all the cards down while playing online, you're not going to do yourself any favors if you aspire to play in live games.

DocAZ's old posts linked in the FAQ are great. I used to organize the folded cards in my head by rank, but in the last couple of years I've found that organizing them by suit makes them stick better. I tend to compress the information as the hand goes along.

[/ QUOTE ]

They are now dead links. Probably because of the forum upgrade coming next month?

[Andy B]

Fabulous. Has anyone saved them to their hard-drive? I haven't had any luck with the search function in the new archives. Knowing a date and a subject line would be a big help.

[PokrLikeItsProse]

[ QUOTE ]
What about pen and paper? (I'm not being facetious here.)


[/ QUOTE ]

I couldn't write fast enough when I used to try and write down all the hands played and board cards in hold em. There's no way I can keep track of all the folded cards in stud without developing some sort of shorthand notation.