Note taking = Really, really boring...

[diebitter]

shorthand is very useful, but to be honest, if I make notes I'm one/two tabling, and that means I have the time and patience to be quite verbose and descriptive. This in turn builds a much better picture of a player than shorthand does. To some degree, you have to guard against shorthand making you think the guy plays the same all the time, and makes your playback a little more mechanical than it should.

I hope this makes sense. I'm not saying there isn't a place for shorthand, you just need to take care it doesn't make your responses botlike.


I think a great balance is shorthand at the top, longhand below - so if you have time to read the verbose stuff great, but at the very least you have a quick and useful snapshot.

[BotOnTilt]

There was some very good posts on the subject in a well, I think it was Aba20

Personally I have been a bit lazy with notetaking lately, mainly due to the fact that I've been bonuswhoring and I don't intend to play on one site for more than 5k hands, so the only notes I make are like "fishy" for players who play for stacks with crap, "bets heavily with set" "pushed nuts" and "bluffs".

Back when I played NL5 and NL10 I also made a lot of notes on tendencies of players, like c-bets 1/2 pot when missed flop, pots when hit. Those where worth a ton, but they mean that I need to pay a lot of attention to the games even when I'm not playing.

[BigDan9]

Yeah - I didn't mean that all my notes are short-hand. I've got some more detailed stuff in there, too. I agree, they're really good for building up a picture, whereas the shorter stuff is useful for on the spot decisions.

One thing I've also done occasionally is to use Poker Tracker to analyse particular regulars in detail. Just pick a range of hands that WTSD, replay them and get some notes down. That way, you don't have to worry quite so much about taking notes while you're playing...