Recently had a sweat session with a guy called Johnathan on a microstakes chat group I frequent. I didn’t play live, but instead zipped through a previously played session using the PokerTracker replayer. I think this worked quite well – I wanted to do it for several reasons;

• My play would have been natural, not effected because someone was watching
• We could concentrate on one table at a time
• We could skip hands where I folded preflop

The final reason is only partly a good idea – obviously you miss what the other players have done at the table. Fortunately I hadn’t filtered the session on ‘put money in’ so we did at least see hands up to the point where I folded, and it was these hands that my sweat partner bought up a good point.

In several instances there had been a couple of limpers and I folded on the button (with complete trash like 83o etc). He pointed out that since I was on the button it was still worth raising while I was building up a picture of who my opponents were. Whether they fold or call (and then what they called with) was golden information when I had no other history on these players. He pointed out that I should be really taking notes on players and try to classify them (even at NL5). As the session went on, he made me classify various players at the table – then in later hands this information made it vastly more clear why certain players were doing what they were doing. So I was convinced.

This morning I opened up a couple of tables and tried to put it into action. The note taking facility on PokerTracker isn’t that great (or at least, I haven’t got the hang of it) so I just opened up notepad and figured that would do while I only had two tables open. The first difficulty was getting time to write the notes – it was like being a multitabler newbie all over again. I need to develop some acronyms and make the notes more concise.

It worked fairly well. Players rapidly showed whether they were calling stations or loose passive way before my HUD kicked in. I adapted to what I was seeing and ended up with a flawless session. It was perhaps an easy session though – everyone seemed to be huge stereotypes of what I was looking for, and even without the note taking I would have noticed how passive some of the guys to my left were. However as a first go I’m still a believer. Furthermore, it was actually fun – I had wondered if going back down to 2 tables would be dull, but to be honest it reawakened the player in me – I suspect that multitabling has really dulled my poker senses.

What I need to do now is stick to a low number of tables and improve my speed at getting those notes down. I guess I’ve got to nail down PokerTracker’s note facility, and come up with a clear and sensible notation.

Update: So what does this mean;

Meteoric’s Looseness vs. Win Rate

this one too;

Meteoric’s Aggression vs. Win Rate

All the ABC poker guides say tight play is better than loose (at NL5), and agression is better than passivity. If that’s true, why don’t those scatter plots slope down from left to right? A few outliers in the top chart slightly give that impression, but really taking the image as a whole it’s generally fairly symmetric.