Note taking when playing without a HUD
One of the best sites to play 6+ / Short Deck is GG poker. There is plenty of action and rakeback is good, compared to the nearly zero percent PokerStars offers you. The one disadvantage is that you can’t use a HUD when playing, so you are missing a lot of information, especially if you are playing 3+ tables. So note taking and using player tags is extremely important if you want to have a great win-rate.
A lot of regs just tag someone a fish because they made a non-GTO play, which is dangerous, because there are many categories of recreational players, and tagging someone a ‘’fish’’ will not tell you how to take advantage of his lack of 6+ knowledge. Note taking is a skill in itself, so I will show you how to make good notes and how to classify players.
If I had to choose the most important thing taking notes about, it would be preflop raising: from which positions do people raise preflop and what sizing do they choose.
Example:
5-handed, everyone has 100A. UTG folds and UTG+1 makes it 8x preflop. It goes to showdown and he flips over KK.
In this situation I would make a note which would look like this:
‘’utg1 8x KK 100a 5h’’
That means raised under the gun 8x with KK 5handed while 100a deep.
It just allows us to read the note quicker, while we have to make decisions on other tables.
Why is this so important?
Just this one hand tells us that:
1) This player is probably unbalanced when it comes to his preflop range. He is probably raising good hands and limping bad hands, which means he is probably not a regular.
2) Since he is raising big with good hands, his limps are much weaker so we can attack them.
3) We can easily put him on a range when he raises and play hands that can crack QQ+ (98s, T9s etc), while folding hands preflop that do badly against a strong preflop range (QJo, KQo, AJo etc)
Let say one orbit later the same player is on UTG+1 again and now opens 3x from UTG+1 again with you on the BTN. Everyone calls his preflop raise. What would you do in this situation with ATs? AJo? KQs A9s? Fold since he is raising again?
The answer is no. You can go allin with all of these hands. Because we know that his standard opening sizing was 8x with KK, 3x is almost always going to be a weaker hand and since everyone else just called, there is about 20 antes of dead money in the middle. The 3x raiser will almost always fold and so will everyone behind them. The chance that CO called that 3x raise with a strong hand like AK is pretty much 0%, so we can pick up 20 antes for free.
Of course, we are generalizing. It’s possible he just opens random sizings and might raise 8x with KK in one hand and 3x on the next one. It’s still a profitable play, since we will be right most of the time, and in case we were wrong and he flips over KK, our A9s still has 44%. That’s the good thing about being agressive in 6+, you always have a decent equity if you get caught preflop.
All of this was possible, because we paid attention and made a note about a player’s sizings.
The second most importand thing to figure out is a recreational player’s VPIP. It’s very easy to play against someone who has a 75% vpip, you just have to notice when someone plays too many hands.
Say you are in the hand. Villain limps UTG. Three other players limp also. Nothing happens till the river, everyone shows their hand and that’s the end of this small pot, but you notice that villain limped J7o from UTG. This is very far from a normal UTG limping range, so I will make a note
‘’L utg 100a J7o 5h’’
That means ‘’Limped J7 offsuit under the gun five handed 100 antes deep’’.
Okay, so he limps a little too loose, how can we take advantage of that?
Example:
Villain limps UTG. Everyone folds. Regular on the CO limps as well and we are on the BTN with QJo. Normally this would be an easy check, since we want to play this hand in position and we don’t want anyone to limp / shove, especially since we are playing against an UTG range, which is the tightest. But because we know UTG limps too wide, we can ISO-raise very wide in this spot. We are not risking getting limp / shoved from UTG and from CO (since regs don’t trap on CO). QJo becomes a great ISO-raise hand in this case. Either we get two folds and we pick up 7 antes for free,, or someone calls our ISO-raise and we are in position with a very playable hand and range advantage.
These are two examples where we can win pots just by paying attention, finding a weakness and taking advantage of that. In both examples, this aggression will work because other regulars will overfold when you are showing strength by reraising allin and in the other example, attacking an UTG limp, since you are showing aggression against a strong range, people will think you are strong too. The truth is you just paid more attention and saw that villain was weak due to note taking.
Article by „coixdog“. If u want more tips on note taking or other topics, you can book coaching lessons with our coach coixdog on Discord or contact us at contact@sixplusholdem.com
