How to remember a poker hand for later review

General Memory Chat
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I know there have been posts like this before, but they’re rather old, so I’m starting a new thread. I play Texas Hold ‘Em. You don’t have to be a poker player, I’ll explain everything. After each hand that I’m involved in (win or lose) I want to note it in my phone or notebook with all the relevant information. If you ask a pro how you played a hand, I guarantee you will often leave out pertinent info, and the answer will ALWAYS be “it depends”. So I want to record it all to review hands using solvers, discussing with a poker coach, etc. I record winning hands because sometimes you make mistakes and just get lucky, and that reinforces weaknesses. On m’y losing hands, was it variance (he was 30% to win I was 70%? Or did I make a mistake by not raising or folding? I record the hand during the next hand. So I only have to remember the info for about 5 mins. The thing I have the hardest time with is remembering the (up to) 5 community cards on the board. See below.

All the relevant in formation to record is as follows:

My position: when it’s my turn to act. Later positions have the advantage of knowing how previous players acted (fold, bet, raise, reraise, etc). Last position is the dealer. Position is a HUGE advantage, and you can profitably play more hands the later the position you’re in.

Opponents’ positions: do they have position on me or vice versa?

My stack size: how many chips I have on the table.

Their stack size: how many chips my opponents have on the table. I’m only interested players involved in the hand, not those who folded on pre-flop (the first round of betting).

Opponent player types: Are they Tight Agressive (TAG), Loose Agressive (LAG), Tight Passive (TP), Loose Passive (LP), a rock (never folds), a maniac (plays most if not every hand and bets big, bluffs a lot), expert (a solid player).

Hole cards: the 2 cards I’m dealt face down

Preflop action: who limped (called the blinds), raised, reraised, etc)

Flop: three community cards face up that everyone plays. This is where I have the most trouble: remember ranks AND suits ( e.g. AhTdQd a h=hearts, s=spades, d=diamonds, c=clubs)

Flop action: again the betting action like preflop.

Turn: the next community face up card everyone gets to play similar to the flop except it’s one card, not 3.

Turn action: the betting action like after the flop

River: the last community card face up that everyone plays, like the turn.

River Action: betting action.

So you have 2 hole cards and 5 community cards and you make your best 5-card poker hand from those 7 cards.

I find it easy to remember stack sizes (I can look, I can remember the pot size and estimate what they had before all the betting)

The action and bet sizes are pretty easy for me to remember.

But the 5 community cards with ranks (A, 2, 3 up to J,Q,K) and the suits for each card.

Later I study the hand. What were my odds on each street (round of betting). What were the betting patterns to note of my opponents? (Does he/she always raise 1/2 pot with a draw, and full pot with a made hand?). Was my hand too weak to play against a TAG who has position on me throughout the hand? Stuff like that.

Any suggestions on how to remember all this info, especially the ranks and suits of the community cards, long enough to notate it in my phone or on a notepad?

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Hi Archman,

I have dabbled slightly with (amateur) poker so I’m loosely familiar with all of the factors involved. Collecting all of this information methodically with mnemonics is a really interesting idea.

Remembering the cards is relatively easy - There are a lot of pre-established cards systems used by magicians or competitive memory athletes. To start, you have to build/learn a system for converting the cards into images. The simplest way is to assign a phoneme/sound to each suit and each value so that you can convert each card into a unique image.

System to convert information into images:
For example, ‘Spades’ could be ‘s’ and a 5 could be ‘L’.
Then you make a word containing these letters: ‘S’ + ‘L’ = SaiL (A SaiLboat).
The next time you see the 5 of Spades, you are reading ‘sail’.

There are several systems for converting numbers into phonetics: One popular options is the major system: https://artofmemory.com/blog/major-system/
Then you extend it by choosing a phoneme for each suit and choosing how to handle the face cards.

The most popular method for remembering information in order is to use a memory palace. Since your 7 poker cards always appear in order, you can just remember a list of 7 cards. You will always know that the first two are your hole cards, the next 3 are the flop, etc.

Personalities:
For player’s personalities, you could create a menmonic image to represent each type of personality and then imagine the person (if you are playing face-to-face) interacting with that mnemonic in some way. E.g. the person on your right is suddenly hit in the head and knocked unconscious by a rock (they’re a rock).

Actions:
You’ll need to find a way to ‘represent’ common actions (bet/raise/call/fold) with a mnemonic for each. You can combine it with numeric information if an action is repeated more than once, or if you need to know how much was raised/bet.

Example: Bet 5
If your image for ‘bet’ is ‘bite’, and your image for ‘5’ is ‘Ale’, you could imagine the person biting into a cask of ale and being soaked in booze.

Other information?
Maybe you can add number to represent the ‘position from dealer’? (To tell you how many players between you and the dealer will make a bet in the current round). Add to your ‘history book’ before each betting round.
‘position from dealer: 0’ ← You are the dealer in this round.
‘position from dealer: 4’ ← You are the 4th person to bet in this round, there will be 3 ‘actions’ before you.

With a memory palace you could walk through it as a kind of ‘history book’.
Example history book:
‘Queen of Club’ ← Hole card
‘10 of Spades’ ← Hole card
‘position from dealer: 4’
‘Bet 3’ (Assuming ‘3’ means 3BB)
‘Fold x2’
‘Call x2’
‘Fold x1’
‘9 of Hearts’ ← You Are seeing ‘cards’ now, so you know we have arrived at the flop
‘2 of spades’
‘10 of diamonds’
‘position from dealer: 2’
‘check x2’
…etc

Just some ideas. I’m not much of a Poker player, but I’d be interested to know what you come up after some trial and error!

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That’s interesting. I’ll definitely work on that. There’s already kind of a built in pneumonic device for player positions. Under the Gun (UTG), UTG+1, UTG+2, URG+3, Lowjack, Hijack, Cutoff, Dealer, Small Blind, Big Blind. UTG+2 can be a guy being hit by 2 bullets at different locations. Small Blind could be a man with an eye patch, and big blind a blind man swinging a cane, etc. Thanks! Great advice.

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