Hello everyone,
I’m currently trying to improve my ability to memorize complex visual information from poker tables, and I would really appreciate some advice from people experienced in memory techniques. I’m much more interested in the memory aspect than in poker strategy.
For example, imagine I see a table like the screenshot below. Within a few seconds, I would like to be able to remember:
- my hole cards: Q
9 - my stack: 19 BB
- the opponents’ stack sizes: 30 BB and 8 BB
- the pot size: 3.1 BB
- the blinds: 150/300
- which specific player made a particular bet/action, together with that player’s stack size
- and, most importantly, what my own action should be in that situation (call, fold or raise).
The difficulty is that these are not simply isolated pieces of information. I need to remember the relationships between the numbers, their positions at the table, the cards, each player’s stack, their bets/actions, and the sequence of actions.
I would be very interested to hear how someone trained in memory techniques would approach this problem if they knew nothing about poker.
What would you recommend using?
I would especially appreciate advice on techniques that could allow me to look at a poker table for just 2–5 seconds and then reconstruct the important information afterward.
I’m also curious about how you would handle dynamic information. For example, I don’t just need to remember that an opponent has 8 BB. I need to remember that this particular opponent (position in table), with this particular stack size, made this particular action, and then remember what my own response should be.
If you were designing a memory system for this from scratch, what kind of encoding system would you personally use?
Thank you very much in advance for any ideas, techniques, or examples you could share. I’d really appreciate any advice!