Taking notes & classifying players

[TheHaversham]

I knew it was going to be skewed since I play such low limits, but I expected to see more greens. ...

Just to follow up on this: keep in mind that when your game improves to the point where you are bringing your A-game every time, you're not going to stay in the micro's very long...hopefully. (Understandably, there comes a point where you're pulling checks offline, so you might hit a bit of a ceiling, but consistently solid play has rewards, one of which is moving up the ladder.) Win a freeroll and you're like, "zOMG!!!!...I won $10!!!!" and you're starting threads congratulating yourself. Win a micro and you're like, "zOMG!!!...I won $40!!!" and you're prone to letting your ego blow it in 4 $10 games at once. But get to where a win is substantial - relatively, like $300-$600, which is only substantial compared to when you were praying to cash for 30 cents in a freeroll - you start to think about how much of it can you take off and still be able to move up to better games without risking too much of your bank.

The easiest and most-profound BRM concept anyone taught me was to simply look at your own MTT Avg finish. Are you ITM above 10%? If so, how many of those are top-3 finishes? The higher those numbers go, the more of your bank you can risk in any one tourney. But now I'm off-topic, lol. What I'm trying to say is a lot of the players who should be green actually end up jumping out of their own league too soon and never get the chance to realize winnings. The players who can hold their ego in check, who can show up with their A-game every time they register, and who can sit on $500 as easily as they can $50, are actually pretty few and far between. And that's why we're taking note of those players. In the micro's, a green opponent should be considered formidable; they are the top of the micro food chain. But like anywhere else, just because they're good at poker doesn't mean they can be a consistently good poker player.

You give a lot of good information, and you're right about the 120 days not really being enough time to judge someone by. I really like your perspective on the 120 day stat. And using PO FRs is a great example, especially at the micro levels I'm still at. Is there anything else you look for when scanning over someone's stats? And what's your opinion on blocking your own stats?

If I'm scanning over someone's stats, I might take note of things like how many rebuys do they play? Is the frenzy of a rebuy going to throw them off or are they used to that? Another good one is the ABI. I've found 3-betting light is usually much more successful when my opponent is playing well above their normal limits. Consider, if you (hypothetically) won a $1 satellite into the $215 Main Event of some series. 3-bets are going to give you much more stress than if you were playing a $1 Turbo.

I don't block my stats, but I see why some would, and like I said, it's generally because they are very good or very bad. In general, if you block stats on yourself, you often can't see stats of anyone else, either. So, if you have a HUD running and your HH database is like 3 million hands and you've got a good sample on most of your regular opponents (there are only so many Americans playing nosebleed stakes online these days, sadly), you might not need to opt in to sites like OPR or SharkScope. Also, if you like to talk shit and you're absolutely horrible and your stats show it, you might have been derided once or twice and just hid your stats out of tilt and frustration. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to worry about. I don't block mine because I'm neither very good nor very bad, and I use the sites often. What I don't do is allow a site to post Accolades next to my avatar or name. I don't want anyone to know how much rake I might pay, or that I won some freeroll or OPS game. What is the value in giving opponents that information other than simply stroking my own ego? To me, that is one reason why some females seem to play more consistently - I apologize if this seems sexist. I think a lot of testosterone-driven egos are killed by hubris, whereas women seem to be able to show a little bling without it going to their heads. It's like jewelry, maybe. They wear it to look pretty, but a lot of men wear it as status symbols. Again, there are always exceptions, but in general, a player who's proudly brandishing some icon that says they won a tourney last week is just vain.