Taking Notes in Zoom Poker

Why should I take notes? 

Taking Notes on how your opponents play is crucial to becoming a big winner at any stakes. Knowing how your opponent approaches certain situations will allow you to take advantage of their play and eliminate most of the guessing work. Depending on the time of day and the stakes that you play in Zoom Poker, the player pool will be around 100-600 players. The smaller the player pool, the more frequently you encounter the same opponents and the more important your notes become.

Below is a list of tips for taking notes in Zoom Poker:

Sit out next hand

If you are playing 4 tables of Zoom Poker it can be very difficult to take quality notes and play at the same time. Don’t fall into the trap of taking notes whilst you continue playing on 4 tables at once. The problem with this is twofold, firstly you will play suboptimal poker when trying to concentrate on note taking and secondly, you may rush your notes and end up with one that doesn’t make sense.

Abbreviate and standardise notes

It’s very important to make your notes as short as possible in order to make it easier for yourself to read later. If you’re note is too long, it will distract you more than help you. By learning to abbreviate your notes you reduce time wasted reading irrelevant notes. The format of your note taking should be consistent. This makes it easier for you to quickly read them and find key information. Use the same abbreviations and the same structure.

Bad Note example: ‘This guy raised pocket sixes under the gun, then reraised all in when guy on the button reraised him preflop and everyone folded around to him’

Good Note example: ‘Raised 66 UTG and 4bet all in to LP 3bet’

The bad note example isn’t terrible because it is a very accurate account of what happened, it took into consideration position, range, different actions etc. But the note is too long!

The good note is much shorter and says pretty much the exact same thing but it makes some important assumptions. These are the assumptions which you will treat as standard. In the good note, it was never mentioned that everyone else folded. If someone had called or raised, then the note would say that. The note also doesn’t mention stack or bet size so we assume 100bb stacks and 3bb open raise. 4bet all in suggests the sizing was large since we did not specify that 3bet was large.

Identify Player type and Counter Strategy

Identifying which player type your opponent falls into will allow you to carry out a generic counter strategy against this opponent in order to exploit them. Is your opponent a TAG (Tight Aggressive), LAG (Loose Aggressive), TP (Tight Passive) or LP(Loose Passive)? What is the appropriate strategy to use against these kind of players? For example, your opponent is Loose Passive, this means they call too much so your counterstrategy should be to value bet them with a wider range and reduce bluffing. This information should be placed at the top of your notes. E.g. ‘Loose Passive. Value bet wider’ 

Colour Coding

This can be a great way to identify players at a glance. A colour coding system may look something like this. You should come up with something similar and that works for you.

• Red – Aggressive players that either raise a lot, 3bet a lot or get really aggressive postflop.
• Blue- Calling stations
• Green- Players who fold their blinds too much so against these players you can steal their blinds with weaker hands.
• Yellow – Shortstackers
• Orange- Tough regulars/Tricky players

The more general the note, the higher up it should be.

Notes which involve very rare situations aren't as useful as notes which involve very common situations so for this reason, general insights should always be on top. Good general notes to take are, how does your opponent play flush/straight draws, small pocket pairs, medium pocket pairs, monster hands etc.

Common Mistake: Generalizing too much and NOT Updating your Notes

Often notes will be taking based on a few hands that go to showdown. You might make assumptions on how someone plays based on a small sample. For example, you see someone go all in UTG with 23o, you immediately assume that this guy is an idiot shoving any two cards. However, It is possible that he is a successful regular who just misclicked and that this won’t happen again. Chances are this isn’t the case but it is possible. So when you are given information that your note is incorrect, do not hesitate to update your notes.  Extreme example: if the next 10 of his all ins, he shows AA.

Session Review

By utilising the Hand History Tool in PokerStars we can sort hands by pot size. At the end of each session, you should analyse the biggest pots regardless of whether you played or not. This will allow you to take notes on players who you have yet to play a huge pot against. This is information you have already paid for. Don’t waste it.

Combining Notes with a HUD

Taking notes is very important when playing online poker. But your notes should be used in conjunction with a HUD (Heads Up Display). A HUD will track your opponents play preflop very accurately over a certain sample size. The drawback of a HUD is that the preflop stats will be much more accurate than postflop. So having good postflop notes on your opponents can make up for this.

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How to Set Up Hot Keys on PokerStars

What are Hotkeys and how can they help?

Hotkeys are shortcuts where we can set certain keys to carry out certain actions. If you are multitabling Zoom Poker, things can get rather hectic with action at every table. There is a limited amount of time for you to act before your time bank is activated. We want to use that time to think rather than to fumble around with the mouse trying to aim for specific buttons. By using Hot Keys we can reduce the time we need to execute a decision. By reducing the amount of time to make our decisions (e.g. folding preflop), we can play even more hands.

In order to set up Hotkeys we first have to go to the PokerStars Lobby. We select the 'Options' tab and then proceed to click 'Hotkey Settings (Beta)...'. This looks like this.

After we click 'Hotkey Settings (Beta)...' we should see a screen that looks like this. 

The Settings will allow you to pick a certain action and assign a hotkey to that action. For example, the Fold action was assigned to 'F', Check was assigned to 'C' and Raise was assigned to 'R' etc. You can assign whatever you feel is most ergonomic and efficient. For the most part, you only want to use a few Hotkeys. You only want Hotkeys that can be used frequently for what you consider standard. It would be a waste of time to set a hotkey for something rare like setting a raise size of 27big blinds in case you need to 4bet as the size of the 4bet will depend on a lot of different factors and 4betting isn't something we do frequently enough to warrant the need for a hotkey. When you get to non standard plays, you want to alter your raise sizes with the scroll wheel or just type in the amount.

Depending on how tight or loose you play, your preflop raise size may differ. For the most part, 3x big blind is a standard open. If you are playing very loose, you can set the preflop raise size to be 2.5x. You can always select 3x big blind and adjust the bet size with the scroll wheel of your mouse. If you want to minraise, you can just press whatever you set for raise. 

You may have noticed that 'Call' hasn't been assigned a hotkey. Calling too frequently is definitely a very common leak. You will find more players who call too often rather than fold too much. Generally, when you are facing the decision to call a bet, you need to think more than when you are raising or folding. Not having a Hotkey for Calling will bring the issue more to your awareness.

As you can see, in the 'Send Hotkeys to:' section, 'Table Under Mouse' and 'Bring to Foreground' have been selected and 'Active Window' has not been selected. The reason for this is that you want to have maximum certainty that the hotkey you press is for the right table. In 'Active Window' mode, any time it is your turn to act at a table, the 'Active Window' will bring that table up. The problem with this is that you could be pressing a hotkey for the last active table and just before you press it, a different table required an action, took control and you accidentally acted for the wrong table. Therefore, the best way to ensure that you are acting on the right tables is to have the table which the mouse is hovering over to be the one you are controlling.

'Bring to Foreground' has been selected in order to prevent confusion when you are overlapping tables because for example your screen is too small to tile 4 or more tables comfortably. It makes it very obvious which table has been selected when you see the target table is highlighted in green (or another bright colour)

During Gameplay, you can turn hotkeys on and off by clicking the little key icon on the top of the table. 

A note of Caution: Using Hotkeys are very convenient but there are things to be aware of. I mentioned overcalling but another thing to look out for is misclicking. Misclicks will occur from time to time just as they would when using a mouse. Do not rush your decisions too much that a) you misclick and b) you give off a timing tell. I would not recommend, setting a hotkey for raising all in as it can be a very costly misclick. Assigning a hotkey to set betsize to all in is very different to assigning a hotkey to raising all in. Knowing that only one key can raise gives you a bit more safety against these mistakes.

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What is Zoom Poker?

What is Zoom Poker?

Zoom Poker is Pokerstars' variant of Rush Poker which was offered on Full Tilt Poker two years ago. The concept is the identical however the game play and software runs much smoother. 

In Zoom Poker, rather than play on a single table against the same opponents at a regular cash game. You play against a pool of players. When you begin playing Zoom Poker, you are given the option to fold your hand immediately before it is your turn to act (unless you are the big blind). Once you fold a hand or the hand has finished, you are immediately put onto a new table with new players and dealt a new hand. When you fold your hand before it is your turn to act, the other players will not know this until the action gets to you.

Zoom Poker plays much faster to regular cash games as the fast fold option allows you to see more hands per hour. In fact, playing Zoom Poker should allow you to play nearly 4 times as many hands as you would on a regular table.

Why Play Zoom Poker?

There are many reasons why you should play Zoom Poker. The following are the benefits of playing Zoom Poker:

• The number one argument is Volume! In Zoom Poker you can easily play over a thousand hands per hour. Assuming that you are a winning player, playing more hands with a solid win rate will earn you more profit. Being able to play more hands in less time means you are increasing your hourly $ win rate significantly. Playing the maximum of 4 tables allows you to play the equivalent of 16 tables at a time. 

• Pokerstars has a great VIP reward system with cash prizes, tournament tickets and much more. The more you play, the more bonuses you get. Playing Zoom Poker will allow you to earn player points quicker and rank up in the VIP ladder faster. The higher you rank, the greater the rewards. 

• It's fun! This argument goes both ways. It is a very exciting form of poker and the rush you get from playing it is incomparable to other forms of poker. This makes Zoom Poker quite addictive. The players you will be playing will be thrill seekers, looking to play for the rush of making quick decisions rather than to make money. They are basically giving away their money.

• You don't have to table select. Frequently the most time and profit consuming part of playing multiple tables is selecting the right tables to play. When you are sitting at a regular cash game online, you are looking for tables with a lot of bad players (fish) and avoiding tables with tough regulars. In Zoom Poker, table selection is not an option and all this is avoided as regulars and fish are put into the same pool of players. The only choice you have when it comes to table selection in Zoom Poker is whether to play or not. You can examine the composition of the player pool to decide whether there are more regulars or fish in the game but I will elaborate more on this in a later post.

• Zoom Poker is great for short sessions where you only have a few mins to half an hour of free time. Although the sessions are short, the number of hands you can play in that time is very high in comparison to regular tables.

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