If im wanting to remember how many hands a particular player has been involved in do i just simply count how many hands he has been involved in and remember that number?

whats a good way to remember the number for each player at the table? I dont wanna use a HUD i wanna practice online and play live.

Sorry .. This is a mental game that you need to practice .. or bring a pad of paper.

You also need to consider what position there were in when they played, do they limp or raise and what range of holdings did they show at showdown. All of these things need to be 'worked' on at the tables, live or online, so they become natural to you. Some folks are better than others simply due to brain power or practice. There is no magic formula .. that's what the HUD's are for, cheating your brain to a certain degree. GL

Exactly. You will have to develop the skill over time. Start by tracking how many hands the player is involved in overall, then as you start doing it automatically, expand your thinking to position. Although generally I find that it's sufficient to group them as "loose", "normal" and "tight" than to keep an exact count.

Since you're new to this, pay particular attention to the two players to your left and right, as you'll be involved in more pots with those guys. Getting good reads on one or two players is likely better than getting vague reads on the table as a whole.

I am curious how big a sample size is needed to get a good read on how many hands/what percentage of hands a villain plays in a live game. Can anyone say how big a sample is needed for the results to be a statistically sound read on the villain's tendencies (I assume this is in the hundreds so impractical) and how many are good for a working estimate? If we're playing 50 hands an hour should I count for 2 hours? More (which might also be impractical)?

Also lol at the idea of sitting at a poker table with a notepad and marking down how many hands someone has played. It might be worthwhile, but someone is going to pick on you for that.

Online I would say hundreds, minimum.

Live - if you've played with them for an hour, consider - they may have been card dead for an hour - it's not uncommon - so an hour is hardly reliable.

They may also play one way for an hour, then play another for another.

Bottom line? You should never STOP. If you pidgeon hole them, then you can't adjust to them when they change.

One other thing...

Who gives a flying ****?

Poker is a grown up game. Are you 8, that it bothers you if someone pokes fun at you? I can exploit that!

If someone picking on you is going to bother you, you may want to play something different.

You do whatever you need to do (within the rules) to improve your game.

But tip - SMART PHONES are way better than notepads.

Do you simply just count in your head how many hands they have played from the button? I also have to try and count how many hands they have limped and how many hands they have raised from the button or from UTG.

Also these stats are only something to consider. they might play 10% of their hands from the button but they may always play 27o or 36o which isnt in the top 10% of hands.

Do you actually imagine a number visually on them or perhaps hear a voice from that particular player that says they played 5 out 13 hands? and how to you quickly convert that number to a %?

5 goes into 13 2.6 times and when we convert 2.6 to a % its 38.4%.

7 hands out of 156 hands. i cant work this out within 1 second or even 10 seconds atm. do i need to play around with numbers until i know this stuff quick.

I have decided im going to practice and work all this stuff out or die trying.

this is just the tip of iceberg. lots of other stuff to consider and recall. even recalling hands, tells etc.. I might look on memory forums to look at techniques that may aid me in remembering numbers, cards etc.

I'm not wanting to use a pen and paper at the table or use a phone. I want to develop the skill of remembering everything and then being able to apply it.

Don't try to be exact.

Approximate, and sometimes it's easier to increase the numbers first to get final numbers that are easier to work with.

Example: 7 out of 156 is roughly 15 out of 300, which is roughly 5 out of 100, or 5%

What did I do? I recognized that 156 * 2 is close enough to 300 not to matter and I can divide 300 by 3 to get to 100.

So multiply both numbers by 2, round the numbers off to easier numbers to work with (14 to 15, 312 to 300), then divide by 3.

In reality, 7/156 = 4.48% but 4.48% is close enough to 5% to not make a bleeping difference. 7 out of 156 is bloody tight as hell.

Another trick is to simply figure out how many times 5 goes into 13. 5*3 = 15.

Since 3/100 is 33%, you can thus establish that 5 is 33% of 15 and therefore MORE than 33% of 13.

This is looseish, but once you think about where those were played (late position, for example, vs early), then you can start ranging.

Is this a good enough sample size to determine that hes loose and playing a high % of hands or is he just running good?

if it was 40 hands out of 100 he was playing that would be a better sample size. when should you determine its a good enough sample size?

Hell no 13 hands isn't enough. 13 hands is nothing. It's not even two orbits.

You can only begin to form a vague outline of a suspicion at that point. It could go either way - hot card streak or just a loose player.

That early on, without extraordinary indicators, you just have to pay attention and play ABC poker against them.

What's extraordinary? Well, not playing less hands. But playing more... here are two anecdotal examples for you.

1st example Live table, $1/3,

New player arrives at table with fairly short stack ($100). Table has been loose passive, and the occasional single raises get 4-5 callers. New player comes in at late position, it limps around to him, and he shoves. Table folds. New player has boosted his stack by 20-30%. Good play, right?

Well, next hand, someone raises, and he 3-bets big. Again, he takes it down. Hand after hand, with only 1 or two folds, he continues playing VERY aggressively, and the table has got him, because he's not playing 5 out of 13, he's playing 7 hands out of 10. NOBODY has it that good that often.

So people start calling his shoves with hands that, to anyone else, they'd fold. I happen to be the first - calling his all in shove with my own JJ. IIRC he had two suited unders (1 gappers I think), and I draw first blood. 2-3 rebuys later, he's gone. He was completely obviously a maniac and nobody missed that.

2nd example - bit more involved.

One player is playing a fairly wide range - 50-60% of hands, and calling down pretty bad showdown cards like bottom pair worse kicker cards on broadway card heavy boards. First time I see him do this, the very next hand, it limps around to him, there's about $12 in the pot, and he shoves $140 or so. Of course, he takes it down.

A bit later, he plays another horrible hand into the ground, and again, very next hand, this time with $3 in the pot, he shoves $90. He does this a 3rd time, shoving huge after losing a moderate pot he should have let go early, and takes it down again.

Of course, he does win some smaller pots too, but then he loses another moderate one, and I know, with absolute certainty, exactly what is going to happen next.

He's in the BB, I'm in CO. HJ limps, I have A8o, so I decide yep, this is the moemnt, and I limp, BTN limps, SB limps, BB SHOVES, $85. Now I've not built up much of a stack yet, I started with $300 and I'm up about $60 and HJ folds. Now if HJ had called, I'd have folded, but HJ folded, and I know it's only gonna put me down $20 from my BI if I DO lose, so I flat call. BTN and SB fold (and later tell me that if I had folded, then BTN would have called and if BTN had folded, SB would have called, so we all knew what was going on)...

Anyway, I called an $80 shove into a $10 pot with A8o. Horrible, right? Except that BB had 57o, and we both missed the board, but even if he'd caught, my read was correct, I was ahead to begin with, and I was right that the other two would fold if I called. Something of a gamble, of course, but poker IS something of a gamble. The point is even if I'd lost, I was paying attention to the player, and knew what he was going to do, and the odds were vastly against him having a monster hand EVERY TIME immediately after he lost a pot by being an idiot.

In the end, he lost about a grand. He lost his stack to me about 4 times, and only one won all in against me, when his AQ vs my AK caught a river Q.

There's no good reason it should differ online from live, it's still pretty much just a binomial distribution.

Yes, of course, you're correct. It's just that online you can see hundreds of hands with one player in a fraction of the time that you can see them live.

I agree.
When I play Live, I make a mental note of who I think the two strongest and weakest players at the table are.

I read that more as 'someone is going to recognize your skill level if you are unable to track players in your head, and will target you', rather than 'someone is going to tease you'. I could be wrong.

Ok, you may be right, lets address that concern then.

So OP - you're playing live, and you're making notes on each hand, paying attention to the bet actions of each player, etc.

Someone notices this. Their thinking can go three ways, as I see it:

1) HA! Look at that noob! He's tracking everyone! I'll target him! - This would be folly, since you're almost certainly paying more attention than the person who sees your tracking as funny, and since you're consciously taking notes, you'll pick up on his targeting and be able to outplay him.

2) Ah, he's tracking people - that makes him better than 75% of poker players at minimum. I'm going to avoid him unless I'm really strong, and be very careful. - This will be smart, but you'll avoid trouble with this player most of the time.

3) Ah, he's tracking people - so am I. So he knows my normal style - which means that I need to change gears ... probably every hour or so ... to keep him off guard. - This is dangerous. When you note someone changing gears, be extra careful.

In any case, none of these things are worse than not tracking, and if you can't do it in your head yet, do it on paper until you develop trust in your ability to do it in your head.

All that said I think if you ask most pro's you'll find that none of them think of their opponents in VPIP/PFR %s. Few but the savant type can really track that kind of info perfectly. Generalizations and experience will generally suffice, given enough time to build the generalization.