Quote Originally Posted by Imthenewfish View Post
yea, theres this feature on a lot of sites called "note taking"
Errr, ok let's think about this.

My HUD is set up so that stats don't even appear until I have 25+ hands on a player, as before then it's pretty much worthless. To be honest until I have 3 times that number I don't give my stats much credence. Only then do SOME stats become reliable, i.e stats which are contributed to with every single hand, such as VPIP.

Now, I'll concede that you MIGHT be able to take a note on how active ONE villain is preflop which gives you about the same level of accuracy as the VPIP stat on your HUD after 75 or so hands - if you're paying sole attention to that villain. Nevermind the other dozen or so you're sitting with.

However, let's consider a stat like like Folds To 3bet. Really useful stat at the micros as re-stealing can win you a lot of nice pots, most fish being scared stiff of 3bets unless they have a monster. Now, before this stat becomes particularly reliable, we need to see villain get 3bet and have our HUD record his reaction a reasonable number of times, say 7 - 10 (a 100% F3B stat over one hand being completely worthless obv). How many hands do you think it might take to see him get 3bet that many times? 400? 500? 600? Say it's just 400. How many sessions, over how many days do you need to play against this villain to clock up that many hands? Especially if we're only playing them on one table at a time. 3 if we're very lucky?

I absolutely defy you to tell me that you can sit down with a random player on 3 different occasions (probably more), perhaps weeks apart, play 100s of hands each time, watch his reaction every time he is 3bet, *remember his reaction every previous time you saw him get 3bet* and then make a note that gives you the same level of reliability as your F3B popup stat on the HUD recording that info for you. And don't even pretend you can do that with every single player you run into, because you can't.

HUDs are on one level super automated note taking devices. It's this premise which means the poker sites allow the use of PT3/HEM on tables where you're active but forbid sitting out on a dozen others just logging hands for stats. It's recording information that in theory you could write down yourself as you're playing your cards, but in practice it would be impossible to do so.

Note taking is fantastic and *highly important* for recording a player's peculiarities in particular situations and for making HUD stat reads more specific. However you simply CANNOT record information on every single villain's most basic tendencies, tendencies on which we make basic decisions with the same degree of reliability as a HUD can.