Score One for Online Poker

I think I'm starting to change my mind about the virtues of online poker. Although I'll never be able to see my opponent's neck veins pulsing online, I've been playing a fair amount online lately and I'm starting to recognize some tremendous potential for improving one's regular poker game.

The trick is that when you're playing online, you can do something that you could never do in a cardroom. Well, actually there are all sorts of things you can do while you're playing online that you couldn't do in a cardroom, but this is a family magazine.

The trick I'm referring to here is G-rated: You can take notes about your plays and how they wind up. You can keep a notebook about your opponents' styles, too, and that can be valuable, but not nearly as valuable as developing, via online play, a body of information that will help your live-game skills.

It's not exactly a poker secret that the single biggest problem most players have is playing too many starting hands. You call a bet with something that looks like it could flop something tricky, like 10 8, planning to get out if you don't flop two pair, a straight, a flush, or a good draw to either one. Then the flop comes something like 8-4-2, you get involved, and wind up losing a bundle to someone who had 9-9 or who had overcards and gets there on the turn or river.

That's never happened to you, has it? Didn't think so. But just in case you know someone to whom this might have happened, consider the power of note taking for a hypothetical $10-$20 hold'em player. Take a look at these two notes:

Hand No. 1: Called with J-10 offsuit in early position. It was raised and reraised before it got back to me, I called, missed flop, lost $30.

Hand No. 2: Called two bets cold in middle position with Q J. Flop came Q-7-6. Wound up losing $110 to initial raiser who had K-Q.

Not only does playing online allow you to write down exactly what hands you are playing and what wound up happening on them, because your chip totals are clearly visible in front of you, you also can note exactly how much playing the hand cost (or won). In a live session, you might for a while remember that your Q-J play cost you some chips, but using those rose-colored glasses that so many poker players favor, you probably would underestimate how much it cost you, and then not even remember the play later on.

I'm not advocating that you slow the game down to take these notes; you don't have to write War and Peace. But on the other hand, I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what this kind of note taking can do for you.

Take a look again at what I wrote down for Hand No. 2. "Called two bets cold in middle position." The mere act of writing down the action forced me to think about the fact that I was calling, not raising, and that I did this in middle position.

The note taking, in other words, actually forced me to think about what I was doing, to realize that I was making a play in middle position vs. late position. It gets me thinking about the hand instead of a bad beat from 10 minutes ago.

The educational benefits of recording the play's results aside (and I hate to state the obvious, but if you don't later bother to study these records and organize them so you can observe trends, you're wasting your time), knowing that I am going to write the plays down will keep me from making some of the sillier ones, in much the same way that clipping a pad and pen to the refrigerator door keeps someone from making those midnight refrigerator raids during a diet.

It's easy enough to fool ourselves when we are depending on selective memory, but when we know that we're keeping a record of our plays, most of us will probably play a little better.

Continuing the diet analogy, just as one cookie here and one sandwich there don't seem to mean much as isolated incidents but add up to a bulging waistline when aggregated, by taking notes we learn how much $10 here and $20 there adds up in the course of a session, to say nothing of how often those "trouble" hands like Q-J turn into exactly that: trouble.

In a diet, we want to shed pounds. In poker, we want to add them (at least if we're playing in England; otherwise, we want to add chips). In either case, writing down what you're doing and then later studying the results to observe trends can provide a big help, and you can't do that as easily while you're sitting in your local cardroom.

Andy Glazer is the weekly gambling columnist for the Detroit Free Press and the author of Casino Gambling the Smart Way. He is also the online poker guide for www.poker.casino.com, and welcomes your questions there or via E-mail at [email protected].