So there I was thinking about how to do it. There has gotta be a way to tie this in to the poker game. At first I watched documentaries and read them on Stu Ungar. Nothing came to mind as to how he remembered things.
It was a month of searching for the right answer until I was coaching a friend of mine in poker by playing and online tournament together. I hadn't really thought of it but we had a few cocktails and I started to remember counts because he had not had the poker tracking software installed on his computer. The idea was born. The memory techniques I had learned thus far however, were letting me down. I kept getting confused and I couldn't keep an accurate VPIP of all the players. Nonetheless we wound up winning the sit and go and I was not at all angry with myself because I knew I had finally made the connection.
After that night I knew I just needed a better way ( which will be covered in the book ) to track the VPIP. I knew after that night of thinking about it what I had to do and started to implement the system.
I did it slowly at first, with 3 people at my Poker league in Winnipeg. It worked. What was more amazing is I had these players classified as "tight", "loose" and "aggresive". I wanted one of each to see if my system worked.
Now this bit will truly amaze you. I had classified all of these players from the first time I played with them, and just assumed that these players played the same basic way every time. After all it was my league and the tight player I knew had the capability of switching up his game but the newer more novice loose players I thought were always well loose.
In my league there are 3 breaks for the 6-7 hour tournament. In the first round my Tight player was at 66% percent VPIP and I wound up busting him out of the tournament with A9, A hand I may not have considered playing. My loose player was at 12% ( not very loose at all ) and my aggressive player was playing so meek it was incredible, he was at 36%. VPIP tells me exactly where I am going to get my chips from. It's like a neon sign above the player. It also tells me whom to watch out for. Now normally when the loose guy raises I would not have given him much credit for his raises and would have tried to make some kinda hero read and call only to discover he had KK. Now that I had tracked him at 12%, I knew that unless I had a monster hand I was't going to tangle with him. This information saved me chips, and allowed me to know where to get chips. Now my final aggressive player, well I beat him up worse than Ali did Wepner. Having that information also allowed me to gather chips.
What really surprised me as well was the two remaining players played differently in the 2nd and 3rd rounds. I was shifting gears with my opponents.
I went on to place 3rd in that tournament instead of busting early because of my new found tracking ability and disposing of the assumptions that I would usually make about that player. I also noticed because I was focused on the table I wasn't nearly as bored as I get sometimes. This also helped me reduce the variability in my stack. Again this was only with 3 players not the full 9.
Needless to say I went home elated and then created a system to easily keep track of all players at the table, not just three, and I practiced until I could perform this at online speed, which was plenty fast for the real world. This happened very easily.
But what else could I accomplish with memory and poker?
VPIP it seemed was the tip of the iceberg.
Bennett Onika
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