I assume there are lots of you who play without a HUD and was wondering how do you keep track of your opponents?
I used to play without a HUD many years and what I did was that I marked players with colors and wrote notes about them:
Green = Good player
Orange = Bad player
Light blue = Fish
Dark blue = Whale
Red = Hazard (which in my book means someone super aggressive who constantly makes really big raises more than a pot, raises all the time, plays almost every hand, never gives up before turn and who most likely will lose their whole buy-in eventually)
In addition to that color coding, I added notes if I saw something valuable happening:
- If someone got caught with a bluff
- If they didn't give up with an overpair or top pair
- If they paid way too much with draws
- If they checked the nuts on river
- What did their donkbet mean
- With what did they reraise
etc.
Basically any information that can come in handy when I am in a tough spot with them. I still use these same colors and notes even with HUD.
Sometimes it makes me laugh when I read the notes which I wrote before.
Me too! Sometimes I see my notes like "plain idiot" which means that I have probably lost a big pot to them when they were calling 'til the end with bottom pair and then got their second pair on river against my Aces for example. Not very informative but sometimes feelings win over reason