Method for "studying" a poker book...

[Blarg]

Either way can work well. I do want to make some further response on these ideas.

The main things that made you learn quickly was that you had to recapitulate the ideas in your mind in order to work with them, which works so much better than just trying to grind them in with brute force memorization alone, or just hoping to catch them eventually while letting them slide in one ear and out the other with occasional study the way ideas can when you don't rephrase them in your own style of thinking and really internalize your relationship to them.

You had to be sure you had an adequate understanding, then organize the ideas. That takes a lot of thinking about not just things but what things mean and how your thought processes relate to them. By the time you had the charts done, you already had put in a solid, very productive amount of effort turning over the ideas in your head in your own voice, really making them yours. Learning from that point on can become surprisingly easy and rapid.

Same thing with flash cards. To even make them up, unless you make the world's lamest ones, means you have to think about them conceptually.

For instance, I did some hand groupings flashcards. "Aces and faces" was a mnemonic that painted a clear picture in my head about some groups, and "aces with spaces" for another. Those mnemonics made me able to group thoughts into meaningful clusters associated with easily memorable images, which was much better than just grinding along with rote memorization.

I also worked up an odds chart going from when you had one out to when you had 20. I rounded things off a bit, and then noticed a strange correspondence popping up. Numbers seemed to reflect each other. As in, when you have 8 outs, the odds are roughly 5 to 1 against you. When you have 5 outs, they're roughly 8 to 1. When you have 7 outs, odds are about 6 to 1, and when you have 6 outs, odds are about 7 to 1. Once I memorized that, I knew the odds on a chunk of numbers within that sequence of 20 almost instantly.

I noticed another correspondence. The first five numbers(when you have 1 to 5 outs) result in odds against you that aren't particularly patterned. They require rote memorization, but when you proceed further, your numbers become suddenly easy.

When you have 5 outs, you have roughly 8 to 1 odds against you. Let's put the next few numbers in table form.

OUTS ODDS

5 8
6 7
7 6
8 5
9 4

That "mirroring" I was talking about is visible here, but so is the the number of odds-to-1 declining very cleanly by one each time....87654. That's a recognizable pattern, different from the splotchiness of the first few numbers. Once you see these two patterns, or maybe even just one alone, you can easily remember what your rough odds are from 5 to 9 outs. The difficulty vanishes.

Let's look at the next cluster, and the tail end of the above one.

OUTS ODDS

9 4
10 4
11 3
12 3
13 2.5
14 2.5
15 2
16 2

Notice anything? The odds now are starting to clump in two's. Another useful pattern! This pattern covers a lot of ground. And by the time it stops, we reach the last pattern of the numbers, and luckily enough, we find another pattern to carry us through. It's a whopper of an easy one.

OUTS ODDS

17 1.5
18 1.5
19 1.5
20 1.5

The last chunk of numbers can be rounded off to come up with the same number! Couldn't be much easier than that.

Whether you remember one number and work your way forward or backward from there to remember another number you forgot, you get to do it in patterns once you remember a few simple patterns. It becomes pretty simple to memorize and quickly recall two columns of numbers and how they correlate to each other with virtually no study time once you've frontloaded the whole process with a little thought in the first place.

Mnemonic patterns can be easily found; even where they don't really exist. The brain is a pattern-making machine.

Some additional mnemonics that can apply the the set of numbers above that I've found useful are -- if you think of the number 10, what other number pops into your mind quickly? If you grew up on cop shows like me, it's 10-4. Anything else unusual about 10? It's the first number in the list of outs that is comprised of two numbers tuck together. Two -- just like the pattern it establishes of being the first "OUTS" number to give the same OUTS number...TWICE. Memorizing gets a little harder in this set of numbers when you have to remember decimals. That's unlucky. Just like the number 13.

Things like this can anchor you, providing a quick foundation to spring from to find other values in either of the two columns you need to do a mental search in, by remembering a pattern or two. If you know 10 goes with 4, you know it's followed by three right after -- and twice. You now know pretty much automatically that not only do 11 outs give about 3 to 1 against you, but so do 12. If you know the last 4 numbers of outs -- 17-20 -- all give you the same pattern of roughly 1.5 to 1 odds, then you know that 16 outs breaks the pattern, that 16 outs is about 2 to 1, and so is its partner in crime, 15 outs, pretty much all at once.

Anyway, finding just a few patterns means you can put a large number of unrelated, random things, like numbers, in your head very quickly. But...you have to think about them first. Some things will still require drawing up charts and flashcards, but even those can be made vastly more useful to memorization if you make conscious associations and look for patterns before you go any further. Making flashcards asking myself what hand groups constituted "aces and faces" and which constituted "aces and spaces" made the flashcards a much stronger learning tool.

Anyway, I hope some of this discussion has been useful. Doing this kind of thing helped me keep a lot of matrix tables and math in my head when I used to count cards in blackjack, and it helps in a lot of things, so I usually recommend it. It seems like a lot of work sometimes, but actually seeing patterns is easy. It's trying to memorize unrelated things you don't really care about that's hard! (It matters to me that the odds are roughly 5 to one that I'm going to fill out an open end straight draw on the next card, but I can't say I care about the numbers; just that they're useful to me. They have no particular grip on the mind whatsoever, yet I need those numbers in there. Knowing a few patterns, even if I forget the numbers a hundred times over, I could bring them right back to mind quickly again just by remembering the patterns.

Anyway, hope this is of some use to somebody. I realize that some people would object to my rounding off numbers for the odds, but in only two cases do I even round off much at all, when I turn 17 outs, or 1.75 to 1 odds, into 1.5 to 1 odds, and when I turn 5 outs from 8.4 to 1 into 8 to 1. These can be kept in mind as exceptions if one wants to, as they are the only noteable ones in the whole list of 20. 17 outs doesn't come up every day, and 5 outs isn't much of a burden to remember you're fudging a little, if you really think it's necessary. The rest of my roundings off are more on the order of turning 15 outs from 2.13 to 1 to 2.0 to 1 instead. Even if one thinks rounding off is just shocking, I hope I've provided some things here in this thread that some people could find useful.

[Foo King]

I read them with a highlighter in hand and I am not afraid to use it.

When I first read a book I hi-lite and made notes in the margin. By doing this I become involved in the book. It helps me by stopping mind drift as I read. I concentrate better especially if the material involves complex ideas.

This in turn helps me review when I go back through a book. I can skim by rereading the hi-lited portions or I can dig deeper by actively hunting for more material to hi-lite or notes to make. It ruins the book's pristene collector's value but inhances the useful knowledge I gain from the material.

I also have a stack of books which I am constantly going through. They are:

The Theory of Poker
Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players
Getting the Best of It
Small Stakes Hold 'em
Internet Texas Hold 'em by Hilger
Hold 'em Poker by Carson

This works for me.