One of the best ways to improve your game and become a great poker player is to improve your memory recall. Whether you are trying to employ complicated computer-based strategies or track an opponent’s betting patterns, you need to be able to accurately remember and retrieve large amounts of information. While some people, like Bryn Kenney, appear to have been born with a natural ability to instantly retrieve massive amounts of memorized information, most of us will have to learn how to improve our ability to store and retrieve past memories.
According to the scientific study of human memory, most people can only hold seven numbers in their short-term memory: this is why basic phone numbers have seven digits. Although seven appears to be an upper limit, most people need to learn how to group information into smaller units in order to improve their retention rate. Psychologists call this process of organizing memories into smaller groups, chunking, and it has been shown that when you try to recall two groups of four numbers at a time instead of eight, you can be much more accurate.
Memory recall is also improved when we connect an event to several other events and other types of information. For instance, if you want to remember a hand range, it often helps to connect the numbers to a visual representation like a hand chart. You can also chunk a hand chart by separating starting hands into groups of hands, like low suited connectors and premium pairs. We also remember things better if they are given a meaning, and so it is important to be able to label different types of grouped information. For example, when you decide to label an opponent as tight-aggressive, you are bundling the memories of his play into a significant pattern that improves later retrieval.
Of course, one reason why computers are starting to beat human players is that these technologies have better memory systems, but for us mere mortals, we need to try to approximate how computers store and retrieve information. Just like a computer works by organizing data into a network of connections, we have to understand that our brains process memories by linking them together in a networked system. In terms of memory recall, this helps us to see how the more memories we can attach to a particular event, the more easily we can recall it.
A key aspect of this process of improving your memory is to maintain a high level of focus, discipline, and attention at the table. The goal here is to become your own living Heads Up Display that tracks all of the moves of your opponents. When we play online, we can usually outsource this process to technology, but if we are playing live, we need to develop a method to track, store, and retrieve the playing patterns of our opponents. Ideally, we would know how frequently each player puts money into the pot from each position, and we would also track how often they fold to three-bets or continue on the flop, turn, and river. Although it is too taxing to do this all live, we can always enhance our ability by training our minds through different mental exercises and processes.
One way to start this process is to write down all significant information while you are playing. It is best to begin with focusing on only one player and variable. For instance, you can simply track how many times a player raises pre-flop during a session. Then you can expand your tracking to what position the player opens from and how much they bet. If you are afraid of people wondering what you are doing or you feel this process could be too burdensome, you can simply narrate in your head the action. I have tried saying to myself things like, “There goes tight-passive Johnny opening from under the gun, he must have a premium hand. This is only the second hand he has played this hour.”
It is vital to practice away from the table, and this can be done by testing yourself on your ability to recall things like the Nash Push/Shove hand range with 15 big blinds from the small blind. Like physical muscles, when you exercise through repetition, you can improve your memory recall. It is also good to not try to cram too much information at a time, and the more that you space out your memorization sessions, the more you will be able to retain and retrieve information.
To enhance your memory retrieval ability, you need to take on an intentional strategy and not simply hope that you will be able to recall things when you need them. It is also important to not be multi-tasking when you are trying to memorize and recall information because when you try to perform different tasks at the same time, your abilities decrease significantly. It can also help to turn information into a story in order to enhance memory recall. One benefit of discussing hand histories is that they help to turn discrete bits of information into a coherent narrative.
All of these techniques take energy, and so it is necessary to see the link between physical health and mental health. As many poker players now know, it does help to eat well, exercise, and sleep well, but what they do not realize that the main reason why you need to be in the right physical state is that you need to have the mental energy and focus to remember and retrieve massive amounts of information.
