I understand that you’re saying it’s your opinion that taking notes violates the spirit of the game. You can set whatever rules you want for your home games but your stated belief that note-taking is against the rules is factually incorrect according to any published set of rules I’ve ever seen.
I understand that you’re saying it’s your opinion that taking notes violates the spirit of the game. You can set whatever rules you want for your home games but your stated belief that note-taking is against the rules is factually incorrect according to any published set of rules I’ve ever seen.
Please don’t do that. I never said it was against any official rules. I said, “my opinion”, “in my book”, “as far as I’m concerned”, and made a point the first time I mentioned it to say that I wasn’t claiming that my opinion had anything to do with what’s officially allowable.
I have heard of small cardrooms (not in Vegas) disallowing notes, but very rarely and only secondhand. I don’t know of any rule against it in any standard rulesbook either.
I hope the phrase “in my book” wasn’t ambiguous. If your location is actually WI, I assume you know I meant it in the metaphorical sense and wasn’t refering to any rule book I had on hand.
Btw, Raymer said he was writing down his chip count b/c they were going into a break.
Actually, on the Party Poker site, you can see the losing hands that were mucked at showdown just by going to the hand history window. Poker-Spy is not providing any information that Party Poker doesn’t itself provide. It’s just making it immediately visible instead of something that you have to click a couple of buttons to go and check.
Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing.
There are two scenarios here. One, that a player who has been dealt cards is allowed to look at mucked hands at showdown. Two, that a player not dealt cards is allowed to look at mucked cards at showdown.
If a player is dealt cards, that player may request to see any hand mucked at the showdown. This is within the rules, but is frowned upon unless the requestor has a good reason for wanting to see the hand. No one who has not been dealt cards in that hand may see mucked hands.
I can’t play PartyPoker because I use a Mac and the site doesn’t support me, so I can’t check out for myself what actually happens. If a player who has been dealt cards is able to pull up the hand history and view cards mucked at the showdown, that’s fine. PokerRoom, the site I play, allows the same. If however PP allows players who were not dealt cards to view cards mucked at showdown then that is a flaw in PP’s software and a violation of the commonly accepted rules of the game. If this poker spy software overrides PP’s software to allow players not dealt cards to view mucked showdown cards then that’s cheating.
Just recently at the very top of the show of one of the televised hold 'em games, as they kinda skimmed through the casino, the camera paused briefly on one of the players who was making a note of something right at a table while his game was proceeding, and the announcer said something to the effect: “…if you wanna remember something write it down!!”
So I have no doubt it’s legal.
But, if lots of people started doing it and this slowed the pace of the game, they’d almost certainly outlaw it, - at least in TV games.
I was only contemplating the first scenario, not the second. I’m at work and can’t spend much time observing tables waiting for a showdown with a muck in order to check and see whether PartyPoker’s software allows nonplayers to view hands mucked at showdown. I’ll check later tonight.
As to Poker-Spy, however, from using it over the weekend I can say that it doesn’t track any hands at all if I haven’t yet stopped observing and taken a seat at the table and I seem to recall that it didn’t track any hands while I had elected to sit out at a table I had been playing. (Now, this is in ring games where when I’m sitting out I’m not being dealt cards. At a tournament table, where ‘sitting out’ doesn’t mean being dealt out, I imagine Poker-Spy would still track the hands.) In any event, it seems pretty clear to me that Poker-Spy is not overriding PP’s software – it only works with the data that PP provides.
I don’t see how it could slow the game down. I mean, particularly at a full table, about 95% of your time in a poker match is spent doing absolutely nothing except watching other people play and trying to decipher their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, etc.
If you’re playing no limit hold 'em—hell, even if you’re playing low limit—you should, in the long run, sit out far more hands than you play. That gives everyone plenty of time to write stuff down when they’re not actively involved in a hand.
Okay, I wasted a bit of my employer’s time and discovered that as an observer at a PartyPoker table, I was able to view the hand history and see the cards that the showdown loser mucked. If I had had Poker-Spy running at the time, it would not have showed me those cards because it won’t start tracking hands until I sit down at the table and get dealt in. I’m still pretty sure that it will suspend tracking hands whenever I choose to get dealt out of a hand, but I’m drawing the (admittedly somewhat fine) line here between observing for 10 minutes and actually sitting down to play on company time. 
Incidentally, Otto, I have a technical rules question on this whole requesting to see mucked cards thing. As you’ve made clear, the rules state that only players who have been dealt in are entitled to request to see cards mucked at showdown. When one does make such a request, I assume that the mucked cards are turned up for all to see – not just shown to the person who asked to see them. Am I correct in that assumption?
Whether or not I’m correct, I still agree that PartyPoker’s software shouldn’t permit observers to see mucked cards.
I read the rules as allowing the requesting player to be the only one to see the mucked cards, but anyone who was dealt in can make the same request to neutralize any advantage.