Flash Cards are my Scales

I am a musician.  After three years in an infantry unit I auditioned for an army band.  For 20 years I played clarinet, did a vocal on occasion, and even played oboe for one rehearsal.  One thing that every musician knows is that you have to practice your scales.  Many musicians do that every day.  Now that poker is my job, flash cards are my scales.

I've mentioned before that I have Attention Deficit Disorder.  I have another mental issue as well.  I have a very difficult time moving information from short-term to long-term memory.  If I store that information but don't use for a while, it's gone.  I'm forgetting the names of a lot of people who played in the band with me, even though in many cases I played music and traveled all over the world with them for more than 10 years.

I have the same problem with poker information.  I memorized a lot of information, for example, with a certain number of outs, what kind of odds do I need to get to profitably play my hand in that situation?

An example:  I know that if I have two overcards (cards higher than the three flop cards, perhaps an ace and a queen) each overcard is worth three outs, because if I have an ace (or a queen) there are three others out there somewhere.  I also know that if the odds that I'm getting are less than 6.83:1 ( spoken as 6.83 to 1), it's not profitable in the long term to play my hand in that situation.

If it sounds complicated it isn't, especially if you memorize "odds and outs."  Once I've memorized (or rememorized) that information I don't have to think about it.  I just got done working with flash cards for 1.5 hours, and a lot of what I've forgotten is either coming back to me or getting relearned.  It works like this:

I make my own flash cards.  For the situation that I described, on one side of the card I wrote"6 OUTS" and the other side says "6.83:1."  Once I have memorized that datum the only math that I have to figure out (unless it's a real close call an estimate is usually good enough) is whether there are enough chips in the pot to pay me 6.83 times my bet if I win the pot, which I might adjust to "around 7 times my bet" to make the math a little easier.  So if  I want to bet or call for 300, the pot should be close to (300 X 7) = 2,100.

I don't know whether other players use flash cards.  It was something that I came up with on my own.  You can write down and learn many types of poker information with flash cards.  For example, I have cards for memorizing the odds than if I'm dealt an ace, how likely am I to be the only player holding an ace (it depends on how many players there are at your table)

I can use the concept to memorize hand ranges, learn what kind of flops I need to see to make a continuation bet, or to know how my hand stands up against a random hand.  Again, it may sound complicated, but anyone who has memorized multiplication tables can do the same thing that I do with poker flash card numbers or ideas.  The concept is the same, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the children competing in the National Geography Bee are doing similar things, but with rivers and mountain ranges instead of odds and outs.  If you know anyone who enters those competitions, I would be interested in hearing from them.

Flash cards are boring. In 2017 I got caught up in learning a lot of things that were more interesting and I let the flash cards fall by the wayside.  I'm not going to do that again.  My brain lost a lot of information that I need to get back and there are always new things to learn.  As with playing scales, working on it every day is probably the right choice.