Note taking during tournaments?

[Twaun007]

Recently, I rifled through my past tournament notes and realized they were loaded with scribbles, life totals plummeting, and random rap lyrics. They actually contained nothing pertaining to turn by turn vintage plays. Interesting... Messy notes equals a messy mind. Which, to me, can lead to messy play. I asked some Standard Mages what their system of note taking resembled, they just stared in confused at the question. This just reinforced, to me, that note taking is pretty much a Vintage phenomenon. Which is an interesting tidbit on its own.

Anyways, I'm thinking of reorganizing my method/technique and incorporating the use of graph paper to maintain the turn by turn sequence of the game. Has anyone else used techniques like this when taking notes or is it too time consuming?

[Cruel Ultimatum]

I never really saw a reason to take notes unless I was planning to write an article on the tournament report. All I keep track of is life total changes, revealed cards, floating mana and storm count.

But the most common thing I see, especially in non vintage formats is an annotation next to the life change that explains where it came from.

[BaronSengir]

I've had times where I create a decision tree that helps me decide what card to play at a crucial point in the game. For example, should I use a FoW or Mana Drain and if I use the MD would I be able to benefit enough from the gained mana, what are they odds they have a counter, etc.

[GrandpaBelcher]

I used to take more thorough notes. Now I just mark life totals, maybe with the source of the damage. Then after the game, I write a one sentence summary of the events or just the endgame. I also track the number of mulligans for each player.

[The Atog Lord]

Note-taking can be a great way to improve your game and to be able to study your results. If I have any hope of writing a tournament report for a given event, I'll take notes during the matches. There are too many games that run together for me to have any chance of writing a cogent tournament report otherwise. And taking notes lets me recollect the events of a game after the fact.

Why doesn't this happen in Standard?
"Delver Flipped. I countered his spells and he died."
"He did some things. I resolved a Sphinx's Revelation for five and ignored him."
"I turned some Red dudes sideways."

I think that it isn't as worthwhile to take notes during a Standard game for the same reason that you don't see many Standard tournament reports -- there is just less there.

[BaronSengir]

I always compared standard to playing checkers, vintage to playing chess.

[Will]

I personally take notes during tournaments and keep them, though it is often too time consuming unless the game is very straightforward.  I try to use 1 sheet of paper for my life totals/notes throughout the day and then keep them in a bag that I have been adding to since mid 2011.  I've gleaned a lot of important information from this over the year and a half and it helps me to remember how I did at each tournament I played in.  One of the most important things for me as a primarily Workshop player is the opening hands that I keep or mulligan because at this stage in the game this is the most common and most costly mistake I make as the sequencing of my plays is for the most part second nature.  Sometimes I write down the sequence of plays or the key mistake that I made during a game if I lost, but hand contents is the most recurring piece of information on my life sheets. 

[boggyb]

I've developed a spartan note-taking system that you may find useful. It tries to be as minimal and chess-like as possible. Its main goal is to be as fast as possible to write without sacrificing fidelity of information. Here's a small example. I'm playing Dark Times and my opponent is on Tezzeret.

2-1 vs. Tezz, by Joe Smith
G1 0-1
bob hex s-swamp jet rit seize vs. 7
1. swamp, seize: drain f-fetch sapphire tezz vault recall, take recall (18), jet, rit, bob.
1.5. fetch, sapphire.
2. seize (17). depths. seize. fetch sea (19), drain. swamp, hex. swing (17).
2.5. fetch island (16), vault, key. 0-1.

So, an only somewhat organized dump of how this works:
• First line is the outcome and a quick description of your opponent's deck, and your opponent's name. Fill in the win-loss record when you're done.
• Then, a header for each game and who won it. For example, here, "G1 0-1" means, it was game 1, and I lost.
• Then, my opening hand, and how many they kept. You list these in order of who's playing. (So if he had been going first, it'd be "7 vs. bob hex s-swamp jet rit seize")
• Whenever you have to mention cards, use short nicknames for each. There aren't many Vintage playables, so you just sort of build your own nickname list as you go and memorize it. I'd encourage you to use your own nicknames -- just pick the ones that are the most obvious to you so you don't have to spend any mental energy remembering what you call a card, and can therefore easily keep your records consistent. My nicknames here are the most obvious to me: bob = Dark Confidant; rit = Dark Ritual; seize = Thoughtseize; jet = Mox Jet; etc.
• If you want to list duplicates, use a hyphen of the first letter, like you're stuttering it: "s-swamp" for two swamps, "s-s-swamp" for three. Saves space and time.
• Then, you list each turn, preceded by its number. You list actions each player took, separated by commas whenever the player's opponent didn't use their priority and the phase stayed the same. When the phase changes or an opponent exercises priority, use a period. This might seem tricky, but is actually quite intuitive after a while.
• And when you draw, just list the card you drew, with a period after it (because the phase changed). If you flip to Bob, just list it like you would a draw (or maybe write "flip [card name]" if you want to be clearer).
• When players' life totals change, note that inline in parentheses. So you can see I flipped Thoughtseize to bob on turn 2, and lost one life, and noted that with "(17)".
• Don't mention what mana was tapped unless it's relevant. For example, you can see I cast Thoughtseize on turn 2 with a Jet and a Swamp available to me -- it wasn't really important which I tapped, so I didn't bother writing it down.
• If you alpha-strike, just say "swing". If you pick and choose, say e.g. "swing hex" if you only attacked with Vampire Hexmage. If they block, go "block" if it's obvious, or say, "block qasali" if they had a meaningful choice.
• Other than that, you will need to improvise in your notation system as weird cards crop up. For example, you can see how I annotated Thoughtseize above, using a colon to list their hand, and the word "take" to indicate my choice. Again, use the most intuitive, shortest solution possible so you'll easily remember it.
• Feel free to add notes and thoughts in the margins, or maybe on a new line in an aside -- figuring out explanations for your choices are very important towards growth, I've found. For example, it'd be a good idea to write down why I chose to take Recall here over Vault on turn 1. Seemed right at the time, but it did cost me this game. Try and do this after a game, or in a lull in the match.

This is just a starting point, and a general overview -- there are a lot of small details to work out as you keep taking notes. Too many to meaningfully list here, since most are little quirks that suit my personality. I recommend you all try it out, though!

[TheBrassMan]

I think it's interesting that there's a consensus in favor of more note taking/better note taking. When I wrote articles I had to take notes a lot. I tried a number of notation techniques, but I found that note-taking pretty universally tanked my results. I found any note taking beyond life totals, revealed cards, and on the rare occasion tracking mana, disrupted my ability to make decisions effectively. It is simply not possible to write at the speed you need to make decisions in magic - and obviously if you could, anything your opponent could read would put you at a significant disadvantage. I can't imagine any complex note-taking not running afoul of slow play rules. There's a chance standard players don't take notes because at high level events it's just not a possibility.

Of course I'm not saying note taking is a bad idea for everyone, I'm just surprised to not hear anyone had the same experience as me. I noticed dramatically different results in tournaments where I did and did not take notes - such to the point that I dreaded writing tournament reports (though to be fair that's only one of a few reasons). Eventually it came to the point where if I really wanted notes, I would only write them between rounds, after the match was over - even then, I had to deal with extra fatigue from less break time.

[MaximumCDawg]

You guys take this way to seriously.  Or just don't get to play sanctioned enough to goof around with it, I dunno.

My notes are life totals.  Or, occasionally, humorous doodles while I want for my opponent to tank or in response to the production of spirit tokens (which end up looking remarkably like the male gamete, usually).

[LotusHead]

I overheard Smennen and Ochoa talking about notetaking. Smennen writes his life totals horizontally (as opposed to vertically), because you can fit more games onto one page. But smemmen uses pages that are like 30% bigger than 8.5/11 sheets.

[serracollector]

Im surprised people don't just record games with thier voice.  Im sure there is an app for that on 99% of phones today.  Just click record, and just say everything thats happening, then play it back later.  Even stuff like "oh shit I think I made a mistake here doing BLAH".  Im pretty sure paper is gonna be made illegal in the next 50 years.  Everything is data now.

[Purple Hat]

I think it's interesting that there's a consensus in favor of more note taking/better note taking. When I wrote articles I had to take notes a lot. I tried a number of notation techniques, but I found that note-taking pretty universally tanked my results. I found any note taking beyond life totals, revealed cards, and on the rare occasion tracking mana, disrupted my ability to make decisions effectively. It is simply not possible to write at the speed you need to make decisions in magic - and obviously if you could, anything your opponent could read would put you at a significant disadvantage. I can't imagine any complex note-taking not running afoul of slow play rules. There's a chance standard players don't take notes because at high level events it's just not a possibility.

Of course I'm not saying note taking is a bad idea for everyone, I'm just surprised to not hear anyone had the same experience as me. I noticed dramatically different results in tournaments where I did and did not take notes - such to the point that I dreaded writing tournament reports (though to be fair that's only one of a few reasons). Eventually it came to the point where if I really wanted notes, I would only write them between rounds, after the match was over - even then, I had to deal with extra fatigue from less break time.

This is exactly how I always felt about it.  I've always thought about taking better notes, but I find that if I'm really dialed in I forget to take notes, but remember the games and can write some quick summaries later if I'm gonna do a report of some kind.  I take notes of life totals, storm count, floating mana and revealed cards. 

the decision tree thing that someone mentioned earlier seems like it would give away way too much about your hand unless you were remembering to do it every time your opponent did something whether you were planning to counter it or not.  I guess you could just do it at random when they did something, but it'd be tough to keep that actually random

[boggyb]

I always compared standard to playing checkers, vintage to playing chess.

I always thought of Legacy as like playing chess but without Queens. And Standard like playing chess without Queens or Rooks.