How Ten-Four Players Actually Use Colour Labels [Konasho Monthly vol.1]

Written by konasho (X: @konasho)

Ten-Four's Four Colour Labels: How Is Everyone Using Them?

"Ten-Four," the poker app where you can burn through hands at absurd speed, gives you four labels: white, red, blue and green. To find out how strong players actually use them, I asked a handful of the members playing in the Seeker Start Houou-sen (page in Japanese).

Labelling by Play Style

The most common approach was labelling by play style — loose or tight, and so on. One example, with colours picked to match the mental image:

• White … someone I know
• Red … aggressive
• Blue … passive
• Green … tough caller

Labelling by Skill Level

Others went by skill level: is this player above me, is this someone I want to fight for pots with? Roughly:

• White … rock solid
• Red … reasonably strong
• Blue … leak already spotted (written up in notes)
• Green … don't fast-fold when this player is at the table

The "White for Now" Approach

In an environment where your opponents change every single hand, being able to get "the information you need at a glance" is enormously useful.

That said, labels can also drag you into a hole by anchoring you to a first impression. One approach was to slap a white label on anyone whose play looked off, then re-colour them according to their actual leak the next time you run into them — building confidence in the read over multiple encounters.

Labels as a Counter to Sizing Tells

There is also a wrinkle specific to fast-fold environments: you can vary your open size by hand strength and get away with it far more easily.

The counter is to tag anyone you suspect of doing it, and then:

• Opens larger than the GTO size → overfold
• Opens smaller than the GTO size → 3-bet more often

That little trick came up as well.

"Strategy Matching," Aimed at Maximising EV

Every use above is really about reducing stress while you play. But one player had a use aimed squarely at maximising EV.

That is the approach of colour-coding by "pick four strategies from your own toolbox and track which one lands."

The reasoning: you can already tell from the stats roughly whether someone is likely to 3-bet you or defend thin. So the four labels — a scarce resource — should be spent on something else.

Pairing Labels with the Notes Feature

The other feature worth using alongside labels is the notes. Writing down "overcalls" and nothing else is not enough. What you want to know is "which hands are travelling to which node."

Things like:

• Does he stick with the draw no matter what you bet?
• Is he unable to fold hands that were strong preflop?
• When he misses the draw, the line becomes bet–check–bet
• His bet size with overpairs is 75%

and so on.

Find the approach that works for you, and one day you'll be sitting at the expert tables. Go win that crown.

Appendix: General Best Practice for Labelling

A quick word on general poker knowledge and the conventions of the online HUD world. One of the well-known colour schemes over there is "red = nit (tight) / yellow = standard reg / green = fish (loose) / orange = LAG or maniac," where the colour is assigned according to VPIP and PFR ranges (source: Smart Poker Study). Colour schemes vary between schools of thought, though, and other systems exist — including five-colour ones (jimmakos.com).

The caution that comes up everywhere is jumping to conclusions on too small a sample. VPIP and PFR are said to need 100–200 hands, and 3-bet stats 500 hands or more, before the numbers settle down (BlackRain79). And the underlying premise gets repeated just as often: a HUD is a tool for checking your reads, not a replacement for thinking. In an environment like Ten-Four where samples are extremely small, the safe way to run labels is to assume from the start that you will re-colour them regularly.

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