Poker Notes is a fast, portable notes app for poker. Write a read on any opponent while you play, tag it in your own colours and find it again in a single keystroke. Autosave, aliases, note history and CSV export are built in, and the optional hover boxes read the seat names off your tables with OCR and show your own notes right there — without ever stealing focus. 100% local, 100% TOS safe.
That is the whole program: one player list, one tags row, one notes field and a single row of buttons for the optional Capture & OCR overlay. No stat columns, no timers, no charts - and the status strip at the bottom is the only thing that ever updates by itself. (Nicknames and aliases in the list are blurred for privacy; the tags and notes are the real thing.)
Write, tag, search and reuse your reads on hundreds of opponents - in one self-contained app that stays out of the way while you play.
Type and stay typing. Your note saves itself about a second after the last keystroke - and the app never steals focus, never moves a window and never interrupts your play.
Create tags with a hex colour, tag players with one click, filter the player list by tag - and let the same colours frame the hover boxes on the table.
Store every nick a player uses in one record. Ctrl+F searches the name, the aliases and the note text, so a read you wrote months ago is one keystroke away.
Ctrl+E snapshots the current note with a timestamp (up to 40 per player) and loads any copy back into the editor. One click exports everything to Excel-ready CSV.
Middle mouse button or one button press: the app finds your tables, reads the seat names with OCR and places a click-through box on every seat. Green = player in database, grey ? = new name.
One self-contained EXE, one plain JSON database, atomic saves and a .bak before every write. No installer, no admin rights, no network calls, no memory reading.
Five short chapters covering everything from the first launch to the OCR hover boxes, your data files and every keyboard shortcut.
Poker Notes is a 100% self-contained portable application. There is no installer, no .NET runtime to download, no Python environment, no SQL server and no account to create.
Tesseract.dll, the tessdata\ folder and the x64\ DLLs next to the EXE; they are only used by the optional Capture & OCR features.
%AppData%\PokerNoteManager_Settings.txt, so you only ever point it at your file once.
๏ผ New player (Ctrl+N) and type the name exactly as the client shows it. The note saves itself about a second after you stop typing; saved HH:MM:SS next to the name confirms it.
Set AUTO to 30 s or 1 min and the hover boxes follow players who come and go. Boxes you removed yourself stay removed.
The editor is the whole workflow: one player record with tags, aliases, the note and its history. Nothing is ever written behind your back.
Ctrl+S forces a save. Before every write the previous file is copied to <your-db>.json.bak.
๐ท Tags opens the tag manager where you create tags and give each one a hex colour such as #FF8C00. Deleting a tag removes it from every player, after a warning.
PLAYERS. Ctrl+F jumps to the search box, which matches the player name, the aliases and the note text.
F2 renames the selected player - notes, tags, aliases and history follow. Delete asks first, and a .bak is always written before the change.
Tags and their colours are stored in a small JSON file next to your settings, so your colour scheme survives a database switch and every tag keeps its own swatch.
Screen reading is back in this release - rebuilt so it can never disturb your tables. There is no background scanning at all: images are only captured when you press the button.
๐บ SCREEN selector at the top right chooses the monitor to look at (the choice is remembered). When you capture with the mouse, the screen under the cursor wins - handy when you run several tables.
๐ธ Capture & Scan or the middle mouse button. Every window on that screen is checked for a green felt (browsers and lobbies are skipped, and a table without felt is judged by its window title), the seat names are read with OCR and one hover box is placed per seat. The status bar reports how many tables and names were found.
? means the name was read but is not in the database yet.
Ctrl+Enter. New names are created automatically and the previous version of the note is copied into the history. Esc or a click outside closes it. A normal click always goes through to the poker client, and right-click is never used (it folds on Unibet).
๐ DB only: ON ignores names that are not in the database, tag colours frame the boxes, ๐ Boxes: ON/OFF hides the overlay, ๐งน Clear wipes it, ๐ Paste & Scan reads a screenshot from the clipboard and โ๏ธ Snip Player reads the name under the mouse.
Use Ctrl+click or โ๏ธ Snip Player to correct the name once - afterwards the name matches reliably. Matching is tolerant of the classic OCR mix-ups (1/l/I, 0/O, 5/S, 8/B, 3/E) with a distance-based fallback, and the debug log lists every reading.
Opponents rename themselves weekly. Aliases keep every nick attached to the same note instead of splitting your reads in two.
Save note copy (Ctrl+E) stores a timestamped copy of the current note. History lists them - pick one and press Load into editor, or Clear history to delete them. Up to 40 copies per player.
Export CSV writes one row per player with aliases, tags, the full note text and the number of history copies - semicolon separated with a UTF-8 BOM, so Excel opens it without any import dialog.
Ctrl+click disappears only on that table. The hover card shows e.g. ruhhy ยท at 2 tables and the status bar counts them.
Write one careful line per read - "calls down light", "min-raises nut draws", "folds to turn barrels" - and let tags do the sorting. The hover card shows the tags first and the note right after, so a read you wrote in June is still useful in December.
Everything is plain text and fully yours - no cloud, no account, no telemetry. Copy the database file to a USB stick and your notes travel with you.
version 1: players, tags, notes, note_history, aliases). Point the app anywhere with Open DB, copy the file to a USB stick and your reads travel with you.
<your-db>.json.bak next to the database. Only one instance of the app runs at a time, so two copies can never overwrite each other.
PokerNoteManager_Settings.txt (last database), PokerNoteManager_Tags.json (tags + colours) and PokerNotes_Window.txt (window size) live in %AppData%. The log pokervision_debug.log (in %LocalAppData%) rotates at 2 MB and opens straight from the ? menu.
Ctrl+N - new playerCtrl+F - search name, alias or noteCtrl+S - save nowCtrl+E - save a note copy to historyF2 - rename the selected playerEsc - close dialog / clear searchMiddle mouse - Capture & ScanCtrl+click box - note editor on the tableCtrl+Enter - save in the on-table editorThe app ships with its own diagnostics. Start it with a switch and the answer is written to a text file in the log folder - the UI and screen tests also save PNGs in debug_snapshots, ready to send along if something looks off.
Classic trackers get flagged because they read or modify the memory of the poker client. Poker Notes never touches the client: it stores the text you write, and the optional capture only looks at a screenshot you asked for.
| Security criterion | Traditional poker HUDs | Poker Notes (OpenPokerLab) |
|---|---|---|
| Memory reading (process hooks) | โ Reads client RAM memory | โ 0% memory reading - only your own notes |
| DLL injection / code modification | โ Injects hooks into the poker client | โ Zero code injection, no process access |
| Background scanning on a timer | โ ๏ธ Polls the tables every 1-2 seconds | โ No timers - capture only when you press it |
| Focus & input automation | โ ๏ธ Can activate windows and click for you | โ Click-through overlay that cannot take focus |
| Real-time assistance (RTA) | โ ๏ธ Live solver output and strategy hints | โ Only the plain text you wrote yourself |
| Privacy & data ownership | โ ๏ธ Uploads hands and stats to cloud servers | โ 100% local JSON file, zero network calls |
Third-party tool policies differ from room to room - always check the current rules of the poker room you play on. Poker Notes is a manual note organizer: it never plays, clicks or decides for you.
Tesseract.dll, the tessdata\ folder and the x64\ DLLs next to the EXE if you want the optional Capture & OCR features.
WS_EX_TRANSPARENT) and can never take focus (WS_EX_NOACTIVATE), so every click lands in the poker client. The only background activity is the deferred save, which runs about 1.2 seconds after your last keystroke and only if something actually changed.
.json file that you pick yourself with Open DB - players, tags, notes, note_history and aliases in one readable file. A .bak copy of the file is written before every save, so a bad edit can never cost you more than the last change you made.
.json file. Send it to a friend, drop it in Dropbox or open it with ๐ Open DB and keep several databases side by side. Prefer a spreadsheet? Export CSV writes every player with aliases, tags, notes and history count in an Excel-ready format.
1/l/I, 0/O, 5/S, 8/B, 3/E) plus a distance-based fallback, and the box turns grey with a ? instead of guessing when a name is unknown. ๐ Snapshot saves the captured table with the readings, ready to send along if something looks odd.
Download Poker Notes v2.0 Portable. Unzip it, point it at your database and start writing notes in under 60 seconds - no installer, no runtime, no account.
Keep Tesseract.dll, the tessdata\ folder and the x64\ DLLs in the same folder as the EXE; they are only used by the optional Capture & OCR features. The download is served from GitHub Releases (release v2.0.0).