270Keeping Records of Your Poker Play
posted on September 25th, 2008
One of the major elements that separates amateur poker players from professionals, and that is often an all-too overlooked aspect of playing poker for a profit, is keeping records of your play. Many players would just prefer in their heads to say, Oh, I’m up about this much, or I’ve probably only lost x dollars, but in the long run, if you’re planning on seeing any kind of regular income at all, you have to run your poker entrepreneurship like the business that it is and be honest with yourself: how much are you making/losing, and under what circumstances do you come out the best.
This means keeping records, and while it might not be fun to put number crunching into the game, it’s really not a matter of a lot of math. A simple spreadsheet and some basic observations about the games you are involved in can be extremely valuable for reflecting on the kinds of tables and limits that you are most successful at.
For instance, do you make more on average playing no limit, or maybe you have more regular profits in the limit tables? When recording a specific session, what was the action like? How much did you come out ahead at a hyper-aggressive table vs. one where you were allowed to steal more pots? These kinds of factors should be recorded with the same kind of tenacity the simple gain or loss per session, so that in reflection you can tend in the future to stay in the terms you are most likely to succeed at.
