Poker Strategy: Keep Good Financial Records

Posted by The Marksman at 5 December, at 13 : 39 PM Print

When you start playing poker whether it be professionally, or just for fun in your spare time you need to make sure you are keeping good and accurate financial records.  A lot of players don’t do this they just put some money in their online poker accounts or head down to their local card room, and start playing without any idea of how much they are losing or winning against their investment.  People will usually continue playing with their personal funds and really don’t have a clue how much they have won or lost, and most importantly what games and stakes are the most profitable for them. Even the most honest and able-minded poker players have a tendency to distort the truth about their results from their poker sessions. Most poker players in fact don’t even have a physical poker bankroll – money that is only used for poker.  Their money is split between real-life needs and their poker playing. Without keeping stats, it can be really easy to lose track of exactly how well you’re doing at the poker table.

Even if you’re winning, how can you tell by how much?

Out-of-pocket players like this are only concerned with two numbers:

1. The amount of money they come into the poker room with.
2. The amount of money they leave the poker room with.

If you want to truly get better at poker, you’ll need to know exactly how much you win or lose at a specific game or limit.  Do you crush $1/$2 for $30/h, but only beat $2/$5 for $15 an hour?  It may be a bigger game with more money in play, but if you’re not making as much money, why play it?  Ultimately you need to know exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are (yes, you have weaknesses).

How to Keep Records

There is really no one right way to keep your records, but there is a wrong way.  Always catalog your losses no matter how small and always include your buy-in amount plus any fees added on to the buy-in.   The main thing that matters is keeping all the information you need to get a complete perspective on where your poker related finances stand.

Pick your own poison:

• Pad of paper and a pencil
• Excel spreadsheet
• Online stat tracking
• iPhone stats app (such as the Hot Poker Log.
• Poker Tracker (Pay App a bit complex but works fairly wel)
• Poker Tourney Tracker (Free app)

Required Information:

• Date
• Start time
• End time
• Total amount of buy-ins
• Cash-out amount

Recommended Information:

• Limit played
• Location played
• Buy-In and Duration (for tournaments)

The more information you keep track of, the more reports you’ll be able to run. Some reports are more valuable than others, it’s important to pay attention to the negative trends as well as the positive.  Too many times people look at the times they won and rave about how great of a player they are, but they fail to see they final tabled once out of 200 tournaments that makes a difference.

Essential Reports

• Legacy Results (A running total of profit/loss for all results)
• Monthly Results

You may also want to know how much you make per hour, how much you make per hour at a specific limit, your BB/hour or even what room you make the most money in.  Depending on how savvy you are with Excel, you can have the program run reports for specific months, limits, dates in a variety of different ways. You can even have it automatically generate a graph from your legacy profits.  The bottom line is you need to have something, it doesn’t have to be very sophisticated or expensive just something that records the information and give it to you in a format you can understand.  I would never have known where I was as a player until I looked at the numbers, and realized I had a lot of work to do if I wanted those numbers to look better.  Just like in Poker without information you are  playing blind, think about it if you paid $5 every week for a chance to win $30 and after doing it for a while you realize that 98% of the time you don’t get the $30 would you continue investing your money???

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