Tag Archives: helpful you 39;re trying
The Importance of Record Keeping in Poker
Poker players are good liars, which is helpful when you’re trying to bluff someone out of their shorts, but not as helpful when you’re trying to honestly asses how profitable you are as a player.
Let’s face it no one likes to lose, and if you have the ability to fudge a session here or a bad night there so that, in your mental ledger, you come out a winning player, then there’s a good chance you will.
While this will make you feel better, what it won’t do is help you to become a better player. The fact of the matter is that good players have to be brutally honest with themselves when it comes to the results of their play. They need to track every win and every loss, because without that knowledge, they have no foundation for analyzing their game.
Think about it let’s say you play poker online a bit, and you also play some live. You mostly play No limit hold’em, but you’ll play Omaha or limit online from time to time, and throw in some tournaments as well. That’s a lot of different games, and it’s very unlikely that you are equally good at each. What is very likely is that one or more of those games is costing you money (or, if you’re superb, one or more of the games is costing you money not because you’re losing money, but because you could be making more money playing another game).
You’ll never know, however, unless you keep good records. Without those records you have no clue what game is your most profitable. You might have a guess, but that guess is probably based on very biased data; as humans, we tend to remember the positive and downplay the negative. That strategy makes it easier to get through the day, but it really undermines our ability to accurately gauge results.
The counter-strategy to this inherent human tendency is simply to keep good records. You’ll find yourself surprised at how the data shakes out, as the written record tends to differ pretty wildly from the remembered one. In fact, it’s not even accurate to call it remembered, as it’s more imagined than anything.
Once you start keeping detailed records, you’ll find yourself in a much better position in terms of being able to analyze your playing trends, and in terms of being to better select the games and formats that are likely to generate the most profit for you as a poker player.
Yes, record-keeping can be a bit of a bore, but losing money unnecessarily certainly isn’t any more exciting. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and if you aren’t working hard on those details, one thing is for sure you’re going to have a devil of a time getting your game to the point of profitability where it deserves to be.