Poker Talk

One more stepping stone you need to climb on your way out of poker “suckerdom” is to recognize the need to keep detailed records of your table antics. Regardless of how objective you think you are, simply keeping a mental track of what you do at the table is not enough, because you’ll always remember things in a slightly distorted way: from your own perspective, exaggerating the good moves you’ve made and forgetting about the bad ones.

The first thing you need to cover when deciding to keep serious track of how you’re performing at the green felt is the issue of the bankroll. Very few players keep a separate bankroll for poker purposes only. Most of us commit the mistake of mixing our everyday finances with the money we take to the poker tables and that’s just plain wrong.

Your primary objective at the poker table is to make money. Sure, some people play it for the fun and the kicks, but I’ll assume you’re in it for the money as much as for the fun aspect.

If your goal is to make money, you need to know exactly how much you’re making, and I’m not talking about keeping track of how much you take to the tables and how much you walk away with. For a serious player, that’s just not going to cut it. You need to know exactly what limits you play and how you do on each and every one of these limits. If you’re dominating a certain limit and you move on to a higher limit where you still win but you only make like $15 an hour, obviously, you shouldn’t hang around there just because it’s a higher limit and you’re aiming for the boasting rights. You should also sign up for rakeback too. Rake rebate deals like the Full Tilt rakeback or the Ultimate Bet rakeback offer you a very nice edge bankroll-wise. Leaving an edge like this unexploited is a sin for every serious poker player.

These factors don’t really have anything to do with actual hands-on poker strategy, but they will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses and ultimately they will help you become a better poker player.

How you keep track of your poker performance is up to you really. You can use the low tech approach of pen and paper, you can use Excel or another similar spread-sheet application, you can use the stats provided by your poker room or you can go really high tech and purchase an application like PokerTracker.

The basic information that you need to keep track of, should include the current date, the start time of the session and its end time (it’s quite easy to lose track of time amid all the excitement, so you need this information to be able to tell exactly how long you play), the total amount of buy-ins (all the money that you take to the tables) and the total amount of your cash outs. This basic information will help you determine your hourly rate, which will offer you a precious clue regarding the EV+ in the hands that you play.

Other information that you should also track: the limits at which you play and the location. Location is not only important for live play. Different online poker rooms throw different levels of competition at you, and if you have accounts in tens of poker rooms, you’ll eventually find it difficult to track what you did and where. The bottom line is, you need to know where you played, because you may dominate a certain limit in one poker room and struggle at the same limit in another.

The most important result is of course your hourly rate, but putting together monthly statistics as well as overall ones is also helpful.

I know it may seem like a lot of effort should go into these statistics but it isn’t exactly so. Once you start doing it, you’ll see it’s easy and the rewards it’ll offer you will be more then worth the effort you put into it.

Keeping records of your poker shenanigans may not give you a direct help at the table, but it will definitely help you identify and eliminate your weaknesses which will translate into a better overall table performance over time.