Tips from the Pros - Tracking Your Results

One of the differences between winning and losing online poker players is something that you would never expect. Winning players almost always keep track of their results, while losing players virtually never do. The rationale is psychological. Losing players don’t want to realize that they’re actually losing, so they don’t keep track. They have a selective memory and probably tell most others that they “break even.” Winning players keep track of their results for a variety of reasons, including confidence, analysis, bankroll management, and perspective.

If you are serious about becoming a winning poker player (or improving your record if you’re already a winner), it’s absolutely essential that you track your results. Don’t wait until you have a good session to start, start now. In addition to your monetary results, you should track the number of hands you play, what stakes you play, what games you play, and how many tables you play. It may also be helpful to keep track of what time of the day your sessions are played, as many players play poorly late at night.

You can keep track simply in a notebook, or create a spreadsheet using Excel or any similar program. For the first couple months that you keep track, you don’t need to do much analysis of the information that you’ve gathered. Simply keeping track will encourage the proper long-term mindset and professionalism.

Once you have accumulated around 20,000 hands of information, you can start to look for patterns. Are your results significantly better when you’re multitabling less? Do you win more at certain games or stakes? You shouldn’t draw any conclusions based solely on the records, because it’s not nearly enough data to draw firm conclusions, but the records should definitely guide you. Play in the games and situations that are most profitable, unless you’re specifically trying to gain experience or knowledge for the future.

The best way to keep track of how you’re doing is a measure called big blinds per one hundred hands (BB/100). In Limit games we measure big bets per one hundred hands. So let’s say you played 10,000 hands of 0.50/1.00 NL Hold’em and made $400. That’s 400 big blinds over 10,000 hands, which equals 4BB/100. That’s a very reasonable win rate, although not fantastic. At the lower stakes you should aim for the 8-10 BB/100 in No Limit and Pot Limit, but any winning record is impressive. For Limit games (using big bets not big blinds) anything over 1BB/100 is quite good, especially at mid-stakes or higher. The BB/100 stat allows you to track your results at different stakes without making the higher stakes game appear more important. However, for a professional poker player the most important statistic is $/hr, so make sure you keep track of that as well. A lower winrate at higher stakes may be better for your bottom line, but the lower your winrate the higher your variance.