Page 17 - December 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Record-Keeping: A Tool for Improving Poker Results
Iby Andrew N.S. Glazer
t’s vitally important to keep records about your poker results, for a lot of reasons. Here are
wire transfer, a bank debit, or a payment to one of the Internet e-cash companies.
Your “forced” passive nancial records almost certainly won’t be as useful as the kind of active records mentioned above, because they won’t include the details about kind of game, time of day or night, stakes, etc., but they will still be far superior to a dependence on the accuracy of your guesstimates, mostly because your guesstimates will record the results that you want to be there: wins, or break-even status. at’s not evil, it’s just human nature, but most of us work too hard for our money for guesstimates to leave us with a false impression of how much poker is costing us.
My rst and best advice is to keep good active records, whether you play online, in home games, or in casinos. If you won’t, it’s probably either because you’re lazy (not a likely road to poker success) or because deep down you already know what the records will tell you, and you don’t want to face it. ere’s a phrase for that sort of attitude. It’s called “gambling problem,” and that’s not likely to o er a promising future in poker, either.
Andrew N.S. Glazer is the poker tournament editor for Card Player magazine, and is widely considered the world’s foremost poker tournament reporter. He writes a gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, and has authored Casino Gambling the Smart Way, which is available in bookstores or at his web site, www.casinoselfdefense.com. His new book with Phil Hellmuth is tentatively titled Practical Tournament Poker: A Guide to Learning Tournament Poker Skills Through Analyzing Actual Plays of the World’s Best Players.
some of the more commonly cited ones:
1) In case you win a big tournament or other lucky gambling “score,” the records will be immeasurably helpfulinprovingyouro settinglossestothe .
2) In case (as is common with beginners) you nd yourself losing, you won’t be kidding yourself about how much your hobby or your poker education is costing you. Human nature almost invariably leads to “guesstimates” that don’t accurately re ect the true nature of your losses.
3) e process will be educational, as you might recognize useful trends. For example, your night sessions are more productive than your day sessions; you win at low stakes but lose at middle stakes; you perform better at some card rooms than others; you think you’re a good hold’em player but your bottom line is actually better at stud, etc., etc.
A Week? How About Six Months?
I think the best reason, especially for beginning players, is a variation of #2. Ever since Je Goldblum uttered his immortal argument for why rationalizations were more important than sex in Lawrence Kasdan’s great movie, e Big Chill (“Oh, yeah? Ever go a week
without a good rationalization?”), I’ve remained aware of just how dangerous rationalizations are to poker players.
I’d be willing to bet that among poker players who do not keep records, more than 90% would sincerely believe that a four-session stretch that included results of +$87,
-$95, +45, and -$86 would consider that they “more or less broke even,” even though the actual records would show that they lost $51. Lose $51 a month for 12 months, and you’re out $612. at handles a lot of Christmas shopping!
Even though I like “in person” poker more than online poker, the “forced” record-keeping that comes along with online poker makes me a fan of that game, especially for players who have not previously kept records.
Passive Record-Keeping is Better Than No Record-Keeping
ere is just no way around record-keeping when you play online, because if you start losing, you have to replenish your chips not with cash from your wallet, but with some kind of transaction of which you’ll have a record, be it a check, a credit card purchase, a
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
DECEMBER 2003 Page 17
Column: The Poker PunditTM