Should I keep records of my play?

Yes. Depending on where you live, this may be required for tax purposes. Even if you are one of those lucky individuals in a nation that doesn’t tax gambling winnings, you are still going to want to have a concrete assessment of your playing abilities.

Make sure you keep back-ups of your records, either through some sort of cloud service or through an external drive. Do this regularly. While poker record keeping software is highly functional, the databases that store your valuable information can become corrupted. Or you could just lose your laptop or drop it or something, and there goes all of your records. I failed to do this in the past and it has come back to haunt me.

How do I keep records of how much I have won and how many hands I have played?

Get PokerTracker. I would buy the microstakes version that only tracks low stakes games first, and then upgrade later. This software does a lot more than keep records, such as providing customizable statistics about your playing style and finding specific spots where you are losing money, called leaks. Most importantly, PokerTracker provides a heads up display, which provides real time statistics about your opponents playing tendencies. This software is legal to use at most poker rooms – I will explicitly mention if it is not allowed at a particular room over at my poker site information page.

If you can’t afford this software, create a spreadsheet where you record the starting balance of your account at the beginning and end of a session, as well as how long you played. Listing the number of hands you played in each session is also a good idea. Usually there is a statistics button on the poker table where you can look this up. When you have won enough money to buy PokerTracker, all your hand histories will have been saved and can be loaded into PokerTracker.

Heads Up Display

A heads up display (HUD) is a sometimes controversial piece of software, but as long as a site allows it you are likely giving up serious EV by not using one.  It does not tell you how to play, it just compiles statistics based on hands you have already played. On each table you are playing a little pop up box appears next to each of your opponents providing you with whatever statistics you want. Here is a screenshot of the Poker Tracker HUD via Wikipedia:

The little floating rectangles are the Heads Up Display. In this particular HUD the number to the right of the screenname is the number of hands (sample size), and then on the bottom row it shows Voluntarily Put Money in Pot percentage (VP$IP or VP), Preflop Raise percentage (PFR or PR) and Aggression Frequency (AF or AFq). If you click on the box, a pop up will show an expanded set of statistics.

This tool can be used to determine the tendencies and skill of another player without having to have a photographic memory. A player who has plays over 30% of his hands preflop at 6max NLHE is almost always a fish. A player who plays less than 15% of his hands is usually a rock, and frequently has a very strong hand when he raises preflop. Players between those numbers are likely to be winning players and tougher to play against. The intricacies of poker statistics are much more complicated than that and that will all be explained later, but that’s a decent generalization to start off with.

For beginners, I would suggest configuring your HUD to display the number of hands, VP$IP %, Preflop Raise %, 3 bet %, fold to 3 bet%, continuation bet % and fold to continuation bet %. Later on you may want to add more stats, or use different ones, but it is not a good idea to start off with something complicated and intimidating.

<< 6. Picking a Screenname and Depositing Funds | 8. Learning Poker Strategy >>