2) In case (as is common with beginners) you find 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 reflect the true nature of your losses.
3) The 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 cardrooms than others, you think you’re a good hold’em player but your bottom line is actually better at stud, etc., etc.
I don’t dispute any of these reasons. They are all excellent reasons to keep records. Note also that just because you keep records, you don’t necessarily have to share them with anyone else (except in instance #1, when you would indeed want to share them with the IRS).
A WEEK? HOW ABOUT SIX MONTHS???
I think the best reason, especially for beginning players, is a variation of #2. Ever since Jeff Goldblum uttered his immortal argument for why rationalizations were more important than sex in Lawrence Kasdan’s great movie, The 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 month that included results of
+$87
-$95
+45
-$86
Would consider that they “more or less broke even” for the month, even though the actual records would show that they lost $51. Lose $51 a month for 12 months, and you’re out $612. Can you think of anything on which you’d like to spend $612?
Even though I believe that one of my strengths as a player is reading other people’s facial expressions and body language while not giving away too much information of that type myself, 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
There 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 wire transfer, a bank debit, or a payment to one of the Internet e-cash companies.
Your “forced” passive financial records almost certainly won’t be as useful as the kind of active records I advised 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. That’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 first 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. There’s a phrase for that sort of attitude. It’s called “gambling problem,” and that’s not likely to offer a promising future in poker, either.
If you won’t keep active records, give online poker a try, if it’s legal where you live, and play for small stakes, especially when you are learning or getting comfortable with the game.
While there can be many reasons why you might perform worse in online games than in live games (just as there are also many reasons why you might perform better), at least you’ll acquire some experience at looking at those cold, hard numbers, and start to realize that either your hobby is a lot more expensive than you thought it was, or that you might do well to invest some of that money you’re losing in some good poker literature.
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We're talking real poker here, not video poker, so remember you're not trying to impress the change lady by getting the highest hand. Your goal is to be holding a better hand than your opponents. When everyone else is frightened off by your superior play, the pot is yours.
