Record-keeping Revisited
By Andy Glazer

Just about every poker writer who has ever lived has advocated keeping good records of your poker results, including quite a few who probably don't keep their own records.

The reasons given usually center around getting an honest picture of your results, and having records ready in case you hit a big score and want to deduct offsetting losses on your taxes. These are both good reasons and I don't need to spend any more time on them.

But there's another kind of record-keeping, a bit more detailed, that can prove invaluable to your long-term success. It's what I call "spike records."

As anyone who has ever played the stock market knows, it's pretty hard to pick the precise best moment to get in or out of a stock. For similar reasons, it's hard to know the best moment to quit a poker game, except of course in hindsight when, having been up $1,400 at one point, you come home a $200 winner, and say, "I wish I'd quit when I was up $1,400."

Many players maintain that good poker players should not consider the amount they are winning or losing in deciding whether or not to stay in a game. These "purists" maintain that unless you are tired or somehow "off" your game for physical reasons, the only valid reasons to leave involve how good or bad the game is. Lots of weak players, you stay, lots of good players, you leave, that's the purist theory. "Life is one long session," the purists say (and they're right), so staying or quitting depending on how you're doing in any one given night isn't a good idea.

Perhaps that's a valid approach for the top 1% of poker players, but the last time I checked, 99% of the world's poker players were not in the top 1%, and for us "human" poker players, I think it's quite reasonable to inject some personal psychology into the quitting-time formula.

Most poker players do NOT play the same when they are either down or up a large amount. In general (an expression that implies specific exceptions), most players play much worse when they are down a certain amount, and many players tend to play worse when ahead a gigantic sum.

The reason is usually the same: playing too many pots. The big loser is desperate to catch up, and the big winner feels invulnerable because he has made six flush draws in a row.

Clearly, the "perfect" poker player would not have this sort of hole in his game. He could play as the purists suggest, always on his "A" game and with results that depend on who else is sitting in. But very few of us are perfect.

If you expand your record-keeping to include not merely your number of hours played, the game you played, and your net result, but also a section on where you "spiked," you'll learn some valuable lessons about when to "get out of Dodge." In a winning session, record when you hit your peak, and what happened after that. In a losing session, keep track of how your play went from hour to hour. Does your play usually deteriorate after you are down 50 big bets ($1,000 in a 10-20 game)? Does it usually get better after you've lost one rack of chips?

If you learn to recognize your own personal trends and danger points-the totals where you start disrespecting the money in front of you, either because you have so much, you throw it around carelessly, or because you've lost so much, you've exceeded your point of misery indifference for the night-you'll start to recognize when you should leave for the night. Similarly, if you discover you almost always start poorly and then pull yourself together, you're on your way to identifying a key weakness in your game.

True, leaving for the night when you hit the high or low spike points won't help you develop the skills to eliminate this hole in your game. But it will certainly help preserve your bankroll, and if you find yourself leaving early too often, you will probably develop the determination you need to work your way past this flaw in your game.

Until you keep records detailed enough to learn these numbers, though, you're left guessing, and as with so many aspects of poker, guessing leads to losing. You can't fix a problem until you clearly understand the problem. Keeping thorough records, not just of results but of how you got those results, is one of the first and most important steps you can take towards gaining that understanding.