If you don't keep records, how will you know if you're a successful poker player? Without accurate records, you'll simply never know. Of course, lots of folk's claim they're winning players - in fact, most players do. But if you ask about their records, they'll conveniently change the subject. That figures. Hey, there's a mountain of self-deception out there.

If you're serious about poker, treat your games like a business or a profession. Every business keeps records. Accurate records are the only way to know if your bottom line should be written in black ink or red ink.

Perhaps it's easier for the vast majority of poker players to avoid looking truth in the face. But if you want to win money playing poker, you need to be honest with yourself. So keep track!

Fortunately, the records you need to keep as a poker player are a lot simpler than the records maintained by business owners. In fact, they're much simpler than the records needed to prepare a simplified income tax return.

What Kind of Records Should I Keep?

You should establish two basic statistical barometers: Your win rate, expressed as average amount of money won or lost per hour, and another figure, called "standard deviation," to measure short-term fluctuations. Your goal is to determine your average hourly expectation. Here's what to do:

Whenever you play online (or off):

You'll also want to record this cumulative information:

If you play at more than one online site, we advise keeping separate hourly, monthly, and yearly records for each one, then combining them monthly or at least annually for overall results.

The calculations are actually quite simple, even for the mathematically phobic. Computing your win or loss rate is just a matter of dividing amount of money won or lost by number of hours played. This calculation yields the average amount of money won or lost each hour. In statistics, we call that average figure the mean.

Knowing how much you're winning or losing on an hourly basis is important. But it's also important to know if your average, or mean, is a realistic barometer of your playing data.

That sounds confusing, but it's really not. Here's a simple case to illustrate:

Let's say San Francisco and Kansas City each have an average (mean) annual temperature of 65 degrees. But in San Francisco, the temperature rarely gets extremely hot or cold, while Kansas City is brutally hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. While mean annual temperature might be the same for both cities, there's more of a spread between the highs and lows in Kansas City than in San Francisco. Consequently, the mean temperature of 65 degrees is more representative of San Francisco's temperate climate than of Kansas City's climatic extremes.

Now let's take the same concept to poker: Two players might each win an average of $15 per hour. One has big wins or big losses very rarely, while the other goes through wild swings or fluctuations (greater variance) to arrive at the same average win rate. Who's better off? Clearly, it's the player who achieves the same win rate while putting less of his bankroll at risk.

To measure variance - which speaks volumes about risk to your bankroll - we need to do a bit more with those observed values (amounts you won or lost each hour and recorded in your computer file or site) that you used to calculate average wins or losses. We need to know just how well the mean reflects reality. That's where the standard deviation comes in.

• What's Money Management All About?
• Does "Quitting Ahead" Online - or Offline - Make Any Sense at All?
• Should You Set Stop-Loss Limits?
• What You Really Need To Know About Money Management
• The Standard Deviation
• Life on the Edge: What's My Risk Tolerance?
• How Should You Balance Your Win Rate Against The Standard Deviation?
• Keeping up with Record Keeping