If you don’t keep records, how will you know whether you’re successful or not? The truth is, without accurate records, you’ll never know how good a player you are.

While most poker players don’t keep accurate records, they’ll also tell you they’re winning players.

They ought to know better. Since the majority of poker players are lifelong losers, there’s a lot of self deception out there.

If you are serious about poker, you have to treat your game like a business or a profession. Every business keeps records. Without them, a business owner has no idea of what it costs to make, sell or inventory their product, and no way of knowing whether their bottom line will be written in black or red.

Perhaps it’s easier for the vast majority of poker players to avoid looking truth in the face. But if you intend to win money playing poker, you must keep abreast of the results you’re achieving.

Fortunately, the kinds of records you’ll need to keep as a poker player are a lot simpler than the records maintained by business owners. In fact, they are much simpler than the kind of records you have to keep in order to prepare a simplified income tax return.

We’re going to talk about record keeping as well as the advisability of maintaining a poker journal, and they’re two entirely different things.

Records are primarily numerically bases — your playing statistics — for want of a better word. They’re the cold, hard facts of your play, summarizing how well or poorly you might be playing, as well as providing a numerical basis to assess how much you’re winning per hour or per hundred hands of play, and what kind of variance you might be experiencing.

A poker journal is like any other kind of journal; it’s a written record of you thoughts and feelings about your play, a discussion with yourself about how well you’re learning and what problem areas seem to be cropping up, as well as anything else you’d like to journalize. If you get nothing else out of journalizing, at least it will keep you focused on the game when you’re away form the table. When you do that, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised about the insights you’ll have into your own game.