How to track poker sessions: cash games and tournaments

Why should poker players track their sessions?

Because short-term results in poker swing hard, and memory is selective: the big wins stick and the small losses fade. A record shows your real total profit and average result per hour, and it reveals which games, venues or times of day suit you best.

Bankroll management depends on the same numbers. Once you know your average profit per session and how much it swings, you can estimate how much money to set aside and which stakes fit. The poker bankroll management guide covers that part in detail.

What should you log for each poker session?

At minimum, log 4 fields: date, game type, buy-in and cash-out. Those 4 give you profit and ROI. Hours and the big blind are optional but they unlock hourly rate and bb stats, and for tournaments the number of bullets matters a lot. The table lists what to log for cash games and tournaments.

It also helps to note how you felt that day, such as tired, tilted or feeling sharp, plus a line or two of notes. After a while you often find that some states go with clearly worse results, which the total profit alone will never show.

How do you calculate profit, hourly rate and ROI?

The four most used numbers only need buy-in, cash-out and hours. The key is to log the total buy-in: if you reload during a cash game with a rebuy or add-on, add it to that session's buy-in.

• Session profitCash-out minus buy-in; positive is a win, negative a loss.
• Hourly rateTotal profit divided by total hours, counting only sessions with hours.
• ROITotal profit divided by total buy-in, times 100%.
• Win rateWinning sessions divided by all sessions, the share of sessions you won.

Here are 5 sample cash sessions at NL 50/100 with a big blind of 100. The numbers are made up and only show the math. In session 3 the player reloaded 5,000 once, so the buy-in is 15,000.

Together the 5 sessions made +14,000 over 19 hours, an hourly rate of about 737. ROI is 14,000 divided by 55,000, about 25.5%, and 3 winning sessions out of 5 make a 60% win rate. With only 5 sessions these numbers are far from stable; the more sessions you log, the closer they get to your real level.

What are bb/hr and bb/100 in cash games?

bb/hr is how many big blinds you win per hour, and bb/100 is how many you win per 100 hands. Measuring in big blinds lets you compare NL 50/100 with NL 100/200, and shows whether your level holds up when you change stakes.

In the example above, an hourly rate of about 737 with a big blind of 100 is about 7.4 bb/hr. Live games rarely record hand counts, so a common estimate is about 30 hands an hour: 19 hours is about 570 hands, and 140 big blinds won works out to about 24.6 bb/100. That is only an estimate, and online games deal far more hands per hour, so do not compare the two directly. For the basics of blinds and stakes, see Wikipedia's Texas hold 'em article.

How do you work out tournament ROI, ITM% and ITM per bullet?

For tournaments, total buy-in is the buy-in per bullet times the number of bullets. ITM% is events where you cashed divided by all events, and ITM per bullet is cashes divided by total bullets. Multi-bullet events cost more, so looking only at ITM% per event tends to flatter your results.

These 4 events give an ROI of about 33.9%, and 2 cashes in 4 events is an ITM% of 50%. But 7 bullets went in, so ITM per bullet is only about 28.6%. Almost the whole result also comes from the single Weekend 10K cash; one big prize can decide months of tournament numbers, so you need far more events than cash sessions before the stats mean much.

What are the most common poker tracking mistakes?

Most bad records come from gaps and inconsistency, not from wrong math. These are the 6 most common problems; settle your rules before you start, then log every session the same way.

• Logging the wins and leaving the losses "for later", which inflates total profit.
• Leaving cash game reloads out of the buy-in, which skews profit and ROI.
• Logging a multi-bullet tournament as one bullet, which flatters ITM per bullet and ROI.
• Logging hours only some of the time, so the hourly rate covers only part of your play.
• Adding up different currencies from trips abroad without converting them first.
• Filling in sessions days later from memory, when amounts and hours are easy to get wrong.

App, notebook or spreadsheet: what is the difference?

Notebooks and spreadsheets are flexible, but you write the formulas yourself and handle currency conversion, multi-bullet tournaments and hourly rate on your own. A tracker app works out profit, ROI, hourly rate and ITM per bullet the moment you save, and logging is quicker. The POKERHERO poker bankroll tracker takes a form, one session per line of pasted text, or the Voice Assistant; no sign-up, and data stays on your phone by default.

How do you start tracking your poker results?

Whether you use an app, a spreadsheet or a notebook, these 4 steps keep the habit going for the long run.

1. Set your tracking rules firstBuy-ins include rebuys and add-ons, tournaments use buy-in per bullet and bullets, and hours run from sitting down to leaving. Write them down and stick to them.
2. Log on the same dayRight after you leave the table, log the 4 required fields: date, game type, buy-in and cash-out.
3. Add hours, big blind and stateHours and the big blind give you hourly rate and bb/hr; state and notes help with later review.
4. Review once a monthCheck monthly profit, hourly rate and ROI by game type, then decide next month's stakes and schedule.

Poker session tracking FAQ