5. Is it Friday? Besides being the last day of the traditional workweek, Fridays are good for poker players because a lot of people get their paychecks on Friday.

6. What time of day is it? Games played during the mornings and afternoons tend to be full of older, more conservative players, who have a lot of playing experience. The pots at those times will be smaller than average, and you won't get paid off as well on your winning hands. Evening and late night players tend to be younger and a little looser, so there's a lot more action in those games. Your opponents at those times will be making more mistakes when they play against you.

7. How big is the jackpot? Is it double or triple jackpot night? If the jackpot is unusually large, then it might be worth your time to play, even if it's a time when you wouldn't ordinarily go. Some cardrooms double or even triple the jackpot (up to a certain amount) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays in an effort to increase business.

8. Is it tournament night? Originally, one of the main purposes of tournaments was to draw players to the cardroom, so they would fill the ring games as they were eliminated from the tournament. It still works. That's why there are more tournaments on a poker room's slow days than there are on the busy days.

9. Personal obligations. There's an old joke with the punch line: "On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, when I attend my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, we play poker. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I attend my Gamblers Anonymous meetings, we sit around and drink." Whatever your personal obligations are during the week, don't forget them. Take them into consideration when deciding when to play.

• Poker Playing Calendar (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records Part3 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records (0)

If you're a typical hold 'em player, you probably have a job, a family, and a home to take care of. You're not free to go play poker for hours on end any time the mood strikes you. You have to budget your time. You have to plan ahead so that you can get the most value and pleasure from your poker playing time. That's how this chapter will help you.

If you play in a regularly scheduled poker game at a friend's home, there's not much you can do about changing the day or the time the game starts. If you're not there for the game, you don't get to play. If you play in a casino poker room, however, or if you're lucky enough to have a choice of more than one poker room to visit, then you have some decisions to make.

Every hour you spend in a hold 'em game is not necessarily equal to every other hour you play. In poker, as in most aspects of life, one day of the week is not the same as every other day of the week. A poker game changes over time. It is like a living, breathing organism that evolves into something else every time a player leaves the game or a new player is seated. You can predict in advance which times are better than others if you know which factors to consider. Let's look at a list of those now:

1. What day of the week is it? Most people have already realized the importance of this question. Everybody knows that Saturday is always better than Tuesday, just because the majority of people who have jobs usually work Monday through Friday.
2. Is Monday a holiday? When Monday is a holiday, the games are just as good on Monday as they are on Saturday and Sunday.

3. Is it Monday evening? If it's Monday night during football season, the poker room usually has giveaways and specials for the poker players. You might get to enter a free football pool or have a shot at extra money added to the jackpot.

4. What day of the month is it?The 15th and the 30th or 31st are Federal Government paydays, and Social Security recipients get their checks on the last day of the month. If that's a Monday, then the previous Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are what's known as "hot-check days," because everyone can write a check and know it will be good by the time it makes it to the bank on Monday or later.

• Poker Playing Calendar Part2 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records Part2 (0)

17. Cocktail waitress tips. This can also be a big expense for some people. These tips come out of the stack of poker chips that you have in front of you, so write them down.

18. Narrative remarks. This section is for anything you want to say about the game that can't be reduced to numbers, or for remarks expanding upon and explaining any of the above entries. I use it as a diarylike entry so that I can give each poker playing session it's own unique characteristics. After reading everything I have on a session, I'm able to remember playing that session, even if it was several years ago.

19. Tournament results. Poker tournaments are very different from regular ring games. These records should be kept totally separate from non-tournament notes. Be sure to record all the same information as in your regular games, but keep it in a separate ledger or file.

How often you take notes is up to you. I would say that the best guideline is: write it down before you forget it. Some people take notes and update them every time they get the dealer button. That's about once every twenty minutes. Some players take notes while the dealer is being replaced by a new dealer. That's exactly once every thirty minutes. Most players wait until after their playing session is over and then take their notes when they get home, either the same day or the next day. Do whatever works for you.

I recommend that you carry a pen and a small writing tablet with you at all times. There are poker rooms that don't allow electronic devices to be used at the table. This includes pocket calculators, voice recorders and palm-sized electronic notepads.

Personally, I carry a small, state-of-the-art digital voice recorder that I step away from the table to use when the dealers are changing. I know another player who sets up a laptop computer on an unused hold 'em table nearby, so he can update his notes every hour or so. Incidentally, this player is far superior to me in skill, so, while you're taking a note from me, maybe I should take a note from him. Couldn't hurt.

• Poker And Keeping Records Part2 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records (0)

The items listed above should be the bare minimum of your records. How much more information you want to collect is practically unlimited and, of course, up to you. Theoretically, the more information you have with which to make decisions, the better your decisions should be. A few more items that might help you are:

12. Who else is at the table? If you have a few known rocks, or a few habitually bad players in the game, then you know that your results may not truly be representative of an average session for you. Making a note of that will make you feel better, especially if you had a loss that session.

13. Type of table. Was it a very loose table, or was it full of no-action rocks? You might want to create a rating system that you understand to help you quantify this quality. You could rate the table on a scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being the tightest table in the world, 5 being average, and 10 being the loosest game you've ever seen. Use whatever works for you.
14. How well did you play? Understand that this is not related to how much you actually won or lost. It has to do only with how well you played the game. Did you do your best? Did you go on tilt? How disciplined were you?

15. Secondary expenses. If you're going to have a hobby, you might as well know how much it's really costing you. Does it cost you anything to get to the game? Bus fare? Road tolls? If you play in the Chicago area, highway or bridge tolls might be a regular expense. Valet parking? Do you want to count these costs as poker related expenses? Maybe you'd like to keep track of them anyway, without counting them as expenses or losses.

16. Dealer tokes. You'd be amazed at how much this can add up to if you give it a little thought. If you play forty hours a week, dealer tips could be as much as $8,000 per year, depending on your style of play and what kind of tipper you are. Whatever they add up to, I strongly recommend that you keep track of them. Apart from being a losing player, they're the single biggest drain on your overall bottom line.

4. How long did you play? This statistic is the actual time you spent at the table, in the game. Do not count that hour you went to lunch or all of your excessive short absences from the table. Make this entry in terms of quarter hours. If you can, narrow it down to tenths of an hour. The more accurate your records are, the more valid your results will be when you analyze them.

5. Calendar date. This one's always a number between 1 and 31 (some date from the first of the month to the thirty-first of the month). This will also be useful for later analysis.

6. Day of the week. M, T, W, R, F, S, U. R is for Thursday and U is for Sunday. As you'll see in the next chapter, this is a very important note to keep.
7. Time of day. Record the time that you started playing and the time that you quit playing. Keep this number separate from the total number of hours played in #4, above. They are very different statistics.

8. How much did you win or lose? Although this may be the bottom line number that you focus on after each playing session, it is by no means the only statistic of use to you.
9. Your win/loss converted into # of big bets. Experienced poker players talk about their wins and losses in terms of how many big bets they won or lost, because that's really the best way to communicate all of the relevant information. If someone tells you, "I won $200 playing poker the other night," he hasn't really told you as much as he could. You don't know if he was playing $l-$5 for two hours and was extremely lucky, or if he was playing $5-$ 10 for eight hours and won that $200 on just the last hand he played before leaving the game. Speaking in terms of big bets also makes it easier to compare how you're doing in different games at varying limits.

10. Hourly rate for this game. Divide your win or loss for this session by the number of hours you played. If you played eight hours and won $120, then your hourly rate would be a plus $ 15 per hour. If you were playing $3-$6 limit, this rate would convert to 2.5 big bets per hour.

11. Hourly rate for all games and totals. This calculation is the total of all the poker games you've played (regardless of the type of game or the limit) divided by the total number of hours you've played poker. You'll be mixing together all of your stud games with your hold 'em games, but, for the purposes of this statistic, it doesn't matter.

• Poker Playing Calendar Part2 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records (0)

In all my years of teaching the game, I've seen everything that a player will do to improve his game. The thing that stands out most is that the players who go on to become winners in the long run-that one player out of twenty-are the ones who kept records of their poker playing from the very beginning.

Learning any game and then practicing it until you become a master is very hard. It doesn't matter if it's chess, tennis, bridge, or poker. The process requires self-analysis, self-criticism, introspection, attention to detail, concentration, and, probably most importantly, the ability to be brutally honest with yourself and tolerate hearing unpleasant facts about yourself.

If you keep records of your poker sessions, you'll see that those brutally honest unpleasant facts about yourself that I'm talking about will come from the times that you lost at poker and then actually recorded your loss in your ledger. Players who are willing to do this are the ones who have what it takes to go on to be winners at hold 'em.

Now that you've decided you're going to be a hold em winner, what kind of records should you keep? You're limited only by your imagination and the time that you're willing to put into record-keeping. You can make them as detailed or as basic as you like. Here's a list of suggested categories to put in your poker records:

1. Where did you play? If you're lucky enough to have a choice of casino poker rooms near you, note the name and the street address of the one you visited.
2. What game did you play?TYiis could be Texas hold 'em, 7-Card Stud, Omaha, or any other poker game.
3. What limit did you play? Although many limits exist, you most likely will be entering something like $3-$6 or $l-$4-$8-$8, since you'll be playing at the beginning lower limits.

• Poker Playing Calendar (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records Part5 (0)

Casino Poker is an easy game to learn, but it's a difficult game to master. It is estimated that of all the people who play poker seriously, only one out of twenty is a regular winner in the long run. Nineteen out of twenty players are life-long losers at the poker table. It's not that these nineteen players are idiots, or can't learn the game, or can't read poker books to try to learn to play better. Most poker players have great intelligence, and a lot of them do read poker books and magazines to improve their games. The problem is the game of poker itself. Poker, while being deceptively easy to deal, is extremely hard to play correctly all the time.

There are easily over one hundred separate skills you must master to become an expert poker player. Every skill that you master will have a positive impact on your game in two ways. First, when you possess a particular skill that you can use against your opponents, and your opponents do not have that same skill, you will win money from them (in the long run) in those situations. Second, when you possess that skill and your opponent does also, you will not lose any money to him (again, in the long run) when that particular situation arises.
In other words, having certain skills will make you money when the other players don't have those skills and it will keep you from losing money when they do have those skills. When you hear people say that a certain player has a "leak" in his game, they mean that he lacks a certain important skill, which is why he's losing a lot of money.

What does this discussion have to do with keeping records? I have taught many people how to play Texas hold 'em. I also know many self-taught poker players. Between the two groups, I know a lot of poker players, and I think I know who the overall winners and losers are. I'm sure that most of these players are keenly interested in improving their games, and I know they work hard at it.

• Poker Playing Calendar Part2 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records Part5 (0)
• Poker And Keeping Records Part3 (0)