Poker is a fun game and keeping close records of your progress may seem like a tedious, unnecessary chore but accounting for your wins and losses may well be one of the most important things you can do if you want to become a serious player.
Record Your Results
Keeping meticulous records has several advantages. Firstly, it will identify if you are currently a winning player. This might seem obvious but poker lends itself easily to self-delusion and many players might claim to be winners whilst in fact, they are bleeding money (and may in fact be unaware of this).
Honestly appraising your success or failures in poker will help you advance your game.
Secondly, once you build up a significant amount of data, it can help you recognize strengths and weaknesses in your game. Perhaps you are a bigger winner in STTs than MTTs and you might like to focus your time on the former whilst learning and improving your technique in the latter.
You can also start to accurately compile statistics like ROI (Return on Investment), Hourly Profit or Loss, Average Profit and many other pieces of information that can help you analyse and improve your game.
Tools To Use
There are a multitude of tools on the market that can help you input your information. Some are free to use and some require a subscription or one-off payment. If you have some flair with spreadsheets, you can use Microsoft Excel, or a similar spreadsheet program, to design your own bookkeeping records.
Sites such as Sharkscope provide a shorthand way to see how you are performing in STTs and MTTs, and other sites cover cash game profit and loss, although bear in mind most of these sites do not have 100% coverage and thus will never be as accurate as records you keep on yourself.
Accounting and auditing your wins and losses may not be the most inspiring part of poker, but most of the top professionals will be closely monitoring their results to record patterns and trends.
Behave like a pro and perhaps soon you will be able to wow your friends and family with sexy graphs and numbers that prove your poker game is robust and you are making impressive progress.