My record-keeping

Warning: One of the most boring posts ever is coming your way.

Since I occasionally mention here specific results for a session or a particular location, it occurs to me that it might be useful to some readers to show you how I keep records. This is a system that has evolved over time. It works for me. It tells me what I want to know, without being gummed up with factors that I don't really care about. That's the main reason that I don't use any of the various software packages or online services that will keep and sort this data for you, if you choose: I haven't seen any that do a better job than what I've codged together on my own.

I have four Excel spreadsheets, each with a different purpose.

The first is a monthly one that I make fresh from a master template each month. It has a sheet for every day of the month, plus a "totals" sheet. Here's the entry from last Wednesday, when I entered the Green Valley Ranch HORSE tournament, then played an unsuccessful cash game for a while afterward:




I have the cursor on the "Hours" column so you can see how that works and copy the formula, if you're interested. Excel is, in my opinion, a nightmare to work with on time functions. It took me a couple of hours of work to finally put together this formula that would do the seemingly simple task of translating my start and stop times into number of hours played. The problem is that sometimes I play past midnight, so that the stop time is on a different date from the start time, and if you don't make explicit allowance for that in the formula, you'll get wonky results. Don't ask me to explain how the terms in the formula work--just trust me that this is what it takes to account for sometimes ending before midnight and sometimes after. Pain in the neck.

Here's the "Total" sheet. I made up October's in advance, because I didn't feel like showing the world my income for any actual month.



If you're at all familiar with Excel, setting up a sheet like this is completely straightforward; the cells just grab the data from the individual days' sheets, then do a bit of adding and averaging in the obvious places.

The individual months' sheets are stored in folders labeled by the year.

The next spreadsheet is "Year to date." I'm not showing you that for the same privacy reason. But it's an extremely simple page with columns for the names of the months, the running net to-date income total, and hours for that month (all automatically grabbed from the first spreadsheet), plus a simple division function to get $/hour for the month and for year-to-date.

The third spreadsheet is called "Summary by place." As you can see below, there is a separate column for each casino, with the dates running down the left-hand side. The summary lines at the top give me a running account of various aspects of my win/loss record for each place, then there is a totals column on the far right. There is an identically set up sheet for tournaments, though it gets a lot fewer entries, since I play very few tournaments.



The "discrepancies" sheet that you can see tabbed at the bottom is just a place where I can account for the rare instances in which I do some sort of gambling that isn't poker. For tax purposes, I can lump all gambling wins/losses together, because the IRS doesn't care whether the money comes from poker or a sports bet. But I care, and I don't want those other amounts to foul up my pure poker results. The final spreadsheet, described below, is the main one for tax purposes, and mixes in the poker and non-poker gaming, so the "discrepancies" page here is where I explain the three or four times a year that I make or lose a few bucks on something other than poker, which causes the sums on these "Summary by place" pages to differ from the totals on the last spreadsheet. I use it so rarely that it's not even formatted; it's just a few text entries with dates and explanations. For example, when I had a friend visiting from out of town last year, I noted this: "9/7/07, lost $5 on video blackjack at MGM Grand." Yep, that's me, Mr. Big-Time Gambler.

The "totals" tab just adds the cash games and tournaments together, formatted the same way.

The final spreadsheet is "Cumulative graph." Shown below is the first month or so that I played poker in Vegas. I have two screen shots of this, so that you can see the formulas used to calculate and display the weekly and monthly totals. The weekly one was pretty easy, but that monthly one was a bear to figure out. As you can see, I had to resort to "lookup" functions, which were new to me. As with the hours thing, don't ask me to explain how all of the terms in the formula work together; they just do. Copy it if it's helpful to you, ignore it otherwise.




There's a summary section for my entire time playing; I've blotted out the totals.

Finally there is a graph further down the spreadsheet page. Shown below is the section covering the same time period as for the data entries. The blue bars are individual days' results, and the pink graph is the cumulative amount won or lost. As you can see, I started out like gangbusters the first couple of weeks, but since I really didn't know much what I was doing, I gave it all back plus a bit, before recovering my footing. Fortunately, the graph has not come anywhere near to crossing back over that ugly net-zero line since then.



The way this all works together is that when I get home from playing, I copy the times and in/out dollar amounts from the piece of paper in my pocket into the tab for that day in the current month's spreadsheet. I then open and close the "year to date" one just so that it automatically updates itself. (Don't really need to do this every day, but I do anyway.) I then enter the totals in the "Summary by place" record and again in the "Cumulative graph" sheet. So basically every dollar amount gets entered three different places. I suppose that with something like a relational database I could get the same kinds of outputs by just entering the data once. But I don't feel like going to the trouble of purchasing and setting up such a system. The way I have it works plenty well for my needs, and takes less than two minutes, so it's not like there's a ton of time savings to be squeezed out of setting up something that might be slightly more efficient day to day.

Here are some things that I do not record, though you'll sometimes see published recommendations that you keep track of them:

Game. For now, what I play is so overwhelmingly $1/2 or $1/3 NLHE that there would be minimal benefit in entering that same data over and over. So I don't. If I graduate to consistently playing a wider variety of games and/or stakes, I may incorporate that information when it becomes needed.

Number of players. Sure, it's probably useful to know whether you make more money at full tables or when playing short-handed. But most of what I play is full ring games, and when that's not the case, it's usually just a transient state until the game fills up again. It would be incredibly cumbersome to try to break down a few hours' playing time into how much I was making per hour separated by how many players were at the table moment by moment.

Name of supervisor on duty. I've seen in several places the claim that you should record who the floor person or other supervisor was, in case of a tax audit. Frankly, I think that's ludicrous. I'm completely confident that the level of detail in the records that I have here would pass every legal test of reasonableness. No supervisor would ever remember, and therefore be able to verify, whether I was present on any given day, nor would they know how much I won or lost. The only potential value that I can see in this information is that theoretically the IRS could double-check with the casino and see if the name I wrote down matched their employee records, thus providing some degree of evidence that I was really there, and didn't just cook up the data. But I think that's silly. They still wouldn't know whether my income numbers were honest, because there is no possible source for that information other than me. Besides, I could presumably provide independent evidence of my attendance that matches my records by getting printouts from the casinos where they swipe my players' club card in and out. Not every place does this, but I think that if I needed corroboration, any court would accept the fact that my records match the places where it could be checked as reasonably suggesting that I was probably honest about hours at the other casinos, too. And, once again, that still wouldn't tell the IRS anything about the money, which is, in the end, all they really care about. If I ever get to playing for tens of thousands of dollars per session, and thus make a more tempting IRS audit target, maybe I'll think about following this piece of advice. For now, I think it's just ridiculously unnecessary.

So there you have it, my boring record-keeping. I hope that at least a few readers find it useful enough to use either directly as a template or as a jumping-off point for creating their own records systems.