Log every session — wins and losses — with enough detail to slice it later. Keep cash and tournaments separate. And read the results as ranges, not verdicts, until your sample is genuinely big.
The hardest part of tracking isn’t the spreadsheet — it’s honesty. The temptation is to record the good sessions, round the bad ones away, and read a flattering story into a tiny sample. Done right, tracking does the opposite: it’s a mirror that won’t let you fool yourself.
What to log every session
- Date and duration. Time is half of your hourly rate, and the easiest thing to forget.
- Game type and stakes. Cash vs tournament, and the exact level — they don’t mix.
- Buy-in and cash-out (cash), or buy-in, fee, re-entries, and winnings (tournaments). The fee matters: a “$100 + $9” event costs $109.
- Venue and, ideally, day and time. This is the data that later tells you which games are actually worth your hours.
What to ignore
You don’t need hand histories, HUD stats, or a solver to track results — those answer a different question (how you played a hand), not whether you’re winning over time. Resist logging your “feelings” about a session as data, too. Tracking is about what happened, not how it felt while it was happening.
Keep cash and tournaments apart
They’re measured differently and behave differently. Cash games live in bb/100 and dollars per hour; tournaments live in ROI and are vastly higher variance. Blending them produces a number that means nothing. Track each on its own terms — get your tournament ROI with the ROI calculator and your cash hourly with the hourly calculator.
How to read what you’ve logged
This is where most players go wrong. A handful of winning sessions is not proof you’ve “figured it out,” and a brutal week is not proof you’ve gone broke as a player. Both are mostly variance. The discipline is to treat your win rate as a range and ask how many hands stand behind it before drawing conclusions.
Before you celebrate or despair, run your numbers through the win-rate confidence calculator. If the range still crosses zero, you simply don’t know yet — and that’s the honest answer.
Spreadsheet or app?
A spreadsheet works and costs nothing, but it’s easy to skip entries and hard to slice on the fly. An app makes logging fast enough that you actually do it, and can apply the statistics for you — which is the whole point of StackWise. Whatever you choose, the rule is the same: log everything, separate your games, and don’t read more into the numbers than the sample can support.
Tracking, without the self-deception.
StackWise makes logging a three-tap habit and reads your results back to you honestly — cash and tournaments apart, every rate with its confidence. Free to start, no account.
