How closely are business and poker related? Some of poker's most successful players have lengthy business resumes, while some great players don't even have a resume.
The man on our cover this month, Tom Schneider, has used his business background to establish a profitable approach to the game. With a career as a certified public accountant and former high-level executive at numerous companies, Tom told
Card Player that poker, like business, needs to be approached with a process and a plan in order for a person to be able to come out ahead. Read all about Tom, the man who won the 2007
World Series of Poker Player of Year award and two bracelets, in this issue.
There is no question that there are huge parallels between successful business management and chip management at the table. However, tracking the intricacies of each and every thing you do at the table is an often ignored yet crucial component of any player's long-term success.
What is your plan? Do you have one? What is your approach to your bankroll and what data do you collect day in and day out to give you an accurate picture of how your play influences your bankroll? Do you collect and catalog meticulous records? If not, you should. At the very minimum, you should capture the day of the week, starting and ending times, stakes, location, and results for each and every session you play. Without this data, you're operating in the dark.
This type of data offers an objective window to analyze your play. Through your records, you learn what games you have leaks in, what games you crush, what days of the week you win, what days of the week you lose, and, if you go a step further, who the players are who beat you time and time again and who the weak players are whom you can steamroll with an out-of-position float.
If you play a significant amount of online poker, do you analyze your hand histories? Do you know the percentage of times, on average, that you see a flop? The percentage of the times you call versus raise and how your play differs between late and early position? If not, all of that data is there for you to sift through.
How about you live-action players? Do you tally and enter all of your results (not just the winners!) into tracking software like the free Card Player Analyst? What stakes are profitable/unprofitable for you? Are your results better on a Friday night versus a Tuesday afternoon? Are your winning sessions longer than your losing sessions?
Yeah, I know you won last night, but how about for the week? Month? Year? If you don't know, you should. In the long run, a single session means nothing; it's the long-term trends that you should analyze in order to understand your play.
If your goal is to be attentive to every last detail at the table, likewise, you should be just as attentive with crafting your plan and tracking your results.
You don't need to be a CEO. You just need to think in terms of the big picture and use tools that are readily available to you. For a good start, check out our Poker Analyst.
