What to log per session
The minimum fields:
- Date and start time
- End time (or total duration, pause-adjusted)
- Game type — NLHE, PLO, PLO5, Stud, HORSE, mixed; cash or tournament
- Stakes — $1/$3, $2/$5, $25 SNG, $1,500 MTT
- Venue — poker room name, casino, or online site
- Buy-in — initial chip purchase
- Rebuys — count and total amount
- Cash-out — final stack value (cash) or final prize (tournament)
- Notes — table conditions, opponents of note, key hands, your mental state
Everything else — net profit, hourly rate, BB/100, ROI, ITM% — should derive automatically from those raw inputs.
Live tracking beats after-the-fact every time
The biggest mistake is logging at the end of the night. Memory drops small rebuys, shifts the start time, and blurs the breaks. A live tracker — even just a stopwatch app if nothing else — captures the actual session. The StackEdge lock-screen timer is purpose-built for this on iPhone: start once, log rebuys with one tap, end with your cash-out.
The metrics that actually matter
You can derive dozens of metrics from a clean session log. These six matter most:
- Hourly rate ($/hr) — total profit ÷ hours. Intuitive headline.
- BB/100 — cash game win rate, normalized across stakes.
- ROI — tournament profit per dollar of buy-in.
- ITM% — share of tournaments you cash.
- Win rate by stake — the stake-level breakdown.
- Sample-size confidence — how much you should trust the above.
Tag venues — your profit-by-room data is shocking
Every live session should be tagged with the venue. Most live players find that one or two rooms account for most of their profit, and two or three rooms are actually losing. StackEdge's venue stats screen sorts by total profit, $/hr, and sessions played — usually the first time a player sees this data, it changes which rooms they play.
Spreadsheet vs tracker app
Spreadsheets work for ~100 sessions. They break for three reasons:
- No live timer. You cannot run a stopwatch in a spreadsheet cell while at the table.
- Formula drift. A column gets resized, a rebuy gets entered as a buy-in, a new venue gets typed three different ways. The bankroll number stops matching reality.
- Limited analytics. Pivot tables work for total profit by venue — they break down for sample-size aware confidence intervals, risk of ruin, BB/100 by stake by day-of-week, and live update bankroll.
A purpose-built tracker (StackEdge is one option, but the same logic applies to competitors) replaces the spreadsheet around session 100. Detailed comparison →
Migrating from a spreadsheet
If you have a spreadsheet with session history, you can import it. StackEdge accepts a CSV with columns for date, game, stakes, buy-in, cash-out, venue, and notes. Download the free CSV template here →
