Discuss

One of the biggest things that I notice about most poker players and people that gamble with money for that matter is that few people can tell you how much they have actually won or lost, either over their whole poker career or sometimes in even as short of time as a month.  Personally, I like to know exactly how much money I am donating to poker or how much I am pulling out to buy cool new toys. 

I am going to talk about some of the tools that are available out there for tracking hands and tracking overall money flow.  I am also going to talk about getting money in and out of poker sites and some of the services that are easy to sign up for and the advantages and disadvantages of those.

I personally have always used my bank card to deposit money into sites and then I would either lose all that money, or pull it out via Neteller.  This worked all great until a few weeks ago when PokerStars stopped accepting my debit card.  This was a not a huge problem as I could just use pokerstars and get instantcash out of my bank account and into stars, then deposit it back out to neteller and either have it sent to my bank account or go withdraw it with my neteller card.  Then I started to read some articles about people's neteller accounts getting hijacked and neteller just turning their head and these people lost all their money.  I didn't want to this to happen to me and even though it would probably only be a few hundred bucks, I still did not want to lose it.  So I decide to signup for a Firepay and look at other options for keeping my money secure.

Neteller and Firepay are both very easy to sign up for.  On Neteller you just fill out information like you would on a normal site, answer some questions that are taken from a the US census if you answer those correctly, someone will call you and ask you to verify more information, then you are good to go.  In order to put money in, you can either deposit with a credit card/bank card,instanCash(must verify account), EFT, or Bank Wire.  In order to verify your account you just have to enter all the information in from one of you personal checks and then wait for them to deposit some small amount, then go back to the site and verify that amount and then you are set to go for instaCash.  I would also not do the instacash through the neteller site as they charge 8.5%, if you do it through pokerstars or UB I think they have some deal where they cover the charge.  Neteller is free to put money back into your bank account and also has a debit card which is real nice for pulling cash from an ATM.

Firepay is even easier to signup, you fill out your information like you would on any other site, answer the US Census question then you enter your bank account information.  You can put money into your firepay account before verifying your account but it costs 6.99, once you verify your account that charge goes down to 3.99, so if you are dealing with larger amounts of money firepay is the way to go.  Also it is free to put your money back into your bank account.

Now that you have easy ways to get that money in and out of your poker account how are some of the best to track your money flow.  The first one that I would recommend is get another checking account, get it with all the bottom of the barrel stuff so you are not paying fees, also not a bad idea to get it at the same bank you have your normal checking at, because you can then transfer funds between the two.  You are probably thinking to yourself, why the heck would I go through that trouble of getting another account, would that be easy for someone to track.  The answer is yes and this is not a bad thing, it also makes it easier for you to track your wins and losses, without it getting mixed in with your real money account.  Also, if you are making alot of money in poker it is really a good idea to pay taxes, I think that if you make under 10k in a year, not too big of deal but if you start pushing 20 to 30k, the last thing you want to be busted for is tax evasion for money you won in poker.  This account could be used to figure out your taxes quite easily.  Another reason is if you better half doesn't want you spending bill money on poker you can make some deal to take so much out of your account every month, or for that matter you can take out as much as you want and they will not figure out.  Also, I don't believe that neteller and firepay are backed like most other banks in the US, so it is always good to store your money in some place that, if it gets lost it will not be gone.

Ok now that we have the money part figured out and how to track our overall wins and losses and put money in and pull money out it is time to figure out how to track different games and even down to particular hands that are winners and losers.

Two of the best programs out there for doing this our PokerTracker and PokerOffice.  I have used both of these and prefer PokerTracker, because it seems a little easier to use and also is more supported in the poker community.  The only issue I have with it is, it seems like it is a windows 3.1 app, so it is a bit clunky.  PokerOffice is newer, but seems a little slower and also I find it hard to read my stats with.  I would try a demo of each of these before you decide to buy one just to see which fits your needs and likes.  Once you get it setup you just need to point it to the directory where you are saving your hand histories and set it up to automatically import them.  They both work great for cash games, but in order to get your tourney summary in place you have to either manually enter it or request an email for tournament history from the Pokerstars application. 

These two pieces of software, which ever one you chose, are both great ways to see how well you are doing in different types of games(ring, stt's, and mtt's) and also see which hands you are misplaying and why.  Once you start to get the game you are best at and most profitable you can start to see huge increases in your new bank account you started and pull some of that money out to buy a nice new thing for the wife or just buy that new electronical device you have always had your eye on. 

Just remember if you are making any profit from poker, Uncle Sam needs his chunk or you can get thrown in the slammer where you now have to play for cigarettes.