Almost everyone agrees that record keeping is a vital part of a serious poker player's regimen. Expending the effort to track results, make notes on key decisions, and record opponents' tendencies can pay big dividends later on. As a consequence, anything that encourages poker players to keep more detailed records of their play, or to keep records at all, is worthy of serious consideration. Jonas Barrish has attempted to provide such encouragement with the release of The Original Poker Diary.
The book's structure is straightforward. There are six pages at the beginning of the book providing information on how to use The Original Poker Diary. At the end of the book is a twenty-odd page glossary that defines many common poker terms. In between these two sections are a whole lot of pages set aside for the recording of events as they happen while playing poker.
Barrish provides pages for recording both cash games and tournaments, with about two thirds of the available space being devoted to the former. Three pages are set aside for each session, meaning that there is room for on the order of 70 live game sessions and 30 tournaments in a single volume. Of course, if one were to run out of room, nothing prevents one form buying another copy of The Original Poker Diary and continuing one's records in a second volume.
For the cash game records, fields include check boxes for game and limit, date and starting time, duration, location, and results. Several lines are available for making note of key hands, both wins and losses, player notes, tells, and any other information the diarist may this is worth remembering later on. Tournament record fields include location, game, buy-in information, and space to record tournament structure information, as well as the expected blank space for recording key information.
With a few exceptions, Barrish provides fields to record the information that is generally worth remembering. One notable omission is a specific field to record table and seat numbers, especially since the IRS recommends that gambling records include this information. It's my opinion that the book's layout could be improved. For each session there is a lot of wasted space providing check boxes for various games and limits, many of which are not commonly played. I believe it would have been a better use of the space to provide a spot for players to just write in the game and limit leaving more space to record observations about that particular session. Also, while the author does make some provision for recording online as well as live poker, there's no natural space for one to record at which online poker room a session occurred. None of these problems make for insurmountable obstacles, though.
The author says that he brings his copy of The Original Poker Diary to the table with him, but this isn't a pocket-sized book. Keeping it in one's car or hotel room seems more reasonable to me. It would be a fair question to ask whether it's really necessary to spend $15 on this book when nearly any inexpensive notebook will serve essentially the same function for a fraction of a price. My feeling is that by all means if a cheap notebook will suffice, then there's no need to buy anything fancier. For my own use, I find that recording session details in a pocket-sized notebook and then transferring this information to my computer at home works best for me. At the same time, if having a structured format such as that found in The Original Poker Diary helps one keep more and more detailed records, then $15 is a small price to pay for such encouragement.
I believe it is very beneficial for poker players to keep records of their poker playing sessions. The Original Poker Diary is a structured approach to such record keeping. Is this format especially advantageous? In my opinion, not especially so. However, despite the fact that I believe the book's layout could be improved, this format can certainly be made to work more than adequately. The bottom line is that if someone finds that a formal layout as is found in this book helps promote good record keeping, then the price of this book is well worth paying to encourage these practices.
Note: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher. I have no other interest, financial or otherwise, in the success of this book.
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