Many online poker players won't like to read this but here's a fact - Recording and effective analysis of your online poker play is one of the biggest secrets of success if you're serious about your poker play and want to make money in poker online or offline. Playing for fun only? Not so necessary. Want to get good extra money or even full time? Then it's critical.

Firstly, as long as you input it right the data don't lie. It's very human to emphasize the good points and memories and minimize or bury the bad. If you play a lot and don't keep records you will almost certainly create false impression. Poker is a card game yes but it is also a game that can be analyzed in depth. Don't worry if you're not a math genius, you don't need to do math but you need to record and look at some other things.

The key things to track are the time you start and end playing, the game type, stakes, cost of entry, your winnings, the amount of your stack at each level and the outcome of key hands. A spreadsheet program is a great way to record this data and, once you learn how use the data you can do all sorts of useful calculations to further refine your performance and see what works well and not.

For example - The time of day you play is often very important; this can tell you what times of day you play best. Track game types and stakes to see what ones you do best and worst at. This is critical at online poker sites where you're paying for every game you play!

The cost of entry and your winnings are the truest track of how much you are winning and losing. By tracking your chip stacks at each level, you can see at what level in a tournament you are obtaining your chips. It you are losing big amounts of chips early, it may well mean that you're being too aggressive early on. In later stages you see low chip growth, then maybe it's time to test being more aggressive at these stages.

The result of the last hand in a tournament is the most critical one to track. You do this to discover what kinds of hands are knocking you out of tournaments. If you see a trend in such hands you should look at those hands more closely. As an example, you may see that Ace - King is ending your tournaments far more often than it should when you're all in. If so then you can combat this by betting Ace - King and not going All In. If you lose you're still in the tournament.

As a first action have a look at the NoPayPoker.com poker forum. See especially the article sections. You'll also find many of the players there very helpful and willing to give a helping hand on how to build your record sheets and make use of the info you collect.

Spreadsheet's data, analysis? I hear you scream. I can't be bothered with that, I'll just play my poker freeform. Fine, up to you but realize that if you ever want to be real good then you need to keep and use records. Realize too that players who do this would like you to stay away from it…you're much easier to beat when you're playing blind after all!