If you’re a beginner poker player, and you’ve read the books and the articles and even googled every poker site you can think of, you’ve probably been told numerous times that keeping notes will improve your poker game. This advice is true of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be in all the books and websites.

But once you’ve got pages of notes and hands, or some poker-hand tracking software loaded with hundreds or thousands of hands, what do you do with the information? Here's where the Poker Rookie comes in to help. Here are some quick tips and methods of analysing your poker data. Here we go:

1. Hands Lost – Everybody loses, especially beginners. But why did you lose a hand? If you answered, "because the other player’s hand was better than mine," you didn’t understand the question. With detailed hand notes or the exact hand recorded card-for-card and bet-for-bet on your computer, you can go back and see what plays you should or shouldn't have made that would have made your hand a winner. Another thing to look at regarding losing hands is: which hands are you constantly losing on? Do you keep playing K 5 to the showdown, and over time give hordes of money to your fellow players? If you were, wouldn’t finding that out save you from going belly-up? Losing hands can turn into winners very easily, and unfortunately the reverse also applies. If you don’t find and identify your mistakes, you can’t fix them. And if you don’t fix them, you’re foolishly handing away your money.

2. Replay big winners – If you have some big losses to review then hopefully every now and then you will have some big winners too. Again, why did you win? Don’t just look at the hands where you got the nuts and cleaned house. Take a closer look at hands you won where maybe you didn’t have the best hand, but walked away with the pot anyway. These are the skills you have to master to be a great poker player. Anybody can catch a great flop and pull in chips with the best hand, but real poker players make money when their cards are actually beaten, but they force their opponent to fold. Find hands where you did this and identify what you did to keep making your opponents run scared.

3. Review other players' methods – You want to be your own poker player, but nobody said you couldn’t steal some methods from your fellow players. This is much easier to do with some kind of poker-tracking software and really only works when you see the winner’s hand. Since you know what they had when they won, then you know what they were holding during each round of betting. Find a hand where another player bluffed you off a pot, or hid his strength from you so well you had no idea he was hiding behind a full house until it was too late. Now watch and learn how they played those hands so well that your money was theirs before you even knew what happened. If you’re a beginner then there’s a pretty good chance the player who’s taking your money is a better player than you. Find out why they are better. What tricks are they using? How do they bet in certain situations? Use your notes to find out the answers to these questions and find out how those plays made them richer and you poorer.

4. Tracking streaks (good and bad) – It usually isn’t hard to tell how much money you’ve won or lost playing poker. For most beginners, you simply subtract your current account balance from your initial starting balance and you’re left with your losses. If you actually know what you’re doing, perhaps you subtract your initial account balance from your current balance and get your winnings. Anyone can do that. But with poker notes you can keep track of your streaks, whether they’re bad or good. Take a look at a week of play and see how your account fluctuated. Then think about how you played that week. What do you think you did wrong, or what do you think you could have done better? Then go and check those out in your other notes. Another thing to look at when examining your ups and downs is what tables you were playing at? What was the limit and what was the number of players? Maybe you were playing in some tournaments when you made all your money one week. This should help you find out where you play your best poker and make sure you avoid or work harder in places where you lose money.

Poker can be a difficult game, so don’t make it even harder by throwing away or not paying attention to information that can fill the holes in your game that you might not even know are there.