My wife, an accountant, bugs me about this all the time. I used to play poker at a pretty high level online for years, and I never tracked a thing. When I first got into slots, I did the same. I couldn’t have cared less. When I wanted to write a book and eventually get a website going, that kind of had to change.
These days, I am mostly tracking wins and losses on newer slots and longer-run games (games in the “red” category). The way I figure, something like Golden Egypt, among many others, is what it is. (I hate that expression, but it fits here.) I don’t need to track how I’m doing on it because a play is a play.
But for anything that came out within the last year or so, I’m at the very least making a mental note of how it went.
As far as the other stuff you mentioned, I think it can only help. I have a pretty good idea of the layout of most casinos I’ve been to. No, I’m not always going to perfectly remember some hole-in-the-wall place in Biloxi, Mississippi, but I have a general feel for Biloxi overall.
That said, these days I try to take videos of all the casinos I’ve been to. I’m pretty far backed up on footage from Colorado and Las Vegas that I will upload shortly, actually.
All of this rambling out of the way, I think it’s going to come down to personality and how your brain works. It certainly couldn’t hurt to track as much as you can if you have the drive to do that, and maybe having everything written out to the cent can help you really maximize your time.
But for me personally, I can’t say that’s how I do things. Slots are enjoyable for me; I love the grind and all the walking. So breaking everything down in a spreadsheet never really appealed to me (even if it could help financially long term).
Ben Rosenthal
