Why your win rate is a fiction
You think you win 8 BB/hr. After the rake cap, the dealer tips and the drive across town, you might be closer to 3. The gap is not pessimism, it is arithmetic most trackers refuse to do.
The cap eats the small stakes
A capped rake takes a fixed slice from pots, which is a much bigger share of a 1/2 pot than a 5/10 one. At small stakes it can quietly remove more than half your gross win rate. If your tracker only logs buy-in and cash-out, that loss is invisible, your graph looks better than your bank balance.
Tips and travel are real costs
A dealer toke per pot and a bit of fuel money and parking are not rounding errors over hundreds of hours. They come straight off your hourly. A true hourly subtracts them; a gross one pretends they do not exist.
Track net or do not bother
The point of tracking is an honest number. Capture rake, tips and travel and your hourly reflects what poker actually pays, the figure you should make stake and life decisions on, not the flattering one.
The decision number is not the ego number
The gross hourly is seductive because it tells the cleaner story. You beat the game, booked a profit, and the line went up. The net hourly is quieter and more useful. It tells you whether the room, stake, session length and travel plan still make sense after the costs are counted. That is the number that should decide whether you add hours, change rooms, move up, or admit a game is not worth the drive.
What to write down next session
You do not need a perfect accounting system to stop lying to yourself. Start with the fields that change decisions: table hours, door-to-door time, rake model, dealer tips, travel cost, stake, venue and final result. After ten sessions, compare the ledger hourly with the true hourly. If the gap is small, good. If the gap is large, the leak may not be strategy at all. It may be the economics of the game you chose.