For spreadsheet trackers ready to switch
A spreadsheet got you this far, and it is where it starts to cost you. Manual entry corrupts samples and skips the true-hourly fields. Bring it across and keep everything that matters.
The sheet got you here. It will not get you further.
The spreadsheet is still a common primary tracker for live cash players, and many sheets record only buy-in and cash-out. If that is you, the sheet has already done its job. It built the logging habit, and the habit is the hard part.
The ceiling shows up when the questions get harder. Is your 6 BB/hr real, or noise on 200 hours? Is this downswing normal for your standard deviation, or a leak? Many players cannot answer that from a results row. It takes session-level data with the right fields, and the variance formulas most sheets never get round to.
Switching does not mean starting over. CSV import maps your columns once and brings the whole history across: sessions, stakes, hours, results, bankroll. Your sample survives the move, so the variance and hourly reads are useful on day one instead of month three.
A week on the tracker, not the tab
Tuesday, 1/2 at your local room. You sit, tap stake and venue, and the timer runs. A top-up gets logged the moment it happens, not reconstructed from memory at midnight. Twice during the session you flag a hand with a three-word note: rivered set, check line. In the car park you close the session, enter tips and mileage, and add one line about the hour you played tired. Ninety seconds, done before the engine starts.
Friday plays out the same way. Sunday you sit at the desk for half an hour. The week's flagged hands are already queued; you run the two that matter through the solver, tag the leak they share, and log it against your study plan. Then the variance read: the last 15 hours are down, but well inside one standard deviation on your sample, so no stake change and no panic.
Now compare the spreadsheet version of that week. Pocket notes, a Sunday hour of data entry, and the quiet errors: the buy-in you fat-fingered, the formula range that stopped updating three months ago. Manual entry does not fail loudly. It corrupts the sample in silence, and you make bankroll decisions on the corrupted number.
The same 40 hours, gross and true
Take a normal month: eight five-hour sessions of 1/2, 40 hours at the table. Buy-ins total £2,400, cash-outs total £2,880, so the sheet says +£480. That is £12.00 an hour and 6 BB/hr. That is the gross log, and it is where a minimal two-field record stops.
Now the true log. You tip about £6 a session, £48 across the month. The room is a 30-mile round trip; at £0.45 a mile that is £13.50 a session, £108 for the month. Net of both, the same 40 hours made £324: £8.10 an hour, 4.05 BB/hr. Same cards, same decisions, and a third of the win rate was never real.
One more read the sheet rarely gives you. At roughly 27 hands an hour, 40 hours is about 1,080 hands. With a live full-ring standard deviation around 100 BB/100, one standard deviation on that month is about 329 BB, or £657 at 1/2. The entire £480 result sits inside one standard deviation of zero. It is a data point, not a verdict.
And nothing is locked in
Every session exports back to CSV whenever you want it, so the spreadsheet can live on as your archive or your parallel check. If Overshove ever stops earning its place, you leave with everything. That is deliberate: the players most careful with their data are exactly the ones who built a sheet in the first place.
What you gain in the meantime is the work the sheet made tedious: a true hourly that nets rake, tips and travel; standard deviation and confidence intervals computed on your actual sample; and a study log tied to flagged hands rather than a separate notes tab. The habit also survives contact with a downswing better. Logging often stops when the graph turns down, which is precisely when the data matters most. Less friction per session means the log keeps running through that stretch.
Overshove's core tracker is free on web and Windows, with mobile planned. Bring the sheet; keep the sample.
- →CSV import keeps the whole sample
- →True hourly without manual formulas
- →Automatic variance and confidence
- →Export back to CSV any time