The seven fields everyone remembers
A betting log is only useful if it can answer a question later. Most people build one that answers exactly one: how much am I up or down? For that you need the date and event, the market, the selection, the price you took, the stake, the bookmaker, and the result. Add profit and loss and you have a running total. This is where nearly every spreadsheet stops.
Those fields are not wrong. They are just not enough. They tell you what happened. They tell you nothing about whether it was likely to happen again, which is the only thing that helps you place the next bet better than the last.
The first field people skip: the closing price
The closing price is where the market settled on your selection at the off, or at kick-off. It is the single most informative number you can add to a bet, and almost nobody records it because you have to go back and look it up after the event.
Take 2.20 on a selection that closes at 2.00 and you beat the close by 10%. That gap is closing line value, and it is the closest thing betting has to a skill signal. Profit is what you took home; CLV is whether the market agreed you had found something before it moved. If you consistently take prices that shorten before the off, you are reading the market ahead of it, and that shows up in dozens of bets rather than the hundreds that profit needs.
You cannot compute CLV if you did not write down the closing price. There is no way to reconstruct it from your P/L. This is the field that turns a log into a measurement of skill instead of a record of luck.
The second field people skip: the time and the reason
Two things belong here. The timestamp of when you placed the bet, and a line on why you placed it. Both feel pointless in the moment and both pay off later.
The timestamp matters because when you bet is often more important than what you bet. A price you took the moment a market opened behaves very differently from the same price taken minutes before the off, once sharp money has had its say. If your early bets beat the close and your late bets do not, that is a pattern you can act on, and you can only see it if the time is in the log.
The reason matters because it stops you rewriting history. Bet on a hunch and win, and memory turns it into a read. One honest line at the time, a stat, a team-news angle, a gut feel, lets you sort your bets by reasoning later and find out which kinds actually make money.
The nine fields, and who skips them
| Field | Why it matters | Most people skip it? |
|---|---|---|
| Date and event | Anchors everything else; lets you filter by period | No |
| Market | Tells you which bet types make or lose money | No |
| Selection | What you actually backed | No |
| Price you took | Half of the CLV calculation; drives your returns | No |
| Stake | Needed for P/L and for ROI (profit over total staked) | No |
| Bookmaker | Shows where you get value and where you get limited | No |
| Result | Won, lost, void or placed | No |
| Closing price | The other half of CLV; turns the log into a skill measure | Yes |
| Time placed and reason | Reveals timing edges and which angles actually work | Yes |
What a good log answers that a bad one cannot
A bad log answers one question. A good one answers the questions that change how you bet. Are my early prices beating the close while my late ones lag? Which markets carry my ROI and which just add turnover? Does my stated reasoning correlate with CLV, or am I fooling myself? Is one bookmaker consistently a source of value?
None of these can be answered by profit and loss alone. They all fall out of the two fields nobody wants to fill in. Log the closing price and the timestamp for three months and you will know more about your betting than most people learn in years of keeping score.
Strike rate, worth a word of warning, is not one of these answers on its own. Winning 60% of your bets means nothing until you know the average price you took to do it; a 60% strike rate at 1.50 is a losing proposition. Record the prices and let ROI, not hit rate, be your headline number.