[BruceZ]

I just don't think it is of all that much importance to most recreational players.

It helps you answer 3 types of questions: 1) How much am I likely to win? 2) Am I likely to lose my whole bankroll? 3) Am I good/bad or just lucky/unlucky? People ask these questions all the time, and I assume most of them are recreational players. If they are interested in objective answers to these questions, then the analysis is important for them. Without it, the average recreational player has no real feel for swings and bankroll requirements. He is likely to assess his abilities based on subjective opinions which are frequently way off, and on meaningless chance fluctuations of results.

Besides, it takes next to no effort to track these statistics. Once you have a spreadsheet set up, all you have to do is take a few seconds to enter how much you won for a session and how long you played, something you probably do anyway, and it calculates everything else. There is no reason not to track them, and there are many benefits. I figure if you're going to play thousands of hours of poker, you might as well record what happened.