You fellows are making my point for me. You have some method, but you haven't said what it is. No one says what their methods are. Now, after about six months, I came up with a method (I count small bets) but it's hard to believe that all these guys writing books about poker don't have a method or don't want to share it. Maybe I re-invented the wheel. Can't tell--folks ain't sharing.

What do you do, and why do you do it that way?

Yes, if I know the pot is $20 and I know my bet is $5, I'm good. But:
  • If I count bets (small or large), it lets me compare games regardless of structure.
  • If I'm counting bets instead of money, I don't freak out over "large" amounts of money. ("Dern, $10K is a big pot!" "Nah, it's only 5BB.") This seems particularly useful in no-limit games because a big stack can easily ruin the odds for a short stack, and you need to know when that is happening.
  • I like to work with numbers I know, especially when I'm sweating bullets over a hand. 1-2-3-4 is easy, but sometimes I can get lost on 80-160 (480 + 160+ 320 is harder than 3+1+2).
  • Finally, if I count bets, I could count the pot in binary on my fingers (up to 31 bets on one hand), converting the count to BB by shifting the total SB to BB via twos-complement division (which includes a natural round-up) and then add in the BB from there. [It's harder to say than it is to do.]
Anysway, the point of all that (especially that last) was to say: there's a lot of ways it MIGHT be done, and no one is talking about how they actually do it and why they do it that way.