Setting Goals

I’ve been trying to set regular goals for myself. Laying out milestones for me to achieve has allowed me to keep focused on the task at hand. Having a laid out track helps greatly. The problem is the nature of poker doesn’t really lend itself to being restricted to a straight and narrow path. There are probably dozens of ways to get to a particular milestone, each one of them valid in its own way. This is also a business where just getting over a milestone doesn’t mean you’ve beaten it for good. You can set a bankroll milestone to hit X dollars, spend 3 weeks grinding 10 hour days to get there, sail hundreds or even thousands of dollars past your goal, and then in the following two session hit a brick wall of variance and be right back to where you started. I’m not suggesting you just rip up all the hopes and dreams you have to be a poker player, but setting goals has to be done differently than in any other arena of competition.

Poker is a very open ended game, particularly when talking about cash game play. Not only do you need to play the game itself well, but you must also have a solid grasp of the outside factors affecting your play. You have to evaluate how each of your opponents are playing, if they seem tilted or fatigued, are you tilted or fatigued, do your opponents overplay hands, are they nits and easy to push off of flops and turns? A big part of being a professional is evaluating whether or not a table is a “good game” or not but that is a huge judgment call. As with most questions in this business, the answer is more than likely going to be “it depends.”

I bring this topic up this week because the month of May is going to be a long month of grinding for me. May has 31 days in it, and my plan at time of writing is to spend 26 of them at the casino and roughly 12 hours each day. I feel like this is the best opportunity I’ll have to reach some of my financial goals. I’m sick of coming up short of the marks that I have set for myself. My bankroll needs a serious boost, and I think this is going to be the best way to inject a little life into my career.

I love playing poker for a living. I feel better about myself and the direction my life is going in when I’m sitting at the tables as opposed to being another cog in a machine working away the prime of my life in a cube. The downside is that I’m flirting with the poverty line on a monthly basis. Now that’s not to say I was living high on the hog at my last job, my income really hasn’t changed since returning to action, but there will come a day when eating Ramen for two meals a day just isn’t going to cut it. I’m very confident in my abilities to play this game. I feel like I have evolved as a player these past 15 weeks. I am seeing the ball well, making some timely plays and reads, and now I feel like it’s time to put myself to the test. Win lose or draw, I just want there to be no doubt that I did everything I could to succeed. If I fail despite my efforts, then at least I’ll know for sure this life just isn’t for me. Until then, it’s off to my arena of competition in southern CT.