Hello world!
4 years ago
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Goals are an important way to push yourself to fulfilling your potential. I think the tricky part though is understanding which goals to set and how ambitious to make them. It comes down to knowing your own self : what motivates you, what demotivates you, how success and failure affect you.
In poker there are certianly plenty of goal choices available - results, volume, learning targets etc.. and you can set them to be daily or even over a year or more as well as making them firm "I must.." and weaker "I'd like to..." targets . Setting short term results goals is inherently wrong due to variance and the fact we play for the long term. However, if you play for a living, bills need to be paid and the long term won't help with that.
When I started the year my primary goal was to work hard enough on my game and prove to myself that I could win enough at poker to make a living from it and I'm proud to say that I have achieved this goal.
Monthly I always wanted to do a decent amount of volume, but have never set myself a hard target but always enough to achieve the max iron man level at FT. Results-wise I always hoped to do better than previous months, and I've had 5 "best month ever"s this year.
Starting at 50 I hoped to move up and as the end of the year approaches I now feel established at 100, taking occasional shots at 200 but still playing 50 if the games are good.
Making the trip to Vegas was a goal I wasn't sure I'd manage in my first year, but it came together at the last minute.
I have had some failures as well that I have already mentioned such as improvements towards a healthier lifestyle and playing with less distractions.
With a year as a pro under my belt now, I can set some more specific targets for 2011 which I'll cover in the final topic - "The Future".
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2 comments:
As last year was yours, this upcomming year will be my first playing pro. When you were starting out, what was your coaching/study time to play/practice time ratio? This has been a topic kind of jumping around twitter recently, jw from a successful "new pro" your general strategy. (If youve talked about this in a previous post, sorry!!!)
When I started I knew it was important for it to be higher than it had been when I played recreationally, and I certainly started out with that intention. I did quite a few sweats, reviewed hhs, talked and thought a lot more than I had in the first few months.
Good results allowed me to reduce the ratio and focus on learning as I played instead. I might not have done as well as I could have done if I had been more dedicated to study, so I hope to up the ratio this coming year.
If I hope to move up stakes further then it will be essential to study more as the opposition will be tougher and they will be more likely to be studying themselves. A lot of the micro stakes players (50 and below) won't do much study at all so I think you can get away without studying much if you can play solid poker at these stakes.
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