One of the best ways to insure that you continue to grow and improve as a poker player is to set goals. While this may seem simple enough, setting goals will require you to do more than simply have good intentions and jot down a few abstract ideas of where you want to be in five years. Serious goal-setting –goal setting that you plan to actually follow-through on– requires a plan of action; a way to turn your good intentions into a measurable reality. As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “A goal without a plan is simply a wish.” With that in mind, in this column I’ll provide you with the groundwork to turn your hopes and dreams into realities, and provide you with the tools to set yourself up to achieve your goals.
Why set goals
Goals are used by many people in many different fields and walks of life. By setting concrete goals you are holding yourself accountable and setting yourself up for success and progressive improvement. Without goals you are basically looking for a restaurant you’ve never been to without a map or directions; your goals represent the information you need to get to your destination as quickly and easily as possible; they are your roadmap to success.
The keys to setting goals is to be specific, realistic, and honest: Vague goals like “I want to be the best tournament player I can be” are not measurable: unrealistic goals like “I want to win the World Series of Poker” or “I want to win $1,000,000 this year” are only going to cause frustration as they are nearly impossible to achieve: and being dishonest about your progress isn’t going to help you improve.
Developing your Plan of Action
If you hang around poker rooms or visit poker forums long enough and you’ll hear plenty of people say something along the lines of, “I want to be a professional poker player.” While that’s all well and good, and I applaud them for it, the problem is they have no plan; they know what they want, but they have no idea how to achieve their goals. The lack of proper goal-setting (being specific, realistic, and honest) is what will keep 99.9% of these “dreamers” from ever being a winning player, let alone a professional poker player.
The first thing you want to do when you begin the goal-setting process is develop a Plan of Action. Your Plan of Action is simply an outline; the driving directions to your destination. So, the first thing you need to do is develop a long-term goal, the end-game of where you want to be in a year, five years, or 10 years, depending on how long you want to make the long-run. Once you have your destination it’s simply a matter of setting-up check-points along the way that will help you get there.
These checkpoints are what I call Benchmark Goals. These are also long-term goals, but they are not your end-game. Benchmark goals should be placed at regular intervals along the way and progress in a linear fashion. Keeping with our roadmap analogy, suppose you are travelling from Boston to Los Angeles by car and have five days to get there; your end-game is Los Angeles but your benchmark goals would be the end of each day, and how far you want to travel on each of those days.
BUT, in order to meet our benchmarks and eventually realize our ultimate long-term goal, our end-game, we need to create short-term “Enabling” goals that will get us from Point A to Point B. For instance, if your long-term goal is to run the Boston Marathon in nine months you’ll need to create a Plan of Action that includes daily goals that will enable you to run progressively longer distances. These are the goals that are going to allow us to increase our maximum running distance from five miles to 26 miles in nine months, and achieve our benchmarks.
For a simpler explanation of this we can revisit our cross-country driving adventure:
- You have a goal of travelling across the country (your End-Game Goal)
- On Day 1 you want to travel 500 miles and wind up in Western New York (your first benchmark goal)
- You set out at 6 AM, you stop every two hours to stretch, you eat lunch in Connecticut, etc. (your enabling goals)
This same process will hold true for aspiring tournament poker players. You can say, “I want to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event next year,” but unless you have a spare $10,000 lying around that statement is nothing more than a dream. What you should be saying is, “I want to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event next year, and this is how I’m going to do it.”
Setting realistic poker goals
Poker, especially tournament poker, is a somewhat difficult game to measure success in because of the inherent variance. Because of this it’s important to set goals that you have control over. Far too many people use performance-based goals such as “I want to win three tournaments in 2013” and/or “average $2,000 per month in profit”. On the surface these may seem like reasonable goals, but they are completely unreasonable since you cannot control the factors that would allow you to win three tournaments or win some predetermined amount of money over the course of a year –in tournament poker, players can lose money for two years and then make a big score in year three, but if they are setting performance-based goals they will look like a complete failure after two years and could quit or have their failures affect their performance moving forward.
Instead of performance-based goals you should set yourself up for success by setting goals you can achieve whether Lady Luck is on your side or not. For instance, instead of “I want to win three tournaments” a better goal would be “I want to play 50 tournaments each month.” Instead of “I want to win $2,000 per month” you should be setting a goal of “I want to play x number of tournaments which based on my long-term ROI of xx% would show a profit of $2,000/month in the long-run.” You should be setting volume or time goals; goals you have complete control over, where your success is entirely dependent on you and you work ethic and not outside forces.
Other goals you can set as a poker player are things that will help you improve, like reading x number of books per month; spending x number of hours per week going through your database; posting x number of hands for review on poker forums every week; and watching x number of training videos per week. You can also set goals such as hiring a poker coach or improving/upgrading your online poker setup.
Revisiting your Goals
The final piece of the puzzle that most people are missing when it comes to goal-setting is to revisit your goals. You should be looking at your goals every day –keep them written down and in a spot where you will see them every day—as well as revisiting them periodically to see how you are progressing. Like jumping on the scale everyday when you are trying to lose weight, make sure you’re not becoming reactive to your progress. Too many people will have a rough patch and decide to double their volume because they feel they can’t reach the goals they set, but this usually only causes them to dig a deeper hole.
This is why it’s also important to adjust your goals when needed. If your initial goal was to build-up your volume and play 100 tournaments every week by June and you accomplish this in April you should immediately make June’s goal harder. The same is true for when you slack or life gets in the way (everyone has to deal with these types of scenarios from time to time) and you simply have no chance to attain the lofty goals you have set for yourself. In these cases don’t be afraid to pull-back a little bit and readjust your goals to something that is achievable. That being said, don’t be a whiteout king and use this as a reason for not reaching your goals, major adjustments should only be made for extraordinary situations.Goal
RaisersEdge
yup! =)