Today I’m going to talk about goals.

To be successful at anything, you need to be able to set goals and meet them. Poker is no exception, and if you haven’t set any goals for the summer yet, I recommend that you do so now. I will include some examples on goals you may want to set for yourself, but first I’d like to talk about what constitutes good goals, and what doesn’t.

A good goal has one very important property: It’s measurable. For instance, if I set a goal that I’m going to play 20,000 hands this summer, it’s a good goal in the sense that it’s something I can check whether or not I have managed. If I set a goal that I’m going to improve my hand reading skills, it’s a bad goal because I have no way of verifying my progress in that aspect. Of course, practising hand reading is important and hopefully this is a skill that I will improve on during the summer, but I can’t use it as a goal because I can’t measure it. See the difference?

However, not all measurable goals are good ones. Specifically, a goal that states how much money I want to make from poker before August 1st is not a good goal. It’s highly measureable, but the problem with that goal is that it’s counter-productive! The game we play and love has swings, both up and down, and setting a goal that may well lie outside of what we can influence is not good. This is, on some level, the same kind of problem as with looking at a single hand and determining whether or not it was well played by looking at who won: In a game of chance (which poker most definitely is, regardless of what some lines in a movie may have tried to convince you of), results orientation is a bad thing. Focusing on the short term is psychologically dangerous, and believe it or not, but “the summer” is also looking at the short term unless you plan on playing half a million hands.

So avoid setting goals that aren’t measurable, but also avoid setting a monetary goal for yourself.

Having said all that, let’s look at some example goals. You may want to set some completely different goals for yourself, but regardless of if you use these or others, I strongly encourage you to write them down somewhere. A thread on the forums that you bookmark could be a good idea. It’s important to have them in writing, because you should return to them after the summer and compare the outcome to the goals you set for yourself.

Hands Played: The most basic goal, saying something about how much poker you intend to play. Highly measurable, especially if you use PokerTracker. This goal can be made more specific with some variation, like “I’m going to play 100 SnGs” or “20,000 hands of 2/4 limit shorthanded”, etc.

Books Read: State which poker books you’re going to read. Easy enough.

Post in Hand Analysis: Set a goal that you will post a certain number of hands in the hand analysis each week.

You get the idea. You can set any goal you want to really, but - if you want my advice - make it measurable, but not results oriented.

Fredrik