Despite a decent recovery these past few days, May will net me a loss, just as April did. I haven’t had many losing months before, so I’m not thrilled about the outcome but I’ll manage. Although it’s been frustrating at times, it’s made me think more about my game and in the end has actually made me more optimistic about my future winnings, not the other way around. I already knew that poker - especially limit hold ‘em - is a game of swings, but after this recent downswing I feel like I can survive it better in the future.

So I’ve set a new goal for myself for 2007, after almost half the year has passed: I want to have taken my first shots at $20/$40 by the end of this year. It’s going to require a lot (for me, anyway) of played hands, and it’s going to require that I stay sharp and it’s going to take at least a little bit of luck. Or, at the very least, that I don’t have too much BAD luck.

I’ll need to win in the vicinity of $16k this year to get there, i.e. to be sufficiently bankrolled that I feel I can take shots at 20/40. If I play solely 5/10, and manage to beat the game for 1BB/100 (so far this year I haven’t, but that needs to be corrected) I’ll need to play a whopping 160k hands before December 31st.

Clearly, this will not happen. I have troubles playing 10k hands per month, let alone more than 20k per month.

There’s some relief in the fact that I will spending (if everything goes according to plan) a decent part of the rest of the year at 10/20, which - if I can stay at my scheduled win-rate (fat chance!) - means that the profits will come faster and fewer hands will need to be played.

There’s also some relief in the fact that PokerStars gives cash bonuses every 50k FPPs. That’s another $650 every… Oh… 25,000 hands or so? I don’t know, it’s hard to calculate.

But the greater point remains: I need to play a lot of hands, and I need to play them damn well, to achieve this target.

Still, this is not my primary poker goal for this year. My primary goals are to have fun, and to play well. In that order. I cannot allow myself to have monetary goals as my primary goal because, quite frankly, I’m not a professional and I don’t depend on poker income for survival. The number one reason I don’t WANT to be a pro is specifically because I don’t want to HAVE to set monetary goals for myself. It’s too stressful and makes me hate playing.

Don’t get me wrong, setting a monetary goal isn’t a problem for me. But having a monetary goal shoved down my throat would be awful. Although it would be cool to not have to play very much and spend most of the summer golfing and what-not, I don’t have any illusion of being good enough for that. If I somehow end up playing 100/200 regularly and crushing the games, I might consider it. But that feels like it’s not exactly around the corner. I’d have to make a LOT of money for poker as a career to be worth considering. I’ve gone on and on about this before, but the social environment at work, coupled with the travels and the challenging (and varying) tasks I get, simply makes “professional poker player” sound like a bad alternative. Add in all the other benefits with having a “real” job (I won’t even bother trying to list them) and the choice becomes even more clear.

But sure, if I win a million bucks per year playing poker at nights and weekends, I’ll consider it. So, uh… Wish me luck, I guess.