Know Where You Want To Go

You must know where you want to go, and you'd do well to be pretty specific about it. Knowing where to go - what your goals are - is important for quite a few reasons, above all the fact that your best chance to achieve your goals is to make a plan that enables them. We are here to make you set goals for yourself, and the principles you should employ when you make a plan to reach those goals.

This series is not aimed at casual players. If your goals are simply "I want to win $1,000" or "I want to play 100 SnG's" then you don't need to dive into the kind of planning I talk about here. This is directed at people who want to be serious students of the game of poker, who want to go as far as they can with the time that they have to spend on it, whether this is 5 or 50 hours a week.

Step one in this process is defining and understanding what you want out of poker. Psychology of Poker by Dr. Alan Schoonmaker may be a good book for you to read to come to terms with what your own motivations are, but right now we would presume that you are a mixture of wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to make money. Hopefully the thrill of gambling isn't one of them; whether or not you also want to play to some extent to pass time is also largely irrelevant.We want to make it clear that making money and challenging yourself may be goals that are contradicting each other, which may not be obvious. Won't higher limits bring both more challenge and more money? Only to a point. Unless you're one of the best players in the world, you are bound to sooner or later reach a limit where you're no longer making money, or just about breaking even. In this case, it's better if you step down to where you maximize your earning if your goal is to make as much money as possible. However, if your goal is to constantly challenge yourself, you should be willing to spend more time fighting at a higher level before learning how to beat it.

An extreme example of money vs. challenge is a player who will play 10 games of $2/$4 limit hold 'em simultaneously online. This was, presumably, challenging and difficult in the beginning. But after a few months of successfully doing this for 40 hours a week, it will become less and less challenging, even mechanical.

So ask yourself, what do you want to achieve? Do you want to be able to eventually take shots at $100/$200? Or are you in it for the money? Accepting that the goals can be contradicting each other is important.

Before we move on to how to construct your plan, we want to suggest a couple of other advantages to making one at all:

Planning...

... breeds discipline

By now, I've hopefully done a pretty good job of giving you the idea that successfully mastering poker is hard work, and if I have, then pointing out that hard work requires discipline is hopefully easy to accept. If you're devoted to the task, then the goal you set for yourself may require a lot of effort to reach, and us humans are infamous for our dislike of effort - we're lazy by nature, this is why we invent all this convenient stuff like armchairs, internet shopping and the wheel. We need to be reminded of why we're putting in all this effort to keep us motivated, even when things aren't going our way and the world appears to be conspiring against us.

Staying disciplined is difficult, but with proper planning it becomes a little bit easier. A lot of people find enjoyment in being able to cross things off their to-do list even if the things actually on the list aren't enjoyable; then that becomes a mini-motivator all by itself.

... and gives a purpose

With a plan and a clearly defined goal, you will be able to see a purpose in what you're doing even when the amount of work you have ahead of you may feel overwhelming. For the sake of motivation, this is more important than just being able to cross things off a to-do list, even if they're actually one and the same. Being able to see progress, over the course of time, is the biggest motivator. A simple example is a bankroll tracking graph: Even with a couple of days' worth of brutal bad beats, you should still be able to look back on your bankroll progress at a whole and see that the graph is pointing up and take some comfort in that.

Finally , your plan should be realistic. In fact, it should be more than realistic; you should give yourself padding, or more time than you think necessary, for the things you plan to do. Unexpected things always occur - including things like being bored with the game for a period of time - and disregarding those factors completely is foolhardy. If you're currently really into poker, and you play 6 hours a day, don't make a goal that requires you to keep up this pace unless you're absolutely sure that you can. Set an easier goal for yourself, because it's important that you set a goal that you can reach. Conversely, however, setting a pointless target that you don't have to work on at all to reach is also counter-productive, of course.

In Closing

In this session, we want to focus on bad beats, frustration, downswings and how seemingly totally unfair this game can be.

The reason most serious players keep hefty bankrolls is because of how variance never fails to eventually knock you over, and then proceed to kick you while you're lying down. If you haven't had a meaningful downswing yet, there's a very, very good chance you haven't played for very long. Being prepared for it, both financially and mentally, is a virtual necessity if you want to go as far as you can. When its said "financially prepared for it," we basically mean that you have a bankroll that can deal with some swings, and that you've planned for the eventuality of a larger downswing happening, of such magnitude that it may force you to step down in limits. Thinking that a good player rarely loses is just plain wrong, because - quite frankly - winning poker means pushing edges, even the smallest ones. When you push a 52% chance of winning, you're going to end up losing virtually half the time. And sometimes, you're on the wrong side of the coin for an extended period of time. Of course, you could pass up the small edges and focus solely on the large edges, which would negate some of your profit, but it would also bring with it less variance.

The problem with downswings is similar to the problem with reverse reinforcement. You may be playing well but you're still losing, which can cause you to believe that you're not playing well after all and in turn this can make you change your game for the worse. This is dangerous. In the short term, this is usually referred to as "tilt." Someone who refuses to raise his two pair on the flop when there are two hearts there, because "someone will just hit a flush and I'll lose more money," is a good example. The real problems arise when this is no longer just a state of mind that we're in for a little while, like the rest of the night or for 15 minutes or something, but when our game permanently changes because of this. Understanding how poker works, that mathematically and logically the universe is not out to get you, is very important in order to counter this behavior. Being able, away from the table, to rationally realize that what happened tonight was just variance, that your losses are at least smaller than they could have been had you not played as well, is imperative. When you don't have the cards in front of you, you can afford the luxury of thinking things through, mulling it over, and reaching the correct conclusion.