Establishing Goals in Poker
The year is winding down to its final few weeks. Many of us have played hundreds and even thousands of online poker cash game sessions and poker tournaments. Cash game and live poker players are starting to count up their wins and losses in order to establish how well they have done for the year in hopes of improving in 2010. Do you know how much your game has progressed over the past 12 months? If not, then you probably want to establish some goals going into the new year.
Why should I establish goals?
Goals allow us to measure our performance over the long term and short term. By keeping track of how well I am doing I can establish trends that will help me define just how well I am doing each session or even from poker tournament to poker tournament. By harvesting this data on a daily basis you begin to see where your game is and whether small tweaks and adjustments are helping your game or not. Without measuring how well you are playing you have no barometer other than guessing to establish where your game is at.
Document your Sessions / Tournaments
Gathering data on your game is relatively simple. You are going to want to record every Texas Hold’em Poker or Omaha cash game session you play and document your profits and losses for that session. You also want to take player notes on the players at your table. Player notes are not just for online poker players. Smart live poker players will take notes on their opponents too. The more information you have available to you the better off you will be. Tournament poker players should document the buy-in, place finished and also take player notes as well. Lastly, no matter what format you are playing in you should document key hands. You may not remember exactly what cards fell but most times you can remember the general gist of why you lost a pot or won one. This kind of information can be studied and analyzed for later. If you happen to be an online poker player you can simply browse through your hand histories or analyze your hand history with a number of products on today’s market.
Analysis
So now that you have gathered all of this information what should you do with it? The purpose in gathering all of this information is to improve your game. As I stated earlier your job is to view the information and pick up on things that appear to be out of the ordinary as well as things that fall within the normal threshold. I think it’s fair to say that if you are busting out of a 180 poker tournament in 120th place, 130th place, 90th place and 176th place that you may have a problem with patience. True that may be a bit extreme but it serves to prove my point and reasoning in how you assess your own performance. You need to be very meticulous about how you analyze that data. You also need to be objective about your own game. It won’t do you any good to make up a reason to not acknowledge you are making mistakes or have a hole in your game. By being honest with your game and accepting the data it has established your game will improve significantly.
By establishing goals we create the mindset that we want to improve and get better at the game of poker or any other endeavor in life. The game of poker is constantly evolving and in order to keep up with it you must adopt any method you can to stay ahead of the trends. The game of poker has trends in it just like any other sport. The players see someone making a particular move and it’s working for them and the next thing ya know everyone is doing it. So look at establishing goals as a way to identify not only trends in your own game but as a way of motivating you to become the best poker player you can be. Without goals we have no tangible way to measure our success. When we do measure our successes and failure we can constantly challenge ourselves and our games to be the best they can be,.