I received a few requests for examples of developing poker goals at the beginning of each month as we discussed earlier. So I figured that I would go through my goals for May and kind of show the thought process that I was talking about in practice.

I am not sure how longwinded I will be, but if I get on a big enough roll I may space this out over a couple of days to help avoid tl;dr syndrome that I am often accused of fostering (I will claim accidentally, but that is another story…)


GOAL #1 - NUMBER OF HANDS FOR MAY

Definition
Play 15k hands total in the month of May.

So now we look at how well the goal measures up to our criteria:

1. How well defined is the goal?
Numbers are great when it comes to setting goals. You cannot get more “pass” or “fail” than knowing that you need to play X number of hands (or do X number of anything).

2. How realistic is the goal and how much will the goal challenge us?
For me, 15k hands is a ton. As you always see me posting, I have a bunch of other things going on. But I was able to hit 12k+ last month. I think that I can press that and make 15k though.

3. Does achieving this goal move us toward accomplishing larger goals?
Yes. Like most of us, I have long term goals (overall winnings, moving up limits, etc.) that are all assisted by the number of hands that I play as long I have a positive expectation in the games that I am playing in (fortunately I do ).

GOAL #2 – STARS PLATINUM

Definition
Hit Platinum on Poker Stars.

1. How well defined is the goal?
Another numbers goal. I either get enough points to hit platinum or I do not.

2. Realism vs Challenge?
I have not hit a level beyond Silver on stars for a long time, so this one should be interesting. It will be challenging, but I think realistic given the fact that I want to play 15k hands this month.

3. Does achieving this goal move us towards accomplishing larger goals?
This is probably the most *meh* goal I have in regards to moving me on to accomplishing larger goals as it really coincides with playing 15k’ish hands. Usually, when I play the FPP game, I do it over on FTP and shoot for Iron Man; the thing that I like about Iron Man is that it forces me to spread out my play time over a number of days which I believe is more beneficial as it eliminates the potential for monster sessions dedicated to hitting the FPP goal. So along with this goal comes the responsibility of being able to split my play up somewhat evenly. I am going to do this by tracking my FPP’s per day and do my best to keep them spread fairly evenly (knowing what I need to average per day to hit platinum based upon the anticipated number of days that I can play this month). So for now this will be a "test" goal that we will evaluate at the end of the month to see if/how we need to tweak it for June and beyond.


GOAL #3 – WATCH AND ANALYZE (2) VIDEOS PER WEEK

Definition: Like the title says.

1. How well defined is the goal?
This one is fairly well defined. I obv have some details that I understand going into this, such as watching and analyzing is not simply streaming the vid, letting it play out and then turning it off – so I realize that I have relatively high expectations as to how I will analyze the vid (and in turn what I get out of it). This of course means time, which takes us to the next criteria…

2. Realism vs Challenge?
This one is all about time. I think that I can make it happen, but it will be interesting with everything else that I have going on.

3. Does achieving this goal move us towards accomplishing larger goals?
I have noticed my game tailing off slightly in what are fairly tricky spots. So either I am overthinking these spots or underthinking them. I am hoping that in addition to hand analysis (another one of my goals that I didn’t get to here) I can watch the videos in order to get back to proper gameflow and hopefully get my thought process back on the right track. Getting on the right track is what helps us to squeeze out an even better win rate, grow our bankroll faster and be rolled properly to move up limits, and all of the other "long term" type goals that we all have. So this goal should help me in achieving larger goals.

So that's it for now as it is getting late here. I will try to make a similar post and look at a few more of my May goals sometime this weekend. But, hopefully this gives you a few decent examples of how I approach monthly goals. It may seem to be a bit over the top, but I really believe that by critically thinking about the goals we set, the better position we put ourselves in to improve.

San Diego
So we got to go down to San Diego this weekend and see my son graduate from Boot Camp (USMC). The weather was nice as it was cool and a bit overcast, which is about a thousand times better than the last time we went down there and got sunburned while wearing 50SPF. That drive is brutal too. I can handle SF to LA, which is about 6’ish hours, but that extra couple of hours to get to San Diego is just enough to make it *blah*. Traffic wise everything was good, which is always a bonus when driving around there. My brother (who used to live in Pasadena) clued us in as to which freeways were to be avoided when and that was a huge help.

The fact that we came back to read all the headlines about the swine flu and San Diego being one of the places where cases had been diagnosed was not the greatest either. All of us that went are doing well though – no symptoms, which is a definite plus.

And Another Swine Flu Scare
So after getting back from San Diego and kind of sweating the headlines, one of the people on the jobsite that I am working on was diagnosed with swine flu, which was definitely life –EV. Luckily though, life variance gave us an upswing and the lab tests came back as negative, so that was definitely life +EV imo. I am not quite sure what happened, there was some talk about a first round of tests that was positive, but then further testing came back negative. I don't know all of the details, but I am glad in the end it was a negative.

I was really kind of a weird deal as there was some talk about actually shutting this jobsite down with the positive diagnosis, which would be the right thing to do. Luckily though, that was able to go away fairly quickly once the second round of results came in.

Poker
Nothing too amazing going on pokerwise as I really have not played too much over the past week.

I was able to hit Iron Man again this month, which was one of my goals. I also hit 10k hands (another goal). I think for next month I may notch that up to 15k hands to see what I can do. To be honest, hitting the hands is probably slightly easier than hitting Iron Man, due to the fact that Iron Man causes me to play almost every day, which proves tricky with my other obligations and deadlines.

I will try to get an April Recap/May Look Ahead post up this weekend sometime.

Wow, April has really blown by. I just checked my blog and realized that I have not made a single post this month – doh! This has been due more to a necessity of focusing time in other areas. Some of the time focus has been Poker good, some of the time focus has been Poker *meh*, but life good. So, here is what I have been up to:

Work Time
So work has picked up a bit. This is actually a good thing, given the current economic situation. I have been called in to help on a couple of important, sizeable projects, which means that my company has enough work to avoid layoffs like so many other businesses have had to endure. In addition, my wife, who works at a restaurant, just finished the lent season which is the most lucrative season, so business has been great for her as well. All in all, I am thankful for what we have (at least she keeps reminding me that we need to be), so I am running with that.

Homework Time
So apparently April is “give homework that is unbelievably challenging" month. I can honestly say that I am amazed at the type of work children are doing at such a young age. We have an 8 year old who is doing decimals and fractions as well as some very basic algebraic functions. She is obviously through all of the basic math functions in order to be here. While I may be old, I can honestly say that I do not recall tackling this until 5th or 6th grade before we crunched out these types of equations. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that they are further ahead than we were 30’ish years ago (ugh), I am just glad that both my wife and I are fairly solid at math as it would be embarassing to be mathematically surpassed by a 3rd grader.

In addition to the 8 year old, we have an 11 year old and 17 year old that are both running into topics that are needing a little additional explanation, so I have been working with them as well. I have probably enjoyed helping our son the most (the 17 year old). He is into Calculus now (they categorize it differently than when I was in school, but it is probably a Calc 2? from my heyday), which I was always pretty proficient in, but have not used for about 15 years. So it is cool to see the old problems and how much I have actually retained there.

(No) Snow Time
No more snowboarding for us this year. My wife’s knee has not healed as quickly as we had hoped, so *meh*. She was not planning on skiing again this year, but she cannot really walk around on the snow with a bad knee, so “blah”. We did work on storing all of the snow gear for next year. I felt like we should have played "Taps" or some other sad song when we were through.

Poker Time
From a poker standpoint, the last two months been interesting to say the least. I have been on a slow dive with respect to All-In Expectation, which peaked at -30BI at about the first week in April. I have been fluttering right around there for the last few weeks.

The silver lining to this cloud is that this is by far the worst I have ever run, so I have had ample opportunity to put my tilt control and recovery measures to the test. I am very pleased with the results, as this type of bad run would definitely have busted me before. But despite the variance, I actually was able to grind up enough to make a move to the next level (of course, I ran behind in expectation and wound up having to drop back, but that is a story for another post )

I am going to try and keep playing through the rest of the month (time permitting) to see if I can hit 15k hands again. I am not sure how that will work with my other obligations, but we will see.

Video Time
I have been continuing work on the Tilt vids, which are coming along. Episode 3 is under review by the crackerjack unit of Quality Control people I have hired on the side (actually it’s the group that was dumb enough to answer when I im'd “you there?”). So Ep3 will be complete by the end of the weekend, and Ep 4 will be right behind. I have been putting the videos ahead of most other poker related items (including playing) to keep the series pushing forward.

So that's about it. I was hoping to get a few more planning and prep posts done as there have been some requests coming through PM's/Skype/MSN for these. The trick has just been fitting them in - we will see what the next week holds for us there.

So another weekend down and another recap:

Poker News
I got to play a couple of decent length sessions this past weekend, getting in about 2,000 hands overall. This weekend included a really interesting session where a 98/0 swelled up to about 10BI and then proceeded to slowly give it all back. I was lucky enough to run decent in a couple of key spots, including riding the nut straight over villain's top two for 300'ish BB.

I also managed to get in enough hands to put me one day away from Iron Man. So I need to play today and I will be there. Of all the goals that I had this month, this is probably the most satisfying as it required me to be able to spread out the hands that I had played rather than cramming them into fewer, more intense sessions (which had a greater potential to be counterproductive).

In a future post I will run through the rest of my March goals and how I did in relationship to them.

Movie News
So we watched Slumdog Millionaire this past weekend. It was a good film. I liked the flashback sequences (I am a sucker for flashbacks for some reason) and was thus entertained overall.

However, that aside, I really cannot say that I agree in the least with this film being selected as Best Picture this past year. It lacks in so many ways when compared to a number of films (e.g., the previously reviewed There Will Be Blood). The character development was *ok*, the acting was *meh*, the plot - while not being linear - was predictable, the writing was bland, etc etc. Really, the major appeal of the film is in the flashback sequences, and there is nothing astounding beyond that.

Weekendaments
So this weekend was pretty *meh* and involved a failed trip to the snow that I will not go into the details on. The bottom line is that the only thing worse than not snowboarding is thinking that you are going to go snowboarding only not being able to go. With any luck we will make it back out there next weekend. We would do it this weekend, but I need to play both days to hit Iron Man (just kidding, we actually have other obligations).

The Quest for the Gold, er Iron
So I have not been mathematically eliminated from Iron Man contention yet. I did get Gold, and have to put in just 5 more days at 200+ FPP's (or whatever they call them on Full Tilt) before next Tuesday is over. I am really glad that I chose a 31 day month to decide to make a run at Iron again; February would have either killed me or just flat out not happened.

Movie Time
So we watched "There Will Be Blood" recently. Wow, what an amazing film. The story is kind of odd...I really don't know how great I thought it was...but the acting was something else. The characters are played brilliantly and their imperfect (actually borderline psychotic) motives are clear, depsite being reprehensible.

It is a very intense movie, and while I typically never think of the soundtrack in a film, this film's soundtrack really drives that home. I have to take the thing in a couple of bites due to some other things coming up, which I think kind of helped to digest it all.

So I wound up watching “What Happens in Vegas” with my wife tonight. It really isn’t very good. I could attack the silly premise or the ridiculous situations, but I am usually tolerant of those types of things – it is a comedy after all. The problem with it is that it just kind of never goes anywhere. The ridiculous situations are just kind of strewn together loosely around the silly premise. Roll all of this up with severe predictability and we have a movie…kind of.

Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher’s performances are kind of bland and uninspiring, while the supplemental comic relief provided by their in movie best friends is lame at best.

I discussed the finer points of the film with my wife during our viewing: “this movie sucks” and “no wonder this movie sucks” (the resounding review provided for the supplemental comic relief).

In poker news, I hit Silver on FTP yesterday, so I have hit a small milestone on the way to my goal of Iron Man.

Poker
So I got to play a few hundred more hands since my last post. Nothing really exciting. Like broke even'ish across FTP and Stars. I am like two days away from hitting Iron Man "Silver" so that is decent.

Also, I re-upped my note taking, which was an "Ugly" that I forgot to post the last time. I believe that with playing as many hands as I have been playing my note taking kind of fell off as fatigue started to set in. So I was basically dealing with two small problems - being off of my game due to fatigue (starting to go into Robo-Tilt actually) and then also blowing off taking notes, again due to the fatigue.

The way that I discovered it was there were like two hands played fairly close together where a random villain took really odd lines and I did not bother noting either one of them. At that point I realized something was off as I am like borderline OCD with the note taking. So I logged off, reviewed some recent HH's coupled with thinking about my play (free association 4tw!) in general and realized that I was Robo'ing it.

Luckily I was able to catch it and I cut my session short and took Sunday off. So when I played today I ratcheted it up again and was more focused on the games.

Durrrr Challenge
Over the last few weeks I had been checking the challenge tables on FTP and never got a chance to see any of the action (well, there wasn't any action). Today was my lucky day though and I was able to catch the four tables of fury. I really do not understand enough about PLO or Nosebleed poker to truly appreciate the levels that these guys are playing at, but the games are definitely entertaining. PA was able to get a fairly decent chunk of his losses back from durrrr and is down like $50k now.

All in all it was really fun to rail.

St. Paddy's Day Parade and Festival
So I went with my family to the St Patrick's Day Parade in beautiful Dublin.....California. It was really kind of interesting, as we got to the parade kind of late and all we saw were what amounted to a series of mobile advertisements for various groups and local businesses. It was kind of depressing to be honest. To make matters even better, I think my spine was telescoped as my 4-Year Old sat on my shoulders for an hour+ so that she could see the parade go by. All-in-All the experience was slightly +LifeEV as the kids did enjoy seeing some of the groups (animal rescue, martial arts, people giving away Jolly Ranchers) go by, plus we got to hit Dim Sum at this really great place in town.

Back to the Powder?
My wife thinks that her knee will be good enough for us to take a day trip up to the snow next weekend. She originally started out thinking she would be good enough to ski, but we went through the whole spiel on weakened ligaments, easier to tear, etc etc etc.

I actually partially tore my MCL in college and was able to come back in about 3 weeks. But I was basically rehab'ing the thing in some way, shape, or form like 6-8 hours a day (icing, whirlpools, PT).

So we will see how things go next week and whether or not she thinks she can trudge through the snow with her brace on (well, at least trudge through enough snow to get up to the lodge).

Poker Update
So I have not given a March poker update for a while. As it would happen I am watching Sergio Leone’s classic Western starring a certain actor turned mayor of an affluent California beach community, so that seems like an appropriate way to present the month so far:

The Good
I have played 10k hands so far. My goal for the month is 15k, so I am ahead of schedule.

I have not been mathematically eliminated from an Iron ranking on FTP.

Heightening awareness of blind defense as well as blind stealing (as stated previously) has been effective.

The Bad
I am still experiencing spots where I am bordering on Fancy Play Syndrome. This is costing me chips for sure. I am not sure how many yet, but I am planning on taking a look at that tonight.

The Ugly
I am running at 13BI below expectation in all-in situations. Some "Good" from the "Ugly" is that I have not had any tilt issues. I have been spending a bit more time than I normally would cooling down post session and working the Automatic Interpretation exercises. I am happy that my desparation and meltdown points continue to increase.

The Results
Currently I am running at like 6BB/100, which is not too bad given the negative expectation. The rough thing is that this number could and should be higher without the lost value of the FPS, which is disappointing.

So in a previous blog entry we talked about the preparation pitfall of failing to begin with the end in mind. In response to this I had quite a few people pinging me about how to come up with solid goals to help with their poker growth.

There are (3) major criteria that we can use to assess how solid a Poker goal is:

#1 - How well is the goal defined?
The answer to this question will hopefully be:

Without clear definition or a total understanding of what we are trying to accomplish, we cannot hope to formulate a clear and direct plan for how we will accomplish the goal.

It is generally good practice to use factual/numerical/empirical relationships when defining goals as this provides specific results by which we can measure success (for example, saying “I want to win 5PTBB/100” is better than saying “I want to win as often as I can” or “I want to win as much as I can.”). Without this tie, our success or failure as well as how we get to those points can sometimes be ambiguous.

One caveat to using hardline results for poker goals is that we need to be cognizant of the fact that setting monetary or numerical values on short term goals can be detrimental. So saying “I want to win 5PTBB/100 this month (if one plays say 3k hands in a month) is not good as the samples are too small. So keep your sample size in mind when developing goals.

#2 - How much will our goal challenge us and how realistic is the goal?
One could argue (and someone usually does) that this item should be broken into two separate items. I would (and always do) argue that the relationship between difficulty and realism is such that they should be kept together. Here is what I mean:

We want our goals to challenge us. The greater the challenge the greater our potential for growth. By setting more challenging goals we will, over the long run, get better more quickly than if we set a whole bunch of unchallenging goals. However, in addition to being challenging, our goals also need to be realistic. If our goals are not realistic then there is potentially that we can actually derail our efforts (note also that unrealistic goals may be evidence to the fact that we do not have a clear understanding of what will be needed to make ourselves get better most efficiently).

Many people confuse “realistic” with “easy” or “unchallenging”. Just because a goal is something that we can readily achieve does not mean that this will be easy. For example, I can set a goal to play 15,000 hands this month. For me, this goal is realistic – it will require me to put in about 500 hands per day, which is possible even with my work schedule, but at the same time the goal is also challenging for a number of reasons (I am coming off of a month playing less than 3k hands so the mental drain may be tough, if I run poorly I will need to strategically work through any tilt episodes or risk not putting in the hands, etc.).

At the same time our goals need to remain realistic. For example, if I decide to set a goal that I will play 100k hands this month, then I am wasting my time as there is no way possible, given my other obligations that I can meet this goal. In this instance I am much more likely to do things like try and cram in a mega-session of 10k hands on a Saturday, at the end of which I will be dead tired, in no mood to think about my game (which defeats a larger goal of learning from key situations), playing completely automatically (which defeats a larger goal of getting better at poker), probably losing (which defeats the larger goals of increasing my winrate and winnings), etc etc – at this point I am derailing multiple goals and not improving in an efficient manner.

#3 - How does meeting this goal get me closer to my larger goals/ultimate goal in this endeavor?
This one is quite simple - the key to all of our goals in any endeavor is that they should work towards either larger goals or our ultimate goal. So if our ultimate goal in poker is to win the WSOP Main Event then we should consider how the goal that we are working on presently helps us to achieve that ultimate goal. If we work on achieving goals that do not satisfy this end, then the goal is –EV in relationship to our effort that we are putting forth and we need to consider reworking it or dropping it completely.

Final Thoughts
Two other items that I would like to mention in regards to goals are that we should try to keep our list of goals in a written format that we keep close by (heightning awareness is the key) and priortize the order in which we will tackle them, which I will actually cover in a future post.

So my head feels like it is going to explode, which is keeping me from sleeping. I figured that this was some kind of omen to come post on my Leggo Bloggo.

I have officially played more hands this month than I did for all of February. While this is a sad testament to how lame February was in regards to Poker, I really cannot complain as there were quite a few poker and non-poker items that took precedence.

I am still hanging out at 100NL for now, given my recent break as well as being a bit under the weather. Between FTP and Stars I am about 3BI behind in all-in EV, but still up like 5BI for the month. I am currently running at 15BB/100, which I cannot complain about given the slight EV issue and my Ricola dependency.

One thing that has been annoying over the last week is that my play has been somewhat inconsistent. Overall I am finding myself making some really solid reads and making some nice moves on later streets to either extract max value or knock a player off of what I believe to be a better hand. But then sometimes out of the blue I will make a really odd move (I am trying to blame it on sinus pressure and overconsumption of Ricolae, but that just isn't sticking). It is not that the plays I am making are absolutely horrible, but when I think about the hand after the fact I kind of wonder what my logic really was to get where I got. I feel as if I am overthinking spots. Maybe tomorrow I will post a couple of examples of what I mean.

Overall, I cannot complain about the first few days of March. It feels good to get back into the swing of things. It is also nice to not be mathematically eliminated from Iron Man status in the first 5 days of the month.

So I will head back to bed now and pop in Aliens versus Predator. While the movie is old and kind of *whatever*, the AvP fight scenes are pretty slick in 65" hi-def (Blu-Ray 4tw!). Plus the movie precludes me from doing any thinking that may further hurt my head.