Working my way back into poker has always been something that I have dealt with due to the intervention of non-poker related events into my game. I posted previously on the subject :

On Breaks - Part I
On Breaks - Part II
On Breaks - Part III

So I find myself in a relatively familiar position again. With the bad news being that I have not played for a while and the good news being that I have an excellent idea of what to expect.

One item that I did not touch upon in the “On Breaks” posts listed above was the importance of setting goals upon our return. The reason that setting goals is so important upon our return is that it gives us a nice set of rules that we are going to play towards and in the case of a return, we can better help ourselves ease into playing again by creating goals that lend themselves to better game situations.

For example, two of my goals for the month of November are:

1. Play 5,000 hands.

2. Play at least 50% of my hands for the month between 5PM Friday to 4AM Saturday and 8PM Saturday to 4AM Sunday.

Goal #1 is pretty straightforward. A nice, small sample that ensures we can get back into the groove, without putting too much pressure on ourselves to bank a ton of hands. For me, this will probably translate to about 12-15 hours of play depending on how many tables I decide to play. If this goal gets crushed then that is fine, but crushing it is better than setting a 10k hand goal and being in a tilt fest at about hand 4k if variance absolutely hates us.

When looking at Goal #2, it may seem odd to limit ourselves to such narrow windows of playtime. Historically, I have found these windows of time to have the most players that we want to play against online (in reality, the window of 12AM-4AM Saturday is by far the juiciest, but it is a bit unrealistic, with everything else going on in life, to be able to commit to 50% of my hands in such a narrow window of time). So the purpose of this goal is to be in a position where we are playing 50%+ of our hands at the most optimal playtimes. The nice thing about this goal is even if I manage to fail it has still heightened my awareness about playtimes as well as the ever important table selection. One could ask the question "why don't we just play 100% of our hands during the aforementioned windows?". There are a few reasons for this, the largest of which being that if we limit our play to the weekends then we are lowering our ability to move beyond the affects of the break that we are pushing out of.

So while Goal #1 is relatively standard (i.e., a set number of hands in a month) as a non-results oriented goal – we use Goal #2 another non-results oriented goal that should push us into a better position to wind up in the black our first month back, which is obviously +EV from a mental game standpoint. One thing to keep in mind with goals that push our play towards certain windows of time is that it becomes more difficult to meet these goals if we plan on playing a significant number of hands in the span of a month.