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).

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.

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.).


#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.