Discipline

The key to successfully playing profitable poker isn’t whether I play A 9o from middle position too often but to my overall discipline…

When starting out on the challenge of something ambitious such as building a bankroll from an insignificant amount to impressive proportions, you tend to begin with bright-eyed confidence and an undying belief that the goal you’re attempting to achieve is reachable. Indeed, it is achievable…just about anything our imagination can think up is achievable. Realising your goal comes down to a number of key factors, but the most important one, and the one in which we have the most control over, is discipline.

Here are a few of the discipline challenges I have encountered over the last couple of months as I have been grinding my bankroll up from $30 to $90 on the Party Poker $5 NLHE Cash tables.

• The discipline of playing day after day in a bid to meet the goal number of hands per day.

• The discipline of sticking to the cash games rather than trying my hand at the SNG tables.

• The discipline of sticking to my tried and tested strategy of leaving the table as soon as a profit has been made.

• The discipline of slowly building my bankroll rather than succumbing to the temptation of moving too quickly out of my depth in a bid to try to speed the process up.

• The discipline of constantly reaffirming my goals to keep them solidified in my head.

• The discipline of honestly recounting my progress in a blog to make it more real and powerful.

• The discipline of remaining pragmatic whenever someone calls my pre-flop raise and then proceeds to take down my pocket KK with their 8 3o.

• The discipline of not allowing overconfidence to distract me from my original goal.
  

Naturally, my discipline is most sorely tested after a losing day as the doubts start crowding in and attempt to take over from all of the hard built positive energy. For all of the reasons listed above, not to mention a few more that will probably come to me as I continue to think hard over it, setting out goals is vital to ongoing poker success.