Adjusting My Poker Goal

Reality has settled in to my ambitious plans and I simply don’t have time to spend 4 hours aevery night grinding away at the Party Poker micro tables. I’ve got other projects demanding my time and, as much as I’d like to neglect them all to concentrate on poker, it can’t happen. As a result I have made a few necessary adjustments to my goals beginning with my short term goal which will then flow on to my longer term goals.

Firstly, I am still allowing myself the luxury of playing every day, I’m not going stark raving mad over the whole “haven’t got time” thing. I’m no longer focussing on making a pre-determined profit every day, instead I’m prepared to quit playing for the day once “a profit” is reached. This has the effect of removing a further pressure which I had placed upon myself that was proving to be rather inhibitive. I was trying to commit to playing at least 100 hands per day. I felt that too often after I had made a profit that I was happy with for the day I was beginning to play a lot of junk hands just to reach the daily quota. It was doing nothing for my game and I was actually resenting the extra hands rather than maintaining a necessary focus and concentration.

I’ve found that unshackling myself from self imposed constraints has given my poker play a new sense of freedom and I am coming away with more winning sessions as a result. It’s all about compromise and whatever strategy most suits your state of mind. For the time being, my state of mind craves the short sessions with smaller profits.

Incidentally, my bankroll has grown too. My starting measly $30 bankroll is now looking a tad more impressive, sitting at $214.90. A paltry sum, to be sure, but when you consider that I’ve mainly been playing the $5 NLHE tables at Party Poker, it represents a helluva lot of patience, quite a few bad beats and a great number of seemingly insignificant profits. Remember, a $0.50 profit is a much better outcome than losing your $5.00 starting stack any day.

I’m still deriving most pleasure from standing up from a table with a profit rather than worrying about the size of the profit itself.

The Price of Success

As I am only a month and a half into my newly devised strategy to play poker profitably, I am on a very steep learning curve. I’m reading as much as I can – and not everything I’m reading has to do solely with poker. As you may have picked up from the bulk of my posts, I am relying on the power of goal-setting, combined with a basic poker savvy, to keep driving me forward.

I thought I would share the latest valuable nugget that might help you get over the next time you go bust:

There is an old saying: "Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first." It is not practice that makes perfect; it is imperfect practice that eventually makes perfect.

Whenever you start something new, you can expect to do it poorly. You will feel clumsy and awkward at first. You will feel inadequate and inferior. You will often feel silly and embarrassed. But this is the price that you pay to achieve excellence in your field. You will always have to pay the price of success, and that price often involves the hard work of mastering a difficult skill that you need to move to the top of your field.

Source : Goals by Brian Tracy (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.)

My Progress Report After 5 Weeks

Time for another check on how my progress is going as I attempt to meet my bankroll goals. I find this kind of analysis is important to reaffirming my goals as well as ensuring that I’m not straying from my original strategy which is easy to do when beset by impatience, overconfidence and complacency. The temptation to begin pushing harder after a little bit of success can cause me to deviate from the original plan and away from the discipline that brought the success in the first place.

I acknowledge that I’m a better poker player than when I started this challenge, but I also acknowledge that I’m nowhere near as good as I will have to be if I am going to succeed at the higher levels.

Goal	Actual
Play 100 hands / day	Playing 99.7 hands / day
To show a profit	Current profit is at 114%
To have a bankroll big enough to allow 20 buy-ins at the next level	Bankroll = $66 Current profit / day is 0.98. The target minimum is $100 which works out at only 0.53 / day.

So I can conclude from this little summary that I am safely on course to achieve the goals I have set for myself. (Insert warm inner glow of indulgent self-congratulation here). I admit that I can improve HOW I play, but, for the standard with which I am mixing it, I'm doing OK.

Adjusting the Short Term Goal

When I posted my initial goal-setting post I mentioned that the goals should be regularly adjusted as circumstances change. I had no illusions about my own progress or that the change of goals would come about because I had far exceeded my own expectations. After all, I had just exhausted my first bankroll, the standard of my own play was awful and there was no real sign that I was going to turn it around.

Some major cramming of noted poker books by Sklansky, Brunson and Harrington as well as diligently putting their theory into practice and some typically shoddy play by my fellow micro-table guppies has kicked me forward at a great rate.

New Short Term Goals

• Complete 10,000 hands at the $5 NLHE tables. (I’ve currently played 3,000 hands).
• Reach a bankroll of $140. To do this I calculate I must average around $1.13 / day which I figure is a challenge on the unpredictable .02/.04 tables.
• Readjust milestone targets to (i) $80 by 24 November (ii) $100 by 10 December (iii) $120 by 26 December
• I’ve bought myself Poker Tracker and plan to use it to identify weaker players to help me choose which tables I play at. Interestingly, when I loaded in my old hand histories the players who came at or near the bottom of the statistics were those players I had identified myself. I was fairly pleased that my own analysis was backed up by the numbers.
  

Long Term Goal Reaffirmed

• Play at the $5,000 NLHE ($25/$50) tables by July 2010.

Medium Term Goal Reaffirmed

• To play profitably at the $100 ($0.50/$1) tables by October 2008.

I’m happy with the knowledge that I have picked up so far by reading the various recommended poker books, but I still have quite a lot of work to do in calculating pot odds. I find it particularly difficult to do given the speed at which on-line poker is played, so this is an aspect that I will have to work on. I figure that when I fold a hand I should sit there and try to calculate what my pot odds would have been had I stayed with the hand.

So much of the success I'm trying to attain has more to do with effective goal setting rather than effective poker.

Pay Me Bitch!

How’s this for a dream scenario.

You’re sitting at a table that contains a couple of absolute feebs who regularly take pots with massive overbets, backing the other players down. Occasionally the overbet is called and you see the bluff but it doesn’t deter them from making the identical play over and over again.

Finally, I’m on the button and pick up 9 Tc and make the call with one of those erratic players checking in the BB. The flop comes 8c 9d 9h – trips is a pretty fair flop, I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming and BB bets the minimum so I call signalling I’m chasing. The turn comes Jc and not only do I sit there with trips but I’ve also got a straight flush draw. The erratic BB predictably bumps the betting up 4 x the pot to scare me off the hand so I again make the call.

Well bugger me if the river isn’t the Qc and there I am with my second queen high straight flush in two days. Now if history is anything to go by…

Sure enough the aggro BB chucks me All-In. It’s one thing to pick up the absolute nuts but a whole nuther thing to get paid off to the max!

And what did the showdown reveal? A mighty 8d 2h!!!

Milestone #3 achieved!

Needless to say I flew past my 3rd milestone target yesterday and am now embarking on a new goal.

If I am going to play the $10 NLHE tables with the recommended bankroll risking a maximum of 5% with your stake, my minimum requirement is a bankroll of $100 for a $5 stake. Therefore my new goal at the $5 tables is to get as close to $100 as possible. I estimate it will take around 60 more days to play the 7000 hands to get me to 10000, so that’s only an average daily profit of 0.60 – a target that’s definitely achievable. Exceeding that mark will allow me to play with a higher stake.

Current Bankroll Position : 108.56%

Step One: Write A Goal

I'm a long-distance runner, so I understand the importance of goal-setting when trying to improve your performance. When I lost my original bankroll I decided to do what I should have done in the first place, write down a clearly defined list of goals complete with strategy, milestones and a timeframe in which I want to achieve them.

The goals come in 3 flavours: long-term, medium-term and short-term and they are also made of plasticine. In other words, they can be reshaped should my circumstances change or the hoped for improvement doesn't come.

Now, my goals are very specific for me and will look ridiculously easy to achieve, but I'm starting right on the bottom rung of the ladder, I admit it.

My Starting Point

I'll be playing the .02/.04 cash tables and have given myself a starting bankroll of $30. I'll be sitting down at each table with an opening stake of $3 (a high 10% of my bankroll) and am planning on leaving the table each time I make a profit.

Long-Term Goals

To play profitable no-limit hold ‘em on the $25/$50 tables.

I’m not completely dedicated to the idea of achieving this goal inside a set timeframe, however, I’ve seen the metric of Hands Played used when others have set their goals and this seems to be a reasonable way to work out how long it might take me to achieve the goal. At this point in my life, I can only reasonably aim to play around 100 - 150 hands per day which means around 10,000 hands in 3 months. Before I allow myself to step up to each consecutive level I want to "do my apprenticeship" by playing at least 10,000 at that level. Therefore, my rough estimate is that I can hope to achieve my long-term goal is by July, 2010.

In order to play effectively at each successive limit level, a minimum bankroll will be required. I have calculated that the minimum bankroll I must attain to play $25/$50 is a tad over $35,000.
During the next 2 and three quarter years, I will have to continue to absorb as much knowledge as I can. To that end, I want to have exhaustively studied the books of Brunson, Harrington and Sklansky – not just read them but read, re-read and re-read again.

I also have to study the mathematics involved with playing winning poker and that means being able to calculate the odds. My ability to calculate pot odds and implied odds should become second nature due to the number of hands I will have played to reach this goal.

Medium-Term Goals

This goal is where I would like to be in 1 year’s time (16 October, 2008). Using the baseline of playing 10,000 hands at each level, I can expect to have progressed up to the 5th level on the ladder which is the .50/$1 level.

The only way I can hope to reach this level is to have shown a profit at each of the lower levels. I can expect my game to improve as I rise to each new level. However, I can also expect the competition to be tougher, so I may find it difficult to start with to maintain profitability.

I must include a plan of what I will do should I find that my bankroll is beginning to dwindle. To that end, I will be stepping back a level if I find that my bankroll is suffering. I will be writing a plan for a bad-case scenario and put it in a future post.

Short-Term Goals

Progress to the next level (.05/.10). Before moving up to the next level I must play at least 10,000 hands and show a profit when I have finished. I hope to average around 100 – 150 hands per day which gives me a timeframe of between 9½ - 14 weeks with which I can expect to have met my goal.

An added monetary goal is to have increased my bankroll from $30 to $60, which is a $30 profit. Given the expected timeframe quoted above, this works out to be an average daily profit of between 0.31 & 0.45 which I think is a reasonable expectation.

In this short-term goal I have split each $10 point as a milestone (Bankroll = $40, $50 and $60) and will be having a mini celebration and indulgent pat on the back when I reach each of these points. I've got to acknowledge my progress

Plans / Expectations to Meet the Goals

I hope to keep a log of every session that I play. In this log I'll note my opening bankroll position, the profit or loss made at each table I play, the number of hands that I played at each table and the closing position of the bankroll at the end of the day. I'll also try to also record notes of mistakes I felt I made and what I could have done better. Just as importantly I will note down when I feel I have played really well pointing out what I did right.

Studying others will become important too, taking notes of other players. Something that I've never done before is determine the loose players, the aggressive, the tight and the solid when I sit down at a table.

I am going to have good days, OK days, bad days and terrible days. The most important factor in succeeding will be how I react to the bad and terrible days. Accepting that they are going to happen is the first step in succeeding despite the losses. I will remain calm and will not complain about the bad beats that I’ve suffered. Instead, I should study the hand history and figure out what I could have done better that may have avoided the loss (or at least minimised it).

Lost Without A Plan

I have been playing NL Hold ‘Em on-line for over a year now but, like many rank amateurs who think they know it all, my play has been erratic, my strategy pretty well non-existent and thoughts about bankroll management nil. I had set myself no goals for how I might improve my game, or even how I would recognise that my game had improved.

A few days ago, I lost the last of my original stake. As the last few cents trickled out of my account my thoughts of consolation to myself were along the lines of, “Ah well, put it down to the cost of education.”

But the reality was I had learned very little, if anything at all. My mistakes were basic, but crippling.

• I played with no strategy.
  
• I had not set myself any goals.
  
• I rarely studied the play of others at the table (I would read a book when I wasn’t in a hand).
  
• I never studied my hand histories.
  
• I still hadn’t picked up a poker book.
  
• I had no idea how to implement an effective bankroll management strategy.
  
• I had no plans on how I might build my bankroll, nor how I would get myself to the next level.

It was time for a wake-up call.

So my education (or re-education) has begun. I have sat down and worked out a plan with written goals for the short-term, medium-term and long-term. I have defined where I want to go and how I’m going to get there and have built in some notable milestones to achieve along the way to stoke my motivational fires.

I have also picked up some books that I have committed to studying (Brunson, Harrington and Sklansky) and I have developed a money-management strategy that will help me protect my bankroll while I’m playing.

Finally, to help me analyse my play and to assist me on my journey I have started a blog. I aim to discuss my progress, post some critical hands for discussion and celebrate the completion of each step.

Before plunging in to the Poker Room, I will give an overview of my goals and the bankroll management strategy that I intend to employ to assist me in becoming a profitable poker player.

And they will be the subjects of the next couple of posts.