Poker goals

Goals and setting them is a very important task, both in life and in poker, but you have to be very careful because poorly set and formulated goals will yield undesirable results. However, just setting the right goals is the initial guarantee of good results, no wonder the saying “a good start is half the battle” is alive in the nation. At the same time, the correct understanding and formulation of goals is a fun psychological game, but let's start from the beginning 😉

Result formulated positively:

Very briefly: Your subconscious does not distinguish negations, i.e., if you formulate a goal “not to overeat,” your subconscious understands it as “to overeat.” If you formulate a goal “not to tilt,” you will only tilt more. All poker goals are formed positively, specifically what we want to achieve or have.

Achieving the result depends only on you:

A common mistake made both in poker and in life is setting goals that do not depend on you. For example: winning $100 a day, but you can play 10,000 hands a day of your best poker and still be in the red, you can have terrible luck. When you set yourself such a goal, which you cannot directly achieve, it creates great resistance within a person when unsuccessfully striving for such a goal. Another example: reading 1 book a week. This goal 100% depends on you and you can achieve it with your efforts. Or doing hand analysis after each session, again a good goal that depends only on you.

The goal must align with the main goal:

In this case, the main goal of a winning, good player in poker is to make good decisions, so all other goals must not conflict with the main one. Let's go back a bit to the previously mentioned “bad” examples. Let's say you set a goal to achieve $100 a week from poker and now you are playing on the 6th day. You are +$110 and feel satisfied because you seem to have achieved the goal. At this moment you are playing an important pot, where you have to make an aggressive play, but you are afraid because if you lose, you will lose a large part of your $110, so you decide to make a not the best decision trying to save the week's earnings. In this case, your main goal and the smaller one conflicted and the smaller one hindered achieving the bigger one.

Specifically formulated result:

To achieve something, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. Let's say many people want to feel happy, be rich, loved, or similar good things, but this is completely vague and undefined. Usually, if you ask the same person what happiness is? or how much money exactly do they need and what will they do with it? they would just shrug. A colleague of mine says he wants to start teaching people? And I ask him: what exactly will you teach them? how many people? how will you teach? where will you teach? and he looks with confused eyes 🙂 The goal must be defined to the smallest detail. The same in poker. I want to be a good player, I want to be a “poker pro,” this is not yet a goal. You have to formulate it exactly for yourself, decide for yourself what a good player is? what is a “poker pro”?

Resistance check

It may sound strange, but often in every problem, e.g., smoking or overweight, there is something valuable to us, so it is so hard for us to “quit smoking” or “lose weight,” so before setting these goals for yourself, you need to find out what ties you to those negative things. For example: I think that when I quit smoking I will gain weight or when I quit smoking I won't know what to do in stressful situations, what to do during lecture breaks? With weight, I feel resistance to “losing weight” because then I won't be able to eat my favorite candies or chocolates, or I will be forced to run, which I really don't like. The same in poker, you want “not to tilt,” or maybe more precisely you should say you want “to always make good decisions”? Think about what you would lose if you achieved this goal? What are you tied to? Maybe you think that then it will be no longer interesting to play? That poker will lose its playfulness and adrenaline feeling? Maybe you think that at the same time the joy of winning will disappear? The answers are very specific and individual. There are no right or wrong answers, there are only your answers that “protect” you from achieving the goal.

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Important in poker:

Avoid financial goals, when playing poker your goal is good decisions in poker, not money (decisions depend directly on you, while financial fluctuations are completely out of your control).

How to set goals:

The result must be formulated positively.
The result must depend directly on you.
Specifically and very very precisely formulated result, if the goal is very big it is better to break it down into smaller ones.
You must know very well what will happen when you achieve the goal, i.e., how will you know that the goal is achieved? what will you see? what will you hear? how will you feel? how will you look?
Resistance check. Will I not lose something important to me when I achieve the result?

Examples of poker goals: