Poker objectives

Goals and goal setting are very important, both in life and in poker, but you have to be very careful, because the wrong goals will lead to the "wrong" or "unexpected" result. However, setting the right goals is the initial guarantee of a good result, which is why the saying "a good start is half the work" is so popular. At the same time, understanding and formulating the right goals is a fun psychological game, but let's start from the beginning 😉

The result is positively worded:

Very briefly: your subconscious mind does not distinguish between negatives, i.e. if you formulate a goal of "not overeating", your subconscious mind understands it as "overeating". If you formulate a goal to "stop fattening", you will only "fatten" more. All poker goals are formulated in a positive way, specifically in terms of what we want to achieve or have.

It's up to you to achieve the result:

A common mistake in poker and in life is to set goals that are out of your control. For example: to win 100$ a day, but you can play 10,000 hands a day of your best poker and still be in the minors, you could be in the black. When you set yourself a goal that you cannot directly achieve, it creates a lot of resistance inside you to failing to achieve it. Another example: reading 1 book a week. This is a goal 100% is up to you and you can achieve it with your own efforts. Or do a hand analysis after each session, again a good goal that is up to you.

The objective must be the same as the main objective:

In this case, the main goal of a winning, good player in poker is to make a good decision, so all other goals must not conflict with the main goal. Let's go back a bit to the "bad" examples mentioned earlier. Let's say you set a goal to achieve 100$ per week from poker and you are now on day 6. You are +110$ and you feel satisfied because you seem to have reached your goal. You are currently playing an important pot where you have to make an aggressive play, but you are afraid that if you lose you will lose most of your 110$, so you decide to make a bad decision to save your weekly earnings. In this case, your main goal and the smaller one clashed and the smaller one got in the way of the bigger one.

Specifically the result:

To achieve something, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. Let's say a lot of people want to feel happy, to be rich, to be loved, or all that good stuff, but that's totally vague and undefined. Most of the time, if you were to ask the same person, what is happiness? Or how much money does he need and what will he do with it? they just shrug their shoulders. I have a colleague who says to me, "I want to start teaching people? And I ask him: what exactly are you going to teach them? How many people? How will you teach them? Where will you teach them? And he looks at me with confused eyes 🙂 The goal must be defined down to the smallest detail. The same in poker. I want to be a good player, I want to be a "poker pro", that is not a goal. You have to articulate it to yourself, decide for yourself what is a good player? What is a "poker pro"?

Resistance check

It may sound strange, but often there is something valuable in every problem, such as smoking or being overweight, which is why it is so hard for us to 'quit' or 'lose weight', so before we can set ourselves these goals, we need to figure out what binds us to those negative things. For example: do 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 a resistance to "slimming down", because then I won't be able to eat my favourite sweets or chocolates, or I'll be forced to run, which I don't like very much. The same in poker, do you want to 'stop getting fat', or maybe it is more accurate to say, do you want to 'make good decisions all the time'? Think what you would lose if you achieved this goal? What are you tying yourself to? Do you think it would be no longer interesting to play? That poker will lose its playfulness and adrenaline? Do you think that the joy of winning will disappear at the same time? The answers are very specific and individual. There are no right or wrong answers, only your answers that "keep" you from achieving your goal.

Where is the best place to play poker?

Important in poker:

Avoid financial goals, in poker your goal is good decisions in pokerand not money (decisions are directly up to you, and monetary fluctuations are completely outside your control).

How to set goals:

• The result must be positively worded.
• The result must depend directly on you.
• A specific and very, very precise result, if the goal is very large it is better to break it down into smaller ones.
• You need to know very well what happens when you reach the goal, i.e. how will you know that the goal has been reached? what will you see? what will you hear? how will you feel? what will you look like?
• Resistance check. Will I lose something important to me when I achieve a result?

Examples of poker goals:

• In one month read "how to be the poker player" poker book.
• To analyse at least one poker hand from my SnG limits every day.
• After each session, make a brief review and analysis.
• View one or more per pound poker instructional videos.
• During this session, I will play the best poker I can.

To conclude:

This information is very useful not only at the poker table, but also in other areas of life and other activities 😉