Goals 08

Broadly speaking, setting poker goals for yourself can be good, but they should never be monetary targets. There are three important reasons why:
1. You have limited power to achieve monetary goals.
2. Conclusions are difficult to draw when you miss a monetary target.
3. Monetary targets detract from your true goal (making correct decisions).
--The Poker Mindset, by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger

I'm pumped about the new year in poker. I feel great about my game, and there will be many opportunities to make money.

I fell short of my broad goals that I set for 2007: I wanted to play 10/20 NL regularly, get my bankroll to $100,000 and keep moving up. None of those things happened.

On the plus side, I made a little more money than last year, I improved my game in countless ways and I'm once again testing the waters at 10/20 this month.

I have a few goals for skills I want to work on in 2008.

1) Improve my bluffing frequency. I know I am unintentionally passing up opportunities to make +EV bluffs. I need to find ways to recognize these spots and have the balls to execute. So far, when I've been looking for places to bluff, I've been getting my money in badly with one pair or Ace-high.

2) Blog regularly. There's a correlation between writing about poker and playing well. Thinking about the game and expressing concepts betters my game.

3) Work on my heads-up game. I'm convinced HU play encourages creative thinking and forces you to widen your arsenal of moves that can later be applied at 6-max or full ring tables.

4) Stop bloody spewing so much. When I'm methodical, I win. When I'm reckless and needlessly aggressive, I lose.

5) Find ways to play my best game. It's easy to say that you should always play your best game, but accomplishing that aim is a bit more difficult. There are times when I feel like I'm on top of my game and then I make a stupid, inexplicable error. I want to be able to recognize when I'm not playing well before I make mistakes. I need to think about ways to do this.

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Separately...

Ed Miller may have completely lost it. I look forward to his next posts about the merits of getting in with the worst of it, the hidden value of going broke and the importance of playing on tilt.