Setting Yourself Goals

In all walks of life it is important to set yourself goals and poker is no different. Setting goals can help to keep you focussed on the long term rather than allowing you to get caught up in the short term results, can help you to map your progress and can encourage you to keep playing even when the cards are not falling your way.

Those over at betfairpoker.com note that the act of setting goals is important but setting the right goals for you is vital otherwise they can have the co,mplete opposite desired effect that you wanted them to have. Setting the wrong type of goals, or making them too ambitious can see you become disillusioned, which in turn can cause you to play in a less than optimal way, losing you money and confidence.

A common goal and one that almost every poker player worth his salt has set at some point in their career is a monetary one, that is a goal of making a certain amount of money. It should be quite obvious why this is a popular goal choice but I advise you not to make any goals that revolves around money. This is simply because you do not have full control over how much money you earn as you can play perfect poker yet still lose money, and setting money related goals can often see you play too aggressively when you are chasing a total and too passively if you have reached your goal and are trying to protect it.

The same goes for goals relating to volume, or hands and tournaments played. Whilst I fully agree that it is critical to play as many hands and tournaments as you can if you want to be a successful poker player, setting goals heavily linked to volume can go horribly wrong, for reasons similar to monetary goals. Firstly, you may find yourself behind pace for your goal and start to add extra tables in order to catch up or you may find yourself folding more so that your hands per hour rate increases, both are bad for your game.

The best goals to set, whether using the Betfair Bonus or not, are those that you have full control of, such as promising yourself that you will study a set amount of hours per week in relation to how many hours of table time you put in, or trying to learn how to keep your emotions under control. Do not let your goals completely consume you and you will not go far wrong.

Tags: focus, game, goal, long term, poker, poker tipShare