Poker Goals for 2007

Poker Goals for 2007

Two posts in two days! At this rate I’ll have more posts than last year by the end of the month.

I’m not a big fan of New Years Resolutions. It seems to me that more often than not people make them because they think they have to and they don’t really have any expectation of actually keeping the resolution. Besides, if it was something that you really wanted to do, why wait until the new year to start? Just do it. That being said, the beginning of the year does provide a convenient point in time to measure one’s goals, and in that in that vein I present to you my poker related goals for the current year.

1. Move Up In Stakes – I tried this last year in ring games with mixed results. I moved up, although not quite as far as I had wanted, and my move was not followed with the success I was hoping for. As of now I’m not planning on playing a whole lot of ring games this year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t move up.

I currently play almost exclusively $20 Sit-N-Goes. It might be $22 for a turbo, or $24 for token events, or big tournaments, but $20ish is more or less as high as I go. I feel like I’ve been pretty successful at these stakes, and its time to move on. By the end of the year I’d like to be playing (successfully) in at least $50 SNG’s and a few of the higher buy in multi-table tournaments on a regular basis. I don’t necessarily expect my ITM rate to stay as high as it has been, but barring any disastrous results and as long as I am winning more than losing, I should come out further ahead in terms of net profits.

2. Earn at least $10,000 – This may be a little on the ambitious side, but I think it’s attainable. Last year I finished up almost $1400. As I already mentioned I plan to eliminate my ring game play which accounted for a $600 swing the wrong way. One of my goals this year is to play more, but that’s somewhat vague and difficult to measure so this is kind of a sneaky way to reach that goal as well. To increase my winnings I’m going to have to play more, or else win every tourney I enter. Couple that with my previous goal of increased stakes, and I think I can do it. I’ll probably still need a few final tables in large tourneys to account for large chunks of this total, but even without that, if I can at least play regularly at higher stakes I think I’ll be ok.

3. Blog More – In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been slacking in the blogging department lately. Part of the problem is that I haven’t been playing much, so I haven’t had anything to write about. On the other hand, I think writing about my play forces me to think about it more which in turn makes me a better player. So, by blogging more, I think I will play better, which will make me want to blog more, which will repeat this cycle until eventually I am the WSOP main event winner. Or something like that. Blogging more isn’t very specific and lately not that tough of a goal, since I think I’ve already matched last month’s post totals. To make this goal quantifiable I need a number, and I think having 100 posts this year is about right. That’s an average of two per week with a few weeks off. That is certainly attainable, but will require some dedication to achieve which is kind of the point. I’ve been slacking lately for no good reason and I need to either pick it up or give it up and I’d prefer the former.

So there are my three goals for the year. Check back this time next year and see how I did.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com