Poker Goals (Monetary & Otherwise)

Listening to my recent podcast hosts, I was reminded that setting poker goals is a good way to start the year off.  Although we are in the early part of February I have only played one session of poker, so setting a goal at this point isn’t cheating too much, but it does make things a bit easier since I am $350 up without ever having made my first objective.

 

To begin with, this is not the first year I have ever set a goal for poker playing.  While not being able to remember exactly what past years I’ve attempted doing so before, poker goals are not entirely foreign to me.  I do recall that I did not meet the goals that were set forth, so actually accomplishing these ambitious endeavors could be a first in 2015.

 

The first goal I will be attempting is the amount of time I play cards.  Having 2.5 kids at home and living 90 minutes from the nearest brick-and-mortar casino limits my potential playing time (and I don’t count the time or funds won and lost in my home game because it is usually just five guys and that is too small of a game to validate in my poker accounting).  That being said, if I can play 150 hours this year I will consider that pretty good.  In the poker ledger I have at home it breaks down how many hours I have played since 2009, but off the top of my head I cannot recall whether 150 hours is too high, too low, or just right.  If I can play two times a month (I only played once in January), that averages out to 12.5 hours per session.

 

The second goal is a monetary one.  I would like to average $15 an hour playing poker this year.  Again, my hourly rate is available to me at home, but I am making this number up off the top of my head.  If I had to guess, I would say with the limited amount of time I actually get to play, making $15 an hour isn’t completely ridiculous.  After winning $350 last month, I am somewhere around $45 an hour, but a single loss of $200 would bring that amount way down.

 

If I were to accomplish both of my first two goals, I would win a minimum of $2,250 from poker for the year.  I have never won that much money, so I doubt this happens, but it will be interesting to see how things shake out this year.

As for in-game play, I want to open up my range of hands that I will three-bet (or re-raise with) pre-flop.  My range of hands I three-bet right now is very slim, so I want to open that up a bit more and be more aggressive with three-betting.  A recent tip I learned about three-betting is that the hands worth three-betting pre-flop are at the top of your folding range to a raise.

 

The final goal I am setting for myself is to read two poker strategy books.  It has been years since I read a strategy book on Texas Hold’em, so I will count re-reading the books I already own because there will certainly be lessons to take away that I have forgotten over the years.  I would like to also add something about reading a poker blog regularly, but it will be too difficult to keep track of how many I read throughout the year.  We are going to start slow and simply keep it at two books.

 

Well, that is about it for my goals this year.  Should I come up with some later, maybe I will update this post or do a new post adding any potential ambitions.  Wish me luck this year as I attempt to continue being a winning poker player.