I recently posted about Setting Effective New Year’s Resolutions for Poker Success. Today, I’m going to start sharing my poker-related resolutions.
Goal 1: Make Some Money
Dolla dolla bills, y’all.
Average At Least 20 Hours of Poker Each Week
This is a step up from last year, but I can do it. I’m going to cut myself some slack on a few other fronts (not that I hit those goals last year) to hopefully free up some more time for actually playing this silly game.
I’m also going to be more flexible about the types of games I can play. One thing I want to do is learn some new games, so as long as I’m playing, I’m not going to worry about which game or how big. There’s really no danger of me not playing enough NLHE to earn a solid living.
Average At Least 5 Hours of Coaching Each Week
I didn’t do it last year, but I want to try again. I make more money playing than I do coaching, but it’s something I enjoy. I’ve made some friends through coaching (hi guys), and it’s nice to occasionally be in a cooperative relationship with another poker player rather than always being out to take everyone’s money. I guess I could go the Stoxtrader route and do both, but that’s not my style.
I’ve started scheduling coaching sessions in two-hour blocks, which I’ve found to be a better use of both my and my students’ time. Five hours a week means two sessions each week plus the prep and follow-up that goes along with them. Actually that would be closer to six hours, so I’m giving myself a little wiggle room here. Two sessions per week shouldn’t be that hard, though.
Towards this end, I’ve begun offering discounts for students who purchase multi-session poker coaching packages. This was something I was opposed to doing for a while, but it’s something that a lot of people ask for, and it should keep my coaching load more predictable. If you’ve been thinking about coaching, check out the new poker coaching offerings and drop me a line.
Produce At Least 4 Videos Per Month for Poker Savvy Plus
Poker Savvy Plus is a great place to work. They give me a lot of freedom to make videos that I believe will be interesting and helpful, and they are very supportive. The community there is great, and I want to start participating more actively in the forums so that I can get to know people and what they are looking for in their videos. To keep things fresh, I also want to start innovating some new types of videos and soliciting suggestions for videos more actively.
Read more in Part 2: Publish!
After doing this poker pro thing on and off full and part time for about forty years with varying degrees of success and failure, I still haven’t found what I consider a happy resolution to the dilemma of how to reconcile game selection with the need to put in enough hours to pay the bills.
The problem I’ve found with trying to put in a set number of hours is that it’s easy (for me, anyway) to wind up playing in bad games when you’re short on hours and/or money and/or shouldn’t be playing, and even easier to pass up on good games when you’re over your daily or weekly time quota.
I’m not opposed to the idea of shooting for a certain number of hours per day or week, and online poker makes this a lot easier to do, but even online, you can find yourself trying to grind out hours in tables full of clueful regulars, especially at the higher stakes. Good game selection can be difficult if you’re not also fairly flexible with your time.
For live game players, it’s even more problematic. During my Las Vegas years, I was a mid-stakes limit Hold’em specialist, but even in LV, the 20/40 and 30/60 games were mostly regulars and often not worth playing, especially during the week. The 40/80 at the Mirage was built around a couple of locals, and if one or both didn’t show up, the game usually wouldn’t go (and wasn’t worth playing if it did). One of the producers was an obstetrician, so you just never knew when he was going to be there. But when you got the phone call that Doc wanted to play, you had to tear yourself away from whatever you were doing and get your ass down there, because he was worth $1K per hour to the table, and you don’t find players like that very often.
A friend of mine once said that he thought playing poker was a good way to build wealth but a lousy way to make a living. I think maybe he was right.
I can definitely see how that would be an issue in live poker, and I would never consider live grinding for a living unless I were really hard-up and out of options. Online, I can pretty much always find things to play. I start at the top of the cash game lobby and just keep moving down from the biggest stakes games adding games and waiting lists when they look good. It’s rare that I get all the way through the 2/4 games without seeing enough to fill my screen. If that happens, there’s always Rush Poker or PLO. Certainly there are diminishing returns: my hourly rate during Hour 20 is not as good my hourly rate during the prime hours, but it’s very rare that I can’t find anything worth playing.
My poker resolution is to learn how to control my tilt problem. It is so bad now it is killing my winrate and self belief alot. I never used to be this bad and im not sure why it has gotten worse. I go back to work tomorrow for 3weeks so the only poker I will play is maybe the odd SnG to keep me sane because there are no suckouts in SnGs :). I used to take slow deep breaths when I was starting to feel tilted and before I played which calmed me down so I need to keep doing that and quiting where necessary until hopefully I get it to a point where I can control it.
GL for 2011 Andrew
I bet that’s a common one. It’s good to have some specific strategies for how you will go about doing that. Have you read Elements of Poker?