Another New (Poker) Year

Who doesn’t love a new year? It’s like a blank slate on your life — or, if you’re a poker player, a new page on your spreadsheet. For some lucky players, it’s the chance to reflect on a successful year of results and look optimistically toward even more success in the future. For the rest of the poker-playing world, it’s a chance to put a losing year in the rearview mirror, start from scratch, and turn things around.

At the end of every calendar year, I always remember three things that went well for me in poker in the past 12 months. Poker can be a long, psychologically taxing struggle, and it’s important to remember that sometimes it goes well, and there’s a reason that you are investing time and money to play the game. Here are my three highlights from 2009:

1. I vastly improved my pot-limit Omaha (PLO) game, which led to a televised final-table appearance at the U.S. Poker Championship. I used to think I knew how to play pot-limit Omaha, based on a few dozen hours of brick-and-mortar casino experience. I was completely wrong. Now, I know what I don’t know, and that’s a monumental first step. Indeed, I’m at a fun place on the PLO learning curve, where I have a decent understanding of fundamental hand values and a basic aggressive strategy, but I haven’t developed a style of my own just yet. I’m in the experimental phase, and really enjoying it. I look forward to continuing to develop my PLO game in 2010.

2. I improved my understanding of newfangled poker software. For many years, I’d been embarrassingly old school about heads-up displays, hand databases, and the like for online play. Now, I’m pretty comfortable with reading a few numbers off my screen while I’m playing, and knowing what they mean, without having everything seem too cluttered. I’ve found that these features improve my decision-making, and therefore make me a stronger online player.

3. I made strong life choices around poker. I decided very early in 2009 (in January) that playing poker would not be my number-one priority of the year. I had several other major personal and creative projects going on, and as a result, I cut back my poker hours to balance my life the way that I wanted. The most obvious example is that I played a very abbreviated World Series of Poker schedule, because I got married in early June. There are many other examples, as well. By not forcing myself to play poker when it would cut into my other projects, I maintained a better poker/life balance than I have in the past.

I’ll now turn to the resolutions that I made in this column at the end of 2008, which is something that I do annually and readers have informed me is helpful to them in their own planning and goal-setting for the poker year. I think I did a pretty good job with my resolutions for the year, but that’s because I made the conscious decision to scrap some of them early on. Let’s get those out of the way first.

2009 resolution: Set aside and schedule time for poker study, and do this studying at least once a month.

2009 resolution: Schedule time each week to update records.

2009 resolution: Play at least two tournaments in fun locations.

Grade: NA. These are three examples of resolutions that I basically decided to break once the year started, for various reasons. I’m not going to fault myself for changing my mind.

Let’s look at the other resolutions.

2009 resolution: After returning home from a poker trip, make notes from hands in which I had an instinct on what to do or how to play, with hope of eventually compiling these notes into something useful.

Grade: C-. I actually did this a couple of times, but I didn’t keep it up. To be fair, I didn’t take too many poker trips, and I don’t think I will be taking enough poker trips in the future to create a sample size that would make this task worthwhile. Therefore, there is no corresponding resolution for 2010.

2009 resolution: Use data to inform more of my online poker decisions.

Grade: A-. As I mentioned above, I got a lot better at this in 2009, to the point where I consider it one of my poker accomplishments. In fact, there’s no need for a corresponding 2010 resolution here, either!

2009 resolution: Make weekly schedules so that I am focusing and working on the things I want to be focused and working on.

Grade: B. While I didn’t always make a weekly schedule, I did a pretty good job of allocating time to the projects I most wanted to focus on. I feel that I improved my overall productivity a great deal from 2008. I want to be quite a bit more productive still, and I want to schedule better. But, scheduling was something that I kept in mind the entire year. This wasn’t one of those resolutions that falls by the wayside; it was my most important resolution at the beginning of the year, and it stayed front and center all the way through December. That in itself is an OK accomplishment, but I want to improve a lot more on this in 2010.

2010 resolution: Make weekly schedules so that I am focusing and working on the things I want to be focused and working on.

In fact, prioritizing my life and putting in the hours on the projects I want to be working on is really the only resolution I need. But because this is, after all, a poker column, I’ll include a couple of poker-specific resolutions, as well.

2010 resolution: Play at least 30,000 more hands of pot-limit Omaha, and then consider learning a new game or continuing to play PLO at higher limits.

2010 resolution: Play one or more PLO events at the WSOP.

2010 resolution: Do more poker studying, especially on those days that I don’t feel like playing.

There we go, a few resolutions for the new year. I hope that you have fun playing poker in 2010. Who knows, maybe this will be the year that we get some favorable legislation passed. That would make poker a lot more fun for a lot of people, and might even help alleviate some of our economic issues. Let’s hope that Congress figures this out!

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player. He is also a featured coach for stoxpoker.com.