Looking Ahead to 2015

My last column was a look back at 2014. Now I’m going to look forward to the upcoming year. My wife and I do a yearly meeting where we talk about our budget, goals, and calendar for the previous year and look forward to plan out the same things for the coming year. It’s really helpful to see where we could use some improvement and where we did well with our spending and how we kept up with our goals from the previous year as well as giving us some guidelines with where to go for the next year’s goals. Before we met, I had never had a budget or goals or any sort of plan at all. I was mostly flitting from place to place, tournament to tournament without really thinking about what I wanted out of my present and future. This has been a great boost to my efficiency as a poker player and as a person overall in addition to being a good benchmark for what I have accomplished each year.

So, I’m setting a few goals for myself both personally and professionally. Since this is a poker magazine, I’m only going to share some of my poker goals in this article. As with all goals, it’s important to make them quantifiable and realistic.

Goal 1: Average 120 Hours Per Month at the Casino.

Another year has come and gone in California with no online poker regulation, so I’m still playing live poker exclusively. This means I spend a lot of time at casinos. Last year, I set a goal to average 30 hours a week playing poker. I realized this year that I need to track that a little differently. I can control how long I’m at the casino, but I can’t control how long I’m actually sitting in a game. I may get there and walk right in to an open seat in a game I want to play or I may walk in and wait for two hours before a seat opens up. Since that’s not up to me, the way I’ll be tracking my hours for this goal this year is hours at the casino. I should probably also track how many hours I spend driving back and forth to the casino, but I live in the LA area and it would depress me entirely too much to see how much time I spend in the car. I can’t wait for legal and regulated online poker in California. I really hope the tribes can get it together this year so we can play next year. With no new baby on the horizon for 2015 I won’t have any long stretches of time with no time at the casino so this goal should be a pretty easy one to reach.

Goal 2: Journal After Each Session.

I recently read The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler and I’ve already recommended it in a previous column but, just in case you haven’t gotten to it yet, it’s a must read. In it, he talks about having a pre and post-game routine that includes journaling about the things you did well and poorly during your session. This is a wonderful idea that I haven’t started implementing in my game yet, but I plan on it this year. This should really help with processing each session, seeing where my game is both on the technical side and on the mental side, and with helping me leave the sessions behind at the casino. I can do them in 15 minutes or so, leaving me with little excuse besides laziness for not doing it. I plan to make this a priority in 2015.

Goal 3: Keep at Least Two Students Active Throughout the Year.

Here’s something I didn’t expect as a benefit to taking on students for private coaching this year: It has greatly improved my game. Obviously, I’m excited to be helping other people improve their game but it has reminded me of some things I lost focus of over time and has really encouraged me to pay attention to some fundamentals that were getting away from me. I’m a strong believer in being able to learn from other people no matter what their skill level, and my students have done a good job of teaching me at the same time I’m teaching them. I’m looking to increase my presence in this area and I’ve found some avenues to explore for finding new students.

2015 should be a year without a pregnant wife, a new baby, or any new broken bones, presuming everything goes to plan and that should facilitate my work towards achieving these goals that I’ve set out for myself. I’ll revisit them again at the end of this year, and perhaps sometime around the mid-point of the year to check in on how it’s going. Good luck with your goals this year! ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG