Goals for the WSOP

Everyone loves goals. People write them on calendars, talk about them constantly, and post messages on their phone’s lock screen to remind them of all the goals they’ve set. These goals can be about anything: get a promotion by next year, write twenty pages this week, visit Peru before I die. We set goals for virtually every measurable aspect of our lives (and even some of the immeasurable ones), and overall this is a fine thing. But if you’re not careful, goals can backfire—especially when those goals involve poker tournaments.

It’s great for a poker player to have a motivating force to help them take their game to the next level. Failing to meet a goal, however, can have negative psychological repercussions, and might even make things worse than they were before. For example, at the beginning of the year I set a goal to read sixty books. So far I’ve read seven. I have very little chance of achieving my goal, and so, I might ask myself, why should I bother reading for the rest of the year? It can be very tempting to fall into this reasoning, which means setting the goal in the first place was counterproductive. If I’m going give up altogether when my goal becomes unattainable, then I would’ve been better off not having a goal at all.

To avoid this pitfall, it’s important to make your goals achievable. Highly achievable. Extremely achievable. No goal is too small, because once you meet it you’re free to set the next goal higher. Maybe my goal should be to read one book by the end of the year. That’s easy! And then once I do it, I can make another goal to read another book, and suddenly I’m being productive again. Set goals you can reach, and eventually they pile up into an accomplishment you can be proud of.

This concept applies to poker tournaments just as much as reading or writing, if not more so. If you go into the World Series of Poker with a goal of winning multiple bracelets, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. Even if you start with the goal of winning one bracelet, you may find yourself feeling defeated when buying into events in the last couple weeks. We don’t have enough control over our results in poker tournaments to set a goal of winning $X amount over six weeks—not even during the WSOP, when there are two events to play almost every day. A sensible, achievable goal has to be more realistic. So what does such a goal look like?

For starters, poker players should avoid any short-term goals having to do with results. The luck factor in our game is such that you can play perfectly in every event, and still go the entire World Series without cashing. You don’t want to beat yourself up for failing to meet your goals when you were merely the victim of atrocious luck. Instead of results, make goals related to process. Don’t focus on whether you cashed in an event, focus on how you played.

It might sound hard, at first, to define a process-oriented goal, especially because some players routinely fail to understand the difference between process and results. “I just want to make it to the first break,” I hear people say. Or, “I just want to make Day Two,” or even, “I just don’t want to go broke with a draw.” All of these goals might seem like they’re focused on process, but they’re really results-based goals in disguise. You can play great and bust on the first day, or even the first hand, and the correct play of a draw might require going all-in with it. A poker player’s goals can’t depend on what happens. They can only depend on how you arrive at your decision.

Here are some goals I might set for myself this WSOP. 1) To spend five minutes today reviewing my decisions from previous tournaments. 2) To eat one piece of fruit before today’s tournament starts. 3) To write down (or otherwise record) the action from one hand I play or witness in today’s event.

These goals are easy to achieve, so I can feel confident in my ability to meet them, and they cover an extremely short time period (one day only), so that if somehow I don’t meet the goals, I can start over fresh and avoid getting down on myself. The great thing about highly achievable goals is that they can trick you into being more productive. If I set a goal of reviewing hands for five minutes, chances are that once I get started I’ll end up reviewing hands for an hour or more. If I know I’m going to eat a banana, I’ll probably go ahead and actually eat breakfast. And while I’m jotting down one interesting hand on my phone, I’ll usually jot down one or two more while I’m at.

Your goals don’t have to be the same as mine, so long as they’re designed to help you improve your process—to help you make better decisions at the poker table than you did the day before. Make goals that are easy to reach, and that have no potential to cause misery for any length of time. Follow through on this plan, and I can’t promise you’ll be wearing a bracelet by the end of the World Series, but I can promise you’ll be a better poker player. Continue to become a better poker player throughout the rest of 2015 and beyond, and eventually you’ll get all the results you need. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, and a three-time WSOP bracelet winner. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.