2016 Goals Check In

Every year, I like to make some goals both in my personal life and as a poker player. I try to keep track of them throughout the year so I know how well I’m doing and see if I need to change focus to achieve them. Sometimes I realize during the year that they were poorly worded or conceived. A good goal should be one that is easily definable with clearly set out steps to achieve. Because we are about halfway through the year, it seems like a good time to check in on this year’s goals.

Goal 1: Get out of makeup (or at least put myself in a position to do so)

In my original goals article, I mentioned a few key things about this goal that have made it difficult to reach. First of all, this goal doesn’t fit the “good goal” criteria. It’s not easily definable and it doesn’t have clear steps. The steps for this goal are as follows:

1. Play tournaments
2. Win one or cash big in a few
3. Clear makeup

That middle step is the difficult one and is terribly unpredictable. If I had done Step 2 a couple times in the last few years I wouldn’t be in makeup in the first place! When I wrote the article in January, I professed the exact reasons I would have trouble with this goal. The main problem with this goal is that most of my tournament action comes in the form of roughly $1,500 buy-in tournaments. When that’s your main game, it’s hard to clear low six-figure makeup. I calculated that if I have a 40 percent ROI and things break out that way, I would need to play around $300,000 in buy-ins in order to clear my makeup. I’m nowhere near on pace for that number. I played the $10,000 buy-in at the LAPC and will play the World Series of Poker Main Event, but every other tournament I’ve played has had a buy-in of less than $2,000. I will need to find some bigger buy-in tournaments that are profitable in order to make significant steps towards accomplishing this goal.

In order to do that I would probably need to travel to Vegas once or twice more during the year and therein lies my second problem: It’s very hard for me to travel with two kids under four and a third on the way. Yes, my wife is pregnant with our third child and it’s hard to take a major child care provider that she trusts implicitly (me) away from a wife who works nearly full time with two kids when she’s not pregnant, even harder when she is. Perhaps we can organize a family trip to Florida or Vegas, but it’s definitely difficult to coordinate and we don’t like to be too far away from her doctor during her pregnancies.

There are certainly some advantages to being young and single with no attachments and I do sometimes miss the ability to just call up my wife’s company to tell them we’re going to (insert random country with a poker festival) for (insert length of time) and heading there.

I’ll find some tournaments on the schedule in LA that make it easier for me to beat this makeup, but this is looking like a difficult goal to accomplish.

Goal 2: Average 100 hours of cash games per month

At the time of writing, I’m just on schedule to make this goal a reality and I’m proud of myself for this as well as thankful to my wife for helping me be on a path to fulfill it. She has been very helpful in finding ways to get me an extra day off work here and there and it’s a sacrifice for her as well. One of the biggest helps for me in this regard has been my oldest son’s school. Because I take care of my two kids by myself on the three days a week my wife works, having some help in the form of preschool two days a week has been huge. On the days that I come home from work at 3 am and have to wake up with them at 7 am, I get pretty sleepy, and having the patience for taking care of two kids is definitely difficult. Being able to have one kid in school where he’s being taken care of well and learning in a useful environment makes me feel okay about playing a couple extra hours on nights when the games are good.

Goal 3: 10 hours of study per month

I have a hard time with this one and I think I know why. I don’t put any study time into my weekly schedule. My wife and I do a schedule to look at the upcoming week on Sundays and, for some reason, I haven’t taken to setting aside some time to study. It’s something that’s easy to improve and I feel as though I should be able to do so quite easily to get from the roughly six hours that I’m doing now up to ten. ♠

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