A Return to Goals and Subgoals in Online Poker
Poker is a game that definitely takes strategy. You hear that a lot, but when you’re a new player you really nee dot hear it multiple times in order to make sure that it sinks in. A lot of people think that they can just play poker in any sort of way, getting emotional about the game, or trying to automatically bully stronger players. You have to remember that the deeper you get into poker, the more serious you get about the game. The top poker players spend hours at a time playing hand after hand so that they will always be able to keep their game sharp.
How do you get from where you are to that level? Goals, actually. Well, more specifically you will need to make sure that you don’t get wrapped up in the game that you fail to set small goals that you can achieve.
For example, you might end up wanting to go ahead and get your poker education started. You can commit to making your goal starting out to be the study of the game of poker. You don’t even have to go with practicing actual hands just yet. Take time to really read up on what it takes to play good poker. Understand the jargon of poker, from positions all the way up to hand hierarchy and tournament play. The more information you can absorb at this point about poker, the better.
Now, you will get to a point where you might have to divide your goals into smaller goals. We can call those subgoals. Subgoals are still important — in fact, some poker players pride themselves on taking care of subgoals before they move onto the next big goal. Subgoals keep you from getting discouraged and quitting the game of poker. Yes, poker is tough, but you can conquer poker with good time. In fact, a lot of the top players that you see on televised events still say that they learn new things about poker — and some of them have been playing for 20 years or longer!
Do you have to complete all of your goals at the same time? No, you don’t. In fact, it’s better for your poker game if you just focus on one thing at a time. If you try to smash all of your goals together you will only get a big mess, and no progress. You need to give yourself time to absorb the things that you’re learning about.
When you’re ready to actually get into the practice of poker, you should make sure that you play a lot of free games first. Bringing money into your poker play definitely changes things, and it’s important to play free games against real players to get a feel for real play. Once you bring money into it, you might find that you play a little tighter, which isn’t a bad thing. However, you should always take every game seriously — that way you aren’t making big mistakes when money starts getting involved. Don’t let greed convince you into making bad decisions — that has led to many a poker player in the past losing their bankroll. In fact, this problem gets so bad that people still have problems holding onto their money — the allure of getting more money is just too great.
Overall, a little return to setting goals and subgoals in poker is very important. Your list of goals might be different from your friends, but when in doubt there are always community boards to help you out — why not get started planning your poker future today?