Goals: Easier to set than complete (Introduction)

This unfortunate reality has cost me a sick amount of money since I started playing poker five years ago. This time though, things are going to be different. At least that's what I'm trying to convince myself, and seeing as how it's gotten to the point where my living expenses are growing and I can no longer rely on just grinding enough to get by, it's become time for me to take the game serious. Like, super seriously. It's time to grind.

The plan for this blog is pretty simple - to motivate me. And perhaps to motivate others. Truth be told, I could care less if anybody is reading this. I'm doing this for me, although I certainly welcome readers. The bottom line is this: every month I'm going to set some kind of goal and I'm going to try real hard to reach it. They'll mostly be hand goals, something like 30k hands a month. I could do monetary goals but I'm not particularly a fan of them. In any event I'm going to try and update this thing daily, and if I don't that means I was probably lazy and didn't put in a session. I hate when I do that, so I'll try to limit those occurances.

I already have a slightly late start to August poker wise, so this month I'm shooting for 25k hands. I'm not a grinder at all so that's actually a lot of volume for me. It averages out to about 1k hands per day which should be easily doable 4 - tabling. I've mostly been a 6 tabler during my poker career, but I've been liking the extra clarity I get with just four tables. I'll probably get back to more tables eventually, but for now I'll stick to four. Currently I'm playing $100nl which is a lot smaller than I've played in the past. I'd say the majority of my hands overall have been played at $200nl where I was a decent winner, and a decent portion at $400nl where I was a small winner. That was a while ago though and I feel like I'm a thousand times better now, and from what I've played so far at $100nl on FTP the games seem extremely soft. It's never been difficult to find a couple tables with at least one obvious fish, and I was also pretty surprised at how easy it was to run over the regulars. They just never seem to put up much resistance, and best of all the majority of the looser, more aggressive tags at these stakes play very transparently with most of their range making it easier to barrell them off of hands in various spots as well as make light calldowns or rebluffs, and of course thin value bets.

So the goal for August is 25k hands at $100nl on FTP. Again, I'm not one to set monetary goals as they can set bad habits or get you overly focused on results. I'll be relatively happy with anything over $1k plus rakeback, though. I'll be posting a bunch of hands every day and some poker theory along the way so stay tuned and wish me skill.