The overall theme of this series, if it isn’t obvious yet, is that mastering poker and reaching our goals takes time - a lot of time. It’s this investment of time that makes it so vital to define our goals and our plan on how to reach them. Spending time working in one direction only to find we didn’t really want to be where we ended up is unfortunate. Spending time working to reach a goal only to come to a late realization that it’s unattainable is also unfortunate. Proper planning should minimize the risk of these things happening.
But this lesson is about taking into account that building a bankroll is, or can be, a slow and tedious process as well.

Some people take a shot and win a (relative to their bankroll) huge amount of money in a tournament which allows them to move up very quickly. Many more people take shots and lose their stake; hopefully they realized that this was the more likely outcome. Some other people refuse to take shots and simply grind their way up, moving up in the ranks no sooner than their bankroll is good for it. I’m one of those people, although I wouldn’t presume to say that it’s the only - or even necessarily the best - way to work one’s way up. Different things work for different people.

What’s clear to me, however, is that unless you’re an exceptional player who just happens to be a bit short on money right now, the average time it will take you to reach higher limits will be about the same regardless of if you take shots or grind yourself up. If you know that you’re a lot more skilled than the opposition, playing higher games than you’re technically bankrolled for is alright, and so you may be able to save yourself some time by taking shots.

But if you move along the usual path of progression, learning as you go and therefore ensuring that you’re ahead of the curve already before moving up (and thus keeping a solid win-rate), I have some interesting numbers to show you:

Let’s say that you’re a limit hold ‘em player, and your goal is to reach the $10/$20 tables. You figure that your average win-rate, if you’re disciplined and work hard on studying (as discussed in the last chapter), will be somewhere around one to two big bets per 100 hands played. Your original investment was to take out $300 from your savings account and deposit it into a poker site, and you use a fairly standard rule of keeping a 300 big bet bankroll, meaning that you will not move up until you’ve built up 300 big bets of the next rank among limits. Your starting capital will let you play at $.50/$1 tables. How many hands will it take you to reach $10/$20, if you can truly sustain a win-rate of 1 big bet/100 hands all the way up?

Easy. You need to win 300 big bets at $.50/$1, which is simply 300 x 100 hands (you win one bet per 100 hands) = 30,000 hands. A single table deals about 80 hands per hour; meaning that you’re looking at 375 hours of time at the table. If you study one hour for every two played (as I’ve mentioned in previous articles), you’re suddenly looking at 535 hours spent on poker. In terms of a regular day job, that’s a little more than 13 weeks. Thirteen weeks! Just to get from $.50/$1 to $1/$2! And then you have another 13 weeks to get from $1/$2 to $2/$4, etc.

Of course, if you multi-table (and sustain your win-rate) you can cut down this time by quite a bit. And if your win-rate is higher than 1BB/100, that will of course also influence how fast you get to where you’re going. But even at playing four tables at once at a win-rate of 2BB/100, we’re still talking about 47 hours at the table, or about 1.5 weeks of work. Aha, now it sounded easy, didn’t it? 1.5 weeks is not that much. But I know of very few people who are capable of four-tabling for a long term profit of 2BB/100 successfully. So, realistically, you’re looking at quite a bit more than that.

So why am I bringing this up? Because I want you to understand that this is not a game of instant gratification, and that if you think you’ll be playing $10/$20 within a few months, you’re kidding yourself.

Another thing to consider is that you may wish to cash out some profit once in awhile. There are several reasons for why you’d want to do this, but to name a few:

It’s a reward for good work; a pat on the back if you will. I discussed this in Lesson #2. You can use the money to pay for books, hand analyzing software, etc.

If your significant other has a problem with you playing poker, cashing out your earnings and taking her or him out to dinner for the winnings is a good way to avoid arguments. Trust me on this one.

If you lose everything, you’ll still have the money you’ve cashed out.

The problem - if you can call it that - with cashing out, is that it’s yet another factor that hampers your bankroll progress. But if you’ve already come to terms with the fact that you’re in it for the long haul, then the extra delay that occurs because you’re getting something “real” out of your effort is perhaps not such a bad thing. Furthermore, slowing down your bankroll progress is not necessarily counter-productive.

If you go on a hot streak, seemingly being invincible, you can make a huge profit in a fairly short period of time even at the low limit tables. I’ve had sessions of a thousand hands where everything went my way, quickly making 150 BB or so. This can be deceiving, because you’re not actually that good: No one’s that good. This fast bankroll boost, in turn, can make you move up before you’re actually ready for it, before you’ve actually learned all the things you needed to learn prior to sitting down at the next level. Cashing out excess profit will effectively take the edge of that problem.Your bankroll will increase at half its speed (but still drop at normal speed) so upswings won’t push you too far too quickly as easily.

Speaking for myself, I’ve chosen to cash out half of everything I earn. It’s simple to keep track of, it gives me a decent amount of pocket change and it keeps me from playing limits I’m not really ready for yet. I’ve spent a lot of time at each of the limits I’ve played, and this has given me plenty of time to learn what I need to learn before moving up. So far, I’ve been ready to crush the game at the new level even before I’ve gotten there.

Now, when I say “half of what I earn” I don’t mean half of the profits from any given session, I should point out. What I do is to keep track - on a weekly basis - of the size of my bankroll. When my bankroll is at a new maximum (which thankfully happens pretty often), I simply take out half of the difference between the new maximum and the old one - half the profit. If I go into a slump, I don’t cash out anything until I’ve reached a new record, etc. In practise, I cash out $100 whenever my bankroll has increased by $200, for simplicity.

But to summarize this lesson: Building a bankroll the conventional way takes a lot of time. Don’t expect miracles, because miracles by definition don’t happen very often. Instead, take this slow advancement as a good time to learn more about the game and practise hard. At the higher limits, the challenges will be much greater, and you will be able to make good use of the experience you amass here, once you get there.

Learning poker will take a whole lot of playing it, but what separates the experts from the novices is often the time spent on studying the game away from the table. I’m not just talking about reading books (although that is surely a big part of it) because lots of people read books but never excel at poker. No, you need to study the books, not just read them. There’s a huge difference, and anyone who’s ever gone to school (that presumably includes all of you) will know what I mean. Sure, I can read through the entire book I have on calculus, probably pretty fast, too. I can even feel like I get what the author is saying, and have no real trouble following the lines of reasoning about integrals and derivatives. But if all I do is read it, I’m going to flunk the test for sure. I need to practice what I’ve learned to fully absorb it, and so all math courses (this goes for virtually any subject, but math is a convenient example) supply their students with problems to solve, helping them to absorb the knowledge they’ve just read about.

Few poker books do this, with a very notable - and commendable - exception of the Harrington on Hold ‘em series. Many of the other Two Plus Two publishing books have quizzes at the end to help you test your knowledge, but most of them fall hopelessly short of a standard that would allow the book itself to be enough material for absorbing the concepts it contains. Therefore, we need to work harder than just reading the books. In fact, without a stern teacher and an upcoming test that we may flunk, mustering the motivation to force ourselves to study at all may be hard.

But I realize - as do you, surely - that learning more about the game is the way we come to the point where we can beat it. And so the problem is not that we don’t understand that we’d be better off if we study hard, the problem is that hard work is often not fun. We need to be motivated to pull it off, and making a habit out of studying takes time and discipline. That’s the core of this lesson: Realize that learning takes time and plan accordingly.

Furthermore, we must realize that studying doesn’t end at some point; we don’t graduate. The money that we make in this game come from the mistakes of others and our job is to make fewer mistakes than our opponents - or more specifically, less costly ones - which is how we show a profit. Competition at its finest. But our opponents aren’t dumb - well, not all of them at least, and the dumb ones become fewer and more far between as we move up in limits - and they learn more about the game for every day that passes, too. In order to keep our win-rate where we want it to be, or even keep winning at all, we need to stay ahead of the curve. We need to know more about the game than they do and we need to work harder than they do so that we can keep outsmarting them. For this reason, there’s no end in sight, no light in the tunnel, no day when our job of studying is done. Learning is a continuous process in poker.

I can’t stress this enough. It seems very obvious to me that most of my opponents today have read many of the same books I have, even at the low limits. I see them applying concepts that I recognize so well that I could almost pinpoint the page where they read about them. Of course, they misapply a lot of them, and that’s why I’m still profiting. They have read the books, gotten the general idea, but they still fall short of understanding how to apply the concepts. You don’t want to be one of those people, you want to be one of the ones who know how to beat those people. You’ve got to know more than they do.

I spend at least one third of my “poker time” studying. For every two hours I spend at the table, I try to spend one hour reading books, analyzing hands, posting hands on boards, etc. Sometimes I play a session with the specific purpose of practising something new. Specific tips on how to make good use of the time we spend studying is a matter I’m going to talk about in the future. How much time you are willing to spend on learning more about the game is of course a matter of choice, but I put in about 30 hours a week on poker, and spending on average ten of those hours working on improving my game away from the table has worked for me so far.

You would do well to take this - studying - into account when you plan how you will spend your time on poker. How strict you want to be about it is, of course, a matter of preference. Perhaps you want to take a whole week to finish a specific book before you go back to the tables, or perhaps you like to spend only 30 minutes here and there on it; do whatever suits you best. But be prepared to spend a lot of time on it. No, be willing to spend a lot of time on it. You already know that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s up to you - and only you - to actually make it happen.

I believe there’s also a risk of overstudying. The theoretical knowledge of 20 books doesn’t mean much without the experience that tells you how to use it properly, so for the best result, you should balance these two. Although I spend on average one third of my time studying (in “studying” I basically include all the time spent away from the table actively thinking about poker), this is not something that I’ve scheduled rigorously - I don’t set the alarm for Sunday morning so I can go up and review sessions in PokerTracker. I think the best thing that can happen is that you’re excited and curious about the game, so that you freely look up the information, rather than having the “must study”-sign hanging like a weight around your neck. Learning new things is fun for me, and I hope it’s fun for you, too. It makes the whole process so much easier.

So if you find that you’re just not interested at the moment to continue reading the book you’re trying to work your way through at the moment, take a break from it. Play poker instead, let the book rest for awhile. While studying is virtually a must to become better, it doesn’t have to be a “must-right-now.” Forcing yourself to learn something is pretty inefficient, and I think you’ll find you have much better results if you spend your time on it when you actually feel like it.

If you have a busy schedule and only a determined number of hours every week to spend on poker, make sure that you don’t set goals that require such a high number of hands played that you leave no room left for learning more about the game. Remember: You must stay ahead of the curve!

You must know where you want to go, and you’d do well to be pretty specific about it.

Knowing where to go - what your goals are - is important for quite a few reasons, above all the fact that your best chance to achieve your goals is to make a plan that enables them. This article is about how you set goals for yourself, and the principles you should employ when you make a plan to reach those goals.

First, let me reiterate something I mentioned in the first article: This series is not aimed at casual players. If your goals are simply “I want to win $1,000″ or “I want to play 100 SnG’s” then you don’t need to dive into the kind of planning I talk about here. This is directed at people who want to be serious students of the game of poker, who want to go as far as they can with the time that they have to spend on it, whether this is 5 or 50 hours a week.

Step one in this process is defining and understanding what you want out of poker. Psychology of Poker by Dr. Alan Schoonmaker may be a good book for you to read to come to terms with what your own motivations are, but right now I will presume that they are a mixture of wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to make money. Hopefully the thrill of gambling isn’t one of them; whether or not you also want to play to some extent to pass time is also largely irrelevant.

I want to make it clear that making money and challenging yourself may be goals that are contradicting each other, which may not be obvious. Won’t higher limits bring both more challenge and more money? Only to a point. Unless you’re one of the best players in the world, you are bound to sooner or later reach a limit where you’re no longer making money, or just about breaking even. In this case, it’s better if you step down to where you maximize your earning if your goal is to make as much money as possible. However, if your goal is to constantly challenge yourself, you should be willing to spend more time fighting at a higher level before learning how to beat it.

An extreme example of money vs. challenge is a player who will play 10 games of $2/$4 limit hold ‘em simultaneously online. This was, presumably, challenging and difficult in the beginning. But after a few months of successfully doing this for 40 hours a week, it will become less and less challenging, even mechanical.

So ask yourself, what do you want to achieve? Do you want to be able to eventually take shots at $100/$200? Or are you in it for the money? Accepting that the goals can be contradicting each other is important.

Before we move on to how to construct your plan, I want to suggest a couple of other advantages to making one at all:

Planning…

… breeds discipline

By now, I’ve hopefully done a pretty good job of giving you the idea that successfully mastering poker is hard work, and if I have, then pointing out that hard work requires discipline is hopefully easy to accept. If you’re devoted to the task, then the goal you set for yourself may require a lot of effort to reach, and us humans are infamous for our dislike of effort - we’re lazy by nature, this is why we invent all this convenient stuff like armchairs, internet shopping and the wheel. We need to be reminded of why we’re putting in all this effort to keep us motivated, even when things aren’t going our way and the world appears to be conspiring against us.

Staying disciplined is difficult, but with proper planning it becomes a little bit easier. A lot of people find enjoyment in being able to cross things off their to-do list even if the things actually on the list aren’t enjoyable; then that becomes a mini-motivator all by itself.

… and gives a purpose

With a plan and a clearly defined goal, you will be able to see a purpose in what you’re doing even when the amount of work you have ahead of you may feel overwhelming. For the sake of motivation, this is more important than just being able to cross things off a to-do list, even if they’re actually one and the same. Being able to see progress, over the course of time, is the biggest motivator I can think of. A simple example is a bankroll tracking graph: Even with a couple of days’ worth of brutal bad beats, you should still be able to look back on your bankroll progress at a whole and see that the graph is pointing up and take some comfort in that. If you know what your next milestone is, you should also be able to deduce how close you are to reaching it.

A milestone, a term simply borrowed from long distance running, is a point in progress where you can say to yourself “now I’ve come THIS far.” If your goal is to build a bankroll of $10,000, for instance, you could have milestones every $500. It wouldn’t make much sense to make each dollar a milestone, because reaching a milestone should be a time for a small celebration of some kind. Instead of focusing on the goal - which may be months or even years away - carefully spaced milestones present you with something that is attainable within the not-so-distant future. It’s easier to work towards a goal that will be reached soon. This is a psychological fact for most people; “instant gratification,” getting our rewards quickly, is a powerful motivator. If we were computers, setting milestones would be useless. But people need a pat on the shoulder every now and then, even if it’s our own hand that’s patting us.

And this brings us to a hugely important factor in setting goals: They should be measurable! If any of you work in larger corporations or have taken courses on the topic, you should be familiar with the idea. Setting goals that cannot be measured in numbers is unwise. I was originally going to say “useless,” but on second thought I disagreed with myself. All goals serve some purpose, but it’s the measurable ones that we can use to our advantage. Non-measurable goals I’d like to call “ambitions,” which can be useful as well, but not act as milestones. Let me give a few examples:

“I’m going to play 10,000 hands of $25 no-limit cash games this month” - this goal is measurable. Its success can be evaluated with a simple “yes” or “no” and reasons for failure to reach it should be more or less obvious. Therefore, corrective action is easy to take (”play more”.

“I’m going to become better at Omaha” - this goal, while noble in its intent, is not going to serve as a very good milestone. You have no deadline, and you have no clear point at which you’ve reached your goal. This is an ambition, not a goal.

These are good examples of a milestone and an ambition. There are, however, measurable goals in poker that are counterproductive, specifically goals which specify a certain amount of profit in a too-small of a sample. For instance:

“I want to win $1000 this week playing $2/$4 limit hold ‘em” - not good.

The basic problem with that is that poker is a gambling game - you’re betting on an uncertain outcome in every hand that you enter - and so you’re at the mercy of the deck. Superior skill will in its own time dictate the outcome, but hardly in a single week. In just one week, it’s unlikely that you’ll play enough hands to actually be able to reach this goal with certainty. You should get in the habit of setting goals that are up to YOU to achieve, not the short term falling of the cards. If you’re a winning player, you should be able to set a goal for winning a certain amount of money over the course of a year or a couple of months, but a week is never enough. I’d be wary of setting a monetary goal with a timeframe as short as one month as well, but that depends largely on how much you actually play.

There’s yet one more principle of planning that I want to touch on: Planning for events you haven’t planned for. This is not a contradiction in terms; a plan can certainly include the possibility of changing itself - a prominent example of this is the US constitution. It goes without saying that your plan will not have to be anywhere near as complete or as detailed as a country’s constitution, but you should have some idea of how you will act if you decide that the current plan is not working. Just starting over again is one option - make a new plan entirely - but there can be other variants.

For instance, if you plan on playing 100,000 hands this year, and you’ve set out milestones of every 10,000 hands where you will review your progress, make cashouts, etc. but you find yourself in a situation where you simply won’t have the time to play this much, how will you adjust? Just keeping the goal as it is and accepting that you won’t reach it can be very detrimental; this goes back to the factor of discipline. I will discuss this in more detail in Lesson #5.

By now, it should be clear why this is something that a casual player is unlikely to want to go through. This is a lot of work for a hobby, and setting strict goals and being disciplined about them is not something that a casual player, whose relationship with poker is limited to logging on when there’s some time left to kill now and then, is going to be up for.

Finally, your plan should be realistic. In fact, it should be more than realistic; you should give yourself padding, or more time than you think necessary, for the things you plan to do. Unexpected things always occur - including things like being bored with the game for a period of time - and disregarding those factors completely is foolhardy. If you’re currently really into poker, and you play 6 hours a day, don’t make a goal that requires you to keep up this pace unless you’re absolutely sure that you can. Set an easier goal for yourself, because it’s important that you set a goal that you can reach. Conversely, however, setting a pointless target that you don’t have to work on at all to reach is also counter-productive, of course.

So how serious and detailed does a plan need to be? That’s entirely dependent on the goals. I wish there was a template I could give you to fill out, but the best I can do is to give you an example, with some basic stipulations.

Anna

Anna has been playing poker for about a year, and is a somewhat stable winner at $10 no-limit hold ‘em cash games. She plays about 10 hours a week, and is ambitious about playing more seriously. Her goal is to be a winning player at $400 no-limit, within a year. She’s a well paid professional, who’s not in it for the money.

She owns one poker book, Super System 2 by Doyle Brunson. She’s a member of an internet forum, and has gotten the recommendation to pick up Dan Harrington’s books, Sklansky’s Theory of Poker and Miller/Sklansky’s No Limit Hold ‘em: Theory and Practise.

Her bankroll is currently $350. She breaks down her goal like this:

Goal:

I want to be a winning player at $400 NL within a year. In order to even play $400 NL, I want a bankroll of $10,000 (25 buy-ins), but on top of that I need to be a winning player. The natural progression of limits to reach $400 is $10 -> $25 -> $50 -> $100 -> $200 -> $400. My way of gauging whether or not I’m winning is if I show a profit after 10,000 hands of a certain limit. How much profit I can show is not important.

Milestones, ambitions and rewards:

The smallest amount of hands I will need to play before having reached my goal is 60,000, or 5000 hands per month. To give myself some padding - in the event that my bankroll is not big enough for the jump after 10k hands - I will try to play 10,000 hands per month, but 5,000 is the minimum.
I’m therefore going to play at least 10,000 hands of $10 NL. If my bankroll is big enough to make the jump to $25 by then ($625, always 25 buy-ins) I will move up to $25. Then another 10,000 hands of $25 NL to see if I qualify for $50, and so on until I reach $400 NL.
Every time I move up to a new limit, I will cash out whatever surplus - money that exceeds 25 buy-ins at the new limit - I have and spend it on whatever I feel like.
I will spend at least three hours a week analyzing hands that I’ve played.
I will read Theory of Poker, and then No Limit Hold ‘em: Theory and Practise , followed by the first two Harrington books in the coming two months, giving me two weeks per book. I intend to read every chapter slowly and take notes.
I will track my bankroll weekly using an Excel spreadsheet. In it, I will also include a small diary where I list things I’ve learned every week.
In case this won’t work:

If I fail to make a profit at any specific level, I will continue there for as long as my bankroll allows - until I drop down to 25 buy-ins at the level below it - and move down when it no longer does. If this eventually leads to me not being able to reach my final goal, I will make a new plan once this is obvious.”
What Anna does with her plan is up to her. She can print it and place it on the wall next to the computer, she could post it on the internet, or she could simply just keep it on a note somewhere. It is good, however, to write it down as that adds extra incentive for fulfilling it and will help her stay disciplined about what she has set out to do.

As you see, the plan doesn’t take up a lot of space, but it contains the core elements nonetheless: A goal and milestones for reaching it, both of which are measurable, it is somewhat realistic and to-the-point, and it includes a clause about how to proceed if the goals within cannot be reached. All that is left is to wish Anna good luck.

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Adam “IceCream” Stanley. I am a United States Marine. I spend all the free time I get playing, learning, and analyzing the game of poker.

This is the first article (out of many) on poker lessons, the purpose of which is to give an idea of what kind of mindset and which commitments I deem to be the most efficient to reach real poker proficiency. The reader doesn’t have to be a player aspiring to become a professional; just wanting to become good enough to beat the game at any meaningful level is enough of an ambition, but I would like to think that even future pros will get something out of these texts.

Why should you take my word on anything? You shouldn’t, necessarily. You should know that I’m not a professional, and I’m far away from becoming one. At the current point in my life, I have a small ambition to become one. I have a job that I like, and I simply don’t have the time I’d like to have with the game of poker to pursue it full time (yet.) This has likely influenced my point of view, in the direction of being less enthusiastic and less optimistic about what is needed to become a very successful poker player. However, if I have to err on any side, I’d prefer it to be on the side of caution - so perhaps my pessimism is useful.

I have never played limits higher than $10/$20 (limit hold ‘em) and $5/$10 (no limit hold ‘em.) Keep in mind I’m very young. Obviously, I lack a lot of the experiences needed to teach an up-and-coming professional everything there is to know, and I’d be surprised if no one tries to throw that in my face. Being a mentor to future world champions, teaching them what poker is all about, is not my intention or ambition and I don’t presume to be the right person to do that. I do, however, have a short list of things going for me as being someone you may want to listen to when it comes to learning about poker and working your way up:

I know a thing or two about the game. I first started playing at the age of 15, and I’ve played quite a lot since those days. I don’t claim to be an authority on poker strategy, but I am confident about the fundamentals and I have sufficient theoretical understanding to realize that I’m no master. Having what it takes and knowing what it takes are two different things, and I know I don’t have it.

I’ve worked myself up from the $.10/$.20 tables. I’ve gone through the ranks the slow way and I’ve picked up lessons along the way. I’m not precisely what you would call a high-roller, but I’ve learned valuable poker lessons in getting to where I am today. Planning and executing virtually-impossible-to-meet schedules is what I do for a living. I’ve learned a thing or two about being a realistic planner from this experience - so I’d like to think I should have at least some authority regarding making plans for success

But enough about me - let’s talk about you.

Anyone can read this, of course, but my target audience is a decently experienced beginner who has started to “get” the game of poker and is now considering taking it more seriously. I use “seriously” in the sense of “being willing to spend as much time as I can to get better at it,” here, not necessarily in the sense of wanting to turn it into his or her primary source of income, as I’ve stated above. The reason I’m repeating this is because I really want to drive home the point that devoting yourself to poker the way I’m suggesting in this series is not something that most people will (or even should) want to do. Perhaps casual players will still get something out of reading this, though, specifically that they’re making the right call staying casual. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Also, none of these articles will actually give strategy tips or pointers. You won’t learn how to play AQ-offsuit from middle position, and you won’t find out how to extract the most money when you flop a set, there are loads of books for that. I will, however, encourage you to read those books, and then re-read them. And perhaps read them again.

And this brings us to the first lesson in this series: Learning how to beat poker takes time - a lot of time. In fact, likely more time than you can imagine. Being a fast learner is imperative, but even if you are you still will need plenty of time to soak up all the information you can in order to move forward. There are natural talents (Stu Ungar comes to mind), but they are very few and far between, and the likelyhood of you being one of them is diminishingly small. The rest of us - myself included - have to work hard to reach a real understanding of how to play.

Now, the exact numbers here aren’t important, but I want to give you an idea about the scale of what I’m talking about in terms of experience and understanding:

-Playing a hundred thousand hands.
-Reading ~3000 pages of poker books, some of them several times and a few of them many times.
-Spending about an hour for every three hours played analyzing the way you played certain hands.

Almost certainly, there will be someone reading this article who will think “100k hands is nowhere near enough!” and this person is probably correct. My point is that if you think 100k hands sounds like a lot, you have to brace yourself for the fact that it will likely take even more - and probably a lot more.

Do you really need to read all those books? Yes, and no. You don’t really need to read all of them, since there will likely be a few books from which you won’t really learn anything you didn’t already know, or couldn’t have picked up from some other book. However, you still need to read all of them because you have no way of knowing beforehand which books you could have been able to skip. It’s a bit of a catch 22, you could say. The willingness to study is absolutely key to becoming better and you should feel excited about devouring a new book on the market, scouring it for things that can help you become better. If you think reading books is boring, then your only way to greatness may be natural talent - see above for how likely I believe this to be.

Spending 25% of your poker time on analyzing hands already played (yours and others) is also something you should take into account and plan for. The best way of plugging holes in your game is to put them under intense scrutiny, and preferably the scrutiny of others. You would do well to spend a lot of time on internet forums, discussing your own and others’ hands. This number - 25% - may be a bit off, but I believe it is reasonable.

If you can work through the three-part list above in less than a year, I’m impressed, not the least if you have other commitments (a job, school, parenting, etc.) that take up time. I read stories all the time about new poker millionaires, like some kid from my home town who won $1 million last year, and similar things. It’s not surprising that many people think that poker is easy money, but they should stop and wonder how come, if it’s so easy, not everyone is doing it. The answer, naturally, is that poker - for most of us - isn’t such easy money after all. I hope to convey that message clearly in these articles, but I also hope that you, despite my inherently negative attitude, will be excited about my suggestions and that you’ll make good use of them.

You’ve likely got a long way to go, and although not everything I suggest will sound fun and exciting, I do believe that it may shorten the time it will take you to get there.

If you’re still interested, stand by for Lesson #2

Thanks for reading.