PROJECT POKER: Setting goals and planning for the upcoming year

Raymond Wu is a Team PokerStars Pro and was the captain for Team Chinese Taipei who won the World Cup of Poker at the 2010 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.   Wu is a Macau Poker Cup - Red Dragon champion and runner up for the 2010 Asia Player of the Year award.

Welcome to 2012! The year of the dragon is here and so are a ton of events at the Pokerstars Macau! Before you get too excited and jump onto every action available, I’d like to talk about one of the most important things to do at the beginning of each year - planning. When you have poker as a career, you can’t just “go with it” and be unprepared. For a pro player, planning is important so lets take an in-depth look. 
The first thing to consider would be to determine where your main source of income would come from. Is it from cash games, tournaments, or other endeavors? Is it online or live? To do this you need to be brutally honest and objective about whether you are able to beat your main game. Once you have the game chosen, you will have to calculate your win rate. For online just go to Hold’em Manager and check out your bb/100 from the previous year, the larger the sample size, the better. For live players it will be estimating your winnings per hour based on last year’s result.  When estimating, I’d strongly recommend lowering your win rate by 20% to increase your margin of safety.
The next thing to do would be mapping out your travel schedule. This specifically applies to players that play on the tournament circuit. Let’s say you plan on playing all the major events at Pokerstars Macau this year. Will you directly buy in or satellite in? If you are going to satellite in, will you do it online or live? Have you taken care of your airfare? Are you booking hotel rooms or renting an apartment? If you are renting would you want a roommate? These are all basic questions for anyone that plays on the circuit but they are often overlooked. Don’t be the person who has to book an overpriced hotel room because he forgot to plan ahead!
Lastly, we all know that poker is an evolving game. A strategy that worked last year may or not may not work this year. Most likely your win rate will drop due to your opponents getting better over time. Thus, it is essential to stay ahead of the curve. To do this you would need a study plan. Successful players don’t just win because they can read souls or calculate odds; they win because they put in the hours that nobody sees. When planning, be humble and list out the books that you will read, the videos that you will watch, and whether you should hire a coach.
Planning out the year in advance is critical for success in this career. For this coming year I plan to spend quite some time playing the pot limit omaha cash games online as my main game and traveling the tournament circuit in Asia. I plan to watch videos weekly and also am looking to hire some really awesome players to improve my tournament game. I’ve done my planning, have you?

More than poker,
Ray

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