Top 10 poker goals for 2023

If you are looking for additional motivation in your poker journey, New Year's poker resolutions are one of the best ways to find it.

For starters, creating a resolution will help you articulate your thoughts about what you expect from poker and help you track your progress more efficiently.

The hardest part of every journey is the beginning, so we have prepared a list with some of the top poker goals you can look to achieve in 2023.

10. Prioritize getting eight hours of sleep
Poker players often overlook things that impact their performance away from the tables. One of the things that has the biggest impact on the fatigue and performance of poker players is sleep, and you shouldn’t forget to include it in your list of poker goals for 2023.

Sleep is extremely important for poker players, as getting enough sleep allows your body and mind to rest and remove toxins that the brain accumulated when you were awake. Sleep is also vital for keeping your memory intact.

Finally, according to some studies, there is a high chance that your emotional response to negative feelings will increase by around 60% if you are not getting enough sleep.

9. Learn a new poker format
The online poker landscape is constantly changing, and one of the best ways to adapt to it, apart from adjusting your strategy, is to learn a new format. Learning a new poker format can help you in a few ways.

First, the learning experience will be a welcomed change in your poker journey that is mostly made up of rinse and repeat. Moreover, learning a new game can help you see poker from a new perspective, which could help you get even better at your main game.

On top of that, there is a chance that sometime in the future, the game you learned in 2023 can become your primary game and the main source of income.

Your goal for 2023 should be to move up at least one stake. (photo by Mart Production)

8. Move up the stakes
Making a list of poker goals is almost impossible without including moving up the stakes, and with good reason. It has a significant financial benefit and a positive impact on a poker player’s development.

So, if you have been stuck at the same stake for a long period or even if you have been climbing the stakes in 2022, your goal for 2023 should be to move up at least one stake.

With this said, you should pay attention to a few things, including game selection, playing the optimum number of tables, and proper bankroll management.

7. Start writing a poker blog
Becoming good at poker is not something that is achievable in a short time. Instead, it is a very long journey, and one of the best ways to track your progress is to start writing a poker blog.

Many sites started as personal blogs. Apart from tracking your progress, one of the main benefits of a poker blog is accountability. You will have a bigger responsibility to yourself if you know that after the session, you will have to write down all of the good and the bad things that happened.

This way of documenting your poker journey will also allow you to recognize possible patterns of behavior, both the good ones that you will want to keep and develop further, as well as the bad ones that you will want to avoid.

6. Play your first live tournament
If you are an online grinder, setting a goal to play your first live tournament in 2023 is one of the best goals you can make. It will be an unforgettable experience as live poker is a different animal, and you will have a blast playing the game surrounded by real people.

Secondly, live tournaments are usually softer, and you might even make a big score. Live games are a great way to meet new poker friends who can significantly impact your career, so you should try them if you have never done so.

5. Study for 25% of your time
For most, studying is the most boring part of being a poker player, and we agree that it is a lot less fun than battling it out at the tables. But no matter how boring studying is for you, it is an inevitable part of becoming a better poker player, and you should approach it as such.

If you are unsure how much time you should spend studying in the lab, a good starting point would be to spend at least a quarter of your time on it. Also, do not try to do it on your own. It’s better if you join an established training site like Upswing Poker and learn from the top players in the game.

Having this kind of study-to-play ratio will help you track your time more efficiently, as your time spent playing and studying should always be on a 3-to-1 ratio. For example, if you played poker for 75 hours, you should spend 25 hours studying.

4. Master a certain poker strategy
The great thing about poker is that there is always some part of your game that you can improve.

You can make things even more interesting and impactful by setting a goal to master a certain poker strategy or concept. We advise limiting this goal to one strategy or concept because mastering a certain area of poker while playing the game will take a lot of your time.

However, if you manage to accomplish this feat, it will do wonders for your overall win rate. Mastering even one part of the game will make you a better poker player than most of your opponents.

3. Play X number of hours or hands
Depending on which games and formats you play, a good idea for 2023 would be to set the number of hours or the number of poker hands that you want to play.

Having a set number will keep you motivated and organized since you will know exactly how much of your time you can spare for playing the game.

If you kept track of how much time you spent playing in 2022, use that number as a starting point to make a realistic goal for 2023 to avoid burning out or becoming rusty during this year.

Try to make a goal of increasing your bankroll over a long period of time. (photo by Pixabay)

2. Build up your poker bankroll
We have all been in a situation where we had a decent bankroll for a certain period, but could not manage to increase it for whatever reason.

In most situations, this does not happen because you don't have the skill to increase your bankroll but because of bad decision-making and lack of patience.

Try to make a goal of increasing your bankroll over a long period of time, for example, a year. This way, you will not feel panicked when you have a downswing and try to dig yourself out of the hole by playing higher stakes instead of going down in stakes.

The most important thing that this approach will help you understand is how small wins can add up over time. Seeing how much your bankroll grew in one year will help you see the big picture and realize why you should not have short-term financial goals in poker.

1. Improve your mental game
What keeps most players from becoming good or great in poker is not the strategy but rather their mental game. More specifically, not knowing how to deal with emotions and tilt.

For this reason, you should aim to improve your mental game in 2023 even if you are quite strong in it already. In this area of human life, there is always room for improvement.

The best thing about working on your mental game is that it will not only help you become a better poker player, but it will also help you deal with stressful and difficult situations in other areas of real life, helping you become the best version of yourself.