One of the most common questions I get asked early on in the coaching process is about putting together a structured, well-thought-out playing schedule for poker. Recreational players and aspiring professionals alike all have to deal with the reality that poker often has to take a back seat to ‘real-life’ issues – family, work, and social commitments often make it difficult to make time for poker, especially if you’re not yet seeing significant financial returns.

The issue is doubly complex for tournament players, who don’t usually have full control over how long their playing sessions last – this can make scheduling even more difficult, and can sometimes result in players moving away from MTTs entirely in favor of SNGs or cash games.

What can be done to overcome these obstacles? How can we put together a workable playing schedule while still preventing poker from getting in the way of other aspects of our lives? Is it even worth it to do this, instead of simply playing poker at every opportunity when an appropriate window of time comes along? In order to answer these questions, we first need to understand the benefits of a well-organised poker schedule.

You don’t even need to get better at poker

Many people direct their improvement energies in entirely the wrong places, particularly when they first start out in the game. They focus heavily on gaining a better understanding of the strategy involved in the game, without recognising that improvements in actual performance – i.e. allowing themselves to access the full extent of their poker knowledge while playing – will immediately improve their bottom line. In this respect, you can make more money without actually getting any better at the game.

Once you’ve gotten to the point of actually being a winning player, managing your schedule effectively can help you put in more volume and make more money as a result. Struggling to get volume is one of the biggest issues among players who have work or family commitments to work around, and setting yourself a specific schedule that allows for those commitments to interfere with poker as little as possible will also help you make more money before you even see any improvements in your game.

Understand your lifestyle and circumstances

Becoming more conscious of the factors most likely to affect you is the first step to taking appropriate measures to face challenges effectively. If you’re not cognizant of the extent to which your life circumstances affect your chances of poker success, you’ll likely have a constant blind spot as to the effect your lifestyle has on your poker.

For example, if you’re the kind of person who has never even thought seriously about developing a consistent habit of exercise, then you’ll ignore the potential benefits of adopting such a habit with a view to positively influencing your poker – the same goes for the effects of a healthy diet. Similarly, if you’re preoccupied with professional success outside of poker to the extent that your job heavily dominates your time away from the poker table, you may find that poker is simply not high enough on your list of priorities for extensive long-term success to be a likely possibility.

The same goes for having a family – it’s unreasonable to expect that there will ever be a time where you can sacrifice family commitments in favour of poker without negatively affecting your family life, so you need to ask yourself if being able to spend less time with your spouse or children is really worth it for the sake of whatever extra income or enjoyment 5-10 extra hours of poker per week might bring you.

Don’t be overly ambitious

Players who first start out in poker talk a lot about ‘catching the poker bug’, and the extent to which this can make them want to spend every available minute studying and learning about the game, for the simple reason of enjoying the learning process. They’ll also start wanting to sacrifice other things in their lives for the sake of playing more or studying more, and this is where things get tricky.

When you don’t have a clearly-defined schedule, it’s easy to allow your enthusiasm for poker to get ahead of itself, and start setting unrealistic targets regarding how much you’re going to play or study – indeed, even when you do start sitting down to choose your playing hours and structure your learning, it’s easy to think that you’ll always be motivated enough to play a four-hour session after work every day, or to watch ten hours of training videos a week, without recognising the likely changes and potential fluctuations in your motivations as time goes by.

A month, a year or five years from now, you might feel totally different about the game than you do right now, and your life circumstances might be radically altered. You might get married, have kids, lose your job or gain a new one, and your attitude to poker will change as a result. To aspire to play or study more poker than is realistic will end up getting in the way of other things – causing you to resent poker and lose motivation – as well as contributing to burnout and making it harder for you to play your A-game when you do play. If you’re playing the right amount of poker to where you’re always motivated to play but never in a state of over-excitement, that’s where you’ve reached a balanced schedule.

Quality over quantity

Finally, if we’re trying to optimise our schedule, it’s worth recognising that grinding the maximum possible number of hands of poker might not always be the best option. In many cases, our life circumstances might dictate we’re not in the best position to play at any given moment – for example, we might frequently be very mentally or physically tired after a long day at work, and thus attempting to play a long poker session right afterwards might be unfeasible.

In this respect, it is much more important to play poker when we’re able to play our best, rather than simply playing as much as possible – indeed, playing when we’re not 100% might reduce our EV in certain games below zero, which makes it a bad idea to play at all. When these instances occur, we might consider how we could use that portion of time more effectively without necessarily needing to put in volume at the tables and risk a high-variance or low-EV session.

One of the most useful ways we can do this is to convert playing time into studying time – we may not have enough energy for four hours of decision-making, but we might very easily have the energy to watch two training videos or read a few articles, or even schedule a session with our coach.

This can help us to make the most of the time we have available to us, and avoid focusing on quantity of volume over quality to the point where it negatively impacts our results. With this mind, you’ll be able to pick a schedule that works to improve your results and give you a platform for improvement, rather than a scattergun approach that might have a greater than 50% chance of failure in the long run.