Plenty of times you can find yourself wondering how’s your poker career going and where you should be in 1 year from now to consider yourself as a long term winning player.
Before answering this question, which is fairly difficult to approach, let’s go back to basics and check out where you stand.

Success in poker means making money

Regardless what you may think, if you are studying hard and grinding but not getting any money out of poker, you are not good enough yet and can’t consider yourself a real poker player. Winning money makes all the difference between wannabes and people who embraced the journey in the right way.

If you are not winning, you haven’t studied enough, you haven’t played enough and you are not experienced enough to consider yourself a good regular.

Winning one or two big shots doesn’t count

If you have scooped a big tournament and you have now a bankroll full of rupees, it doesn’t mean you are a successful player. The key of success in poker is being consistently winning scaling up the stakes.

Every time you beat a stake you should celebrate the event because you took a step ahead in your poker journey. Being a winner of a stake means playing many tournaments of a given buy in and, in the long term, having a positive return of investment. If you get it, you can move forward onto the next stake.

Success is not playing high stakes

Despite leveling up is mandatory, it’s not true that your goal should be playing nosebleed stakes. In fact, if you can win an amount of rupees out of poker that can increase your quality of life, that’s more than enough to consider yourself fully satisfied.

You are not going to play big live tournaments abroad, then what? Just keep your head down, play a good poker and make a withdrawal from your favorite Indian poker rooms every month. It’s more than most of the people do.

Success comes from other’s mistakes

Do not think that your success, therefore money, come from your absolutely brilliant mind and your sharpened skills. More of the money you will dig out from poker comes from bad players’ mistakes that you are smart enough to exploit turning them into profit for your pocket.

Out of 10 nice hands, 8 of them are won just because your opponents have made a mistake judging our range, being tilted or whatever. It’s sometime you have to clear in mind because it helps dramatically in avoiding gifting money away as others do.

Conclusions

If you truly study hard and commit yourself into playing constantly and consistently, results will come and with them, money will start to flow, sooner or later. Do not be eager to being able to consider yourself as a good regular, because with the right amount of hard work it will come by itself and other players’ mistakes will start paying off your bills.