Jim Reid is a longtime lover of poker, a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, and host of the popular RecPoker podcast.
Hey, gang! I had a really fun chat with Sky Matsuhashi on the podcast this week, during which we took a look ahead at our poker goals for 2025 and how we could give ourselves the best possible chance of achieving them.
Sky likes to use the S.M.A.R.T. system (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to make sure he stays on track for longer-term goals, and if you listen to Sky you’ll see how and why it works. We all need help now and then to pursue our dreams - after all, if we were naturally good at completing our goals, we would never struggle to achieve them! I won’t speak for you, but I definitely need all the help I can get, and I took a lot out of this interview.
My own poker goals for 2025 are about things I can control, like how I spend my time: mostly based around creating opportunities to study more and play more. I’d like to block out longer times to play more comprehensive online sessions when I am home, and I’d like to find ways to play local live games more frequently so that when I do get the chance to travel I’m not just knocking the rust off for the first few days every time. Traveling for poker is the one big luxury I afford myself, and some of my most fond memories over the last few years have been poker trips and the fun I’ve had alongside them.
Poker's global village
In 2025 I’m looking at several such trips: at the end of January it’s RecPoker Weekend at Running Aces in Minnesota where we’ll benefit a local food bank with a donation drive alongside a whole weekend of poker tournaments and cash games based around our recreational-poker-loving learning community that originated there.
In April I’d love to return to the Irish Poker Open and have the time of my life with the friends I made there last year. RunGood will have some fun events throughout the year, this summer of course the World Series Of Poker perpetually beckons with its glittering allure and promise, The North American Poker Tour and the Big Game will be back in November and you all know how I feel about the World Poker Tour winter series which will return to the Wynn next December.
But it’s not just the fun and excitement on the felt that fills these trips with memories, it’s the time I spend with old friends, and the time I spend making new ones. It’s the color and atmosphere of the places I visit, it’s the carefree pleasure I take in roaming the world playing games for money, and exploring the places and people I meet while doing so.
The view from over the fence
I read an article this week by Dara O’Kearney about how he is less likely to visit the USA this year than other countries, because of the political polarization that has permeated the discourse there. I had a really stimulating conversation over midnight tacos with David Lappin and David Docherty when I was down in Las Vegas for the last NAPT at Resorts World, where we discussed similar topics and tried to make some sense of how to spend our time - as non-Americans - traversing the American political climate of our time.
I think being from away, being able to look in from outside, we see it differently than how American politics is viewed from within. We’ve seen a change in how people speak of each other and treat each other over the last long while, and it does make some of us uneasy about traveling there.
Heck, I’m starting to get uneasy just staying home! I live in a country that the US President-elect continues to refer to as his 51st state, despite centuries of peaceful international collaboration between our two sovereign nations. Together, we sit astride the longest land border in the world, and we are each other’s largest trading partners by a long shot.
Disrupting that doesn’t seem like a very S.M.A.R.T. way to start 2025.
You can follow Jim here at PokerOrg, on BlueSky and on X.
Image courtesy of WPT
