How Poker Player Can Start 2025 on the Right Foot

Step 1: Change Behavior

If you want to become better, not just as a poker player, but as a human being during 2025, mental coach and professional psychologist Francois “Frank” Hamel advises following his 30 days of advice on X. For starters, let’s think about what’s stopping you from making sustainable habits. While some blame laziness, others point to their surroundings. However, Hamel points out three distinct challenges on the way to making lasting changes:

1. Identifying the right goals.
2. Transitioning from planning to execution.
3. Fostering consistency to create long-term habits.

To overcome these challenges, Hamel suggests going through three key counter-phases over 30 days:

1. Clarifying Intentions – Setting clear, achievable, and meaningful objectives.
2. Initiating Action – Breaking inertia and starting with small, manageable steps.
3. Sustaining Habits – Implementing strategies to reinforce behaviors and ensure they endure.

Follow these steps to the tee — and by the end of the month you’ll have sustainable habits that help you transition into the maintenance phase. Here, the first thing you need to do is choose one of four dimensions that lay in the basis of poker as youк priority:

• Technical Poker Skills: Enhancing decision-making, refining HUD stats, and learning from your mistakes.
• Tactical Game Plan: Optimizing risk management, volume, and game selection for long-term growth.
• Mental Game: Strengthening your mindset with emotion and stress management, managing expectations, and mindfulness practices.
• Lifestyle & Routine: Prioritizing exercise, sleep, and recovery to fuel your best game.

Here, prioritizing doesn’t mean being active and persistent only in one of these four dimension. Rather, it means you need to shift your attention to one of them more than others. When your focus is clear, you’ll be ready for the next phase — to choose a determinant and set the tone for this year.

Hamel argues that we have three determinants of behavior change:

1. Affective Intent: Do you find enjoyment, pleasure, or interest in this area? The more you enjoy the process, the easier it is to stay engaged.
2. Perceived Behavioral Control/Agency: Do you feel capable and equipped to take action? Confidence in your skills and access to opportunities is crucial for follow-through.
3. Instrumental Intent: Do you believe the effort will lead to meaningful, long-term benefits? A clear vision of the payoff fuels sustained motivation.

Ask yourself what determinant is more suitable for you to lean on your journey. When this is done, it’s time to clarify your “whys?”, specifically: Why are you pursuing poker — is it for freedom, the intellectual challenge, or to prove your skill?

You need to know this, as Hamel states, to be more resistant to the influence of variance during the game:

“Understanding your deeper motivation keeps you grounded and resilient through the inevitable ups and downs of the game. Here’s an example of how to break it down:

Surface Goal: “I want to make $100k/year in poker.”

Deeper Why:

“Why $100k? To achieve financial freedom.”

“Why financial freedom? To have control over my time and life.”

“Why control? Because I value independence and want to live on my terms.”

The clearer you are on your “why,” the stronger your motivation will be, even when variance hits hard.

What’s your ultimate reason for playing poker?”

Want to read more Francois Hamel’s tips? Follow a special thread with advice and tips on his X account.

Step 2: Set Process-Based Goals

Among the threats that could endanger a poker player’s success the most vicious is setting result-based goals. If you don’t know what these goals are, here are three examples from Faraz Jaka’s newsletter:

• Make $80k playing MTTs this year
• Final table a WSOP event
• Get better at poker tournaments

Do these goals look right for you? Well, according to Jaka, they’re wrong because:

• You could play great, run bad, and not hit your goals — leaving you discouraged.
• Or you could play poorly, run good, and hit a big score — reinforcing bad habits.
• “Get better at poker tournaments”… not measurable and instead left to interpretation.

So, how to set your goals for 2025 more clearly and make them more achievable?

Jaka suggests using the Objective and Key Result (OKR) framework to set goals based on process because in the end poker is always about the process.

What is your objective? Continuously improve your decision-making, strategy, and preparation.

What key results do you pursue:

• Play a x number of MTTs per month
• Document at least 5 key hands per tournament
• Dedicate 1 hour per week reviewing my own hands
• Spend a total of 1h / wk discussing hands with other players
• Spend x monthly hours watching training videos and summarizing notes after each session.
• Learn and master 1 new tool or resource every 6 months

As you can see, results aren’t central to this this framework — they’re just a natural outcome of sticking to the process in the right way.

Other PokerListings Articles to Help Start the New Year Easier

• Poker New Year’s Resolutions: Are They Worth Making?
• Three Crucial Poker Mindset Tips Inspired by Jared Tendler
• Patrick Howard’s Five Things Vital For Poker Success