My goals in poker

Of course short term goals are to win money and move up, but I'm concentrating here on more longterm goals.

Someone asked me in a comment about what my ultimate (long term) goals are with poker. I think it's an interesting question, and can be better answered than by a simple "get better". I want to be as close to a perfect player and possible, and be able to defend all of my plays in retrospect. My definition of a perfect player is someone who takes all factors into an account before each decision he makes, all the way to the end of the hand. That means that I am thinking about stack size, and how my move would differ with stacks of 10/20/30/50/100/150/200/250+ BBs. I am thinking about every statistic that PAHUD has to offer intuitively, and to the best of my memory, for each player currently in the hand. Seconds before the flop hits, I have already thought of a great number of flops, and how I will procede in each case. The ability to figure out an accurate range and get your equity against it using combinatorics. The ability to do all of this while my eyes flick between different opponents constantly (live game), and I am subconciously gathering information about each of them as I calculate, varying my ranges and picking up long term reads.

While this is a laundry list of impossibilities, I think it offers some insight into how I want to think, and how I believe players better than me think. Notice that no where is "win money" noted, because +/- is only a somewhat related bi-product of how you're playing. At the very worst I could be happy if I could back up all of my previous decisions to the above specifications, and yet be down money. This is true because I'm not, nor will I ever be playing for a living. Just some insights while I'm sitting here at work waiting for code to compile ;)