I will be spending plenty of time up at the old digs – probably until Monday or Tuesday when the Refurbished D3 will be arriving via UPS from Salt Lake. That little piece of wizardry is what connects the router and modem to the satellite. The D3 searches and stows, shows the status of the signal, and who knows what else. But that may not even be the problem. It’s kind of a shot in the dark. If that works, wonderful, if not then something else has to happen down the test line. The good news is that I have a house full of tolerant family to put up with me and my gypsy laptop as I taxi back and forth. Motosat is not one of my favorite words right now but I’m talking myself into turning this into an adventure rather than a hate-a-thon.

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I’ve been pondering the vast complexity of poker as I see it.

See…for some of you, it’s all a game of logistics and calculations, preprogrammed ideas gleaned from reading books on how to play different games, at different limits, and tournaments.

I’m sorry but I think those of you that feel that way are missing the game. The game is about people. Of course you’ll want to play with all the discipline you can muster, and have your thinking cap on, and be able to see through the veneer of the people you’re challenging, but when it comes down to the game, if it weren’t for those people that come in for a million different reasons, there would be no game. If everyone waited for A-A to play a hand, there would be no game.

When we take a seat, what are we waiting for? For someone to come in and make the game happen? For another player to start bouncing off the walls when they get Aces beat? For our beau to finish their day job so we can go meet them? For a friendly smile and lively conversation because we’re lonely? For the rush that accompanies winning a giant pot when you had to suckout? For a place to hide away from the responsibilities of life that we don’t want to have ground into our forehead everyday?

That’s just a touch on the reasons people play. But let me not leave out the fact that some people play to make their living. I think that’s the part that really sticks in my head like a butcher knife with a broken tip that’s being pounded in with a hammer. How many people really make a living playing poker? Year in, year out, grinding it up at the tables, 40 hours a week type of thing, how many people really make a living? I used to believe it was as high as four percent. Now I believe it’s closer to two. It’s almost impossible to do. There are some that treat it exactly as a job, play a hand exactly as it should be played, no emotion, no stress, release when the time is right, pound the shit out of it to extract the most $$ when the time is right, and soft play to make anything out of it when the time is right. How many people can do that, day in and day out, never getting frustrated and going on tilt, or question whether or not they will ever win another pot, or want to go back and play again tomorrow when they’ve been getting their brains beat out for the last three weeks on a daily basis?

But since we are all human, and humans do make mistakes, how can we follow through exactly as we should in a hand, especially since we are up against other flawed humans such as ourselves? How often would a hand play out exactly the same way, if the same cards and board were dealt, in the same position, at the same limit, but change one player at the table? What if the same situation happened only changing two players? And keep bumping up the situation with more players being exchanged. And then what if all of the same players were at the table, but no one had taken a bad beat the hand before? Or if one player had just taken three bad beats in a row? There are way too many variables to be able to set up a platform in which we can play correctly all the time. When we know someone’s steaming, we have a better shot at breaking through their game and getting their chips…because now we’ve broken into their head, not their game.

Ok…I don’t, and never, have professed to be a poker expert. I probably play for all the wrong reasons. Some times I love to play. Other times I can’t stand the thought of looking at another 9-3 or Q-2 off for hours at a time. For me it’s more of a platform of looking inside myself and trying to figure out why I’m playing poker. Some of us just like to go hang out, visit, and try to beat each other up with cards. I think that’s my guideline with why and how I like to play. I don’t believe I could ever play poker for a living. It would kill the best part of my personality (a friend of mine told me that years ago, and to this day, I believe he’s correct). I don’t want to get up and know I HAVE to go play, and hate the thought of it. UGH! That’s just like punching a time clock in a bolt factory.

It’s taken me years of poker – dealing it and watching others, playing it myself – to get to this spot. And obviously the first 20 or so years of my poker life, online poker was not available, but it is now. Even though I still love live poker, and it made me a great living over the years as I dealt it, I believe that online poker is the only true way to play exactly as you should – to be a winning player. The key is not to play in one or two games, the key is to multi-table. IMHO. Remember I’m not an expert. But if you are multi-tabling, you don’t have time to flirt with a hand or take a card off…you play exactly as you should, pitching everything that isn’t a hand, raising when you should, dumping the hand when you should. You aren’t bored stiff because you’re looking at so many hands, so fast, you don’t have time to be bored stiff.

And as far as some of these players that have won tournaments in the last few years, and have crushed the live ring games, I seriously have my doubts if most of the world will remember their names in the next five years. There’s a flood gate open, it’s filled with a swirling, raging river of new faces and bodies. If they win a big tournament, or the cards run over their faces in live games, they don’t plan or prepare for the next stop. It’s usually quite painful because most of them can’t adjust their style of play or their finances and they play higher.
There really is no point to any of this post, other than the loss of my internet access for the next five days.