♠ Sunday, January 11, 2004
Relaunch!
After seeing so many other nice poker-related Weblogs out there, I relaunch this site with some old material and a new emphasis.
Since the earlier posts, I have discovered poker. Truly, of course, I knew about it, and enjoyed playing, even for the quarter-half-dollar stakes that usually obtained when, rarely, there was a game.
No, the poker (rhymes with joker) I've been playing has been of higher stakes than I had been used to, both online (mostly on PartyPoker, at least for money) at stakes from $0.50/$1 to $10/$20 (briefly) and in bricks-and-mortar cardrooms (Little River Casino in Manistee, Mich, mostly, but also at Greektown Casino in Detroit and Harrah's in East Chicago) at $4/$8 and $5/$10 stakes.
Overall I'm down, which is to be expected when I'm learning the game. I've put $1000 into PartyPoker over the last eight or nine months, and have about $150 in my account there now, so I figure I've paid $850 in "tuition" to the players that have beat me. In B&M cardrooms I'd be up except for one disastrous weekend where I just never went home despite repeatedly showing down second-best hands, going from roughly even to down $800-1000 (in my mind, it's $1000, but I include my room, meals, etc in that). Since then, I've clawed back about $500 of that, so I'm down $500 lifetime playing poker in B&M cardrooms. If I include all I've ever spent on slots or other casino games in my life it's probably about $750 down. (I'm fairly disciplined in not playing other games while I'm at the casino--I'll play $20 worth of blackjack from time to time despite not knowing "basic strategy," other than that it seems to be based upon assuming that the dealer's down card is a 10. I'll also still toss $5 or $10 into a slot, usually losing it but I've cashed out $50 and $200 wins.)
I intend this blog to be a sort of running tally of how I've done at various forms of poker, what I've learned, and any other thing that strikes my fancy. I forgot entirely about what I'd written about Democrats and witches, below, and found it an interesting (and amusing) quote, and I hope I continue to post things like that.
I don't know how much I'll quote from other blogs. At the moment I hope I quote from things that I find interesting, whatever they be, even if they are on other blogs. I rely on them to pick out the gems from the poker fora, because my sojourns into those fora usually finds a mountain of crap with the occasional gem, and I only have so much time on my hands.
Other things occur to me to post at the moment, but I'll save them for another time.
