Poker? What's That?

Remember back in the days when I used to write stuff for this blog? Me too. Good times, good times.


It’s only been seven months since my last post. Everyone is entitled to a little time off right?

So why haven’t I written anything for a while, besides the fact that I’m pretty lazy? Well there are a lot of reasons really, but the main reason is that I haven’t much related to poker since that last post.

I haven’t played online almost all year. I still have money in my accounts at a few sites, but I just haven’t been motivated to play. Maybe it’s the difficulty in cashing out, either real or perceived that makes me feel like what’s the point?

I stopped reading poker books. This happened a while ago. I made it about halfway through Harrington’s first book, and stopped for whatever reason and I’ve yet to go back. I think with all the books I’ve already ready and all the blog posts I’ve gone over that I’ve just burnt out on strategy. And it doesn’t help that most of them go over more or less the same information over and over again. Yes I know, good players are always learning, but I have a short attention span and most poker books are pretty boring.

I stopped reading poker blogs. Even before I stopped writing I had stopped reading blogs as often. I think I oversubscribed to them, so I never had time to read everything. There were a select few that I would read whenever they had new posts, but most I would either skim looking for interesting topics, or just ignore. Now all the blogs I used to read have fallen into the ignore column.

I stopped watching poker on TV. I DVR-ed the WSOP this year, but never got around to watching them. Then last week my DVR flipped out and decided that CSI was a 500 minute long show, and to make room for it deleted everything else I had saved. So I’ll catch them on reruns if at all. I don’t even know who won any of events. I usually do FullTilt’s fantasy poker, but totally forgot about it this year. I caught a few minutes of an episode a few weeks ago and that was all I could stand.

I do miss High Stakes Poker which was by far my favorite poker related show, but my DVR can’t distinguish between new episodes and reruns, and since the GSN runs one new episode and 37 old episodes a week, I got sick of going through and deleting them all. I turned off the scheduled recording at the end of last season with the intention of turning it back on when new episodes start. If new episodes have started then I’m missing them.

I haven’t played live poker in many months. Our “monthly” game has happened once this year. I would be surprised if it ever meets again with any regularity. We tried to organize an office game a few times but it kept falling through at the last minute.

Every Memorial Day I get together with my good friends who live on the east coast, and we inevitably end up playing ridiculous poker games until the wee hours of the night while consuming entirely too much alcohol. This year poker was mentioned I think a total of zero times and I don’t think anyone missed it. Maybe it was because we were having too much fun playing rock band until the wee hours of the night while consuming entirely too much alcohol, or maybe it was because we’re bored of poker.

I’m not bored with poker. I still love playing, and would love to play more often, but I think at least for me that it has hit its peak in popularity and is on the decline. Is anyone else noticing this or is poker still as popular in your circles? I guess if I still read poker blogs I’d have more insight on this.

So what does this mean for my humble little blog? I don’t know. I planned on diverting the focus of the blog to be less about poker and more about whatever else I felt like writing about, but it turns out that I haven’t felt like writing about much recently. I actually did start a number of posts over the last few months, but I never actually finished them and I don’t care to anymore.

On the plus side, I’m thinking about entering some satellites for the Heartland Poker Tour this weekend, so perhaps I’ll have some exciting stories to tell next week. If not I’ll do my best to get some other posts out every now and then. But don’t get your hopes up.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com