To think of all the positive things one could do with time in life, I have decided to join the ranks of those incessantly plugging away at a keyboard throughout the Internet blogging on poker. It's just that most of those guys don't talk to the non-poker player or someone who wants to get started in the game. In fact, most of the material on the game is in pretty bad shape or in books you need to visit bookstores to acquire. The aim of this blog is to put together a series of instructional material on the game of poker... introducing the beginner to the game and putting you in a position to think the game, choose the right places to plop your money down, and in the end, make a little coin.
Where "It" Started and Why I Can Help You
I was a junior in college when I put my hands on the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich. I was immediately enthralled with the subject matter: the ability of a few select students at MIT to design a blackjack system so strong as to literally rip money from the casinos coffers at will. As a computer science major with a keen interest in probability and statistics, the concept that blackjack could be broken and instant money be made was mindblowing to me. I had previously read books on blackjack strategy and card counting, liked Edward Thorp's Beat the Dealer, and I had tried my hand at playing blackjack using the basic strategy. But, the concepts laid out in Bringing Down the House I would say were the principle reason why I became interested in gambling and gaming.
When my four-man senior design team was tasked with coming up with a software development idea to design and implement, we threw around several ideas. Websites? No, what fun is that. A game? Who cares anyway. I pitched the idea to the group of writing some software that would simulate millions of hands of blackjack using user-defined playing strategies and game rules, allowing users to statistically analyze the results and refine strategies. I had already designed a blackjack game for a previous class; much of that code could be reused for this project.
My team had a vote. We decided to work on the Blackjack Simulation System. In a real world sense, the project did nothing. We did not win the Nobel Prize on Degenerate Gambling. The bells, whistles, blood, and sweat that went into it won us an Honorable Mention in the senior design competition. But, the program itself limped over the finish line. While there were bugs (a plenty!), the results were enough to show you that you needed to be an absolute robot to gain an edge in blackjack. No mistakes. Make one in an hour and your whole advantage built by tediously counting cards and memorizing strategy was lost.
On a trip to Atlantic City where I completed playing blackjack, I went to watch a few friends play poker. It seemed like poker was small in 2002. I was playing blackjack at the Claridge, which had recently been bought out by Bally's. The two casinos were connected and the poker room was a small cave above the main floor at Bally's. You had to go upstairs away from the pits to get to it. For a Saturday night, there was not very many people there. I watched for an hour or so as my friends played. On the way home, we talked about the rudiments of the game (I had never played it before).
Before long, we started playing a weekly home game on Thursday nights. And that was the hook: I simply wanted to beat my friends on Thursday nights. On lunch breaks at work, I stopped by a local Borders and read the "good" books on poker that I could find in their racks:
I would say these books were enough, along with several others as I moved along, to make me quite a formidable player in my homegames. In 2003, the World Series of Poker (WSoP) Finals between Chris Moneymaker and Sam Farha aired on ESPN and it was like the world was set ablaze. Our home games drew more interest, we had poker tournaments springing up everywhere we went, and we drove to Atlantic City weekend after weekend. We attended poker tournaments at random peoples' homes. Games were found through the internet at dorms on campus. The Thursday Night Poker Club chugged along for almost two years of not missing a week.
In time, I began playing on the internet, studying statistical data generated from my play over thousands and thousands of hands. I tracked opponents play using a database and repeatedly stalked the weakest ones. I jumped into the world of no-limit poker. I found out what worked for me and why I should always put myself in a position to exploit my strengths. I peeled back the onion of the world of poker layer by layer... a process that still continues and will for the foreseeable future!
My foundation in poker is built in a strong mathematical background. I play because I can make decisions where, if given that decision with its associated odds of winning over and over again, I will be a winner over time. I don't play because I need a thrill, although you will certainly get more than your share when you play. I don't really even play for entertainment. I want to win. In the end, if you come to the game of poker with any other motivation than winning, in my opinion, there are better outlets for your time and money.
In this blog, my hope is to put together enough material to where an absolute beginner in poker can take my blog address and, after reading and practice, become a decent player at the game and also take pieces of my experiences to advance their knowledge of the game past their time invested in learning it. I, by no means, consider myself an authority of the game. I have no shiny bracelets or million dollar wins. But, I have logged my fair share of time and if there's one thing the 2003 WSoP Main Event results should tell you (and the 2006 results for that matter also), you don't have to be an expert to win!
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