As you can see from my poker blog, I had attempted a fun experiment: To see if I could start with zero money and make it to $60,000 from just online poker. I believe my overall process was spot on and doable: Start by winning money in a sit’n'go or freeroll tournament and then use those winnings to play cash tables. There were two problems with this:
1) Tournaments are susceptible to luck.
- It’s not an accident that Emmanuel Lasker and Garry Kasparov were world chess champions for years: They were head-and-shoulders above every player around them. There is very little luck involved in competitive chess at a very high level.
- You don’t see this in poker. Even the great players don’t dominate like you see in other individual sports. Winning the World Series of Poker three years in a row? Nearly impossible, even for incredibly talented players.
2) Cash tables are incredibly boring
- Right now, I bet I could win $100 to $200 a day just playing the low stakes tables in online poker rooms. But there is a big problem: I find cash games incredibly boring. All it really takes is patience and discipline. So you sit there minute after minute, hour after hour, just mindlessly turning cards over, and the few moments of excitement are anti-climactic–you either get hit with a bad beat or you win a big pot off of the really poor players at the table.
As a result, I just couldn’t continue with this experiment. It was alternately frustrating and boring. Winning a freeroll takes a tremendous amount of luck, and my whole idea was to minimize luck with knowledge. Unfortunately, in chess tournaments, it is extremely hard to minimize luck.
This means that I’m going to drastically curtail my poker play, making my poker site somewhat irrelevant. I’ll keep it up for the occasional poker post and update, but my attention now is going to be aimed at something more interesting: Writing.
I’ve decided to work on my three current projects, pretty much simultaneously: My mystery novel, my science fiction novel, and my Twitter novel. Over the next few weeks I’ll set up a way to track these via this or other websites.
As I mention numerous times on this blog, this is a standard situation for me–my life is a series of tangents that I follow and then abandon (e.g. poker) when I get bored. I then follow the current of my life in some new direction. And that new direction now is writing.