Five years ago today a guy who thought he knew how to play poker decided to take a chance on this online poker thing. Pacific Poker was the place. It was chosen because it was where his buddy George played online.
He started playing limit hold'em at a level that was way beyond his bankroll, or at least the amount deposited. And he got lucky. It didn't hurt that Pacific Poker was widely regarded as the site with the worst poker players online. That small initial deposit grew.
Within a fairly short period he began to realize how little he actually knew about the game, despite nearly a lifetime of playing poker at almost every opportunity. Books were ordered and studied. Shortly the initial bankroll had multiplied several times and the confines of Pacific Poker, rich though they were, began to feel limiting.
If memory serves, Poker Room was the next stop, along with a very nice first deposit bonus. Bonus? "Oh, yeah, this is sweet. All I have to do is be reasonably competent and do what I'd be doing anyway, and this site gives me money to do it."
It was about this time that everybody and their maiden aunts thought they could run a poker site, and they were happy to throw money away trying to build a base of players. The Cryptos were particularly sweet, most of them offering regular monthly bonuses just for playing. No special deposit required. And the tables were loaded with drunken Europeans playing way over their limit. The GBP tables were the sweetest. Must have been due to the pubs closing early or something.
Eventually the Poker Room network opened up and some extremely lucrative bonuses appeared. Ah, those were the good old days. Four-tabling $2/$4 limit. Watching the bonus money pile up. Cha-ching.
Never happy with the status quo, the Cryptos started offering micro-limit tables and the action at $1/$2 and above completely dried up. The bonus became very difficult to clear. Eventually it seemed hardly worth the effort.
At some point along the way, the siren call of tournament poker became too attractive to ignore. Bye-bye, limit. Hello, NLHE. Tournaments, tournaments, and more tournaments. The Wil Wheaton-hosted WWDN became a regular weekly stop. Then more blogger tournaments started to appear. If you go back and read the first entry on this blog you'll see it was started just to fulfill a requirement for entry to a blogger tournament.
Then came the day the poker died. Well, almost. I'll leave you to fill in your own Pythonesque skit here. The UIGEA was signed into law. It has so far turned out to be more nuisance than actual death, but it has definitely put a damper on things.
Like most episodes of looking back, it simultaneously seems like just yesterday and a long, long time ago that I sat down at the first virtual poker table. I played for at least an hour pretty much every day for the first couple years. I've been more on-and-off with it over the last three. I'll play regularly for three or four months, then I'll kind of lose interest and let it sit idle for a while.
This year has seen me go through a number of pretty major life changes. I've had three mailing addresses -- one on each of the coasts and one pretty much in the middle. I'm recently coming out of another hiatus that was due mostly to one of those real life changes. Things are settling into a regular pattern again and I find myself catching hints of that siren call just at the limits of my hearing.
I've been playing a bit of PLO the last couple weeks. It seems to be about where hold'em was five years ago -- full of players who have barely a clue what they're doing. You could fit my knowledge of PLO in a thimble and have plenty of room left over, but it's still a lot more knowledge than many of the players I've seen online. Of course, I'm still wading in the kiddie pool. Fun thing is, you can make some real money in the kiddie pool.
The last five years have not always been the greatest in my real life, but the poker has been fun. I've learned tons, made quite a few friends I've never met, and turned a pretty decent profit.
Something I never expected when I threw myself at poker was how much I'd learn about real life from playing a game. Poker has brought me patience I never had before. It has taught me that slim odds are not the same as no odds. One-outers do hit, seemingly far more often than the odds would suggest. It has taught me that the proper answer to almost any question is -- it depends.
I hope by the time I write my tenth anniversary post that the US government will have stopped wearing its ass for a hat and online poker will be legal in all states. I hope it will be regulated by some recognized, impartial party and this will give the average Joe faith that the game is honest and his money is safe (at least when it's not in the pot). I don't give this outcome great odds, but it wouldn't be the first time I've hit a two-outer at the river.
