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BGonline.org Forums
Re: The Education of a Phearsome Poker Player
Posted By: Stick In Response To: The Education of a Phearsome Poker Player (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Friday, 18 May 2007, at 5:05 a.m.
Always happy to share my story because, well, who usually wants to hear my story? lol I'll try to keep it short but no promises.
I was young, maybe 5ish? I don't know what age but I'm sure my mom or grandma could give a more definite age. We'd go over to my grandma's and they'd always play cards. What games, I had no clue at the time, I didn't know how to play anything other than maybe solitaire, war, go fish, etc... I guess I finally got tired of all the 'grownups' playing cards and I never got to play, so one day I asked "Can I play?" I was told, I believe by my mom, that I was too young and that I wouldn't understand how to play the game. It was Euchre that they were playing at the time ... and I've said it before but if you want a kid to do something, at least a kid like myself, tell me I can't do it.
I didn't say much, I sat & watched. The next time we went over to grandma's I told them again I wanted to play ... they told me I wouldn't understand, I told them I already knew how. They let me play and thus started the waste of a perfectly good college education.
Growing up I played all sorts of card games, Euchre, Spades, Canasta, Rook, Rummy 500, etc... I loved cards, at one point I learned 101 different kinds of solitaire (and their names, I was sick), Oh Hell (great game btw), Spit, Speed, Spoons, anything I could grind out strategy that nobody else saw I played. It wasn't until high school when I moved in with my dad that I played poker. He played in a weekend poker game, this was before 'chips' even existed, it was a cash game with some of the worst players around. Not that I knew that at the time, but my dad always came home a winner, and I started going over there with him. I'd stay a day, two days, however long the game went. Typically it ran all weekend if they had the players for it and I watched, and watched, and ate bologna sandwiches and drank pepsi and watched some more. Finally I told my dad I wanted to play. Problem was I was in HS, I had no money, not even to enter this low stakes game. [it was a limit game, usually $1/$2 or $2/$4 but played a wide variety of games, games you'll never see]
He told me I could play next week, but that I was playing with my money, which was nearly non existant. I played the next week, and lost 30 some bucks. I was pretty annoyed to say the least and my dad afterwards gave me back the money I lost. He also told me that's the last time he'd do that. I believed him and didn't lose after that. I played in that game for just under a couple of years. There were maybe 2-3 decent players, including my dad, who played there. The rest were complete fish. My dad and I started playing at home for nickels and dimes. Sure, it was just for fun, but it helped.
After that I went to college, not to play poker again for years. What I did pick up though was Hearts. We started to play a live game in my dorm and it didn't take 15 minutes until I was destroying this game. I then hunted down any Hearts game I could online, tried to find a book on the game and there was 1, and it was a piece of shit. I could have written it by my 2nd day of play. Hearts is by far my best card game even though I haven't played it now in a couple of years it will always be my best ...if you don't count Speed :) I wrote a Hearts book after much online play and even considered going to the "World Series of Hearts", which I'm not sure if they even still hold. I didn't like the structure and it was only entered by around 40 people I think and I thought it would be a waste of my time [much like entering the main event @ the WSOP now]
In college I also wandered into a pool hall and the owner, "Red", wanted to play some Gin. He owned a pool hall so of course he wanted to play for money. I'd never played Gin but this mattered little to me. Told him we'd play one 'practice' game to make sure I had all the rules down etc... He explained it to me, then we played for money. We continued to play for a year or so. I worked part time in the pool hall more as an excuse to spend time playing pool and gin than anything else. He was a decent gin player but it frustrated the hell out of him that right when we started I'd stack the discards all nice and neat. He said people usually didn't do that so they could kind of see 'what had been played'. Well fuck that... remember what's been played you lazy bitch!
Somewhere near the end of my college career I spent about 6 months on blackjack, graduated, moved to Europe for a year, and found a backgammon game lol. I did come back around to poker for another year or so? Then I started off playing small stakes online, I moved up through all the ranks. I started at $25 NL, then $50 NL, then $100 NL, then $200 NL, then I got bored and decided to try out limit. It seemed so much easier for me to play limit and that's where I've been ever since. I still play NL for tourneys of course and I feel comfortable playing it, but it does bore me, I don't know why.
I don't play any real 'live' games anymore though I don't think my live play will suffer because of it. I only read the books because it can't hurt. I don't believe they help me but you never know. Most of the time I read & read & read thinking .... "yea, knew that, knew that, nope, he's wrong there". That's probably the most instructive thing to me personally, disagreeing with the author and then trying to prove to myself (or someone else) that I'm right and why.
Sorry for the long backstory but I'm not a poker player, I'm a card player. It's why everything (poker games) come easy to me. The more variety of games you play the more sense the next one down the road makes. You see things other people don't see. There are card games in Ohio and I've been invited to a few but my response is the same. Usually the stakes are wrong, a complete waste of time for me to go somewhere and play in a $50 buyin' tourney with 10-30 people. More aggrivation than anything to me... people not knowing how to deal, act in turn, keep the game moving, I'm easily annoyed. If the stakes do happen to be right, $30/60 limit or above, still, why bother? I can play 5x as many hands at home and make as much money as I want and quit whenever I want. The only time I play live poker is with friends, usually at my house or my brother's, and that fun for me, I'm not trying to win money (though I always do of course). Even in Vegas I'm only going to play live poker games because I'm meeting a couple friends there otherwise I don't see the point.
Ohio has a riverboat that has table(s). I've never been but ppl keep telling me "You should go". Umm.. why? lol
Sorry for the length again, if I left any stone(s) unturned just ask.
Stick
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