Blind Melee

For an anthropologist I harbor a strange fascination with the wall street tabloids.

One of my then favorite but now defunct blog Going Private noted, “weblogs on private equity seem to be abortive.  They start, stagnate and then halt altogether.  Their half-finished efforts are left dangling for anyone with a search engine to wander across and wonder after.  ‘No updates in 6 months?  Hmmm.’”

Most poker blogs suffer the same fate, although their demises are often triggered by the unfortunate rendezvous of underfunded bankrolls, negative variances, and overinflated egos of their authors grinding in the microstake purgatories.

In fact, I confess that both of my previous blogs expired for those exact reasons. They followed the formula of:

Blog #1: Introduction, goals and dreams

Blog #5: First downswing, riiiigged!

Blog #9: Revised goals and dreams

Blog #13: Upswing, ecstatic proclamation on turning pro sometime within the next two years

…and blog #14 that never comes because of the horrific downswing after taking a shot at a higher stake and the inevitable busto that followed…

In the book Poker Faces, anthropologist David Hayano ventured into the Gardena cardrooms in the 1970s with his hopeful vision “that poker and ethnography could be compatible activities”, and admits that “poker is a game to experience and play rather than observe”.

…But is it a game to be put down on paper?

The greats like to write their strategies in book form to leave their footprints in the hall of poker theoretics a la Supersystem and Harrington on Holdem; The 2NL grinders like to write on their pocketfives blogs to let their friends see how they are doing on their quest to be the next Phil Ivey; The academic in me secretly hopes that I had some noble aspirations to continue Hayano’s fieldwork onto the online felts (googling anthropology and poker, I was delighted to find the works of a certain Prof. Jouhki, doing some ethnography on online poker players).

In the end though, my aspirations to blog are much more mundane.

I’m writing because I want to have an honest and open conversation with myself about poker.

As rounders we pride ourselves on manipulation, but all too often we end up bluffing ourselves. Andrew Sullivan noted in his Why I Blog that the origins of blogging came from logs. “…In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship’s owners and traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart from the crew’s own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.”

So here you go. My new misadventures in the irreverent world of poker. I’ve posted my blinds. Readers please keep me honest.

P.S.

I’m also writing because my writing skills since I entered the corporate world have been reduced to inundate people with corporate jargons faster than a Scandanavian LAG spew chips at the Commerce. Reading other poker blogging gems like the recent story by Dr. Pauly on Mr. Ivey taking out the Supercomputer brought the old writing bug out of me.