Blogs, vlogs and books.
One of my poker students recently arranged for me to visit one of the many poker seminars that pop up in Las Vegas. Of course, I almost didn’t make it, as I am an excellent canceller. I had lost my keys on a recent trip to look after dad and family up north; skipping a…
The complete-ish guide to every poker podcast You may not know much about the poker podcasts you don’t listen to. Nearly all published guidance to the market is click-bait or AI drivel. Google’s and Spotify’s algorithms promote long-dead pods while burying interesting content. Maybe that’s okay, though, because most poker podcasts are duplicative, recycling the…
The GPI Poker Awards are dead, long live the GPIs. They were great. Eric Danis did a terrific job. What were the (il)legitimate criticisms and problems? Too expensive? Too democratic? Or maybe not democratic enough? Maybe a little out of touch with actual players? Today we remedy very little of that, here from the heart…
Recently itinerant low-stakes poker legend TBC has been on a downswing. The web of problems he suffers from include the extraordinary leak of various forms of blackjack. I don’t see this as a moral problem or anything silly like that, but it does make planning a bankroll nearly impossible. Impossibility is an extreme. To deal…
It’s not the resort fees. That’s the easy one. It’s not the ass shaking or the finger wagging, which is just going to happen. It’s not even the purchase of subs, which is funny and pathetic and infrequent. The hard one is defending Dustin Iannotti, which I am now going to do. First, I didn’t…
or, Rob Gardner and the Continuing Inability of Poker to Grasp its Cultural Situation In popular ethics, a man in a nice suit is confronted with a drowning child. After removing his swag, he rescues the child but realizes he needs to rescue children everywhere. A whole series of absurd propositions and even movements like…
Of all the writing I do, I am most ambivalent about these vlog review pieces. Vlogs are poker at its most consumerist, while also at its most hopeful; there is a relationship there to explore. However, measuring the hunger for the poker dream can seem churlish, until you remember that all these open-mouthed aspirants want…
The effort that goes into a making a “movie” is immense. Amazing, really. The final product usually takes years to create, and hundreds of people, if not thousands, are often involved. So, when some brash viewer or flippant critic says some movie is “bad,” or even worse, gives you the ol’ low-IQ “meh,” figuratively or…