Persuadeo.nl welcomes d’Artagnan’s first post. Poker is a learned man’s game. We accumulate experience and become professors in our own minds, postulating all sorts of convoluted rationalizations for the ways we choose to play. So here’s one. Early position raiser, Free Lunch Guy, a portly and affable reg, has been raising light all night. He makes it $20, and Gargamel, our favorite light dimmer at the Village […]
(Special post from Gargamel himself – P.) Much of my disposable income goes to food and travel, but I prefer having a good time with other people’s money. On the outset of my vacation, I looked down at my boarding pass. It was labeled “TSAprecheck,” which was great since I didn’t pay for the status: running hot from the start. My girlfriend and I were headed for Europe […]
The long, slow downswing, against which, like the cancer it has been, I diagnosed, summarized, and prescribed some low stakes immersion therapy, was in part brought on by a lack of hours of $5 games at the Village. My absence, however, has had other effects besides a deleterious one for my bank balance. It turns out I’m mostly an unknown on Friday when I play the small game […]
On the night of my return to the local games after nearly three weeks on the road, I look for a soft landing at the Village. I have not played much poker in months. My games on the road were mostly short, breezy sessions accomplished as a sampling. Between travels, writing, and family, the coming months will be my first clear schedule since summer. Even in the […]
Gargamel, wolf in wolf’s clothing, is taking his time. Playing great poker doesn’t just take time, it eats time. Poker devours thought, patience, intelligence, guts, math, instinct, discipline. The table tonight, however, is not accustomed to this slow burn and it is breaking up the rhythm of their evening. It’s uncomfortable. Players fidget. This is a “Got Cards?” kind of group. If I were not his friend, […]
Gargamel has disappeared. He hasn’t actually vanished, or been bound and kidnapped by a crowd of torch bearing Smurfs, but he is still gone for another day. In fact, the WSOP has carried away not only your favorite Villain, but silent Osiris as well, perhaps the only other true TAG in the player pool and one who regularly makes his way back to the cage with racks […]
Gargamel is diabolic. Blessed with top percentile mathematical ability, he calculates his hourly at the table, adjusted for the swings of his session. He wants to extract every last dollar from his victims; if he missized a bet that was supposed to be called, I have to hear about the $20 he lost out on for most of the ride home. Even when he writes up a […]
It’s not exactly The Professor, the Banker and friends, but the Village does have its scions, the upstanding winners who funnel money from the dollar store bad, software good games. There aren’t many. The Smurfs love, to speak technically, to realize their equity, and so they trade chips back and forth in a kind of raked pyramid scheme, a game of poker hot potato where winning might […]