Mission statements were never my strong suit

Oh shit, I made a blog.

But don't worry. This isn't like other blawgs out there. It's not a preening, narcissistic log of my own haphazard, questionable observations about myself, my life, and my staggeringly deep, perceptive nature.

It's about poker.

[Really quick, I have to get a joke out of my system: "Poker? I didn't even know her!" There. Done. Stet.]

Ah yes, poker. The game of the civilized sportsman. Not a sport, you say? No argument here. But ever since the "poker boom" a couple of years ago, I've had a half-assed curiosity about dipping my toes in the gambling waters. As a financial issue, I figured, wouldn't it be cool and super and rad and gnarly and def and stupid and pop 'n fresh to make extra money essentially by playing a game I enjoy -- a game that I spend a great deal of time thinking about as it is? And who knows, maybe I'll actually get better and be able to play some live games with a scintilla of competence once I move home?

The problem, of course, was money. My current status as a life failure, while conferring other substantial benefits, does not endow me with a great deal of excess capital. To begin to play online, a $50 minimum deposit is needed at most sites. Believe it or not, working at The Nation's Leading Liberal Newspaper isn't exactly a cash cow. And I wasn't sure that my lifestyle ("lifestyle" being a word that's synonymous with "Taco Bell") could take the hit. Plus, what if I'm genetically predisposed to be a degenerate gambler? Heading down a road to financial ruin could only be a bad thing.

Enter a great friend of mine. For privacy's sake, let's refer to him as "D. Lane". No -- that's too obvious. Let's say "Emerson L.". In his quest for a reasonable return on investment, this man has traveled to the ends of the Earth -- from mutual funds to cotton candy dividends, from leveraged-to-the-hilt international currency to 8-track futures.

So when I first tended to jabber to him about the World Series of Poker on TV and the poker material I read online, Emerson L. immediately saw an opportunity to make money. "I'll bankroll you," I remember him ejaculating the first time we had this conversation. "What?" "I'll bankroll you -- you've got to be able to make some money doing this, right? And anything you could make above and beyond my checking account -- well, that's pure profit."

I was definitely skeptical of the idea. Who said I know anything about poker? There are plenty of bad players out there, who lose money, family, friends and self-respect in their pursuit of the game. Hell, Sports Illustrated was running articles about college kids who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt because of their poker foibles. Did I want to become one of these people?

Emerson, for some reason, was showing inexplicable confidence in my poker-playing ability. I wasn't sure I could turn a profit. So I put him off, and off, and off.

But thanks to the magic of the Interweb, I heard about a way in. The more I read, the more people I saw touting their success at low-limit hold 'em games. This is much different than what you see on TV most times -- those are no-limit tournaments, where a player can lose his entire bankroll on any given hand. Limit, on the other hand has very structured betting -- one minimum bet preflop and on the flop (with a 3-raise limit), and double the bet value on the turn and river. And thanks to the magic of the online cardroom, poker sites began offering limits for people who didn't want to play for nothing, but wanted to risk nearly nothing.

At your typical brick-and-mortar cardrooms, you generally don't see limits under $1/$2. Maybe, in rare cases, $.50/$1. On PokerStars and PartyPoker, on the other hand, you can play down to $0.02/$0.04. Perfect for a clueless newbie like me.

The other component is what, in a lot of ways, is a system. With the glut of bad players out there, certain authors (in true capitalist style) saw suckers. What if good players making optimal decisions ney?o play them? Wouldn't they win a lot of money?

For awhile, the standard-bearers of low-limit (generally understood to be 12 and below; maybe 2/4 and below) Internet hold 'em books were Winning Low Limit Hold 'Em by Lee Jones and "Internet Texas Hold ’Em” byMatthew Hilger. The latter is probably the better book; the former, much-reviled for teaching an overly weak-tight style of play (that is to say, you won't maximize your winning opportunities enough).

Then in 2004, 2+2 Publishing -- pretty much the gold standard for poker publishing right now -- printed "Small Stakes Hold 'Em" (SSHE) by Ed Miller, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth. Sklansky & Malmuth (known hilariously as "S&M") are giants int he poker authorship world. They have published numerous books together and apart on all forms of poker and gambling in general, most notably "Hold 'Em Poker For Advanced Players" -- a guide to the higher limits. I had heard of Sklansky before Malmuth, because Sklansky's book "The Theory of Poker" is considered to possibly be the finest poker tome out there. (Math-intensive, I hear.) Ed Miller is an Internet professional who realized the potential out there and brought it to S&M's attention as a collaborator. I may post more about the central tenets of SSHE later -- the online community does actually refer to this book as "The Bible" -- but for now, I'll let one passage sum it up:

"Every cent of your long-term profit comes from exploitng your opponents' errors and predictable tendencies."

So I bought The Bible (this is Waco, after all), and I'm here today. I've read and mostly mastered the preflop section of the book, and have been horribly lazy about finishing it. I got too antsy, and jumped right in to playing online with play money (which, everyone says, plays nothing like the real money tables -- even microstakes). Nevertheless, I did pretty well after losing a couple of 1,000-playchip buyins at Stars -- learning to be more patient and gaining the discipline to fold 50 hands in a row probably was the best thing I got out of the play stakes. I won several 45-, 27- and 9-person tourneys and was able to play cash games effectively as well. After my 1,000-playchip seed hit the 25k mark, I decided I needed to move on and see if I had any actual skill/smarts/discipline.

Whereas Emerson's initial thought was "a couple-a thou," I'm pretty sure my reaction was "whoa, cowboy." I don't want to be responsible for that. I had read that people generally try to keep their bankrolls at 300 BBs (that's "big bets" for the table level you're playing at) to handle any sizable swings. Tournament players seem to like 30 buy-ins as a good gauge. And many people who "grind up the levels" (gain experience and bankroll by playing each level a long time and then moving up) like to grow their bankrolls to 500BB of the next level before jumping. Triangulating from the lowest levels -- $0.02/$0.04, and figuring I might play some of the $5.50 buy-in tournies, I settled on a reasonable number that definitely has only 3 digits. And Emerson foolishly gave it to me.

My parents think is in the Bad Idea range of somewhat (my father) to insane (my mother). I think she's worried that it will all end in either:
a) a lawsuit
b) David clubbing me with a tire iron and stealing my wallet
Don't worry, mom. The latter is far, far more likely.

I've heard lately that with great power comes great responsibility. (Then, of course, I've heard that it's not the heat it's the humidity.) I wanted to be responsible and open to the investor -- in fact, I figured I would dash off a daily report of some sort to Emerson L., as a way of reporting on the management of the fund. But then I figured:
a) He's going to get sick of that.
b) And besides, no personal e-mail at work.
c) Ward and Thom would probably enjoy laughing at my misfortune. (Well, David's misfortune, am I rite?)

So that's why this blog is here. I chose Blogger because it allowed non-registered peeps to comment if they chose, and also because LiveJournal was a labyrinth of nonsense. (Also, when Kenny and Ward both agree on something, it's usually the right call.) Hopefully I'll make a daily entry on my progress, and hopefully you'll read it occasionally and get a kick out of it. (Note that, in this space, I will not glibly or otherwise say "Hay maybe you'll see me on TV one day LOLzz!")

Check out the post date and time on this. And then consider that I'm clicking on "publish" at 2:19 a.m. on Sept. 1. A typical Win work ethic, eh? Hoser?