F-Train is a freelance writer and avid poker player who made the jump to the industry side of poker. In a different life he was a corporate lawyer. He can be reached at ftrainpoker AT gmail DOT com.
All advertising inquiries should be directed to the author's email address.
I'm not a high-volume online player. I never have been, and I find it unlikely that I ever will be. But I do go through phases were I play online a little bit more than normal like I'm doing the past few weeks. Since I've never kept much more than $1,000 online, my poison of choice has been low-limit 135-player Rush SNGs ($4.40 and $12).
Playing these tournaments has given me a new appreciation for the insane volume players have to put in if they hope to overcome short-term variance. As someone who's made his living around tournament poker for the past several years, I wasn't oblivious to short-term variance. But witnessing it in the aggregate is very different than living through it yourself.
Multi-tabling takes on much more importance as a tournament player. In the past, some of the highest-volume tournament players played 10,000 online tournaments per year. That's the only way to try to smooth out short-term variance, and it requires the ability to play 15 or more tables at once.
The rest of us -- the recreational players, the ones who aren't willing to commit that amount of time to online poker or to develop the ability to play that many tables at once -- really are just treating tournament poker as a lottery ticket. Is there a skill component? Of course. Is it greater than short-term variance? Ask anybody who's ever lost a flip on a final table.
In the interests of bumping my 9/11 post down the page a bit, a brief anecdote from last night:
I was playing some live 1-2. The first pot I played I flopped a set of 7s. On the turn of an A-7-8-6 board a player raised all in behind me. He Hollywooded it pretty badly -- the whole hemming and hawing, sighing, then shipping his stack. I was reasonably confident he had a straight but the amount back to me was small enough that I was priced in to call for a full house.
I quickly called and asked, "Do you have a straight?"
He shook his head. "No, I have a pair of 7s."
The river bricked off and I turned over my hand. "I have a set of 7s." My opponent looked at my hand, peeked back at his own cards, and then slowly and deliberately turned over the nuts, 9-10. He turned the ten-high straight all along, just as I had guessed.
You can imagine how smug he looked after the hand. He was so proud of himself! Later I saw him pull an almost-as-douchey maneuver, all in pre-flop against A-K. The flop came 6-8-9. This guy, even knowing he was up against A-K (his opponent opened pre-flop), waited until the river to turn over two eights for a set. Obviously there's no requirement that he open before the river, but when you have your opponent drawing dead to a chop, all you're doing by not opening sooner is slow-rolling him.
I've been slow-rolled before, of course. Play the game long enough and it will happen at some point (although being flat-out lied to on top of that was a new one to me). My question: what possesses people to act like that? Are their lives so miserable that the only way they can get any joy is by trying to give others a false sense of hope, just so that they can watch those other people deflate? Are they so insecure that they can only find any self-worth by tearing down the people around them so that they feel better about themselves?
I've never written much about September 11. In 2004 I said a few brief words about being thankful for the important things in your life; in 2006 I posted a photo I took of the Towers of Light a few blocks from my Brooklyn apartment:
In 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009 I didn't write or post about 9/11 at all.
A good writer tries to make a point or tell a story with the writing he produces. I've never known what point or what story I wanted to tell about that day. Just listing my tiny little piece of the experiences and my memories -- as vivid as they still are nine years later -- never seemed like enough. After all, the 9/11 attacks became one of the most well-documented news stories of the modern era. The September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times devoted all 28 pages of the front section to the attacks. They were the first of thousands of pages the Gray Lady would produce on the attacks. Other news organizations did likewise.
Apart from the coverage saturation, I think my problem is two-fold. First, the experience of being in Manhattan on that day, with the connections that I had to the World Trade Center, was intensely personal. I have never been adept at writing about intensely personal experiences on this page, and that day changed me. It sounds so melodramatic and cliched to say that, but it is undeniably true.
More importantly, I don't know how to make sense of that day. I know what happened and I know why it happened. But I just can't wrap my brain around it. If I can't make sense of something I can't write about it. That's just the way I am. Nothing that's ever been connected with that day has made sense to me (see, most recently, the "ground zero" mosque and opposition thereto).
And so, on the 9th anniversary of the attacks, all I have to offer is this meta-post about why I don't write about that day. But if you ever corner me with a drink in my hand and are interested enough to ask, I can give you an hour-by-hour description of my experience, from boarding the subway at 8:15am until I got home at about 6 in the evening.
Even if you don't write them down, some things you don't ever forget.
Vanity is not one of my dominant personality traits, but even I am not above linking to a couple of things I've written this week that appear on other sites:
* All of this month, I'll be writing final-table recap posts of World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) events over on the PokerStarsBlog. My first effort covered Event #1, $215 NLHE 6-max, and appeared yesterday morning. You'll also find recaps by Change100, Jen Newell, Drizz, Pauly, Shamus, and Kevin Mathers.
It is no hyperbole to say that the PokerStarsBlog's WCOOP team is one of the most talented groups of poker writers you'll find assembled on one web page. Brad Willis -- an excellent writer himself -- is at the helm of this outstanding crew.
* I've become an occasional contributor at Out of the Storm News, a web publication of the Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE). The Heartland Institute is a non-profit organization that strives to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to a wide range of social and economic problems. It should be no surprise that my first contribution is on internet poker and the UIGEA, although future pieces most likely will not have any gaming angle.
* I have a few post ideas that I'm hoping to pound out on this page later this week. I've even written them down this time around so I don't forget them.
I'm sure I've written in the past about how music is a very powerful memory trigger for me. For example, play Andain's "Beautiful Things" and I'm transported to Seoul, 2008. All of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" album takes me to Shutters in Santa Monica in 2009, watching a beautiful Japanese woman wrapped in a terrycloth robe as she stands on the balcony of our hotel room and tilts her head to the right side while toweling her hair. Sia's "Breathe Me" puts me on the F train in NYC on my way to work in 2007.
Train's "Drops of Jupiter" is a song I hate, but even hated songs trigger memories. That one brings me to 660 Rose Avenue in Venice, California one afternoon in 2003. The day started with Train's bass player in a throwing-and-breaking-things domestic dispute (his girlfriend found out he'd been fucking several other women) and ended with lots of booze, some drugs and me seeing three different women naked. Including the bass player's girlfriend. [FN1]
A few nights ago I saw a commercial on TV for Halo:Reach, the latest offering in the wildly popular and successful Halo franchise of video games for the XBox. Because I find video games especially addictive, I don't own an XBox or any other gaming console and won't be purchasing Halo:Reach. [FN2] But of course I've known people with XBox consoles. One of them was a good friend in NYC who hosted a home poker game on the Upper West Side from 2001-2003.
I'm certain that anyone who's ever played Halo remembers and recognizes the game's theme music. It is stirring and iconic. Whenever I think of Halo, I think of that music. Whenever I think of that music, I think of those home games -- Sunday nights which usually ended with some multi-player Halo action before we all went home to get some shut-eye in preparation for the work week.
The games were the silly variants you often find in quarter-denominated home games (I believe we played $0.25-$3 spread limit), replete with all sorts of wild cards and crazy rules. They're the types of games I don't like to play much anymore. They're not pure enough for me. But the camaraderie of a home game is usually what will make or break it, not the games themselves. That's one of the things that Halo gave us, and the memories that the game's theme music triggers. [FN3]
Now I live in Las Vegas, where home games basically don't exist. "Why play in a home game when you can drive 15 minutes to the nearest casino and take some stranger's money?" is the typical refrain. But for me at least, home games were never about taking other people's money. They were about friends, and bonding, and blowing up aliens. Those memories will always be more powerful than winning some random pot against some random player in a random casino poker game.
FN1: I only slept with one of the three. That day. My life was more entertaining back then, wasn't it?
FN2: If this post were about video games, it would include a passage damning Katkin to the blackest circles of hell for introducing me to Angry Birds last week. Fucking hell, who sells a video game for $0.99? That's like giving away crack for free.
FN3: It also gave me my former blogging name and still-used online poker screen names.Read more...
Riding the F Train is a personal blog that was started in Spring 2004. Most of the posts on the site are related to the author's experiences playing poker or working in the poker industry.
The views presented here should in no way be deemed to represent those of any person, entity or media outlet other than F-Train.
