The You in Community

It all started innocently enough, as these things usually do. Kevin Mathers tweeted a link to a consolidated "Joe Sebok" thread on the 2+2 forums. Sebok is the son of Barry Greenstein and president of PokerRoad. About a year and a half ago he joined scandal-plagued UB as a sponsored player and a media and operations consultant. Since then, and as details continue to trickle to light about the UB cheating scandal, Sebok has been a favored whipping boy for many at 2+2.

I rarely read 2+2. Although there are interesting and useful nuggets of information that can be mined there, the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad that it kills any desire I have to go prospecting. When someone I trust links a thread I will usually at least scan it but that's as far as my participation goes.

During yesterday's scan I noticed Mason Malmuth posting in the thread. Two statements he made caught my eye. "2+2 is where the poker community is," and "our site is now essentially the discussion center of everything poker". Malmuth has always struck me as extremely egotistical (par for the course with 90% of the moderators and participants at 2+2, Kevmath excepted) and those statements fit right into the mold.

I tweeted back at Kevmath, "I find it hilarious that Mason thinks 2+2 is the poker community. I know so many people who won't set foot in there."

I was surprised at what followed -- a rather lengthy Twitter-discussion of what the poker community is and is not, and how it means different things to different people. I thought The Entities at Wicked Chops put a nice period on the discussion by closing it out with the statement, "65M+ people play poker in US alone. 20-25k go to 2+2 daily? Important but not central hub & not [a] thorough representation of poker community" (Caveat: I have no idea about the accuracy of their numbers.)

I should be fair to Malmuth. It's natural to have a self-centered view of the world. We can only experience the world through our own eyes and our own ears. It often leads us to make erroneous assumptions that the world we experience is the world everyone experiences.

There's no doubt in my mind that for some people, like Malmuth, 2+2 is their poker community. There's also no doubt in my mind that many other people (I can list players, industry types, fans) don't even know of 2+2's existence or believe that 2+2 represents everything detestable about the poker community. And this doesn't even touch upon the other poker forums -- PocketFives, for example -- that capture a similar segment of the community that 2+2 represents.

In Las Vegas, there is a community of local grinders, spanning all manners of limits. Yet there are regulars in the Vegas poker scene who would be offended to be included in that community and associated with people that they find offensive (for whatever reason and in whatever manner).

For many people with whom I regularly interact, the poker community is the tournament circuit. Yet what percentage of poker players or even industry types will ever spend more than a few days on the circuit? And how exactly do you define "the circuit" these days, with so many different tournament offerings spanning the globe?

What about people who are recreational players online and/or live but who never look at poker training sites, poker forums, or anything having to do with poker's internet presence (besides the poker sites themselves)? I'm willing to bet those people represent a larger segment of the industry than many would expect.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no one poker community. Poker represents different things to different people, based in no small part upon their own demographic background and their own experiences. The industry may be small, in terms of "percentage of people in the world who regularly play poker in some form", but it is incredibly diverse, both in the types of people it brings to the table and the manner in which they experience the game. That's one of the beauties of poker.

In my opinion, Malmuth is dead wrong. 2+2 is not where the poker community is. 2+2 is where a certain segment of the poker community is. Focusing on the I in community, as Malmuth has done, misses everything that is fantastic about the game of poker. For that, we need to look at the you in community.