I *think* this is Swedish for "who wants a beating" or "who wants a beating from me". I'm sure all the Swedish poker players who read this will find it hilarious anyway.

This week, police made raids in what is the biggest gambling bust in Austin history.

More than 700 gambling machines known as 8-liners, a type of slot machine, were confiscated into moving trucks; 76 from one location alone.

Link

It's probably a direct result of the popularity of televised poker and its glorification of the poker elite, but I've noticed people I know and play with talking about playing poker professionally a lot more in the last year. The number of emails I've gotten from people asking for advice has steadily increased since I started this blog too.

My advice, always, is - don't do it. Not really because I think they should not do it, but because I think being a successful professional poker player requires a grit, determination and self-motivation that should not be deterred by asking someone for advice and hearing them tell you not to do it. So if the person takes my advice, they shouldn't have been considering playing poker professionally in the first place, and if they ignore my advice, they probably should have ignored it.

I've never done it, but I do genuinely believe that playing poker professionally is a horrible way to live for 99.999% of the population. From what I've seen of professional poker players - let's call them PPP's, the main personality traits that help you enjoy the life are being highly solitary, not requiring a lot of human interaction in your life, not caring about directly bettering society through work, being highly self-motivated and disciplined. Not ever indulging in alcohol or drugs appears to help too.

I guess this post is sort of a counterpoint to my post yesterday about pokernerd, and was inspired by Josh Hoptay's post in which he describes his six months as a successful PPP, after which he realized it was not for him.

Since I have started, my skin has paled out, I've put on some weight (I don't know how much is bad weight though: I started a workout program a month and a half ago and I'm hoping its all muscle), and I have begun to experience small bouts of depression and loneliness.

Poker offers such a unique oppurtunity to make it big doing little, but it comes at a significant emotional and mental cost. Working a 9-5 job may not be the most magnificient thing to do, but for the most part, no matter what job it is, doing it performs a service or benefits society in some way. Admit it or not, that gives us, or at least me, some sort of satisfaction. I lack that satisfaction with poker. Unless its a live game, I don't have any communication with anybody while I'm "working" and when you boil it down, all my "job" consists of is taking other people's money and giving them an ass whooping in return. There is something very unsatisfing about that.

His post is somewhat depressing, but 100% required reading for anyone who is considering life as a professional poker player. Good luck Josh. Link

Anyway as we go over that, the WSOP main event is down to near 100 players remaining, and Raymer continues to kick butt, including busting someone out on the first hand of the day! Winning the WSOP main event twice also seems like a pretty good justification for becoming a PPP :)

I also need to append my observations on Sam Farha from two years ago... he's not just a cool mutha, he's my new gambling hero. Last night according to Pauly he lost $25k on $1k coin flips. That's quality. He displaces my good friend Hamslice, who was previously my hero for losing $1600 at rock-paper-scissors. Good work. (Mental note: bring stack of $1k chips next time I hang out with Sam Farha.)

(Update: Dan has some extra detail on the $25k coin flip here.)

The world series of poker is down to 214 players now; Greg Raymer is doing really well and while I don't think this yet qualifies as one of the greatest poker accomplishments ever, it's pretty impressive.

Even more impressive is the volume of comments that Pauly's blog is generating -- holy smokes, he's up to over 200 comments on his latest update post. That's about as many comments as I get in six months!

If you are looking for some non-WSOP reading, I recommend pokernerd's updates on his quest to make money playing $50 sit-n-go tournaments -- 8 at a time to do 1,000 in a month.

Logistically, I'm playing four sets of eight each weekday night and five sets each weekend day. With the new blind structure and eight-tabling, each set is taking or close to taking a full hour, with bathroom/eyeball break. Hitting these targets every day for this month would be 1,072 SNG's, so I have some leeway...I'm trying to accumulate more at the beginning of the month, because I remember being pretty burned out at the end of February, when I played 600 4-tabling.

So far he is up just under $2k after 355 tournaments, which is about $5 per tournament, or $40 per hour playing poker tournaments, a solid win rate for just about any professional player. My win rate when I was playing $30 sit-n-go's "seriously" was $2.20 per tournament, but I don't think I could have kept that up playing eight at a time... and kept my sanity.

In other news, (A Fool and His Money) there is an interesting thread over at 2+2 regarding PartyPoker sending warning emails to accounts based on their observed usage of online poker assistance programs like PokerEdge, and more surprisingly, PokerTracker.

Personally, I am glad to see that Party is taking a fairly unequivocal position one way or the other on the subject of assistance programs. I'm ambivalent about their use -- I think some retrospective analysis programs like PokerTracker should definitely be allowed, while others that do collective data mining and inline odds calculations I'm less in favor of. However, I'm not at all ambivalent about poker sites staying quiet about them. I think they should either explicitly allow or disallow them, but they should not stay quiet on them.

Certainly an anti-software policy of any kind is impossible to completely enforce, and will result in an arms race between software producers and online poker rooms. The folks who rely on these programs to make a solid living, and have a lot of time and energy to devote to thwarting detection, will succeed. But sites like Party don't have to succeed in stamping out 100% of people violating their terms of service to make a huge difference. Even a small enforcement policy will greatly reduce the number of users who use these programs, as well as moving some of those who do to other sites.

Why is that good for poker? Applications that help professionals play many more tables at a time than they could unaided - and turn a signficant profit - are not great for the sustainability of the online poker community. Applications that help professionals in ways that an average player with a great memory and a calculator would not have access to such as massive hand databases are even worse for the sustainability of poker.

I have used PokerTracker and think it's a terrific application for understanding the holes in your own game. I've never even downloaded an odds calculation / inspector app, not because I think they're unfair, but because I play poker online only to improve my live game, and I think having access to a real-time odds calculator would hurt it. But if "Party policy" is anti-software, I have no problem following that policy.

I clearly spoke too soon about there being no good WSOP photos on Flickr!

(reference to this Hellmuth incident.)

The main event is well underway; blog highlights:

• Pauly continues with his excellent real-time coverage
  
• Flip Chip continues to post some excellent photos and coverage of the event. Man, Dutch Boyd and Penn Jillette are looking rough. Evelyn Ng is definitely not though.
  
• Wil Wheaton is busted out
  
• Head on over to Poker Nation for not only a pretty solid blog, but also some good pictures of Pauly's much-lauded bad beat that he handed to Shannon Elizabeth.
  
• not WSOP related, but the over-under is set at 50 for the number of hot dogs Kobayashi will eat at next year's hot dog eating contest. I'm calling it: bet the under like there's no tomorrow.
  

A few other random notes -- as promised, my sidebar now is linked to my bloglines account, which means the links you see there are the actual blogs I read.

I've been enjoying the Flickr Poker feed, which shows the latest poker photos that have been added. Apparently there are no Flickr users at the WSOP, because there have been almost no good WSOP photos lately. But I did find this one:

"I can't believe you check-raised a baby."

I came across a nifty little site called 43things and was surprised to see that only 12 people want to win the WSOP, making it a less popular goal than winning any poker tournament (18) or playing strip poker (14), and a drop in the pond compared to losing weight (1,845). Go figure.

As for me, winning the main event would be great but I've got my sights on a bracelet from a two-day event first.

My reading of RSS feeds in general, and poker blogs in particular, had really tapered off over the past few months, mainly due to having a lot of other things going on and not a lot of spare reading time.

I've recently gotten my blog reading list back in order, thanks largely to biting the bullet and switching from a desktop RSS reader to the excellent Bloglines service. Bloglines is a web newsreader, which also happens to have a lot of nice features like a mobile lightweight interface, and some little widgets for blogs as well. The mobile interface is huge for me as I travel a fair bit and use my Sidekick for casual reading. Being able to have my blog subscriptions up-to-date no matter where I'm reading from is a nice plus.

As a side effect of getting this stuff back in order, I was pleasantly surprised to find some interesting new blogs on the block.

My local recommendation is fellow Austinite Mike K, who I've known for a few years from various local games. Mike has written some great insights into his poker experiences, and has a great sense of humor and some interesting stories.

Eric, another local, has recently decided to move to Vegas and go back to playing poker for a living. Good luck, Eric, and I look forward to reading about your experiences. I gotta say I don't envy you, playing pro poker is definitely not for everyone.

I still haven't made up my mind whether or not I like Oddjack. It's a little high-volume and off-topic for me, but I find it a lot more readable than the other Gawker blogs.

Dan continues his good WSOP-and-beyond coverage with a great little exchange overheard at the series.

I forgot to add mine, from when I played. At the table next to me was Men "The Master" Nguyen and Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari. They had just gotten seated.

Antonio: Men "The Master" Nguyen. Men "The Master".
Men (happily): Hi, how are you doing.
Antonio: How does a guy get to be named "The Master" anyway? Did your parents name you Men "The Master"?

It sure cracked me up at the time.

By the way, with 10 million blogs now in the world, and seemingly half of them about poker, I get a lot of requests every week to do a link exchange or writeup of someone's new blog. I'm going to change my sidebar soon so it links directly to my subscription list on Bloglines, which means that the only way to get linked from this site is to get me to read your blog. My advice to you is to write to me after you've been at it for at least a month, and write about something beyond whether you won or lost today.

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