Poker and Life

If you are a true philosphical person your first question should always deal with: What the heck will I talk about in this blog? Well to be honest. I am neither a philopher nor is my english good enough to talk about philosophy in general, but I hope you anyways will enjoy this blog.

So let's us try to answer a relativly simple question. What is Poker? Poker is a card game. By some it is recognized as a game of skill, but the majority thinks its a game for gamblers. Nowadays exists a wide variety of poker types. The most popular types in the western world (that I talk about) are Texas Holdem and Omaha. But there exist many more like Stud, Razz and special forms like Hi/Lo or Mixed Games.

I will mostly talk about No Limit (NL) Poker (no matter which type), because personally I think Limit is for P**sies. I don't want to waste my time and yours to explain each game, but try to get it from a diffrent angle. The blog title is All in for Life and that says how much poker helps to understand simple situations in life. Yes, I even would say that you can compare all that to each other. If you ask poker players what you need to be successful in poker you will ear probably this: Patience, stamina and a strong will, money and many other things. These attributes are not very wide spread in a world where everything needs to go faster and faster, some of them are not of importance. Nonetheless they remain at any time, at any speed and at any point of your (poker) career true.

You can do everything right in poker, win for three years in a row and easily can loose it within one night. Just because you did ignore one of above mentioned points. Whats the difference in life? Sometimes you work very hard in your job - for years. Then suddenly you make one mistake. Obviously a big mistake which caused a lot of trouble, but it is the same like in poker - sometimes you can loose everything - within one night if you ignore above mentioned attributes.

Some think poker is the fast road for them to be successful, that it is just about clicking and that everybody can do it. Well, that is the biggest mistake when you start to think about playing poker. Nothing in life can be achieved via the fast lane. Poker professionals work as hard (sometimes even harder) as any other professional. You need to take care of your health, mentally and physically. Otherwise you might be successful, but ruin your life. You need to study the game. Most people reject to study their game in order to improve it. If you do not review your actions at work critically - you would be not able to improve the quality of your work. At one point someone with more dedication would come and simply be better than you. You would loose your job and thats it.

There are so many qualified examples for situations in my life that I thought I am such a crappy poker player, but I have so much fun thinking about the game and philosphy about this. Not every post will have a final resumee, because soemtimes its simply impossible to find the final answer, but maybe it makes you think about poker in a new and diffrent way and thats what I like to do. I would love to have discussions with the readers of this blog, about the ProS and ConS of poker. Hopefully have the chance to get one or another Pro or Amateur to tell about their perspective. Find notorious gamblers and notorious winners in this world that is so out of touch with what is going on in the real world.

Can't wait to write my first entry and hope this blog will be read by some people