Why this blog?

Though I like to write, I never had any ambition to be a blogger. One of the things I struggle with is that there are so many passwords, web sites, blogs, etc. to keep track of that I'm struggling to not let all that eat up too much of my time. Now that I am self-employed as a poker player, ALL of my time is valuable.

I am keenly aware that time has what economists call an "opportunity cost". That is, the cost of anything that you choose to do (whether it's working, sleeping, watching TV, or spending time with your family) is that you lose the posssiblity of doing something else. So, for example, if I spend two hours reading blogs, those two hours are lost to the possibility of doing something else. In my case, those are two hours that I can't use to make money playing poker. Until I have a large enough bankroll to produce at least a minimal regular income and pay my taxes, that opportunity cost is a very big deal.

There always seems to be a new cool application, program, or web site that I must see or use or learn--and that is as true in poker as in anything else. I have mentioned Holdem Manager recently, and in the short time that I have been using the program, it has in fact become a suite of programs, including their purchase this month of Table Ninja (which automates and eases the process of playing many tables at once.) Even though I'm very careful about jumping on "the next big thing", I always seem to be two manuals behind in reading what I need to know. And of course, you don't exist if you're not on Facebook, which I have resisted so far, even as I hear the Facebook Borg coming up behind me saying, "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." Even my new bathroom scale must be programmed before it can be used, and it comes with a nine-page manual!

So, given the opportunity cost, why do I have a blog? There are two reasons, one primary and one peripheral. The peripheral reason is that I might get feedback from other poker players and learn something that will improve my game. I call this peripheral because I already get and give advice with some of the top players in the world on the twoplustwo.com poker forums.

The main reason that I'm doing this is that I have a lot of friends who want to be updated on how I'm doing. It's just easier to set up a blog than to call or E-mail a bunch of people about my next poker milestone. And since most of my friends aren't poker players, a lot of concepts such as bankroll management, expected value, or the importance of the poker-as-a-skill-game battle in US state courts and legislatures, will have to be explained. This isn't a blog on a poker site where I will be discussing what kind of implied odds I might need to draw to a flush on the river when I'm getting less than the required expressed odds of 4.11 to 1.

So, I'll mostly be on here telling people what's going on with my nascent career as a poker player, and explaining how it all works. And putting it all in writing helps me to think through what I'm doing and why, so it should be good for all of us.

Your posts, comments, questions, and corrections are always welcome.

Thanks for reading,

Poker Clif