Giving it Up

So I've been rolling this idea around in my ahead a bit and decided, you know, what the hell. It's been an interesting few months in the poker blog cosmos, as far as assorted flame wars, questions about the merits of new poker blogs, about what the meaning of an online commmunity exactly is, and all that jazz.

If you boil away all the extraneous crippety-crap, I think the root cause of a lot of the above is that there's a basic inbalance inherent in poker that gets extended to blogging about poker. It's one of the few pursuits that you can work really damn hard at and get a negative return from. Negative dollars and cents. Negative anonymous assholes leaving comments. Negative feelings of rage when J4o cracks your AA for the eighteenth time that month.

And yeah, sure, shit happens, and there's no magic cure. But we all work really hard at these damn blogs and put in a lot of time. And in many cases it's largely for naught, from both an economic and a more amorphous, feeling-satisfied point of view.

While I can't do much about the more amorphous stuff, I can do a little token something as far as cold, hard, crass rewards. And it also has the nice little side effect of encouraging people to be better poker bloggers. Here's the plan, effective as of, umm, now:

Each month I'm going to give out two different awards, each worth the princely sum of $25. These awards will be:

1) The "I'm A Deep, Deep Poker Thinker, Baby, Just Like That Dude Socrates" Award

Blogging about poker strategy is good. It helps all of us. The more solid poker strategy out there, the better. For everyone. One of the key purposes of any blogging community is to build a repository of useful, shared knowledge. The more people building and contributing, the better off we all are.

On the first of each month I'll give $25 to the blogger that dedicated the most effort to providing valuable, strategy-related poker content in the previous month. It can be one entry, thirty entries, whatever. I get to be the final, ultimate judge, as far as intanglibles such as "valuable" and "most". Hah.

While I could try to quantify this in many ways, I think you get the gist of it. I'll be out here lurking. If you post lots of good strategy content, you'll have a good chance of winning.

2) The Funky Monkey Award

This goes to the most entertaining poker blog. That's it. That's all. You just have to be entertaining and mainly blog about poker. As valuable as strategy is, it'd get real damn boring if that's all people posted. Thus enter the Funky Monkey award.

Again, I get to be sole arbiter, judge, and executioner. Muhwahaha. The funniest and most entertaining poker blogger for the previous month gets $25, paid on the first of the next month. It can be based on one entry, many entries, whatever. Alls you gots to do is be entertaining. That's it.

I'll be lurking. You be funny. Deal?

So what do you have to do to be considered for these awards? Not a dang thing. If your blog is listed in the blogroll to the right, I'm reading you, and you're in the running. If it's not in the blogroll and you want to be considered (or you read a blog that you think should be considered), leave a comment and I'll add it to the blogroll.

All you have to do is think deeply and/or be entertaining. That's it. Many of you already do this naturally. So it's a win-win situation.

As far as payment details, I'd prefer to do it via a player to player transfer at PokerNow, as I have some mad money sitting in my account there, whispering seductively in my ear to do something wacky like this with it. If you don't have an account there, it's a dang fine site, just like Party, and using bonus code Crown gets you a big fat 20% signup bonus.

If you don't have a PokerNow account and there's no way you can open one, and you beg and cry and plead and promise to pet small dogs and children when you see them, I can probably be coerced into paying you directly via Neteller. But only if it's a last resort, as I'll have to pay additional fees there for a peer to peer transfer.

I'll keep a running tally of previous winners and incorporate it into my template here, moving forward, so that people can revel in the glory that is some damn fine strategic and entertaining poker content.

So yeah. Think deeply. And be funny, damnit.