Still at the in-laws, but we're finally rolling back into Austin later today. Travelling is fun and all but man, I'm pretty ready to get home, where I can activate the plan to stay home, play lots of poker, and not wear pants for the next five days, until I'm due back at the monkey factory.
Hopefully I'll be able to just completely check out at work, knowing the end is drawing near, and do nothing to attract attention to myself. Part of me would love to go out with a bang but it's lkely more +EV to just silently keep my head down, do the bare minimum of work to not draw any attention, and work on assorted other projects for the next few months.
Things are still rolling at the tables. Barring anything wacky, December's going to finish up as a pretty damn good month. Which is nice, as November wasn't kind at all, to the tune of a little over -$2,000 when it was all said and done. Sort of nice, in a backward way, to book a reasonably sizable loss for a month, shake it off, and get back to business.
I've also started propping the last few days, which has been interesting. It leads to a lot of heads-up and shorthanded play, which sort of segued nicely into the whole play a shit-ton of shorthanded poker experiment I'm currently undertaking. Can't really go into specific details on the propping publicly, but it's looking like I can fairly easily add another $10-$20/hr to my earn rate, without doing much more than playing 2-3 shorthanded tables at 5/10 and above.
'Tis kind of interesting, reading assorted mainstream articles here and there, announcing that the poker fad is waning, that retail merchandise is being deeply discounted and shoved to the back, ratings of televised poker are flat, growth of signups at online sites is slowing, all with the non-subtle implication that (insert Nelson voice) Ha ha, all you poker freaks are finally going to be relegated back to the dark, smoky regions from whence you came.
And there's some truth in that, all the way around. Anyone who thought that new people would keep piling into online sites and that televised poker would continue to add millions of viewers each year was (and is) crazy. Whether you use the "fad" word or not, poker grew at a completely unsustainable clip for a few years there, and is doomed to give back a lot of those gains.
That said, I think the implied assumption that things will now return to the way they were before the boom is just as crazy. If you haven't noticed, people like to gamble. Even when they can't physically make it to Vegas. And whether we like to admit it or not, people are addicted to gambling. And yes, indeed, poker is gambling.
Who knows where things level off at, but wherever you spread a game, you're going to attract the sharks, fish, and hopelessly addicted. And once you pass a certain critical mass of general awareness (which we shot past long ago), there's no turning back the clock and returning poker to a dusty little corner with a sparsely populated table and rocky, calloused asses. Whether you like it or not, poker is here to stay.
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I also think that people miss the fact that in other parts of the world Poker is just starting to get into the swing, we here in little Oz are really just ramping up. Aussie Millions and Joe Hachem have seen to that.
So while things in the US may be ramping down, we are just getting started. We Australians love to gamble, perhaps one of the new countires that have a public holiday for a horse race (the Melbourne Cup) on which we bet around the $1.5 billion vacinity. Our casions are growing and becoming more aware of trends...so we'll see.
Looking forward to seeing how your expolits pan out.
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