Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Just Slip Her a Mickey

As far as advice to hook wives/girlfriends/significant others on poker, I have none. At all. I took the contrarian approach of never, ever trying to infect her with the poker bug, not one single, solitary time, until ScurvyWife finally broke down and was like, "Okay, dumbass, you play all the damn time, why don't you teach me what this whole thing is all about, so I can mock you properly."

(She actually was more motivated by finding a way to mutually share our interests and spend more time together, but that's too damn mushy and touchy-feely to admit.)

Of course, if the SO in question is female, you could also slip her the following book, instead of a mickey: The Badass Girl's Guide to Poker: All You Need to Beat the Boys by Toby Leah Bochan

Yesterday was not a good poker day. Initiating stop-loss experiment immediately. Lamenting lack of working time machine so I could start said experiment yesterday. For 10/20 short, I'm going to stick with a 40 BB daily stop-loss, or $800. That's fairly arbitrary, and more based on the pain threshold where I start thinking, Damn, I've lost a lot of money today. That's gonestly a little low, as you routinely hit 50 BB swings either way fairly regularly playing 2-3 tables of 10/20 short, but it's a starting point, so we'll see what happens.

Mandatory work meetings in which absolutely nothing applies to my job are teh bomb.

4 comments:

Toby Leah Bochan said...

I think the key to hooking Sig. others on poker is to play with other real people -- I think it's a hard thing to get people into playing online first.

I of course come to it from the gal's side, but my male SO didn't play poker when we started and protested much at picking up poker. Now he plays online more (way more) than I do. But it started with a very low-limit series (we're talking $10-20 buy in) of tournaments & home games populated with other people who were a) also his friends b) no more familiar with poker than he is.

My advice is to make poker part of some other friendly gathering, like a dinner party, and see how that goes.

Failing that, I totally know of a book aimed at beginner women... ;) I kid. Sort of.

d said...

Wow, 40BB seems awfully low. Is this from a single 10/20SH table?

I know that the convention wisdom is to ignore stop loss limits and just play when the conditions are favorable. However, I do understand that taking a substantial hit can impact a person so much psychologically that the game is no longer good anyway (plus your opponents are embolded to run you over). Still 40BB seems low for a stop loss for a SH game.

Maybe reading about other people's SH experiences would be motivational? Do you read Terrace Chan's blog? http://terrencechan.livejournal.com/

(I've got essentially no SH experience whatsoever, so naturally I feel the need to chime in...)

Toby Leah Bochan said...

Ha. I wasn't asking for pimpage, but thanks, of course. :)

ScurvyDog said...

Toby Toby,

I know you weren't looking for a pimp, I just am old and forgetful these days, and would have include the pimpage to begin with, if I'd remembered that, umm, someone I knew had written a book about, umm, women and poker.