Are Poker Communities Possible?

[shipitfish]

I started working on another post about River Street (I promise, it's coming soon, salvelinus), and it got me thinking about poker communities. River Street made my poker life into a community. I honestly have never felt part of a community in poker since then. These days, I am in poker as I am in most things — an outsider looking in.

Poker has become a solitary activity. I do play mostly online at the moment, simply because the EV is better. But, even when I was travelling weekly to Foxwoods or playing a few times a week at the games in NYC, I was generally not part of a specific community.

As an outsider, I often wonder if the poker communities that I see around me are genuine. Are people really friends in poker? How much time do they spend together? How much time do they spend talking about the game? Are their friendships primarily outside of poker or is poker the central commonality that holds the relationships together? I admit that while I can often make great reads of people and their tendencies at the poker table, relationships — even those in poker — have usually remained completely mysterious.

My closest poker-playing friends are simply not as deeply into it as I am (e.g., W.D. and nick_marden), and our relationships are primarily defined in commonalities that are wholly outside of poker. So, I naturally wonder what I'm missing that these seemingly tight nit groups of poker players have. Do players in these groups have an edge over the solitary, self-motivated player? Is there more to be learned by having a group than going it alone? Is poker more fun and less lonely that way?

Oddly, I got seriously into poker primarily as a way to meet people outside of the computer science world and expand my horizons. But, ironically, I don't meet many people anymore in poker. Sure, just like on a plane ride, I meet the occasional “single-serving friend” at the tables, but I rarely ever see that person again. I am certainly not finding friends easily in poker anymore; I am mostly just showing up to take their money.

From time to time, I have thought about getting out there and just building a poker community myself. I was reminded of this when Howard Lederer talked on The Circuit recently about the group that came out of the old Mayfair club right here in NYC. They became some of the best in the world because they came together as part of a group that learned from each other. The NYC poker clubs of today are too transient now to make that happen. Nevertheless, the idea of forming a poker study group has crossed my mind more than twice. I wonder, though, if it would be worth the effort. I doubt that anyone in NYC but me is enough of a poker geek to show up regularly to sit around and talk about poker without even playing it. But, I'm still thinking about it, anyway.

As for online “communities”, like the 2+2 fora, such things aren't for me anymore. As a lifelong computer geek, I've already spent far too much of my life substituting online venues for real life interaction, and I resolved long ago not to do that anymore. It's real life or burst, at least in that arena.

Comments

[shipitfish.livejournal.com]

As I hinted at above, I've never been that much in the poker blogging world. My blog is this strange anomaly, mostly read by the old River Street crowd and a few LiveJournalers who found me. In general, the bulk of my regular readers are people whom I knew in Real Life before the journal. Meanwhile, yours was actually the only blog I ever really read of someone I didn't know until recently.

Indeed, I am so disconnected from the proper “poker blogging world” that I frankly didn't even know there was was a blogger tourney in Vegas until I saw that you won it in your blog (strangely, googling for it can't even seem to turn up an official detail page about it even now). If I had known, I probably would have tried to plan my WSoP tournament (since I could pick any $1,500 event) around it. But, I was out of the loop.

I think that maybe I just don't have the amount of time for online pursuits that others do. I don't follow lots of blogs carefully; I read backlog every few days when I get a chance. But, just following the few NYC poker blogs that I have subscribed to is far too much content already. I'm just not immersed into the world, it seems.

The other factor here is the disdain for online communities that I've gained over the years. I was involved in online communities when most people didn't know there was an “online”. From 1985 on, I was a BBS guy, a Usenet guy, and so forth. Like most geeks my age, most of my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood was spent interacting with people primarily through a computer screen. Not much good came of that for me; I ended up in high school and college as deeply socially awkward and spent years trying to recover.

Now, I see this strange world where online social networking has become the trendiest thing ever, and I am totally burned out on it after decades of feeling like it is part of the reason I'm such a social misfit to begin with. It's hard to describe how this feels to someone who didn't grow up on and out of BBS's and Usenet, but perhaps you can imagine. I just have this deep sense of really really bad timing; I loved doing everything on computers back when I got made fun of for it, and now I want out of that world just when everyone wants in it..

So, the idea of building community around the blogging seems so wrong-headed to me (at least at first glance). Particularly so with poker, because I go more seriously into poker originally as a way to get out and meet more people in real life in the first place.

Yes, I see the point that getting out and going to one of these blogger events would be exactly the right thing to bridge the gap — turning the blogging world into a real human connection. But, the fear of it all going wrong is strong, especially when you've spent a lifetime trying to bridge online life into Real Life and failing. Trying it again seems like an obvious mistake.

Anyway, I long ago promised myself and my readers to keep my blog free of narcissistic self-pity (heck, I even avoid telling bad beat stories), so I should stop there. I apologize to my readers that I even took this much of a detour into it. At least it was only in a comment.

[asphnxma.livejournal.com]

It's hard to describe how this feels to someone who didn't grow up on and out of BBS's and Usenet

Um, except that I did. =D From 1993 on. First RL bridge from an online community in 1994 - it was a usenet newsgroup for fans of the "Ultima" line of computer RPGs; about as dorky as you can get.

Anyway, I just say "dive in" and don't think too hard about it.