High On Poker

My blog sucks. Okay, maybe not totally sucks, but lately I bust out a post and then read it later and think, That’s content? I mean, Jesus. I long for the days of You Decide posts.

It’s all about my decision to cut down on online poker. In the past, I never really have a problem posting. I played poker online daily so something would come up, whether it be pontifications of a particular aspect of the game or a recap of my wins and losses. Luckily, I never even had problems posting about losses, for the most part, so even when things were running bad, the blog was running good.

Now, not so much. What is going on out there? I was supposed to play at the SIF homegame on Saturday, but that has been canceled. (For all NY players…anyone know of a cardroom that is open and has a good game going on Saturday afternoon?) The cancellation of the SIF game isn’t so bad, overall, because I should probably go into the office at some point.

The thing about poker blogging is, it’s a melding of poker and the Internet. It is so closely linked to online poker, for me and for a great number of the community, that online poker’s death [Disclaimer: For all of you who insist that online poker is not dying, I only refer to my own decision to slowly kill off my online poker play. For everyone else, can you believe these fools who think that nothing has changed in online poker?!] is having a real impact on blogging.

For one thing, you can’t throw a virtual stone without hitting a post about the horrors of the ban. I’ve done it here too, on both sides of the argument, so guilty as charged. It is, very much, the tie that binds me to the community, first with the Challenges and then the DADI tournaments, eventually giving way to the weekly tournaments that I tried to attend semi-regularly. I still played the Mookie this week and got fairly far along in 11th out of 55, but it is becoming a rare occassion.

God damn it. There I go again with the navel gazing.

I feel a definite desire to continue posting, mostly because I feel an obligation to myself, my blog and anyone who reads me. It has been the corner-stone of my blogging principles, and is deteriorating in front of my very eyes.

Then there is the other rule I try to place on my blog. I try to avoid posting things that would only interest fellow bloggers because, even if they may make up the majority of my readership (no confirmation on this), this is a public blog and ideally accessible to the public reader. And here I go, posting about the effects of the online poker ban on poker blogging.

Here is my new promise to me and to you: I rededicate myself to this blog with a newfound set of rules.

1. I will post when I feel I have something worth saying.
2. I will delete posts after the fact if I mentally masticate (with a C!) them and later determine that they are utter crap. Sorry RSS feed readers, but you’ll still have to sift through it.
3. I will continue to post updates on the AC gathering, because that is really the light at the end of the tunnel for me.
4. I will do my best to keep things interesting.

That’s really all there is to it. I still love poker and I still love blogging. I just need to change my expectations and my assumed expectations of readers so that I can continue without feeling like I’m doing a piss-poor job. And with that….

Until next time, make mine poker!