Poker Musings

Poker.  Oh glorious poker.  You were my love and then became my addiction and now you are something that I look fondly at remembering the good old days when I did not have any restrictions other than having to be to work the next day.  It gets hard to justify going out and playing poker after work to the wife when you will be playing from 11 pm until 3 or 5 am and that you want to do this multiple nights a week.
Oh yes, responsibilities have put an end to most of that, but that is why online poker exists.

I'm trying to get back into online poker.  It will never be like the good old days of Party Poker and Poker Stars again but in terms of legality there is a shining light of Nevada finally deciding to allow the first legal online poker room into existence.

While online poker in the United States might not be the greatest it has ever been over in Canada they have it a lot easier than we do.  Sometimes I wonder what life might be like if I had decided to just hop the border and move to Canada instead of packing up my bags and heading out to Las Vegas instead.

I'd still have access to a lot of live poker. I know myself and realize that I'd make sure that I lived within driving distance to the Niagra Falls area so that I could play either on the Canadian side or the American side.  I'd also have a lot better access to good online poker games so that I could practice and grinding out money while sitting at home instead of having to rely on playing poker only occasionally when I could make it out to the casino's.

Instead of living in the land of sin I could be wearing extra layers of clothing and trying to keep warm while clicking away at my mouse, raising fools on dead bluffs and complaining about how online is rigged.  I could have developed a Canadian accent while collecting my fat rakeback bonuses from sites like Pokersites.ca and been infinitely more attractive to the opposite sex.  I could have had Pamela Anderson and Alanis Morissette come to my house and put on private shows for me with Bryan Adams but instead I'm sitting around in my underwear with a bag of cheetos and a Diet Mountain Dew contemplating whether I have the motivation to head to the nutrition store so that I can buy some Whey Protein suppliment mix so that I no longer ache like crazy for days after lifting weights to shed the excess fat that I have developed from being lazy.

But, poker (both live and online) is not the only major aspect of my life that I have noticed a huge change on. As I have gotten older I have noticed a trending change in my video gaming habits as well. I used to be able to sit down and play an old fashioned Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) for hours on end.  I was king of the Final Fantasies and the Dragon Warriors and I'd put fifty to one hundred hours into them and not bat an eye.  Now that I'm getting older I find myself gravitating more towards action games that allow me to beat them in six to twelve hours instead. It's not that my attention span has dwindled but it is that my free time has mostly disappeared.  While the job does get in the way it is more the family life that interrupts my leisure time.  Sure I can still play video games with the child but they generally are not the type of games that I would normally chose to take on. Lego Indiana Jones and Spiderman: Web of Shadows have replaced Elder Scrolls IV Skyrim and Diablo III.

If I were living in Canada and killing it at the tables I wouldn't have to work a retail job (this December is 11 years strong. Four more to go for another week of vacation) and try to plan out how and where my free time is going to be spent.  I'd just wake up and play video games until it was time to go put in a poker session.  But no, I chose to move to Las Vegas instead of Canada and instead of being a professional degenerate soaking up the cold and wearing heavy baggy coats I rarely ever wear anything heavier than a T-shirt and shorts in the Las Vegas sun.

I am engaged to the most wonderful woman in the world and we have this amazing child who has changed my life in the past year more than any other person has changed it in the previous 37 years of my existence. So, while it's fun to play the what if game I love my life and my family and am extremely happy that I have made every single choice that has led me to where I am right now.

But I totally wish that online poker were cool again, like back in the day.....