Texas Holdem Press

Hey, what do you want? Life got in the way. I have a job. I have a life. I had the flu. I should have tried playing when I had the flu. I coukldn’t have done any worse, and maybe I would have taken the kind of chances that – when my head is clear, I’m too rational to risk. Maybe, I should play ‘as if’ the chips were worth real money? Wait, let me try – and see what happens. Hold on, while I log on…. Well, first off, even though I am impressed overall, with the program and how it works, there are quite a few times when the thing freezes, or logs me off, or something happens. Then the whole game goes into limbo. Now there’s some new software to download, and after a few false starts, its loads and what do I see – a come-on for a new game. I think if regulators get down to it, they shouldn’t allow those kinds of promos, pop-ups, etc. They shouldn’t be able to get you in a virtual corner and say, try this, you’ll like it.

Okay so I thought I’d give ‘Rush Poker’ a try, on the Full Tilt site. They show you how to play, offer a $5 bonus for trying, but then I can’t figure out how to get started. Is it only for real money? I’ve got a few hundred ‘play’ chips? A $5 bonus for trying something that looks like it could suck a lot of money out of my pocket in minutes, doesn’t seem like a good bet.

Okay I figure it out, and got into a game, and lost every chip I had in under five minutes. Mistakes, I’ve made a few, but then again, here’s a few to mention.. I went in on a no-limit game. In one hand, in about 15 seconds or less, I lost 2000 or more chips. I stayed alive a few more hands, won two in fact, but then went all in, by default, and was stoned. I shouldn’t have played at all without a better sense of when to go in and when to get out, fold. Then again, it seemed more real, more like real poker, like what you see on TV, might in fact be better ‘training’ for real poker. It happened so fast, it didn’t even hurt.

“I have a life you know. Right now I’m pretty sure that my life and poker are not the same thing, and never will be. But I know how it goes. I mean, if you win. If you win you think, this is easy, and that probably fuels the fun. What I am saying is that right now I can’t see giving this enough time to grow on me. I don’t think I have enough fanatic in me to become obsessed, driven enough to spend the time to learn this game.

“I went back, sure, after a week off, and I was pretty bad. I started off with a few hundred chips, lost those, tapped some more of my ‘winnings’, lost those. I started to think I knew what I was doing. I had a strategy. I folded if I didn’t have a minimum hand, face card suited, or at least a pair, something. But it seemed like those at the table with me were more risky, and were lucky too. I thought, at first, that I needed to play for real money, if low stakes. But then I thought, if you can’t figure out how to win for fun, what the hell do you think you’re doing? I am not sure that makes sense. Maybe playing for fun alone, no cash, is just putting yourself at the mercy of the odds. You have to beat the odds, don’t you? I mean if you can’t see the other people’s faces, their real faces – then all you can go by is the odds, and I suppose, if you were real paranoid, the way the funny heads played. But do people really follow other players around, compile statistics? For what? Maybe if I was playing for real, I mean real money. But is that the same thing? I mean is poker not just my cards against yours? Is it mean against the machine?”

The story of Sharona Packs, a beginner at so many things, poker being just one. But one evening Sharona crashed the annual all-night poker ‘shebang’ – least that’s what her boyfriend called it, and became enamored of the game.

“I was lucky enough to stumble up to his apartment at an hour when most, if not all of the boys were more than half in the bag,” Sharona remembers, “ and I watched with, call it amusement, as they took turns making dumb bets, blowing good hands, and otherwise doing a disservice to poker lovers everywhere.”

But still Sharona was impressed, at least with the passion of the players, despite their alcohol-infused ineptitude. And one particular fellow – notably not her boyfriend at the time, was what she called ‘a warehouse of information’ on the game – and an industry, that seemed to be some kind of secret and exciting club.

“If you’re not a player,” Sharona said, “you just don’t have a clue what’s going on. I mean the millions of players, the millions of dollars, the thousands of games going on, live, or online, and the amount of money that the average idiot (her word, not mine) is throwing away because he doesn’t have the time, or the intelligence (her words not mine) to figure it out.”

So Sharona started to play, and we thought it might be interesting to follow along, see how she does. See if she can succeed, make a little money, or at least learn how to play the game in a way that will allow her to easily beat the boys at the annual ‘Shebang’.

“That was one of the first things that hit me when I began to play,” Sharona said. “This is a game that is associated – or at least was in my mind associated, with wrinkled old men clutching bourbon bottles in the back rooms of whore houses in old Clint Eastwood movies. But women can and do excel at this. And geeks and nerds, and Wall Street brokers.. so why not me?”

Sure, why not. So we’re going to follow Sharona as she deals herself in to this secret, not at all what she expected, world of poker. Stay tuned.