Getting Started
Too many people start this journey wanting to become the best. But what does that mean? No-limit hold 'em or mixed games? The person who wins the most money or the one with the highest ROI? The person who wins at the highest stakes, or the one who cashes the most in large field events?
It's like saying you want to be the best entrepreneur in the world. Or the best musician. There's no singular way to define it.
Poker is a game of skill, but one where the outcome of any single hand is affected by randomness. There's enough of it that you can't judge skill based on the results of any given tournament or series.
It's a game marked by variance and the swings can be vast. You need a few hundred tournaments to begin to get any sense of what your true win rate is. Hundreds of thousands of hands.
But I have to start somewhere. Maybe I can't prove anything this year at the WSOP, but my expectations are high.
Since I bagged day 2 of the WSOP Reunion event yesterday, there aren’t any tournaments for me at the Rio today. Instead, I’m headed to my favorite poker room — The Wynn. There’s a single day $1k event and I’m eager to play.
I grind my stack up over a few hours but then an unlucky river in one hand and a bad call on another leave me with dust.
I rebuy right before late registration closes, then get a big hand right after break. A guy in EP1 opens, HJ calls and I look at AKo in the cutoff. EP folds and after some hemming and hawing the HJ calls and flips over A9o. A 9 on the turn puts me behind, and the river seals my fate. I shrug, tap the table, and head out.
My consolation prize is a delicious vegan pizza that I savor while I replay a few key hands in my head.
I’d rather be at the tables, but I’m grateful for the chance to get to bed early and rest up for the long week ahead.
Times I’ve heard casino staff ask someone to pull a mask over their nose or mouth: ∞
Scroll down toward the bottom of the about page if none of these abbreviations make sense.