chiasm
COMING SOON TO CHIASM: ONLINE POKER ADDICTION
posted Tue, 05-31-05
Man, the Sunday NYT is just chock full of shit I want to read - check out this piece on Danny Negreanu, one of the greatest poker players in the world and kind of an interesting character. The dude has an awesome mom that still packs him brown bag lunches for his games, and he isn't afraid to totally destroy his g/f at the table:
Beyond Negreanu's knowledge and considerable intelligence, what makes him truly great is his aggressiveness in a game -- his ruthlessness, some might say. He once bluffed his own girlfriend, also a professional poker player, out of a large pot at a tournament. ''I bet with nothing,'' he says, ''and she folded. To rub it in, I showed her my hand. She was furious. She stormed into the bathroom, and we could hear her kicking the door, screaming, smashing stuff. When she came out she kicked me in the shin and said, 'Take your own cab home.''' She is no longer his girlfriend.
MOST INTERESTINGLY OF ALL, he also recognizes the startling-yet-not-startling-at-all way in which THE
INTERNET is changing this game, like every other 'game':
Poker is no longer the sole preserve of unshaved, cigar-smoking older men in cheap motel rooms. It has become a game of the young, most of whom have made their poker bones playing online poker. Negreanu says they learn as much about poker in a year as he did in seven years playing cash games. ''I see Internet kids with a $250,000 bankroll,'' he told me. ''I had to hustle up games to get a bankroll, which is why I consider myself a bridge between the old-timers and the kids. I have a hustler's skills, but I'm up on what's happening now too. Some old-timers don't keep up with the kids and get passed by. They don't respect their intellect.''
RESPECT THE INTELLECT - and, more importantly, and more generally, RESPECT THE INTERNET! UPDATE: COOL, dude has a BLOG, definitely respecting the internet! He keeps it up-to-date, so if you, like me, have ever - or even often - wondered how awesome it is to be a professional poker player, READ IT. I particularly enjoyed this recent entry in which Daniel does a stand-up routine where he imitates a lot of famous poker players and says, sincerely, that "there is no rush like it in the world for me, nothing at all." Dude is a pro poker player, talk about a RUSH
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