Poker Principles - Making Money Anyway You Can

This month’s task was to write a 1,000 word story about the virtues of buying a Mars bar for €5. Simple. Check into a Paris hotel room! It actually wasn’t but it could have been. It was to write something, anything, about poker when completely brain dead and, as the year draws to a close, all pokered out.

Oh my, did you know in the introduction to his book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t, author Stephen Prothero wrote, “Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. They are Protestants who can’t name the four Gospels, Catholics who can’t name the seven sacraments and Jews who can’t name the five books of Moses. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.”

What’s that got to do with the cost of a flop in a maniac cash game? Well, I found it refreshing that an American could speak so bluntly about something he is knowledgeable about whilst condemning his contemporaries. Such is religion’s popularity – churchgoing is America’s favorite and most profitable pastime – it also refreshingly confirmed that I need not be fully qualified in a subject in order to make it a cash cow.

Here’s another example, no so long ago Pammy Anderson married a character who describes himself as a professional poker player. Come on, we all know “professional poker player” is a somewhat loosely applied term. It’s like describing Jenna Jameson as frigid. Truth be known the happy groom made his first lot of dough from a home video staring Paris Hilton who, wouldn’t you know it, grabbed the headlines when reportedly losing a Bentley playing poker.

Look if it means I have to appear in a home made video with Paris Hilton to make both the headlines and the money, so be it. Hell, I’d also entertain her sisters Paddington, Park Lane and Gatwick if need be!

Hold up here, I am a pro poker player. No, really, I am. What’s with all this Paris/Pammy stuff anyway? Possibly idiotic celebrities jumping on the poker bandwagon – Pammy opened her own poker room for a short while – by pretending they can differentiate an inside straight from a character in a Lowry painting rile me. Shouldn’t they return to less cerebral pursuits such as cramming small hairless dogs into even smaller pink handbags?

Such inner frustration and dismay, it’s like rage. Road rage, the phenomenon which also best describes my online poker exploits. Come on, no matter how pious you are, I bet you’ve vented furiously at some arbitrary stranger in the traffic at some point. Of course you have and felt a whole lot better in the process.

Possibly I elect to play online poker for this very reason, to vent the frustrations that plague my real life, verbally assassinating people mentally and within the frequently disbarred chat-box whilst attempting to win some money in the process. What a tonic and one that is a lot easier than writing!