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This quarter's obsession brought to you by the numbers 7 and two, and by two unsuited symbols.
I have been playing Magic The Gathering for a little over a year, and have really enjoyed myself. Now that I'm no longer a quarter rat, I don't really have a dazzling night life. These days I spend my Friday nights at a game shop doing battle with card decks that cost around $200 a pop. It's a lot of fun, and I plan to keep playing for the near future.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with Magic that keep it from being a general purpose social game. 1) It costs about $200 to build a decent deck. It's pretty hard to get your friends to dump that kind of money into a casual game. 2) The learning curve is immense. There is no way you're going to get a room full of drunk friends to understand Magic in under 3 hours. 3) It's freaking nerdy. People refuse to play it on general principle.
Eventually, even my stalwart wife began to refuse playing Magic with me, and I was stuck with just playing on Fridays. Any time we had a get-together, (which is admittedly rare now that we live in the styx) there was no way I could convince people to play Magic.
I needed a new hobby, and Poker was it. I decided on Poker because a lot of high-profile Magic pros (yes, there are professional Magic players) switched to Poker. The skills learned from Magic supposedly translate well to Poker. Being me, I immediately started reading books and keeping a comprehensive spreadsheet of every session I played.
These days, when people talk about Poker, they generally mean Texas Hold 'Em. That's what Matt Damon said was cool, right? I started with 3/6 limit, and doggedly focused on this until I realized that limit is really really crappy. Right now my focus is primarily on fast multi-table tournaments, with the occasional small-stakes no-limit cash game thrown in.
I have learned a lot. Poker is hard, and Poker is humbling. While there is a lot of skill to Poker, the skill is really more of a long-term effect. In any given tournament, or any given cash game session, the luck of the draw can make you a big winner or a pathetic loser. You can play a quick tournament with friends and the crappiest player at the table can win the whole shebang, while you -- the guy who has read 9 books on Poker in the past three months -- bust out without cashing. Nobody cares if you were way ahead when you pushed all-in, nobody cares that the donkey was a moron to call you with only two outs. All anybody remembers is that the donkey got an Ace on the river, and the big bad smart dude lost the whole thing.
Still, skill does matter. It just doesn't guarantee short-term success. It isn't like Street Fighter where an expert can completely dominate a novice with absolutely no chance of competition. In Poker, skill gives you a tiny edge which over the long term allows you to show a profit.
So, to help you build that skill I'm going to shoot you a little info that will help you out.
If you want to start out conservatively and make your money last, try out 3/6 limit Hold 'Em. If you live in Louisiana, the Poker room at Harrah's always has a lot of 3/6 limit tables going. It's a great way to learn Poker. For this type of book, get the Sklansky book on low stakes limit Poker.
If you'd like to play with the big dogs, try out 1/2 No Limit Hold 'Em. Don't let the 1/2 blinds mislead you. They're meaningless. Dudes show up at these tables with $3,000. Harrah's has 1/2 NL tables running all of the time. The only bad thing about these tables is the time rake. You have to pay $6 every 1/2 hour to play at the table. On the upside, the house doesn't take any part of the pot, but on the down side, you're paying $12 per hour just to play. I wouldn't bother playing these tables if I had under $500 to throw around. You're just not going to be able to beat that $12 per hour rake with a small stack. A good book for this style of Poker is Harrington on Cash Games
If you like the No Limit structure, but just don't have the bankroll for a cash game, you should try out Tournament No Limit Hold 'Em. The cool thing about tournaments is that you can buy in for around $60, and have about $1500 worth of chips to work with. Everybody starts out with the same number of chips. These chips have no cash value, however. You make money in a tournament by placing high, typically in the top 9 or so. On the down side, the blinds rise very rapidly in most tournaments, so you're often forced to gamble for your whole stack before the blinds eat you alive. The bible of No Limit Hold 'Em Tournaments is Harrington on Hold 'Em.
Figuring out what variant of Hold 'Em to play initially is important. As a noob, you can really shoot yourself in the foot by jumping between them too much. What works in one variant doesn't necessarily translate, and you're going to have a tough enough time just treading water without having to worry about the (pretty substantial) differences between NL tournament play and 3/6 limit.
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