About
Statistics
- Born: 1977
- Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
- Current Residence: Berlin, Germany
And you may ask yourself: Well…How did I get here?
The real reason for starting this thing was to see if I had the discipline
to write every day. I’ve read a lot of books that have changed my
life, and I’ve always wanted to write something that would change someone
else’s life. So I started this thing out as a sort of practice…
a place to develop my unique voice and style. I figured if I got a
few people reading me, then that would motivate me to keep writing.
Why Poker?
I don’t think writing about poker is going to lead people to any
epiphanies, but it’s something I’m passionate about and I spend a lot of
time thinking about. Maybe some day I’ll get tired of the game, and
move on to writing about something “deeper,” but for now I really enjoy
reading, writing, and playing poker. Joseph Campbell said that if
you “follow your bliss,” you’ll end up in a good place. For now, poker
is bliss for me.
Life before Poker
I played football since I was 8 years old, and I always loved the game.
After 18 years, this last year has been the first year I haven’t played,
and I guess I’m officially retired. I played at a Division III school
in Connecticut after blowing out my knee in high school. I blew out
my other knee my sophomore year in college, but was dumb enough to come back
for 2 more seasons, and more recently 2 more years of semi-pro ball out
here in Southern California. I always dreamed of playing pro, and
I think I had the skills, but not the frame. I think part of the reason
I like poker so much is that it’s a replacement for football. It’s
different in almost every way, but there are enough similarities between
the poker table and the football field that I feel at home in a poker game.
When I was 5, my Dad brought home a Commodore 64, and I played games on
that thing for years. When I finally got to college (Wesleyan University,
Connecticut) and took a computer science class, I was hooked. I went
on to Grad School at the University of California, Irvine, after they offered
me a nice little stipend to live on while I studied. After 3 years,
I was 2 years away from getting my PHD, but my advisor jumped ship and left
town, so I had to decide whether to take my Master’s degree and run, or
hook up with a new advisor for some serious PHD research. I took the
degree, and got a job writing code for a major hospital in Los Angeles.
Although my dad taught me how to play when I was young, I never played
a real poker game until the summer of 2003. I dove in headfirst, reading
as many books as I could, and playing thousands of hands in the best Poker
simulation out there– Turbo Texas Hold ‘Em. Reading, playing, and
especially writing about poker has made me think about a lot of things (in
addition to poker), and hopefully I’m still learning.
These are a few of my favorite things
- Everything Walker Percy wrote, especially The Last Gentleman
- Dostoevsky
- Almost all of the Coen Brothers movies, especially “The Big Lebowski”
- Joyce’s Dubliners
- Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
- Playing guitar with the boys from Folk Ax
- Uncle Tupelo, The Bottlerockets, and Wilco
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Anthony Holden’s Big Deal (the best poker book)
- Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty
To everybody out there reading– thank you, and I can never get enough feedback.
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