A good beginning makes a good ending

Welcome all readers to my new Poker blog,

it's a pleasure to be here and I look forward to reading all the other blogs out there!

Let me begin by telling you all about how I was first introduced to the game of poker.  With all puns intended, I was a bit of a wildcard when I first met my group of friends as a young university student in freshers week, fourteen years ago now.  I can still recall the music beating heavily, the club filled with drunk young people, and the great excitement I felt about the newness of it all.  

One by one I befriended Nathan, Jude, Matt and Dean and some others along the way.  We had all been in the same club dancing and drinking, dressed up to the nines and looking for the same things, with most of us doing very badly at trying to chat up the pretty girls and women, apart from Nathan.  I had about as much a clue about chatting up women then as I did about playing Poker on the card table.  I was very much a newbie to it all then.

At that time I was young, brash and over-confident and still had hair, but as I met each of my new compadres on that fateful night, I never would have thought we would have formed such a strong bond of friendship connected by the game of No limit Texas hold'em.

For the next 3 years we would all hang out, having fun, going to each other's houses to play FIFA, or to go out into the local nightclub on the pier in Eastbourne or head down to Brighton for a music gig or someone's birthday.  Somewhere, along the line Poker was introduced and we were all hooked.  Oh yes, that was it, it was James who worked at the casino.  No it wasn't.  It was fated to be.  

We started playing in James' kitchen, down some steps directly below three upper tier floors, leading out to the garden and we all loved the excitement of the game, our competitive spirits coming out in the desire to win twenty five quid and sipping beer (non too zealously except on the odd occasion) as the cards were shuffled and placed on the rustic tablecloth and the hours unfolded deep into the night, waiting with anticipation for a good hand.  Sometimes some of us played for so long we didn't even bother going to bed to get to the lecture in the morning.  You could say we were a competitive lot and anyone was welcome, especially crap players.  They were crazy times, something wild, something adult having just left home and I was eager at that time to try everything I could to improve and become a winner.  I read book after book.  I studied, but thus was the competitiveness that I found it hard to beat these guys.  Still I tried and after a time I began to come second or even win.  The elevation of winning, well with those six or seven friends, combined with the fun times we had are kind of incomparable to anything else.  Where did those times go?  

Sadly, we played our final game in James' kitchen at the end of the second year of university and I can still recall us discussing whether we would see each other again.  Perhaps at someone's wedding?  I think we all met up once or twice afterwards in the summer, but after that I've not heard or seen from anyone again.  Sometime life feels like its divided into categorised time periods, depending on your age and when you reach a certain age, like a flowing river, you just allow yourself to get carried away, or risk falling behind.  I look back on those days with a real sense of glowing happiness.

Afterwards I would visit the odd casino with some sort of vision of becoming some kind of the next Negreanu and I was soon put in my place by the more experienced players.  Since then I've been playing online, but I would love to go back to that kitchen scenario one day and just enjoy a game with the guys.  I respected them all a lot; each and every one of them were talented guys in their own rights.  

After a long break due to my personal reasons, I'm happy to say I'm now back playing online on Bwin, which in my opinion is an excellent poker site, for its easy game play, style and usually filled with honest players.  I also like the fact there is no chat on there as that option can lead to a lot of nastiness communicated between players if one player receives a bad beat or something or is just losing his cool.  I'm glad to be back in the game playing, wiser, older and more in control of my emotions, which hopefully will lead to greater profits.  I've had a far better run of things back making a small profit on small stakes cash games and I've been regularly hitting the cash spots in tournaments.

I hope you enjoyed my short story and may you have good luck at the tables.  I'll be maintaining a regular post on here from now on.

best,

Goldcard7