Healthy Competition

A couple of days ago I made my weekly visit to the bookstore.

I've always been a sucker for bookstores and libraries. Maybe it’s the smell, the sounds (often the lack there of), or even the memories of my childhood self, checking out nudie pictures in the art or photography sections without fear of being caught. "What, it's educational!" I would say if it ever came up...

Well, as I was reminiscing to myself about this and making my way to the magazine rack, I saw an image that startled me. A kid, not much older than I was during my ‘nudie art picture phase,’ was looking at the March issue of Bluff Magazine.

I've always hear ‘seasoned’ poker players, not 'old' - let's just say seasoned... talk about young players, wishing that they had the amount of poker material at their fingertips when they were at their age, that 20 year olds have today. "Imagine how good I would be by now," they quip.

The poker saying “...a lifetime to master" is true - the longer you play - the better you get. Seeing thousands of hands played out is much different than seeing millions of them. You can learn something about the game and yourself to apply to future hands every single time. We all know that the 20-something poker player population is getting so much larger - this can pose a major threat to the 40 to 60 year olds that have been playing since long before you could just go online or buy a poker mag in any bookstore!

So, when I saw this kid - flipping through this poker magazine, I had a terrible thought...I didn't get the poker bug until I was 19...when he is my age, he'll have a full seven years more exposure! We could say for sake of argument, that sometime in the future - this kid will be all grown up - sitting across a table from me...taking my money! That bastard! Then I thought about how much harder I would have to work...how much I would have to do just to keep up with him. Ha, I had to laugh - this thought made me want to go play poker right then. The mere hypothetical challenge injected me with excitement - damn I love this game!

Besides, I figured as I grabbed a copy for myself… I won this battle little dude- he’s just flipping through it, but I’m old enough to buy one!


Del