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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

Sep. 01, 2007

Poker Words: Wisdom, Fun, and Accuracy

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts. -- Voltaire

Internet blogging was the rage for a while. It still is, though the My Spaces and You Tubes are getting more attention these days. Anyone with anything on his or her mind could find a site to play host to individual imaginations, thoughts or ramblings.

Reading the Internet diaries and thought processes of various friends (and strangers, many of whom revealed only a screen names), was a delight.

Some of these keepers of the poker word provided downright valuable material; others gave way to hilarious entertainment. Some of the ramblings, especially the road trip reports, tended to be monotonous but then that's because they usually included a visit to Las Vegas and the descriptions of poker hands that bordered on boredom.

In what had become the new measurement for the speed of light - uploading -- everybody was blogging. Trying to figure out which chronicle to read regularly became a real chore.

Case in point, Iggy's Party Poker blog -- guinnessandpoker.blogspot.com -- (one of the pioneers) lists 184 individual links to other blogs, including one that claims This is Not a Poker Blog, one that titles itself simply Poker Blog and one that connects to the Ultimate Fighting Championship chatter, which means maybe 183 real poker sites.

Now one of Iggy's links (pokergrub) counts out (actually, I counted them) 138 additional links. (Do I have too much time on my hands? She asks. No. Yes. Maybe.) Combining the two and eliminating all duplicates (or almost all because it was a cursory culling), in just two sites, I found 286 blog links. (Oh, and pokergrub is on my A list for well-written words.)

I thought about checking out a couple of terms in blue type from Grub's site. The first one was a broken link (Page not Found, three words familiar to any Internet user) and another appeared to be in Chinese but could well have been any of the languages that uses beautiful calligraphic characters.

But think about it for a minute, or two or three. If one of us were to spend eight hours a day for one week, I'm betting we couldn't read one post from every blog we clicked on before running out of time. These things might be kind of like the seven degrees of separation at the very best but chances are good we'd keep finding more and more unduplicated tentacles of content.

What's a poker fan to do? (Of course I have suggestions; why else the column?)

Create a criterion for what you want to read. My method of choosing blogs is based on some quick questions:

Is the blog well written? I'm not implying that everyone who keeps an Internet log has to be an outstanding grammarian with perfect spelling. But I do want clarity. I don't want to wonder whether the author is implying something or making a technical error that changes the actual meaning of a thought or sentence without the writer's knowledge. For this I turn to www.pokerblog.com/user/poker-shrink.html, a site I found only recently, probably because it just parked it self at this address. The Shrink (I don't know him but this is how he's known around the green felt arenas) writes straight from the scene with well-formed opinion and nicely turned words.

Does the blog entertain? This is one area where I don't mind vernacular, a little trash talk, some valley girl speech, a bit of poker jargon or even some street language. I want to nod and smile with acknowledgement, chuckle at innuendo and outright laugh at well-written wit. For this I often turn to pokerworks.com/blogs/grubby, a spot shared by grubby and grubbette. (Can you imagine someone breaking out in an off-key version of Queen's We Are the Champions in the midst of a crowded poker room?)

Is the blog informative? Those of us who work full time and have lives that include things other than poker don't have time to read everything about what's going on with our game. That's why I turn to one of my all-time, long-time favorites, loukrieger.blogspot.com. Lou gives me the lowdown on rumor, fact, fiction, and fun without wasting words. There's never any need to ask if something is fact or fiction, definitive or implication.

I'm not a fan of a lot of self-serving articles that seem to be in a time warp, ones that think I've been reading them from back when Al Gore invented the Internet and thus am familiar with all the first-names, nick-names and snide innuendos dotting the page. If I want expert advice, I read books or listen to audio books by the pros who have proven their mettle at the tables. I prefer to know the identity of an author but in the case of entertainment, I can forgo that need.

I guess I'm rather picky with my time, so I want to choose wisely the way I spend it.