I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts lately about the need to legalise online gambling. I think this is the best approach. I don’t know the mechanics of how it would work but I think that once there is a mechanism in place, there will be regulation and taxation of online gambling. Perhaps even the setting up of an officiating body to do audits and checks of the systems and the management of the online advertising and so on.
The other day I was in a chat room and I had a pretty standard conversation with a fellow poker player. He was critical of the decisions the UK government had taken and was considering doing nothing about it. I pushed the folded hand a little and said “what if you opened one of your poker tables in your house and had a bar in the window for your friends to buy beer and food whilst playing?” He looked at me with a questioning eye and said ” Vaughan, you’re out of your depth here. customer service is the key here.”
Once I went on to my next hand as I was typing this up, I found this guy had missed his turn to speak and his only “la” was a straight flush on the flop. He was prettyaked out by his run of luck, which ended up costing him quite a lot of money. He had a lot of money to lose and not come out of the game without some big losses, he was quite scared of losing it.
Once I got over my initial despair of the situation, I checked out the poker table. There were quite a few tables still open and I went to one and noticed that there were quite a few straddling the fence. I watched for a while and then decided to go to war. I entered the first hand and after the blinds had increased to proper levels, I waited for the button to go to the SB and so I could start shuffling. I left it so I could get my own shots in.
Having made a basic amount of money, I relaxed a bit. It was still fun to take the pot – the only time I really feared losing money was when I did nothing and when the blinds increased which was a bit of a pain. Before I knew it, the action was on me and I pushed hard for some nut hands. I got into a big pot with Avuyu and I got a caller on the flop. The turn and river didn’t help me and I lost to Avuyu again.
I was pretty sick after that tournament, even though I had made some good investments on the button. I couldn’t shake the feeling that some amateur player was sucking out and I wondered if I should pay some blinds to learn the ropes or was it still worth just losing?!? loads of poker tournaments suck but this one in particular definitely drew me in as the player/s were very good. I wasn’t ready for them.
Fast forward to today and I am a pretty regular poker player. I play on quite a few different sites and have become somewhat of an expert. I speaking from my experience, average Joes who don’t really know too many about poker but who are not afraid to get their hands on cash. I have quite a bit of experience in cash games now though and have made a pretty nice amount of what I won in one tournament. I also had a ton of fun and made some new friends thanks to my first endeavor. So if you’re looking for a good time over the aster, stop by.. Oh I almost forgot, a fun game is to playsters poker.