This is a little hard for me to believe, but I realized this week that I started writing to this blog over five years ago. Wow, half a decade. How time flies....
Over this five year period, the readership of this blog has grown steadily from about 20 people visiting the site per month, to now between 150 and 300 unique visitors every single day. That's a 200-fold increase in readership. I'm thrilled with this of course, but as I’ve mentioned before in other posts, my intention for writing to this blog has never been to add readers for the sake of, well, adding readers. My intention has been to help me with my poker. Simply trying to explain a concept or describe a hand to a generic "someone" reading this blog has helped improve my own game immeasurably. I learned a long time ago that the best way to learn something was to teach it to someone else. So I've (mostly) treated this blog as a way to teach myself a number of concepts in poker.
Has it been successful?
I believe the answer is yes, definitely. From understanding basic, fundamental gambling concepts such as edge and equity, to mastering specific poker tactics and strategies such as bet-folding and delayed c-betting, to the development of my own unique ways to think about and work through the play of a hand (i.e., REDi), this blog has unquestionably helped me lay a foundation and then build a body of poker knowledge that wouldn't (in fact, couldn't) have happened without the blog....
....so where do I go from here? Now that five years has passed, what's the next five hold in store for this blog? What's left to write about? Do I know enough about poker to now stop blogging? Have I run out of ideas to post on? Do I have blog-writer's block?
Seriously? Are you kidding me? The more I peel back the layers of hold'em, the more things I realize I don't know. The deeper I dig, the richer the vein or poker ore I uncover. If anything, I have the opposite of writers block. In fact, many times that I sit down to bang out a blog I have too many choices to pick from.
The funny thing is that this can actually cause a “block” of sorts, but a non-traditional one; i.e., I don’t know which idea to cover, so I sometimes get into ping-pong mode, where I go back and forth for a while before settling on one to tackle. Today, for instance, I alternately considered writing about stack-to-pot ratios, the notion of leaks, or the building blocks of hand reading. Alternatively, I could have written about what constitutes a "line" in poker, or what it means to maximize EV. I could also have written about non-technical topics, such as Pokerstars new "Zoom" poker, or the latest rumors about Full Tilt's on-again/off-again buy-out by GBT. Or I could have posted a specific hand I played in the last couple of days (there were at least three hands that were interesting and/or informative), or I could have chosen from a half-dozen reader's emails I received over the past week to comment on. Or....
...well, the list goes on. Said another way, the problem I have isn't one of writer's block. Instead, it's the opposite. I have too many topics to continue to research and write about. How many topics is this? Well, I figure I have at least five more years of stuff to cover...
All-in for now…
-Bug
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