Bug's Gone Dark-- But Will Be Back

To those of you asking where the bug posts have gone and if I'm still alive... well, I'm still here, but it will be at least another few days before I'm able to resume normal posting to the blog. Lots of un-fun things going on, including a foreign biz trip and a death in the family. I'll be back, but I have a few more pressing items on my plate right now.

Thanks for asking...

All-in for now...
-Bug

One hundred grand... Wow.

At some point, just after midnight last night, Mountain Standard Time, I had my 100,000th visitor to this humble little blog.

Yes, one hundred thousand people have stopped by for a read. Actually, part of that count includes search 'bot stopovers by the likes of Google and Yahoo, but the vast majority are real people, with unique IP addresses, apparently searching for real poker information.

Even better, many of the hundred grand are repeat visitors, coming back week after week for the ramblings I post herein. To these of you I say an honest and hearty Thank You. Your repeat callings mean something significant to me. Yes, I continue to pen the blog primarily to make myself better at poker (and yes, sometimes just to rant, vent, and spew), but knowing that many of you come back on a regular basis apparently because the topics upon which I write resonates with you... well, like I said, this is very meaningful to me. It's both invigorating and inspiring to know that I have an audience, and this makes me want to do even better at what I've been doing.

Moving forward from here, life and this blog will mostly continue mostly as before, sporadic and focused and sometimes random, too. And always onward and upward, including the creation of a set of poker lessons for newbies to the game. The fact that 100K people have stopped by won't materially change my writing topics or style. Said simply: I'm going to keep on keepin' on as before.

The bottom line of this post is I want to say many, many thanks to all you long time readers for reading, and occasionally holding my feet the to the fire and questioning my words. You keep me honest. Please don't hesitate to continue dropping me a line (email: bugeyebug@gmail.com) when something strikes you, positive or negative. And as always, I welcome all manner of feedback, criticism, commentary, disagreement, and/or advice.

Here's to the next 100K!

All-in for now...
-Bug

Existential Angst

Something I've been thinking about lately is this blog. Specifically, what's this Poker Bug thing all about? Call it existential angst, but what the hell is la raison d'etre of the Bug? What's the purpose? I've been to the WSOP, and I have returned. Now what?

Years ago, when I started posting on these pages, the blog purpose was crystal clear: get better at poker by trying to write down lessons learned, thoughts, and ideas. Along the way, I've interjected lots of other things herein, including poker news, politics, and plenty of bitching, whining, and moaning. But the overarching goal has always been to articulate poker theory and lessons learned in a way that I could then internalize and learn from. Decades ago, I taught Calculus 101 at the local community college, and the big life lesson I took away from that experience is that if you want to truly master something, try explaining it to someone else. This blog has definitely served that same purpose; I don't think I'm bragging when I say that I'm now a pretty good poker player, at least at the small and medium cash stakes. I've played roughly two million hands of Hold'em over the past decade, and for the last half million or so I've averaged an hourly earn rate that could actually serve as a back-up career if my current one ever went kaput. No, I wouldn't be rich, and no, I really don't want to play poker for a living, but I could if I had to; I could pay the bills and keep a roof overhead if it all came to that.

The other day I looked at PokerBug's web traffic statistics, which showed that over 90,000 visitors have dropped in on this self-improvement journey. I average around 200 repeat readers per day, from pretty much all over the globe. This would seem to imply that there's still an audience for my scribblings, but the big question remains: where do I go from here?

Good question, and I'm not sure what the real answer is. Part of continuing the blog is to keep getting better, and I've got a lot in my game yet to improve upon. Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master, right? Tournament play is definitely an area that could be bettered, as well as other games, such as Omaha and Stud. And Hold'em hand reviews and musings still interest me...

...but that's no longer enough. I think now I want to do something a little bigger picture than just continuing the same old, same old....

... which brings me to my somewhat fuzzy and cryptic point: I've been germinating an idea about a relatively big poker-related project. I have bounced the seed of this idea off a few people such as Mr. Multi to get constructive feedback, and to see if I can figure out how the blog ties into the project. I'm not quite ready to commit to the project, but I'm definitely leaning that way. It's been said that the cure to angst is purpose, and this project would definitely be a big, big purpose, filled with lots of angst.

Poker Bug is not going away, but the focus might be changing a bit.

Click here to continue reading about my changing focus of the blog...

All-in for now...
-Bug

The Big Five-Oh-Oh

The big number of the day on this blog is 500.

Yes, that's right: this is my five hundredth posting on the pokerbug blog. Seriously. Five hundred posts, and I'm still yapping away. Pretty damn amazing, if you ask me.

For fun, I opened up the site statistics meter to see how many people are now visiting the site. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I'm now averaging over 4500 hits per month. I'm also thrilled to see that I have loyal readers who drop in on a regular basis from six of the seven continents (alas, I'm still searching for that elusive poker playing penguin researcher in Antarctica to log in). The biggest group of readers still hail from the USofA and Canada, but a surprisingly large fraction of my readership comes from Europe and Asia. Down Under is also fairly well represented, and some readers in South America have recently discovered the blog. Plus there's a handful of die hard poker nuts dialing in from Africa on a weekly basis. Very, very cool.

Thanks to everyone for the interest you've shown in what I write. Thanks, too, for all the emails, questions, likes, and, yes, even the dislikes that you send me. Keep the comments and suggestions coming... I really appreciate the feedback. And here's to the next five hundred posts!
---
The other big number is 3, which is the number of sessions I've played this weekend. Here's the chart for a tad over four total hours of play:

This nice looking chart might be the result of me recognizing the "humbleness" issue I mentioned the other day, which really forced to me to take a hard look at my numbers and how I was playing. Because of this, I've stepped down to $10NL 6max. I've also ramped up my aggression, tightened up my VPIP, and tried hard not to chase. I'm definitely playing better as a result.... oh, plus I am suddenly running pretty good. For instance, I had two straight flushes dealt to me in the span of twenty minutes today. Even better, I got paid off with both of them.

Now if I can just keep this humble momentum going...

All-in for now...
--Bug

The Opposite of Writer's Block

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