Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Otis and the Mea Culpa

This post is worth mentioning. Otis and the Mea Culpa is an excellent entry about a man, one Otis B. Dart, explaining the last several months of the poker blog boom. Here's a bit:
I need to take a brief diversion from our regular poker passion to consider the value of our community of poker players and writers.

I've long believed green felt could've torn down the Berlin Wall. Few substances and even fewer fabrics have the ability to bring together such a wide variety of people, backgrounds, and mindsets. Maybe booze, but green felt is better to set your chips on.

If not for the inherent competition in the game, it could likely serve as the world's greatest relationship therapist.

I believed that even before CJ invited me to begin blogging here on Up For Poker. But once we started here I discovered something even greater. You don't even have to have the felt. You don't need chips. You just need a love of the game.

In the past year I've come to ethereally know some of the best players, writers, and thinkers out there in the poker world. In a few short months I felt myself actually thinking about these folks and talking about them to my wife. How one guy lost his job. How one guy was nursing his pet back to health. How one guy is on the road living a bohemian life.

That was pretty odd for me, to be honest. I typically care about a small circle of people and the rest be damned.
I think that I'm that Bohemian he's referring to. Anyway, Otis summed up pretty clearly in the rest of the entry why writing about poker is as important as it is to read about poker. And we all write and blog for free. It allc omes together in this statement:
We are people who realize that poker is not just a means to play, or not just a means to a profitable end, but a means to some sort of greater understanding of our own minds. If we can understand why we make decisions in a game, me might better understand how or why we make certain decisions in our life.
Way to go, Otis!

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