Are Poker Communities Possible?
I started working on another post about River Street (I promise, it's coming soon, salvelinus), and it got me thinking about poker communities. River Street made my poker life into a community. I honestly have never felt part of a community in poker since then. These days, I am in poker as I am in most things - an outsider looking in.
Poker has become a solitary activity. I do play mostly online at the moment, simply because the EV is better. But, even when I was travelling weekly to Foxwoods or playing a few times a week at the games in NYC, I was generally not part of a specific community.
As an outsider, I often wonder if the poker communities that I see around me are genuine. Are people really friends in poker? How much time do they spend together? How much time do they spend talking about the game? Are their friendships primarily outside of poker or is poker the central commonality that holds the relationships together? I admit that while I can often make great reads of people and their tendencies at the poker table, relationships - even those in poker - have usually remained completely mysterious.
My closest poker-playing friends are simply not as deeply into it as I am (e.g., W.D. and nick_marden), and our relationships are primarily defined in commonalities that are wholly outside of poker. So, I naturally wonder what I'm missing that these seemingly tight nit groups of poker players have. Do players in these groups have an edge over the solitary, self-motivated player? Is there more to be learned by having a group than going it alone? Is poker more fun and less lonely that way?
Oddly, I got seriously into poker primarily as a way to meet people outside of the computer science world and expand my horizons. But, ironically, I don't meet many people anymore in poker. Sure, just like on a plane ride, I meet the occasional “single-serving friend” at the tables, but I rarely ever see that person again. I am certainly not finding friends easily in poker anymore; I am mostly just showing up to take their money.
From time to time, I have thought about getting out there and just building a poker community myself. I was reminded of this when Howard Lederer talked on The Circuit recently about the group that came out of the old Mayfair club right here in NYC. They became some of the best in the world because they came together as part of a group that learned from each other. The NYC poker clubs of today are too transient now to make that happen. Nevertheless, the idea of forming a poker study group has crossed my mind more than twice. I wonder, though, if it would be worth the effort. I doubt that anyone in NYC but me is enough of a poker geek to show up regularly to sit around and talk about poker without even playing it. But, I'm still thinking about it, anyway.
As for online “communities”, like the 2+2 fora, such things aren't for me anymore. As a lifelong computer geek, I've already spent far too much of my life substituting online venues for real life interaction, and I resolved long ago not to do that anymore. It's real life or burst, at least in that arena.