Tonight I started playing hold’em poker on the iPhone using the Zynga app. In my very first hand I lost with three queens to someone who went all-in with hopes of hitting an inside straight. Of course he hit it, and I was ready to just delete the app right there. I’m glad I didn’t as later in the night I hit a royal flush.

I don’t think I will ever hit a royal flush again in my life. Hell, I never imagined I would ever get one. It’s like one of those things that only happens in the movies. But it did happen, and it made my day.

So our apartment had a poker night for residents, with first prize being $50 off of the next month’s rent. Of course I decided to play. I have played tons of online poker, but I’ve never really played live, so this was a new experience for me.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. I made some stupid mistakes due to the very casual atmosphere, but in the end I did well. I finished in second place and won some glasses. It was rather amusing, actually. It reminded me of Glengarry Glen Ross—“Second prize? Steak knives!” Only here, second prize were four glasses.

Well, at least I won something.

As you can see from my poker blog, I had attempted a fun experiment: To see if I could start with zero money and make it to $60,000 from just online poker. I believe my overall process was spot on and doable: Start by winning money in a sit’n'go or freeroll tournament and then use those winnings to play cash tables. There were two problems with this:

1) Tournaments are susceptible to luck.

• It’s not an accident that Emmanuel Lasker and Garry Kasparov were world chess champions for years: They were head-and-shoulders above every player around them. There is very little luck involved in competitive chess at a very high level.
• You don’t see this in poker. Even the great players don’t dominate like you see in other individual sports. Winning the World Series of Poker three years in a row? Nearly impossible, even for incredibly talented players.

2) Cash tables are incredibly boring

• Right now, I bet I could win $100 to $200 a day just playing the low stakes tables in online poker rooms. But there is a big problem: I find cash games incredibly boring. All it really takes is patience and discipline. So you sit there minute after minute, hour after hour, just mindlessly turning cards over, and the few moments of excitement are anti-climactic–you either get hit with a bad beat or you win a big pot off of the really poor players at the table.

As a result, I just couldn’t continue with this experiment. It was alternately frustrating and boring. Winning a freeroll takes a tremendous amount of luck, and my whole idea was to minimize luck with knowledge. Unfortunately, in chess tournaments, it is extremely hard to minimize luck.

This means that I’m going to drastically curtail my poker play, making my poker site somewhat irrelevant. I’ll keep it up for the occasional poker post and update, but my attention now is going to be aimed at something more interesting: Writing.

I’ve decided to work on my three current projects, pretty much simultaneously: My mystery novel, my science fiction novel, and my Twitter novel. Over the next few weeks I’ll set up a way to track these via this or other websites.

As I mention numerous times on this blog, this is a standard situation for me–my life is a series of tangents that I follow and then abandon (e.g. poker) when I get bored. I then follow the current of my life in some new direction. And that new direction now is writing.

I tend to cash my random business and assorted other checks at a small store and check cashing place near our apartment. I went there today to cash a $50 check in online poker winnings. The person behind the counter generally is always there, and when he looked at the check, he asked me about it.

I told him, “Oh, that’s just poker winnings.”

To which he replied, “You cash the coolest checks!” I asked him what he meant, and he pointed out that last month I brought in a royalty check from sales of my novel. I replied that normally I just bring in expense checks from my job, and he laughed and said, “Expense checks are cool, too!”

I was telling Lea about the conversation, and she commented that it does appear I live this total jet set life–I’m cashing checks from sales of my novel and my poker winnings in between all those expense checks from my travels.

If only it were that glamorous.

So I put my poker secondary blog online. That’s where I’ll gather the chronicle of my pursuit of $60K in online poker winnings. You can check it out at poker.currentsandtangents.com, although I will be cross-posting all the entries here.