Email = g00t

September 4, 2008

Email is, in almost every respect, my preferred method of communication. It’s not just the ease of use; it’s the content that’s a million times better than I get over the phone or in the old mailbox barely hanging on to its decrepit post out front by the road.

Take, for instance, an email I got not too long ago inviting me to play in a four-tournament freeroll series with some of my favorite people in poker. My friend Matt Showell, in addition to being a superstar tournament reporter at PokerListings, also likes to actually play poker. Last week he invited me to come along with him and several other of my favorite people in poker for three Saturdays this month to play a series of small-field tournaments he’s calling the PokerListings Run-Good Challenge.

Here’s the structure. Twelve players will play a different game every week (regular NLHE, turbo NLHE, half NLHE/half PLO) with the top three getting paid in each event. Everyone gets points for their finishes (6 for first, 5 for second, etc.), with the top six overall finishers after three weeks (one PL representative and five challengers) advancing to a deep-stack NLHE Grand Final.

Seriously. Email rocks. I don’t get offers like this via phone. And don’t even think about something cool coming in the mail.

Run good, baby!

The chance to play for free money is always good, but the opportunity to do so against a small field is even better. Still, I’ll definitely have to run good playing against the likes of hottest girl in poker Lacey Jones, Houston cougar Michele Lewis, outlaw poker writer Pauly, California pothead-slash-fashionista Change100, blog overachiever and Matusow biographer Poker Shrink, hard-boiled poker literary giant Shamus, stalwart poker blogger and Olympic 20km Walk superfan Kid Dynamite, The Entities Who Need No Explanation Or Introduction, and the two PokerListings representatives, Matt and strategy writer Dan Skolovy. Also, gonzo pink-shirt wearer Pokerati Dan is playing, but I wouldn’t keep with the theme of all my years of interactions with him if I said anything nice like “I need to run good to beat him.” (Besides, have you ever seen those bankroll graphs he occasionally posts in lieu of writing about his own play?)

I have to admit, too, that something like this gives me a reason to play poker again. I have only played on occasion since coming home in mid-July, for lots of reasons. Slight WSOP burnout is among them, but factoring much more heavily into the equation is the fact that the majority of the poker available to me is against unknown quantities over a crappy satellite internet connection. Together, spotty connections and random opponents introduce entirely too many variables into the online poker experience to make it enjoyable for very long. By contrast, the chance to play against a small field, most of whom I know in the “real” poker world, makes the game I fell in love with four years ago interesting and fun for me again.

As Pauly said during this year’s WSOP, “Poker is a simple game. Played among friends, it can be one of the most entertaining experiences in life.” After grinding in the corporate tournament poker trenches for a few years, churning out descriptions of hand after hand that everyone in the game has seen a million times before, I can’t put a price tag on making the game fun again. And I’m getting it for free, all thanks to email.

Hooray, email!

(For those of you who might want to watch the game, the whole thing kicks off at 2 p.m. EDT on PokerStars this Saturday.)

The post Email = g00t by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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