Poker has arrived! With the popularity of its television coverage, poker has hit the mainstream, filling poker rooms and online sites with a new generation of players. They come, interestingly enough, from the likes of Hollywood celebrities to the tens of thousands of average people from around the world.

Recently while I was in a casino, a player who knows I write for Card Player asked me a question. Now, since I’ve been writing, I’ve been asked lots of questions by players on a broad range of subjects, but in all honesty, I’ve never thought about the following subject until the question was posed to me. The player asked me a question I wasn’t expecting: “What do you hate the most about poker?”

It/s the new year, and like most, I have made many New Year/s resolutions. This year, I vow to listen. Would you like to join me?
As I was growing up, I was a mischievous kid and was constantly reprimanded. My mom or dad would tell me what I did wrong, and then I/d hear those infamous words, “Are you listening?”

It’s time to say happy holidays to all of my friends, and you. Is it that easy to do? Well, sure it is. I mean, I guess it is. After all, I try to beat my friends out of money every day. But, everyone has been very friendly – well, everyone except the guy who slow-rolled me! I have such a list of great memories for the year gone by that this is going to be a piece of cake!

Recently I was reading RGP (rec.gambling.poker), an Internet poker newsgroup, when I came upon a post about a tournament in Ohio that is sponsored by the American Heart Association. I clicked on the link and found a website dedicated to poker in Ohio, and it contained all the info on the tourney. There was even a web page dedicated to Ohio’s own poker son, Jim Lester.

When I was in my 20s and living in New York, I could not get enough sports on television. This was very early in the life of cable television and ESPN. Many places didn/t have cable available, and SportsCenter in those days was a microcosm of what it is today. So, I got my sports from radio talk shows and the 11 o/clock news. I loved watching the highlights, and CBS at the time had a sports reporter by the name of Warner Wolf who always cried, “Let/s go to the videotape.”

A few issues ago I wrote about ladies-only tournaments, and that I believe they help in getting new players into our game. I wrote about how these tournaments tend to be a great starting point for new players, and that with a little luck, these players will move from tournaments to live-action poker games.

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently at Commerce Casino, where he plays in the pot-limit hold’em game. I consider him a very good player in that game, and he will admit that it is his best game. We were talking about how he’d been running, and he brought up a hand that he lost and asked my opinion as to how he played it at the end. I say at the end because based on his explanation, he played it perfectly up to the river. Here’s a quick rundown to illustrate the point:

I remember the first time I walked into Binion’s Horseshoe in Las Vegas. It just happened to be during May, and the World Series of Poker was in progress. I saw throngs of people lining the rails to get a glimpse of what turned out to be the final table of the big event.

Earlier this year in the Jan. 18, 2002, issue (“A Tale of Two . “), I wrote about Carlos and Jay, and the two different roads they took to learn, play, and win at the game of poker. Carlos took the route of going to the casino many years ago, sitting at an instruction table, and learning the ropes by playing the game. Jay, on the other hand, made analogies to chess and therefore took a more conceptual approach to learning the game. As I said then and I’ll say now, neither approach is wrong. Jay just has many more tools available to him than Carlos had. These tools are the books, computer software programs, online forums, and so on that I’ve mentioned many times.