Seven Years of Good Luck

Just a quick note to mark the occasion of the blog turning seven years old today.

“You’d be in second grade by now,” says Vera.

Yesterday I spent a little bit of time bringing all of the archive pages up-to-date once again. I usually keep adding the new items to those pages as I go, although will sometimes fall behind by a few weeks.

If you scroll down and look on the right-hand column, you’ll see pics with links to the five different categories of posts -- “On the Street,” “The Rumble,” “Shots in the Dark,” “High Society,” and “By the Book” -- which take you to the pages to which I’m referring. (Or just click the links in this paragraph.)

There I’ve listed links to every post I’ve written on Hard-Boiled Poker, all 1,917 of them (including this one). I remember when I started building the archive pages, I would add a sentence to each summarizing what the post was about. That proved too much of a hassle after a while, and so all you get are the clickable post titles.

The largest category over the years has become “The Rumble,” which really ought to have been a couple or three categories. That’s where I have placed any post having to do with “how poker is presented & discussed in various media,” and so usually any hard-to-categorize post (like this one) ends up in that box.

Vera has been suggesting to me that I should think about collecting some of these posts and perhaps put them out as ebooks or in some other fashion, and I’m starting to edge closer to doing something along those lines. Not all of the posts are worthy of such treatment, of course, but some are and I think it would be fun to try.

Despite the high volume of posts, I’ve always tried to include at least something worthwhile in each one to reward those giving a few minutes of their day to reading it. It’s tough sometimes -- especially continuing with this at-least-once-every-weekday schedule as I do -- to remain inspired. But as anyone who has stumbled onto this blog well knows, the poker world seems to provide an inexhaustible supply of stories and characters about which to scribble.

Thanks again, everyone, for coming around and further inspiring me to keep this sucker going. I feel especially lucky to have had readers all this time, not to mention fortunate when I think of all the places the blog has helped take me over the years. And, most importantly, I’m grateful for all of the great people and friendships I’ve been privileged enough to enjoy thanks in part to our finding each other here at HBP.