Invitation to Learn

Had a lot of fun over the weekend playing golf again, something I hadn’t done a lot of for a long while until recently. Ended up writing something about it elsewhere and so thought I’d just use today’s post here to point you there.

The post appears over on Learn.PokerNews, sort of a spinoff site from PokerNews that I’ve recently begun to help manage. Learn.PokerNews is intended as a site for new poker players and those just getting interested in the game, and I’m contributing with some articles and in other ways including starting to get others involved.

The idea of the site is to bring new players into the game, so the articles are mostly geared toward newcomers or those with a little poker experience -- that is, people looking for a new challenge and thinking poker might be one worth trying.

There are a few contributors at Learn.PokerNews currently and we’ll be adding more soon. I’m also doing a lot of brainstorming with folks about the site and the idea of creating interesting content for those curious about poker and/or just picking up the game.

The whole project is making me think back to first getting hooked by poker -- I mean really hooked like so many others were about a decade ago. Since then there have been multiple waves of new “post-boom” poker players coming to the game for the first time from a variety of different avenues.

Just the other day I was sent a brand new poker strategy book and was kind of surprised to read one of the co-authors describe himself as having first gotten into the game by playing Zynga poker on Facebook... in 2009!

Reading that I realized how after several years of belonging to the same “generation” (so to speak) of players who began playing in earnest -- say, after seeing Rounders in the late 1990s/early 2000s or after watching Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP Main Event in 2003 -- that group has come and in some cases now gone. Meanwhile it’s probably in the interests of those of us who remain to try and get new players into the game both for reasons of self-preservation and for more altruistic purposes of sharing with others all of the good things we’ve enjoyed and gotten from poker since we were first introduced.

I may bring up Learn.PokerNews here from time to time in the form of pointing you to pieces or announcing new writers having gotten involved. I’d like also to ask for your suggestions as well regarding what kinds of content might be of interest on such a site, which like I say is geared toward the new player but should have items of interest to a wider audience, too.

Also, let me go ahead and put out a “call” (of sorts) to anyone who might be interested in contributing in some fashion to Learn.PokerNews to get in touch.

We’re just getting things started over there and so there’s a lot of building up to do with various plans for doing so already in the works. But I am already thinking of the site as hopefully becoming part of a community of people interested in poker and promoting the game, and so would like to do something not unlike what others did for me when I first got interested in the game -- i.e., provide interesting and useful content that helps that interest grow, as well as perhaps a place for folks to contribute as well.

Like I say, leave a comment or shoot me a note (email in the profile) with any suggestions about possible content or thoughts about perhaps participating yourself.

Meanwhile, that piece I mentioned in which I wrote a little about the weekend golfing excursion is called “Off the Green and On the Felt; or, The Object of the Game.” What will you learn from it? Well, for one thing, you’ll learn about what happened to make possible that picture to the left taken on the very first hole of my Saturday round.