Before BF

Was watching the live stream of the World Poker Tour Rolling Thunder final table some tonight being shown via the WPT’s Twitch channel -- another use of that platform in poker, incidentally, with that Global Poker Masters event happening this weekend and also being shown on Twitch coming soon as well.

It’s late and they’re still at it, with Taylor Paur (who just won the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars title less than two weeks ago), Jesse Rockowitz, and Ravee Mathi Sundar having been battling three-handed for quite some time.

The commentary is being provided by Kane Kalas and Tony Dunst. Earlier tonight I caught part of something Dunst said about having played online pre-Black Friday -- I think he might have been talking about playing against Paur, who has long been a successful online player. He still is, in fact, having just won the Super Tuesday back in November.

Dunst was noting how a lot has changed in poker over these last almost-four years, and thus memories of having played certain players then (such as Paur) were only of limited relevance when assessing those players’ styles today.

Reminded me a little of Dunst’s appearance in BET RAISE FOLD and the story he shared there of his life as an online grinder coming to an abrupt halt on April 15, 2011. It also reminded me of how that generation of online players -- I’m thinking mainly of the American ones, of course -- kind of split into a couple of camps post-BF, with some moving out of the U.S. and continuing online and others essentially becoming live players almost exclusively (if they stayed in the game, that is).

I suppose it’s more accurate to say that group fragmented into dozens of different directions, as in truth I’m only really referring to a small percentage of the whole. In any case, that era “before BF” continues to exert its influence, and probably will for a while longer, too.

Talking Generational Differences in the Great White North

Rapid-fire posting this morning as we are readying for an early start (11 a.m.) for this first of three Day 1 flights at the World Poker Tour National: Canadian Spring Championship in Kahnawake near Montreal. There is snow on the ground here and cold temps here for my return visit to the Great White North (after having come to Niagara Falls just a month ago).

Got in around dinner time last night and had a fun meal at a local steakhouse with Tony Dunst, WPT Event Coordinator Bennsey Johnson, and my blogging colleages for the week, B.J. Nemeth and Ryan Luchessi.

Among the many topics of conversation was an interesting discussion of the “internet generation” -- i.e., those who are young enough to have grown up in a world in which the internet was already the omnipresent cultural force it is today -- and how they differ from those who came before.

B.J. made an interesting analogy, I thought, when he pointed out how those of us who grew up pre-internet (like he and I did) often have to “translate” online phenomena into offline approximations in order to understand them, whereas the younger generation is already “fluent” and doesn’t have to make that extra step.

Online poker perhaps provides the most ready example, as Tony and his contemporaries all took to the game -- their introduction to poker -- without having to think of it as a “version” of live poker and thus needing to adapt strategies learned in that context when playing online.

I’d go on, but we are already here at the Playground Club and readying to go, and so I’ll stop here. Follow the updates over at the World Poker Tour site today to see how things go, eh?