John Turner

I haven’t been playing much poker lately. When I have played, it has been in heads-up tournaments, mostly because they seem to move faster and I get impatient. What I also did was read “The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time”. It really changed my perspective on the poker world. Until I read the book, I had thought that the superstars you see and hear about, like Howard Lederer, Ted Forrest, Doyle Brunson and his son Todd, Jennifer Harmann, Barry Greenstein, etc. all had some sort of magical knack for never losing at poker. The book points out, though, that every one of the poker greats you see and hear about has 1) worked their butts off for years to get where they are today, and 2) had times in their lives and in their poker careers when they were flat broke, or worse, in debt to someone else because they lost at poker. I realize now that I shouldn’t feel so bad that I am not regularly doing better in tournaments after a year of playing off and on at the amateur level. The important thing is to keep playing, keep learning, and work harder to make better poker decisions while remembering that it is about the long run, not the short run.