A Change is as Good as a Rest

I guess if you do something for long enough then things are bound to get somewhat stale. Even back when I had a conventional job, I never stuck at any job for longer than four years. I would hate to have to do the same thing repeatedly for year after year. Writing always seemed like a refreshing change but now it has gone too far in that direction and I crave doing other things.

Sports betting and exchange trading has always fascinated me and on reflection, I don’t think that it has the excitement levels of online poker for a beginner. However the fast moving numbers on the betting exchange markets excite me more than multi-tabling. My problem with multi-tabling is that I switch to auto-pilot and then the next step is boredom which usually kicks in between fifteen minutes and thirty minutes later.

Seeing as poker is really nothing more than a mental contest (peel away the outer layers and the crap and basically that is what it is) then in order to say fresh I think that you need to spice things up every so often. The horse racing markets on the exchanges in the few minutes prior to the start mimic electronic day trading quite accurately.

This has been my new baby of late but seeing as I am like a kid who craves a new toy and then gets bored with it then I wonder how long this will last. I think the process though of changing how you work is good for your frame of mind. At least with a job, if your mindset shifts and boredom and lethargy really sets in then your salary will still be the same at the end of the month.

This isn’t the case with poker as a bad state of mind will cost you. It is far better to have a highly paid part time job than a mediocre paid full-time one and this is what is in danger of happening to any serious player. At the end of the day, there are only so many ways to play poker hands and once you have a solid style then whatever extra knowledge you acquire will likely only have fractional value.

I really don’t think that any online poker player should be putting all their eggs into the online poker basket. Many are going down other avenues and staking and coaching seems to be popular these days.

Even years ago, the evolutionary process of online poker and what paths it was going to take seemed evident to me, this happens with all fields. But if you think that online poker is getting tougher… try the betting exchanges. At least with online poker you can table select and find fish, pretty hard to get heads up with a fish in an environment where the money is pooled and ninety percent of it is pro money… but that’s the fascination.