greetings and salutations

finally figured out how to embed a blog in this bitch! i will primarily be using it to blog about poker, but perhaps will discuss other related and unrelated topics of interest.

first of all, why am i thegroupie? in a past life, one of my favorite activities was going to rock’n’roll shows, and for several years i haunted the music scene in cities up and down the eastern seaboard. consequently i became friends with a lot of musicians, but since i am not one myself (and since these were mostly males) i always felt a bit like a groupie. i adopted the nickname for my online endeavors about 10 years ago, as sort of a tongue-in-cheek jab at myself. i am not a “real” groupie of the “almost famous” variety (terrible movie btw), but i find aspects of that culture intriguing, and i admit i do still have a soft spot for boys in bands ;)

this website has been up in various incarnations since 2001. i started it as a place where people (including me) could post photos of themselves with their favorite bands. i did a couple silly little interviews with music friends, as well as legendary groupies pamela des barres and cynthia plastercaster. maybe i should put those back up. i haven’t been using the site for much of anything lately, but i figured it would be a nice place to house this new poker persona of mine.

so yes, poker. i have a lot more to tell you about myself, but right now i will just describe how i got to this point. i spent the last six years working on my ph.d. at an esteemed west coast university. when i finally finished, in early autumn of 2009, i had absolutely no idea what to do with my life. the only thing i was certain of was that i needed to get the fuck out of academia, and fast. the constant guilt, stress, insane workload, minimal pay, unrealistic expectations, and lack of encouragement or respect that comes with being a grad student pretty much destroyed my soul. no matter how much i did, it was never enough to keep up with the overachieving rodents on the perverse rat race up the ivory tower. even if there were plenty of academic jobs out there for new ph.d.s (which there aren’t), it didn’t matter. i was done.

i had learned to play poker one night drinking wine with some friends in los angeles a couple years ago, and we played a few times in very very casual home games. my friends and i basically just knew the rules for what hand beats what; there was no strategy going on whatsoever. i knew i enjoyed playing poker, but my friends weren’t that interested in keeping the games going and they died off. at some point i think i saw a full tilt ad, and decided to throw $50 online just for kicks in april of 2008. i’d play the lowest possible stakes cash games when i was drunk and bored at home, get a huge kick out of it whenever i won a hand, gradually lose the $50 over several months, deposit again. i knew there was supposed to be some strategy behind poker, but i really had no interest in finding it out; i enjoyed gambling purely as entertainment.

after i finally finished my ph.d. i had a little more time on my hands, and it randomly occurred to me that maybe i should try to look into how to play poker for real. i had always won money when i played against my friends, so i assumed i was pretty good; why was it that i kept on losing when i played online? so i found some article for supernoobs online that was called like “how to stop sucking at poker” or something, and i was so fucking appalled – i was a total fish! i was doing ALL of the things people do who totally suck! playing any hand with a face card, chasing out any straight or flush to the river, and fuck if i knew what “position” i was in or why that had any relevance to anything. at first i was daunted; i knew poker was complex, but i didn’t realize it was THAT complex. it looked like way too much boring crazy crap to learn.

at that point my main goal was to get some sort of boring “real job” that paid me a lot of money. or at least, more than grad school did. one of the dirty little secrets that no one tells you about grad school, is that they pay you *half* of a minimum entry-level salary. i just wanted a job that was easy and mindless, with minimal responsibilities, that i could do 9-5 and go home and NOT THINK ABOUT. so i went to the campus career center, and met with a counselor a few times. we did all these personality and skills assessments – meyers-briggs, etc – to help me figure out what kind of job would best suit my temperament. among other things, i am highly independent, introverted, and logic/analysis-oriented; she came up with a lot of suggestions for jobs that might be a good fit, like stuff to do with accounting and computer programming, but honestly they all sounded TOO boring. when this wasn’t really getting anywhere, she started asking me about my hobbies and personal interests, i.e. what stuff i actually LIKE doing. i went through a bunch (i am scarily obsessed with word games such as scrabble and boggle; i have been learning yiddish for the last few years; i figure skate; very interested in music obvs) and i mentioned as an afterthought that i’d been learning to play poker. she immediately pounced on that idea and was like “omg that is the perfect career for you – a professional poker player!” i’m like, “huh?” and she’s all, “haven’t you seen the world series of poker? those people make millions of dollars! you can work independently, set your own hours, use your analytical skills..” and i’m like “uhh.. ok,” but thinking, yeah right – that’s not a valid job! i just got a fucking ph.d. and i’m going to go be a professional gambler?

i absolutely did not take that suggestion seriously, but i did continue to read up on poker on the internet, and bit by bit started understanding how the strategy worked. i was already familiar with the concept of expected value, as part of my dissertation looked at how different areas of the brain are involved in aspects of reward prediction and processing (this falls under the trendy new field of neuroeconomics), including the neural regions that code for probabilities of different outcomes, magnitudes of the expected rewards, etc. this boring poker stats stuff wasn’t really that hard – in fact it was a lot of stuff i already understood! i continued to read up, i started downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of tournament videos, and after a little while poker just started making total sense to me.

and i guess the rest is history! i have been playing pretty much every day since september of 2009, at first still harboring the idea that i was going to get a “real job.” in december, though up only a pathetic $250 from my $50 deposit, i decided that i was going to abandon the real job thing and REALLY commit myself to trying to play poker for a living. i told all my family and friends about it when i went home for the holidays. i won my first big cash ($900) in january, and have just been continuing to work as hard as i can to become as proficient as possible. i spend all day playing, watching poker tournaments, reading poker books. i have had several more large cashes and am up over $3500 at present. and i am so confident that i will continue to have success, as i can feel myself improving every day. i am aiming for the stars with this; if grad school taught me nothing else, it taught me how to work hard, and with the rate i am progressing i see no reason why i won’t someday be playing in the biggest tournaments!! :)