Here's the thing: I'm superficial, one of those who never read instruction manuals. I get excited with new things and try to learn by myself and very often I mess up things.
That's exactly what happened with my first, introductory post that you can find here, may be giving it a 2nd chance:
Yes, Your Honour, I didn't put my validation picture and yes, I'm here to beg your pardon
I have to admit I'm not THAT social, but Steemit is such a huge thing that I decided to make some efforts and trying to be skilled about it. So here I am, on my 33rd birthday, with my unsmiling face facing my mistakes and trying to recover them.
(Next step will be learning how to grin in pictures )
OH YES, I HAD TO TALK ABOUT POKER...
Two weeks ago I was playing poker sitting in the Bobby's Room, facing a 30K $ bet from a crazy player, with me holding AT on a board saying A449.
For those who don't know, Bobby's Room is considered a poker temple. All the biggest games in the history of poker have been played in there. Even if on each of the tables there's always at least one million dollars the atmosphere is always relaxed. People smile, people eat. Basically they are all rich men having fun (and freezing cold, I don't know why they always put a -7 degrees temperature in that place considering that polar bears don't play poker...)
Anyway, I'm not a regular in that game, but last summer during the last World Series of Poker I played those stakes quite often. It means that you sit at the table with 40K, 50K dollars and basically hope for the best, because even if you are one of the best player in the world (yeah I probably am in that range in these days), you will rarely play so high, and as I said in my introduction in short time stretches luck matters. A lot.
So, I was facing this huge bet that put me all-in for all my money. The crazy fish (that's how we call recreational players in poker: fishes. Then there are the sharks, who are the professionals. Whales instead are a particular kind of recreational players. It's funny how on Steemit is inspired by a different marine fauna hierarchy.) was very capable of huge bluffs. He was the owner of the biggest students loan company in the US, and he was also into TV contents production. His bet was probably his daily salary. A bad daily salary. May be a bad Sunday salary. May be a Sunday during is vacation.
To me was basically the amount of money I used to earn in two months of mouse clicking playing online.
I don't like folding. So I called and lost to trips fours. It was a 70K$ pot, the biggest of my life.
I took a small break. Washed my face. Reloaded the money. I was trying to pretend nothing really happened. And I wasn't even pretending...I could really handle that mentally. I sat again ready to recover. But the fish left because his wife wanted to go dinner. Thank you wife.
I started playing online poker in 2006. 99% of those who were playing in those days no longer play. I'm a real veteran, and even if I am 33, I can consider my self very old, poker wise. On average poker professionals are 25 years old I think. Back in the days I was very young and casually discovered the game. I have a Magic the Gathering background, strategy games have always been something I was good at. I used to play home poker games with my family, and I felt that there was some deep strategy involved even if at the beginning it looks like a game of luck. So I googled “poker” and I discovered that people was playing online, for real money!
I still remember the exact day: 5 January 2006. I downloaded the client and deposited 20 euros.
I never deposited again. What happened in the following 10 years is in the title.
Ah those days! Every one was bad, and I was bad too. Even the best players in the world at that time had a very rough game knowledge. Poker is studied by a very complex game theory that nowadays has almost “solved” the game. But back in the 2006 none knew about that, and if you made money you felt like you were good, even a God. In retrospective we were all huge fishes.
But to survive in the system you don't need to be the best as possible. You just need to be better than the others. I played for ten years so I went through all the “poker discoveries” that changed the approach to the game. It happens in all sports. Try to watch '70 a soccer game, or a basket game. Compare the tactics to today's games. They looked so naive. Nevertheless the game rules were the same! But great players 30 years ago probably couldn't even approach a game nowadays.
For ten years there have always been hunters, at the top of the food chain, and hunted at the bottom.
Hunted at a certain point gave up, quitting but only after complaining about bad luck, rigged servers and poker rooms awarding only certain players that looked somehow privileged. Sharks who didn't work hard on their games eventually became weak fishes, and died at the bottom of the chain, starting whining and complaining about bad luck and so on.
Do you see similarities?
I am new in Steemit, definitely a “fish”, still not fully aware of its potentials, and not sure if I will ever be a huge content creator in here but I see what is happening.
Steemit is in his early days and looks full of prospective, unripe, a new game with rules in fast evolution exploited by few. Those who don't exploit, whine. Whine about the system, about rules, about whales. The most of those who are making money now will probably stop at a certain point, in most cases not understanding why, supplanted by those who will be creating something new, something different.
Steemit now looks like poker in 2006 A LOT. We don't know how long Steemit will live and how.
But sure it's a enormous thing, with very dynamic rules. There are a lot of articles explaining how to write good contents, how to be in whale's sympathies, and those are very useful things to know now.
But be prepared to change, because everything will mutate quickly. And that's the key idea to have a long time success on Steemit like it has been for me in poker.
At the moment we are looking to the tip of an iceberg, making efforts to understand it while probably, under the sea level, it's not even an ice mass but a huge apple.