Poker Player (noun)

Poker Player noun 

Definition – One who whines a lot, typically while playing poker. Also a gambler who doesn’t enjoy, but frequently plays, the game of poker. Typically impossible to satisfy.

Sometimes used as a slang term or insult - “It’s just a paper cut, stop bawling, you act like a poker player!”

See Also – contrary, unpleasant, annoying, or never happy.

The ability of poker players to complain never ceases to amaze me. We all know that life isn’t fair, and playing poker in a casino is one of the most fair and well regulated things we can do. It doesn’t matter how good looking, tall, rich, well educated, connected, well dressed, or well liked you are or if the dealer is your best friend and the floor guy is your brother-in-law, the rules apply to you the same way.

While no system is perfect, poker is drastically more fair than most of the rest of our lives. And our lives (assuming you are a reasonably healthy person living in America) are much more fair than the average human’s life. I get increasingly frustrated hearing vitriol and anger from poker players who have it so good.

Let’s take a look at how much worse it could be…

If you lived in Guatemala and were born into abject poverty with no health care and very little chance at a good education, I would be happy to listen to your complaints, even if they were laced with anger. When you have to carry water home from the water truck every day, anger is a reasonable response.

If you lived in Utah, where there are no poker rooms, then you could whine about the lack of poker, though you are much better off than the people in Guatemala.

In many places in America there is not a card room within 200 miles. If you had no card room, you could complain about that, but you have an abundance of professional card rooms that are clean, safe, and well run.

While I will occasionally bemoan the lack of soft games in Minnesota compared to other places in the country (I am a poker player myself after all), the fact is that the poker climate here is really quite good. A highly skilled player can make a living playing fixed-limit, spread-limit, or survivor games, or they can make an excellent living playing tournaments and hardly leave the state.

The tournament scene has improved immeasurably, with bigger buy-in weekly tournaments, bigger fields, and better structures than even a year or two ago. With multiple MSPT events, regular features like the spring and fall series from the big two at Canterbury and Running Aces, nice smaller events at outlying card rooms, the selection is excellent.

A dedicated player could easily spend $200,000 in tournament entries in Minnesota, and with a measly 50% ROI, make $100,000 a year playing tournament poker in their home state. There are very few states where that is possible, probably less than ten. If you are nit picking at that number, then you need to go back to the beginning and read this article again, it’s about you.

Now that I work with the MSPT, I get to hear all the complaints and see all the negative facebook posts. I’m astounded that Bryan Mileski deals with them as professionally as he does, I’m  not sure I would be so forgiving. The structure will never be good enough, the start times will never be right, and the re-entry rule will always be terrible, no matter how we adjust them.

What was my point? I got a little lost in there somewhere. Just quit whining and complaining about bad beats, structures, and floor decisions, because you are crying wolf and on the occasions when there are legitimate complaints they end up lost in the whine fest and no one pays attention to them. Quit yer cryin’.