[daveT]

Poker is good for me because if it wasn't for poker, there would be little other resources for making a living wage. For a small amount of money, relative to college, I am able to earn what a trained office professional is able to learn.

As a professional, I am riddled with addiction. This is the healthiest way that I am able to outlet my addictions.

There is very little that I can say to a casual player of why I play. Many casual players do not care, nor take the pride to learn much in their daily lives. Most Americans do not care to read, persue good music, or appreciate art. In a society that still believes that the proper path to education is schooling, this article is going to ring as contradictory.

Most people do not take the time to analyze and reflect upon lessons in life and strategy in life. The average person never read Carnegie, always seeks out employment, and has children long before they are ready. They take the lives that they have now and eat off the plates that are served for them. Trying to talk to people like they are going to improve to some sort of professional executive thinker is not going to work.

I took many dives in my life that where poorly calculated, and even now, I do not believe that knowing how to play poker would have changed anything in my life. I have always been good at games of strategy. Saying that applying this to my life sound like a bunch of BS to me, even.

If people really want to change their lives, and learn, we all need to have experiences. An actor in Orlando is going to quickly figure out that there is no future in Disney World. They will go to LA or NY and fail, fail, fail, and with experience, succeed. I am not convinced that playing poker is going to help this person.

So what happens if all of a sudden I cannot play on-line? I am not going to quit playing poker. I will adjust to the conditions. I will go back to playing in a real casino. No big worry there. Howard Stern was fined over and over again. Did he quit? No, he went where he could express himself and now earns more money than he used to. Did poker teach him this? No. Life taught him this. That he was shrewed enough and thoughtful enough to pull off his success is a reflection of the spark that drove him to succeed in the first place.

Poker will never teach the attributes to learn it.

I think that the biggest test is to say that anyone can learn to become successful at this game, that I can teach anyone to be a winning player by plugging in these attributes. This is outrageous. This forum itself is a testament to how many players are busted out and can't figure out how to beat the game, even after reading 15 books, playing for hours, doing the math, and studying the threads. Many people may be collapsing "as the palm trees are on the horizon." Poker is a ruthless game to win at. Only a select few can say they can beat it. Out of these few, a handful can say that they have mastered all the attributes to truly succeed at it. I would never take the time to teach anyone from scratch. Many people simply don't have the interest to learn something like math. And why would they want to learn for some game anyways.