El Diablo

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA


Why should I have sympathy for the devil?

What has that fucker ever done for me? Well, except get me laid, wasted, and led through a maze of debauchery, so much so, that I have enough stories to fill up four books and material for a few screenplays and an HBO mini-series. When I listen to the devil, I always get caught up in the most awful scenario possible. How bad? Imagine getting stuck in an elevator for 48 hours with Ted Kennedy but there's not any booze... or imagine a bad acid trip where you have to drive a busload of humorless Nazis and rabid political pundits through rush hour crosstown traffic and the only thing on the radio is the polka station. That's what happens when you hang out with the devil on a good day.

When you walk the straight line and follow the choir of angels into heaven, you find inner peace and eternal salvation. But isn't that.... dare I say... boring? I always pictured heaven sort of like having Easter Sunday brunch at Tavern on the Green with your grandparents. Everyone is well dressed, the culinary choices are delectable, but the conversation seems too stifled and everyone around you is stiff as shit.

Hell is a whorehouse in Tijuana with cockroaches crawling over piss-warm beers, hookers older than Joan Rivers, Coldplay screeching on the jukebox, a midget eating a jar of pickled eggs, and a bandito in the corner fondling a butcher knife.

That's the beauty about life. Someone might find Tavern on the Green as a personal hell, while others hope to God that heaven is a brothel south of the border.

Who knows for sure? That's why you play the game. Why waste time and energy worrying about the big questions in life? What's the point?

We're born. We live. We die.

We do a lot of stupid shit in the middle and blow most of our slave wages on useless material crap. But that's the point. It's what you do with the little time you have that makes life worth living. Money isn't the root of all happiness, but it can buy you a lot of stuff to make you feel happy. And for some people, that's good enough.

If you're not a complete degenerate gambler, or a fucked up head case who is addicted to losing, or a lonely soul looking for conversation... then you play poker to make money. That's the point, right? To win enough money so we can keep playing more poker tomorrow. Next week. Next month. Next year. The good players can deposit $500 to a single site and run that up to hundreds of thousands of dollars while never having to reload. The shitty players get stuck digging into their personal wealth and savings to fund their poker hobby. Let's face it, if you're constantly losing at poker and don't blink twice to reload your bankroll, then poker is just another expensive hobby like hang gliding or golf. Those are the fuckers that I want to play against. Dotcom millionaires. Japanese industrialists. Trust fund kids. Son of a sheik. Heir to the Spork fortune. Colombian cocaine traffickers. Old school Texas oilmen. They are all white whales.

Did you know that Isildur is Swedish for whale? Maybe it's not. Babelfish is so unreliable these days.

I heard a story about a guy who lost his entire sporting goods business because of gambling debts. Wait, maybe that was a plot line out of a Sopranos episode? Who cares. Regardless, go to any GA meeting and you'll find some schmuck in tears who admits that he lacks have self-control. You wanna be cruel? Wait for him to get out of his meeting and ask him to flip coins for $100. He can't say no. That's why drug dealers hang out in parking lots of AA and NA meetings -- to drum up new business.

It's a fuckin' cruel reality that given the chance, any degenerate gambler would run up his spouse's credit card in order to make one more bet to get unstuck. Life longer losers roll away their rent money or have no qualms about fleecing Little Johnnie's college fund that grandma had set up. I say go for it. Bet it all on black. College is overrated these days. Why the fuck do you want to drop a quarter of a million to send Little Johnnie to Stanford where he'll end up a fascist frat boy with a penchant for date raping coeds snookered on Jell-O shots, or worse, he'll become a hash-toking-commie-pinko-eco-freak-tree-hugger?

Or how about this.... stake Little Johnnie at the tables. To hell with being a Little League coach or a Soccer Mom. How about teaching Little Johnnie how to play a wrap in PLO8 instead of trying to hit a curve ball? Online poker is a far more lucrative and a more exciting adventure than wasting money on an investment in one's education. Why send your kid to private school when you can send him to public school and fund his online poker account instead?

Right now, Swedish children as young as eight years old are sitting on seven figure bankrolls. These kids are fuckin' hellcats, sort of like Children of the Corn except with messier hair and designer sunglasses. How many 2nd grade drop outs do you know who have Swiss bank accounts?


Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.