Welcome to Dispatches from the Felt

My name is Kent Anderson and I have just completed my first year of playing poker for a living. I am not a professional, but a regular guy who had his fill of conventional employment and decided to swing the bat playing a game I love. This column won’t be about false promises of incomprehensible sums of cash, but rather a practical discussion of the realities, as I have experienced them, of playing poker to pay the bills.

Quitting your job to play poker is not for everyone, and is a personal decision one should make only after very honest evaluation. Basically, the full Monty is a conversation best had with oneself. However, whether you play cards to supplement your income, play in a regular home game or want poker to be where your bread is buttered I will discuss ways to wrap your head around this game that will help you make better decisions and ultimately make you more effective at the table.

Like life there is no absolute answer when it comes to poker. You won’t read about how to play AK suited under the gun or how much you should raise pocket 7’s on the button. My feeling is that advice like this is poison. Nobody knows the answer to these questions and the number of different variables involved each time you sit down at the table make it impossible to come up with a specific answer.

I believe it comes down to being able to perceive your innate instincts in an attempt to make the best decisions for your individual situations. I firmly believe that we all have the answers but for one reason or another (which I’ll discuss ) we get in our own way. Your toughest opponent is yourself and the more you stay out of your own way the more success you will have.

The ultimate goal is for this column to be a point of departure to begin a fresh conversation about poker and help everybody (myself included) explore a more intuitive approach. My goal is to also inject some humor and for all of us to enjoy our time on the felt. The poker table is a battlefield, but fortunately if your head is straight it can be an enjoyable and even profitable campaign. Like Paul Newman said in THE HUSTLER, “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.”

About Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson has spent the past year making the rounds at various poker rooms on the West Coast. He started playing poker at a cigar shop in the Belmont Shore section of Long Beach, California in the early nineties. Anderson, who hails from Long Beach, spent his childhood in South Africa before returning to study history at UC Berkeley, where he also rowed crew and was active in the Sigma Nu fraternity.
After punching the corporate clock for several years at Universal and Castle Rock Entertainment working for a feature film producer, he branched out on his own and is developing original film and television projects in addition to honing his poker game. Anderson, also an avid waterman, prolific in sailing and surfing, believes two simple credos: what others think has no material impact on your life unless you let it, and it's more fun to have more fun."