If You Like Glenn Beck, Don’t Quit Your Day Job To Play Poker

I know many of you have been watching this Charlie Sheen saga play out and have probably been shaking your head from time to wondering what on earth he must be thinking. Although, who am I to judge? He is "winning" after all!

In my opinion, too much emphasis is being placed on Charlie and not enough on Glenn Beck lately. Beck is 10x as bat shit AND gives us new material virtually every single day. Beck is such a mess that train wrecks slow down to watch him. You know you are pretty fucked up when advertisers on Fox news want to distance themselves from you like 300 of them already have from Beck's show. Think about this for a moment. Companies used to associating themselves with FOX NEWS, think Beck is too far out there for them! These are the advertisers who are perfectly comfortable with Hannity, Coulter, Palin, Huckabee and other Republican State TV talking heads. Yet they are running from Beck. They should really have a Charlie Sheen vs. Glenn Beck battle where they both get up on a podium with a bat shit o meter and the winner is the one who can cause the meter to implode.

I was asked in an interview the other day what type of person I thought would have the best chance of becoming a great poker player. Was it an MIT math major, a doctor, college kid etc? I gave this some pause for consideration and the first thing that popped into my head was who was definitely NOT the type of person who would ever make it as a professional poker player. I have heard some poker players say that republicans in general have very little chance of ever becoming a poker professional because poker is basically a logic game and their hypothesis was that republicans by and large are not logical people and therefore would not make good poker players. It was argued that republicans stance on most things is ideological and often based on lies rather than fact. While this is often true, I argued that I know many good poker playing republicans and all republicans are not created equal. There are some who are simply republicans because they have a lot of money and like that republicans fight to lower their taxes (so you can call them selfish, but not stupid!). There are others who believe in what they think the republicans should, or used to, stand for but no longer do. They believe that democrats are sending us in the wrong direction, but are not happy with their own party either. So they still consider themselves republican, but they are not exactly watching Rush Limbaugh and hanging on every word.

Now that I have had some more time to think about and digest this question, I know I can for sure say this: If you watch Glenn Beck and really think he is spot on, I personally believe you do not have any chance of becoming a poker professional one day. If you believe that these are the end times, that Obama is with the terrorists, that Obama is racist, 9/11 victims are complainers, the only people affected by Katrina are "scumbags", that all Muslims are terrorists, that Obama is secretly trying to create a "master race" and many, many others bat shit insane things, then you can not win money at a logic game. You just can't. So I am not encouraging you to quit poker. I'm just encouraging Glenn Beck followers to sit at MY table!

I do think there are a ton of interesting ways to look at this question of what types of people make the best poker players. The #1 personality type that I think would do well at poker is a liberal college kid with a strong work ethic. While I do consider myself a liberal, I know some of you might be thinking I have a bias towards the liberal way of thought. It is not so much that I am biased in that direction so much as it is a matter of fact that to arrive at the liberal way of thinking, you are much more often using fact and logic. And while this may sound like an extreme stance to take, it isn't. I am just stating facts. If you look at the agendas of the two parties, one is grounded in fact, and the other is grounded in, to put it politely, not facts. When you are against climate change, think religion is a fact, pot should be illegal, online poker should be illegal, trickle down economics, tax cuts for the wealthiest people in a time of recession/depression/war, think immigrants should be shot, believe gay people can be talked out of it, think Obama is not a US citizen, think Obama is a socialist, and well, I could go on for about 9 pages here, but my main point is that to believe in these things, you have to ignore facts as often as possible.

Another type of person who I think would do great is a top attorney. I think they are very used to dealing in absolute fact as well having to present their arguments in a logical fashion. I can't imagine what would stop them from being good poker players. They are also used to working hard and late, which are other huge attributes to being a poker player. So I might just say that the ultimate poker player in the making would be a very good attorney. Liberal college kids I think are the demographic that are the most prevalent in poker today. It seems every time I play in the WSOP I sit with about 6 or 7 liberal college age kids. They are definitely the future of this game.

I think the whole debate on what types of people would do best at poker is pretty interesting. Poker is a very hard game unless you can ground yourself in a logical thought process. If you are someone easily paralyzed by fear or focuses too heavily on the highs and lows of this game, you are really going to struggle. So many people could be good at this game, but their own fears ruin them. They might come up with a great play that will bluff someone out of a pot 75% of the time on average. But when it doesn't work for them 3 times in a row, they fear that the play doesn't work and they abandon it. These are the things that ruin so many budding careers. So many people simply don't understand that this game is about pushing small edges thousands of times and watching that all add up to money in the bank. They get too consumed with the short term and get paralyzed by their own fears to the point that they self destruct at the tables. Much like in politics, in poker, you have to ground yourself in logic and fact as often as possible and you and many others will be much better off for it.