Poker Champion

A friend of mine, Darren Kramer, recently won the South African Poker Championship with a first prize of R 1,000,000 ($140,575).

Darren is a great guy and a wonderful poker player, but that doesn't stop me from being jealous when I sit at my desk over a long weekend studying.

Thing is, this wasn't once off. Darren came 3rd in the All-Africa Poker championship winning over R200,000 and a full-expenses trip to play in the 2006 World Series.

Poker is very much a game of skill. One of the best,Chris Ferguson ran an experiment last year , and following various rules, he turned $0 into $10,000.

I started playing online poker in September 2005 by deposting R400 onto a site. The highest I managed to grow that to was R10,500... but I am back down to R3,000. I like Mr Ferguson manage my bankroll very carefully, and so two and a half years of entertainment hasn't cost me a cent. I, unlike Mr Ferguson, did break the rules occassionaly which pushed me back to virtual square one.

What did make me feel better though was that it did take him almost a year to achieve his goal, and I am not even close to the league he is in.

What doesn't make me feel good is the number of friends I have making bucket loads of money in the game. Makes me seem like a horrible person. I should be happy for them. I am. Very. But... I am a very financially conservative, long term thinking guy with bucket loads of actuarial and financial analyst prudence... but oooooooo.... what crazy things I would get up to if I won lots of money playing poker :-)

It just seems money won in that way just begs to be spent recklessly.

Oh well, let me get back to my R100 buy in games (after a 3 month break) while Darren plays his games with R100/R200 blinds and R20,000 buy ins.

To think, I knew him when he was just a boy ;-)