As a kid, we had a pack of cards in the house but no gambling culture whatsoever.
Years later I would watch the odd poker video knowing nothing about the game (hand strengths etc.). After an extended period I realized (as well as the You Tube algorithm) that I was getting more and more fascinated with poker.
I then would thrill to watching the European Tour events sponsored by PokerStars from beginning to end. Likewise the WSOP.
Finally it occurred to me I should start playing the game myself (never yet playing a single poker hand) and so I joined PokerStars and learnt by playing 'play money' MTT's.
This is very similar to how I started playing poker too. However, no one was ever against me learning poker early on: the game just never interested me. I have like zero interest in the "thrill of gambling" and to this day, things like betting on horse racing or casino slot machines never appeal to me. I am not 100% against these things if someone gets enjoyment from it, but I guess I just don't see how you would win at these long-term. Horse racing (and other sports betting) has "
odds" factored in, so you are never really "ahead" through much research and statistics because chances are someone has already factored that information into the "odds" and slot machines are a joke because of them literally pre-set by the
casinos.
I don't know, I guess I just had little interest in poker because I put it under the same category of chance while underestimating the value of skill and psychology that poker offers and these other forms of entertainment do not.
I more or less learned the rules of poker in elementary school from some friends of mine (obviously we didn't gamble with
real money) and I had a little fun with poker, but it was just another card game like go-fish or war. It was kind of fun for us to have massive piles of
chips all over the floor though and then imagine we were playing for millions or something lol - to be honest, I don't even think half of us knew how hand kickers worked: we just knew basics like a flush beats a straight.
I guess I wasn't ever really against poker, it just didn't interest me a whole lot. However, I always did seem to have an interest in psychology and a knack at reading people. It wasn't until a college student of age 23 woke up from bed one morning and literally thought to himself: "hey, I
bet I could be good at poker." I then started learning poker more seriously as just a challenge to myself. I literally was learning just for the love of the game and as a way to put my psychology skills to the test. Since then, I've actually been enjoying my poker improvement and been doing better than I would have even thought.
In my quest for improvement, my first big step (just after learning all of the rules and subtle points of the game) was finding a
poker forum community I could interact with. It was that day I created my account here at cardschat.com and the rest is history as they say
