I’m Finn Callahan, and this is a site for people who’ve decided to take poker seriously, or who are in the middle of deciding.
I started playing in 2006, when poker was on TV every night and it felt like everyone I knew was suddenly talking about it. I’d just finished high school, had no real plan, and this looked like a door that had swung open.
So I did what most people did. Small deposit, sit-and-gos, ran it up a bit, then nearly handed the whole thing back, because I’d never heard of bankroll management and had no idea I was doing anything wrong. Being broke and unwilling to reload turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. I read instead. Forums, mostly, and a lot of hands played badly and thought about afterwards.
That’s what actually changed things. I moved to full-ring cash, played more tables at once than I probably should have, and slowly ground a small roll into something that mattered to me. By then I wasn’t playing for fun. I was building toward a real attempt at doing it full time, and I was close.
Then one morning I sat down to fire up the tables and the money was gone. Not lost at the tables. Locked away, for years, by something entirely outside the game. That’s not a bad beat story. It’s just where that chapter stopped.
I came back after legalisation, with a small deposit and whatever evenings I had. These days it’s micro-stakes cash for enjoyment and the occasional small tournament.
What I have is twenty years of paying attention to a game most people dip into and leave, and the whole arc inside it. The boom, the near-bust, the decision to study, the exile, and coming back to a game that had got considerably harder while I was away. If you played through that era and you’re wondering whether it’s still worth sitting down, I know where you’re standing.
Articles here are researched against current sources and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed by a person before publishing. My role is editorial rather than writing original strategy.
If something here is wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it. finn@daze-inc.com
The one thing I’d argue for
Decide what poker is for you, then act accordingly.
A fun pastime is a perfectly good answer, and it needs no study at all. Wanting to improve is also a good answer, but it’s a different one, and it means doing the work. The mistake almost everyone makes, and the one I made for years, is wanting the second while behaving like the first.