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The Online Poker Generation Takes Over
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Author: Marc Weinberg
April 16 - While watching two dough-faced boys barely out of their teens fight it out heads up for the 2006 US Poker Championship on an ESPN rerun last night it occurred to me that there is a new hybrid of the Slacker generation. Welcome to the OP Generation, no more sleek in appearance but way more evolved in terms of a game plan.
When I was but a lad of twenty-one the idea of work in the common sense of punching a clock for some corporation of suits was anathema. This was the time of Grunge where rebellion took the form of the late shift at the book store or coffee house (they were just coming back into fashion) and settling for a normal existence was out of the question.
The answer back then was to lead an abnormal life of sloth and aimlessness - believing in nothing except for that world-weary cynicism known to nerds as contemptus mundi. We didn't achieve much, but our parents' generation had done very well so it wasn't that big of an issue.
Today's 2.0 version of the slacker is a far more sophisticated model. The antisocial behavior is there: he spends all his time in a state of undress in a room with a computer, never communicating let alone emerging for social activities. But this is no "slacker" in terms of finances. The online poker player wants fame, fortune + the lone wolf independent lifestyle, and they're willing to work hard to get it.
Make no mistake that playing online poker every day while you live in a hotel room at the Commerce (the lot of Devon Miller), multi-tabling for sixteen hours a day (a list of the new breed) is a grind. The burn-out rate will be high and swift just like that job at Goldman or McKinsey.
So who were the protagonists at the US Poker Championship last year? The final heads up battle was between Alex Jacob, resplendent in his shapeless grunge shirt, unshaven, unkempt, and generally slack to the eye, and his good friend Jordan Morgan. Jacob eventually won, an event which he accepted with the same docile equanimity that he displayed throughout. You could almost hear him say, "hey, it's just one tournament. The money is nice but it doesn't really change anything. This is just what I do."
Morgan could be the world's first shifty-eyed Midwesterner. His opaque childlike exterior resembles a blank canvas (so far so pure Midwest), but this is no Oakie. Inside he's making calculations to carve you up. Both were at the WSOP for the first time in 2006 now that they're legal. Between them they cashed 10 times, made three final tables, and got everyone's attention.
These guys are silent at the table but extremely polite to the point of being socially passive. They're awkward to watch, their movements plotted out in excruciatingly deliberate slow motion because they are still learning to act in front of others. But make no mistake, they are changing the way we will all play poker in the future. Their strategy is evolved way beyond the dinosaur-era stuff that we were weaned on five years ago.
There are too many of these guys to keep track of - Gigabet, Shaniac, ZeeJustin, Gobboboy, the mythical Johnny Bax, and it seems like hundreds more yoked together by the knowledge that they alone are the best poker player in the world. Every college campus in America has several of these guys to call upon, and the rest of the world is right there as well.
Playing online poker for a living is the new response to the age old dilemma of newly forged adults: what to do with one's life now that you are solely responsible for it all that isn't settling.
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