People don't read any more

 The most common reaction I got when I told people 7 years ago I was writing a book on satellites with Barry Carter was

“Why? In this age of training videos, nobody reads any more?”

But do they?

Seven years later, the book has sold over 100 times as many copies as I was told to expect it to sell (and still sells more every month than I was told to expect lifetime), and may not even end up being my biggest seller (GTO Poker Simplified is catching it fast). 

I hear similar claims made for shorter written content: that in this age of training videos nobody reads strategy articles or newsletters, and in the age of vlogs nobody reads blogs. 

Dear diary....

I started writing this blog almost two decades ago purely for myself (I’d written a similar journal in my running days) never expecting anyone else to read it. I remember the shock the first time I ran into someone at a poker tournament who had, and I realised I was going to have to be a little more careful when I got death threats from one player angered by what I’d written. I remember the endorphin rush when I wrote my first blog that got 100 readers: imagine that, one hundred people actually reading something I’d written! I remember the first 1000 reader blog I wrote, and the first 3000, 5000, 10000, 20000 and 50000 ones. I remember my delight when the counter on the blog overall hit 100k, 200k, 500k and a million. 

It felt like the blog peaked about ten years ago, and as I got approached and paid to write for other sites and moved more towards books, my posts here slowed down and withered to the occasional piece to promote a new book or course. While I was very flattered to be asked to write for other sites (and the money was nice) I did feel a tinge of regret at abandoning the blog. One of the things I most liked about the blog was the idea that when it’s all over, I (and others) could look back for a full warts and all in running account of my poker career. I often go back to read old blogs to check if my memory of certain key events aligns with the reality I wrote at the time (and I’m often both alarmed at how widely different it is, and happy to have it to refer to. Human memory is very imperfect, we remember the retellings of events which tend to change over time like a corrupted hard drive rather than the actual event itself). It therefore saddens me somewhat that the last five years or so contain so few of these accounts. 

Don't call it a comeback

When VegasSlotsOnline decided to stop publishing written poker content earlier this year, I made a decision that rather than move to another paid site I’d revive this blog. It was predicated on people actually reading it, which I wasn’t sure they would any more. I was pleasantly surprised by the numbers who did read the first few entries, and really really surprised by how many were going back and reading old blogs once I started promoting them again. David Bowie told me once the real secret to longevity (in the music industry) was you didn’t need every album to be a hit: you just needed one every five years or so, to a new audience who would then go back and buy your older albums. Similarly with the Chip Race we know from the metrics that as long as we continue to attract new listeners, the old episodes continue to get listens as a small percentage of those new listeners dip back into the back catalogue. 

There was a time I wasn’t sure this blog would ever get to the million mark. Monthly reads had declined back into the hundreds when the overall number was around 900k, so the math indicated a million might never come (at least in my lifetime). To get there I put in a spurt of effort into both new posts and promoting the older ones.

Since then, monthly hits ticked along in the 2-3k region, which was fine, but since I started updating this blog again this year, and promoting it more, that number has increased ten fold. So don’t tell me people don’t read any more: maybe they just don’t want to read the AI slop that seems to be taking over most poker sites. 

In an effort to make this blog a complete central repository for my short written poker content I have already started moving older pieces written for now defunct sites here. I’m excited about the blog again (I genuinely think it’s fairly unique in the poker content space), grateful to everyone who reads and helps spread the word, and open to all feedback as to what I should write about.

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