Paul McGuire

Shaun Deeb was already a legend before the 2012 Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) began. Deeb once retired, albeit briefly, at age 24, after suffering immense burnout from grinding it out on the virtual felt in excess of 100 hours a week. Prior to 2012, Deeb was widely considered the best online player who never won a major live tournament. He accumulated $5 million in career online tournament earnings with $3 million won on PokerStars (screen name: “shaundeeb”) and over $2 million at Full Tilt Poker (screen name: “tedsfishfry”). But for some peculiar reason, Deeb’s virtual prowess never translated to brick and mortar rooms, where he only collected $750,000 in earnings with a handful of disappointing runner-up performances.

by Paul ‘Dr. Pauly’ McGuire

California is broke and struggling to pay its bills on time. Many of its politicians would rather “kick the can down the road” than risk losing their foothold on power by introducing unpopular legislation, cutting back services, or raising taxes. But right now, a few politicians are turning to gambling to help solve a colossal $9 billion budget deficit. After all, at the height of the poker boom, it was estimated that more than 2 million California residents played online poker, wagering over $13 billion annually.

by Paul ‘Dr. Pauly’ McGuire

 Poker is getting positive press from the mainstream media for the first time in nearly a year, thanks to the opening of a new documentary titled All In: The Poker Movie. Glowing reviews of the film, directed by Douglas Tirola and produced by 4th Row Films, have been hitting the intertubes since the film’s limited release this past March.

 All In is a survey course about poker, focusing on its rising popularity over the last two centuries. Tirola chronicles poker’s highwatermark, and its glorious boom, fueled by Chris Moneymaker’s stunning victory at the 2003 World Series of Poker’s Main Event. Unfortunately, the film also covers the eventual downfall of the online poker industry, when the Department of Justice shut down major online sites on April 15, 2011, which has been dubbed “Black Friday” in the poker community.

by Paul 'Dr. Pauly' McGuire

 I moved to San Francisco, the epicenter of hipster geekdom, and played in a home game with an eclectic gaggle of tech-savvy poker enthusiasts. The weekly gathering epitomized binge-drinking and cardslinging, but unfortunately, the more intoxicated everyone became, the more the action slowed down. A few bored players killed idle time by playing Zynga Poker on their iPhones.

 Zynga Poker became the most popular version of online poker played in America, because of its partnership with the social media behemoth, Facebook. Bored housewives, college students, and cubicle slaves, battled it out on the virtual felt through Zynga Poker, a free app readily available on Facebook.

Paul ‘Dr. Pauly’ McGuire
I’m an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction books. In my previous column, I discussed four non-poker books that influenced my poker game: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig), The Gambler (Fyodor Dostoevsky), The Art of War (Sun Tzu), and The Warrior Within (Bruce Lee). In this column, I’m going to share three more non-poker books that radically helped me think outside of the box: Blink (Malcolm Gladwell), Switch (Chip Heath and Dan Heath), and Hamlet (William Shakespeare).

by Paul "Dr. Pauly" McGuire
 
I once played online poker every single day for a hundred days in a row. I skirted the fine line between passion and addiction as online poker became a major driving force in my life. Obviously, it’s been a long and frustrating ten months since I last fired up my favorite online poker site and played pot-limit Omaha late into the night. Online poker was my biggest passion outside of writing. A day would not pass when I didn’t think about online poker or hear “alert sounds” rattling around my head.

by Paul 'Dr. Pauly' McGuire - @taopauly
 

by Paul "Dr. Pauly" McGuire
 

by Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire

 “You’ll never make money playing video games!” That’s a direct quote from my mother 30 years ago. She was frustrated with my newly-formed addiction to video games and preferred I hit the books instead of playing Atari with my brother. She scoffed at how many hours we wasted playing mindless games.

 Flash forward to the early days of the 21st Century. Almost twenty years after I acquired my first Atari video game console, I ventured into the virtual world of gaming and played online poker almost every day for seven years.

by Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire

The 1981 World Series of Poker main event was the first poker tournament poker I watched on television. Fifteen years ago I sat in my apartment in New York City, flipping through the slim pickings of late-late night television and eventually stopped on ESPN2. I watched the final table of the 1981 main event, which was hosted by legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy.

 I had never seen a poker tournament before. I sat in awe and wonderment at the action as Stu Ungar held on to win his second main event in a row after he beat out Perry Green, a furrier from Alaska. Ungar faded a field of 75 players—nine tables—to win $375,000.