Running with Spades

Current Bankroll: $2 - 700K Play Chips

I haven't had hardly any time to fire up the poker tables in the past week, and have become really antsy to get some decent time at the tables in. I got a bit too impatient the other night and bought into the nightly 500K Play Chip $40 Freeroll at Full Tilt despite being way below the 2M Play Chip minimum that I set for myself as a rule to limit my buy-in for this tournament. I managed to cash in the tournament and get my real money bankroll back in the green, but it has put my play chip bankroll in some very sketchy territory. I'm going to have to really be disciplined and force myself to wait until I've built my play chip bankroll back up to 2M before buying into the 500K play chip freeroll again, so it could be a little while before I'm able to pick up a couple more dollars with the amount of time I've had to play lately.

I recently noticed that my bankroll graph had disappeared, and upon further investigation the table in my database holding the info seems to have been deleted. I didn't have a backup, and neither did my host, so it looks like the first month of my bankroll challenge has been lost in the cyber void. I guess it's not that big a deal since I haven't really gotten anywhere yet, but I still feel a bit sad about not having the challenge on the graph from the very beginning.

In more positive news, Burnley Mik is back with a new blog, Donkey Thrasher, as part of the new UK Poker Scene, a group of UK poker bloggers centered around the Raise the River community. These guys are always a great read, so the site is definitely worth a look.

I recently suggested that Digg needs a poker category for poker related articles. For some reason there has already been quite a bit of resistance to this idea from the Digg community. My understanding of this resistance is that it is a reaction to all the poker related spam that currently surfaces on Digg.

Unfortunately due to the fact that there is no poker category, people who would post legitimate poker articles don't bother because there is no category to post them in and so the only people who are posting poker related links on Digg are the spammers who tend to be a bit more determined than your average user.

This means that the only contact with the poker world that the Digg community experiences is at the hands of spammers whom they viciously hate.

I understand that the poker industry is full of promotions and advertising and that it has it's fair share of spammers (if not more so than other industries), but that doesn't mean that there aren't tons of interesting legitimate articles out that there as well that would make the Digg community a more diverse and interesting place.

What makes Digg such an amazing website is that it embraces community and diversity and allows the community decide what it wants to see and what it wants to bury. But what really makes it successful is the fact that it isn't just a collection of the most popular articles on the web, it actually allows the user to find the most popular articles in areas that the user is interested in.

Without categories, Digg is another list of popular websites that doesn't really serve the needs of the community. If you want to read articles on Apple, you can find them in the Apple category even if they weren't popular enough to make the front page. If you want to read articles on the upcoming election, there is even a category for that.

But if you want to read articles about poker, you have to use the search function, which is fine except for the fact that there aren't really any legitimate poker articles on Digg because people can't figure out which category to post them in.

With a category dedicated to poker, not only would you suddenly see all the legitimate websites and articles suddenly being posted, but people reading other categories wouldn't have to deal with the poker spam that currently plagues categories that have nothing to do with poker.

With a poker category you could let the people interested in poker deal with the poker spam, and you would be providing them with the same right to the great Digg that we all love by providing a category for them to post and find articles.

So please, to all you people out there who think that having a poker category on Digg would be bad for the community, please remember that the community isn't just the majority, or even limited to it's current members. The Digg community is the group of all people who have a legitimate use for the website, and as such we would be doing many people a disservice by continuing to deny them a place to post and find great poker articles.

**Editors Note** There has been some resistance to this idea from the current Digg community. Please see my response: An Open Letter to the Digg Community: Why Digg Needs a Poker Category.

I'm a big fan of Digg for finding interesting articles relating to technology and politics, but I've noticed that when it comes to poker, Digg just plain sucks.

The poker community doesn't seem to have embraced Digg as a means to find and promote interesting articles relating to poker, and I think that the main reason is that there is no real category for poker on Digg, and as such people are often confused as to which category to submit to. Some stories end up in Gaming > Playable Web Games, others in Sports > Other Sports, and even some in Offbeat News just to name a couple. I think that if there were an actual category on Digg specifically for poker we would find that there is quite a large online poker community ready to embrace Digg as a way to find and promote the best websites and news relating to poker.

As it stands now, there are several forums where poker aficionados find their poker news, but for the most part it is quite diluted across the web and there is really no central location that makes finding and promoting the best poker articles easy in the way that Digg does for other genres.

One of the great things about Digg is that they embrace the community and shape the website around what the community wants. I think that if we get the poker community interested in having a poker category on Digg and get enough people to push Digg to make it happen they will surely make it happen.

I am going to send an email to Digg to see if we can get a poker category added to Digg. I will suggest that they place it as a subcategory of both the Gaming and Sports categories. Before I send it though I want to get some proof that there are enough people interested in this. If you would like to be able to use Digg to find interesting poker articles, please Digg this story to show your support. Once there are 100 diggs I will write to Digg to let them know.