Spare Change

So much change in a blink of an eye. If you don't go to Vegas often then you will be amazed everytime you travel there. With changes in the way we live our lives and the speed of electronics and medical miracles, we sometimes forget our history even very recent history. It really wasn't that long ago that there were no cell phones except for maybe the CIA & Maxwell Smart's shoephone. You couldn't play poker on-line because there were no computers. Even when computers were introduced to households there was no dierct line to Party Poker. Now people even advertise their home games on-line. On the other hand there were no panhandlers with signs on freeway exits. There were no school shootings with bullied kids at the end of the shot guns. Mom & Pop stores and home cooking is now replaced with 7-11 and Dennys. You didn't have to pay for a glass of clean water and could just turn on your t.v. & the light bill was all there was to pay. The biggest change that I have seen in over 50 years has been the change in people. Poker is the same game it has always been but the people have changed. We have more things in our lives to worry about. There is a scary e-coli, flu, disease, killer bees, predators or some other horror, lurking and waiting for us as we roam the earth. Or at least the media hypes it up that way. People are not as open or forgiving as I have seen in my past. The ways of this world has made the general public more wary. This has to affect the way the game is played as opposed to the players of the olden days. In the 70's when I saw the game introduced in Vegas there was not the action you see now. As the game changes so must the players. I believe that the main difference is odds, whether pot or implied, that tends to rule a players decisions foregoing the players, the humans, who are involved in the hand. Allot of it comes from the mentality of playing on-line, loosing the real FEEL of the game. I feel that the game of poker was a more intimate game back then. It's hard to completely focus on your game in a warehouse of over 100 other games or cameras following people around, flashing lights in your face and asking some really ridicules questions. Remember you are not a machine nor is your opponent.