Who
Who Am I?
My name is Paul
I am a web 2.0 enthusiast, search engine evangelist, writer, recently married father and Poker player.
I was one of the founders of the vault9 network and kinetiq and was responsible for positioning and PR as well as new ideas and research for kinetiq although I suck at positioning and PR I am great with ideas.
I came up with most of the concepts for blogmad.net and another project called xlinks which seems to be dead in the water currently.
Most unfortunately the Kinetiq team has almost disolved completely and no work has been done on any apps in the last year or so.
I’m currently employed by a large South African Media company in the capacity of a Systems Manager, whichmeans I manage a web cms, I also spend a fair amount of time dealing with Web Applications and I get to flaunt my SEO knowledge every so often.
I’m in love with anything to do with online marketing and strategy, new web apps and the web 2.0 revolution.
I have a fondness for open source and anything unixy/linuxy
I love a good joke and have no qualms poking fun at anything worthy of my wrath.
I love writing. I have written a number of poker articles for 52outs.net as well as some articles for various other sites and magazines. I’ve been working on a novel but it’s far from finished.
Writing seems very natural to me, I love writing about the faults I find in everything, especially the government of South Africa and other things which are easy to poke fun at.
I have written a number of short stories over the years but decided to keep and publish just a handful on this blog.
You can take a look at some of my short stories over here.
I got a novel in progress if you wanna follow it to date its over here.
As a poker player I got exposed to holdem a few years back but never took much notice of it, I had played variations of poker over the years and when holdem exposed itself to me a second time, I fell in love.
I have been playing relatively seriously for just over 2 years now and obviously aspire to play at the world series one day.
The closest I have come is placing 14th at All Africa, missing a seat to Vegas and the world series by 4 places.
I have had relative small successes in large multi table tournaments and my biggest accolade to date was a 1600 player tournament that I won.
I have often given thought to becoming a pro poker player but I am far from it, if I do go that route one day, I will start off as a semi pro, keeping my job and playing in my spare time.
Holdem is an easy game to learn, as Mike Sexton says, “It takes a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master”
My son Dylan has also started playing poker and totally loves it, he will be a better player than I would ever be because he has had an early advantage over other people. Not to mention the fact that his mathematics is superb and will be way better than mine, thus giving him another edge completely. Most of the pros were taught poker as young children.
I am extremely proud of my boy as he is alot more at his age than I ever was – not only is he an avid footballer and classroom whizkid but he also has the abs I always wanted.
When I am not out playing poker or hanging out with my boy, you can catch me on irc.shadowfire.org in #52outs or playing on Piggs or Full Tilt as riverboatrat.
The origins of that poker nickname stems from the fact that in my first proper game of holdem, I made a series of full houses on the river (the last community card in holdem)
A riverrat is someone that continously makes a winning hand on the last street or river and a boat is the holdem nickname for a fullhouse – hence: riverboatrat.
Enjoy my blog.
Want more info on me? Theres a list of 101 useless facts about me over here