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Steve Badger interview - Part 1: PlayWinningPoker.com

Your website, Play Winning Poker, is without doubt the best resource about Online Poker on the Internet. The quality of the articles, especially those dealing with Omaha strategy, is extremely high. Good solid content is coupled with a very clear writing style, making your site a better read than the majority of online poker sites and professional poker books.

Q: When did you start Play Winning Poker and what was your inspiration for it?

A: November 2000. That summer, Kathy Liebert told me I should create a place to archive my poker articles. I knew next to nothing about website stuff at the time, and it grew from there.

Q: Why would a successful poker player want to share his secrets on a public medium like the Internet? Don't you run the risk that other poker players might use the information published on your website against you, especially in real poker tournaments? Do you play under your own name in online poker games btw?

A: The concept of "giving back" to the poker world is alien to most people, but I've found it a very positive thing in several ways. A non-obvious one is that writing helps me with my own thought process. Top players do sometimes use certain things against me. It was even the source of a lot of pleasure (for my opponents..) one day when it so happened that a couple of players were able to repeatedly use something against me that I had written about. My Paradise Poker name, ThunderRoad, is well-known, and some people know my name on Pokerstars, but elsewhere it is a secret. I don't mind people watching me play or knowing who I am, but sometimes it is nice to just ignore the chat when I play.

Q: For those readers that don't know your website yet, can you tell us a little about it? Besides the excellent Omaha Poker section, what other poker subjects are covered. For someone new to your website, where would you recommend them to start reading?

A: I try to cover almost all the bases, except hand playing tactics, which I find nearly useless to write about. I put my Winner's Guide to Online Poker online in 2000. There wasn't anything like it on the Internet then, and still very few resources like it, so new online players would want to start there. For novices I have a "How to Play Poker" section that covers a wide range of topics. In general my site deals with the "inner game of poker" -- the mental, strategic approaches to the game. A big part of a successful poker career takes places away from the table, much to the destruction of some partly talented players.

Continue with Part 2 of this interview: Steve Badger's Poker career