This article originally appeared in Card Player Magazine . One of the enduring pleasures of owning a computer and connecting to the Internet is the ease of finding a community of people for just about any interest you might have - including poker. If you're not wired up and dialed in, you may not know about poker's primary community. It's a newsgroup called rec.gambling.poker . Newsgroups are locations in cyberspace where you can read, post, and respond to messages about issues of mutual interest and concern.
Some messages are banal, others boring, and a few are simply news items about events of interest.
Recantations of poker road trips abound, as do debates that occasionally escalate into flame wars. But real gems sometimes work their way through poker's newsgroup, and when that happens, the level of dialogue is elevated to a higher order. When all has been said and done, those who took the time to follow the debate usually learn something that measurably improves their game. Morton's Theorem is one of those gems. It was posted to the newsgroup by Andy Morton, a Los Angeles-based poker player who concluded that David Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker does not usually apply in multihanded situations.