10 Questions Answering the Who and Why Bill’s Poker Blog Site Exists
1. Who is Bill?
That’s a question I ask myself every day. As soon as I have an answer I’ll update this page.
2. What’s Bill’s Poker Blog about?
It’s been about many things over the years. Way back in the day I got together with a friend and we created the Real Internet News Initiative (RINI.org). We picked the name because I already owned the domain and we were too lazy to think of anything cooler. Of course, that was before it was called a weblog. In fact, it was so far back that it was before there was an Internet. We used to chisel posts into stone tablets and then we would walk those tablets (uphill in the snow – both ways) to our friends and families caves so they could chisel in comments as we sat around the campfire. Like I said, that was a long time ago. Things have changed a bit since then.
With the invention of computers RINI.org was combined with billrini.com and it was a weblog with little purpose and a complete lack of goals other than to serve as a place for me to post links to interesting stuff so I could find them when I woke at 2am in the morning trying to remember what the URL was to that crazy chicken website I had seen six months ago. Needless to say the audience was quite small.
The most recent transformation of the site has been to chronicle my poker life. When I first started playing poker seriously (and some would argue that hasn’t happened yet) I ran across Iggy’s site and said “That’s pretty cool. I’ll rip off his idea instead of coming up with one of my own.” With that, another poker weblog was born.
3. Will Bill’s Poker Blog help me become a better poker player?
I certainly hope not.
4. What’s your poker story?
Well, even at an early age I knew I was destined to become the world’s best poker player. As a child I was an egotistical sociopath prone to delusions of grandeur so thoughts of this nature were quite common. In fact, at one time I had my sights set on becoming supreme ruler of the universe but I figured that would be a lot of work and even as a child I was pretty lazy so I dropped that idea entirely. Still, as I grew older and my delusions of grandeur matured into illusions of grandeur I stayed true to my poker calling.
At the tender age of ten I left home and traveled to the world famous casinos of Nepal in search of divine poker enlightenment. For years I studied under the great Nepalese poker gurus and with each passing year my skills at the more ancient forms of poker such as 357 (the Hyndai of poker), baseball (the Yugo of poker), and blind man’s bluff (the Schwinn of poker) developed by leaps and bounds. I soon found myself able to make $3 and sometimes $4 USD a week (even more if they didn’t always screw you on the goat to USD exchange rate)! Yet, I still had not attained total poker enlightenment so I continued on my journey and became a poker nomad.
I loved the freedom of being out on the road. I would travel from village to village and town to town fleecing the locals for tens of dollars. But despite being flush with cash and blessed with more cheap women and loose booze than any twelve year old could ever want, I knew that to become the best I needed to master the game and attain poker enlightenment.
So here I am today; a successful poker player making gobs and gobs of money hoping to one day reach poker nirvana.
5. I see, so what’s your day job?
Depends on what day you’re asking.
I’m currently working at the World Poker Tour (WPT) as a product manager for their online offerings.
Prior to the WPT I spent about two and a half years living in Thailand. I kept myself busy working on gambling affiliate projects, consulting, and running one of Thailand’s most popular social networking sites for expats and Thais.
My time in beautiful Thailand was preceded by several years in Gibraltar where I served as Poker Room Manager and Poker Product Manager at PartyPoker.
Before that I worked for Tiltware (cough, cough . . . Full Tilt Poker) in Los Angeles where I was a project manager in charge of everything from the Mac poker client to the payment processing systems.
Pre-poker, I was a child of the dotcom boom (and bust). I worked with companies like AOL, eToys, and the IEEE Computer Society on software development projects.
6. What do you like to do when you’re not playing poker or lying about how you got involved with poker?
Scuba Diving
Travel (goes hand in hand with scuba diving)
Underwater Photography (sensing a theme?)
Design Software / Write Code
7. What places have you traveled to?
Not enough. Let’s see:
Bahamas
Cambodia
Caymans
France
Germany
Gibraltar
Greece
Holland
Hong Kong
India
Ireland
Isle of Man
Italy
Macau
Malta
Mexico
Spain
Sweden
Thailand
Turkey
UK
Portugal
Vietnam
The list goes on and on (hopefully). Check out my Where Have You Been? section where I try to keep the list of places I’ve visited up to date.
8. What’s the best poker advice you would give a new player.
Always fold pocket aces.
9. If I wanted to [ask you a question, send you free stuff, hire you, send you a subpoena, buy ads on your website, ask you to review a product, etc] how would I go about contacting you?
Use this link. My people will get back with your people who will get back with you and then you can get back with me. Sorry for all of the middlemen but I have to keep my entourage busy otherwise they’ll steal the silverware.
10. What’s next for Bill?
I was thinking about grabbing lunch. After that I may win a WSOP bracelet or two and then retire.
Other sites/projects I’m working on
Sites I’ve Been Mentioned On
About Bill Rini
Bill Rini has been working in the online poker industry since 2004. He was a product manager for poker at Full Tilt and was the poker room manager at PartyPoker.
Bill has been blogging about online poker since 2003 and is considered one of the leading authorities on the online poker industry.
“I like What Bill Rini said in his blog” – Doyle Brunson
“In other news, we had Bill Rini write an absolutely home run blog.” Daniel Negreanu
“Industry insider Bill Rini has one of the most popular blogs in poker, with thousands of subscribers and fans regularly coming back for his universally respected insight into the industry” – Barry Carter (News editor for PokerStrategy, Co-Author: The Mental Game of Poker)
Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
PokerBot Pro - The Scam Continues
Glazen is actually Stephen Glazer from Toronto, Ontario Canada. He's s
Red Kings the Most Spammy Poker Room?
One of the cheapest and most rigged site on the poker internet industr
Proof That Online Poker Is Rigged!
why do so many aces always come out in online poker? yesterday i co
It’s a question of range: Guest Post by Carl "The Dean" Sampson
A great book on ranges is Ed Miller's Playing the Player http://www
It’s a question of range: Guest Post by Carl "The Dean" Sampson
Consideration of ranges has improved my game. I'm always learning so I