PZ101: Sara O’Connor Does Things

It’s early in the back nine for the Poker Zoo podcast, so it’s time to focus on what we want to accomplish. I have a fitting guest today in Sara O’Connor, a mid-Atlantic player and writer who has gathered some attention through her book, A New Queen’s Guide to Poker, and through some social media expertise. Sara has a lot of drive.

I was introduced to Sara through my friend Jason when he bit off a little more than he could chew in the course of his regular Twitter trolling. While Sara and I discuss many things about her life in poker, her first book is or was the original focus of the interview. I think she has done a great job in acclimating the novice to specifically live casino poker. Explicatory passages such as this could do a lot for the unfamiliar:

The game is played with a dealer in the center of the table and
two to ten players. Seat numbers start from the dealer’s left at seat
one and usually end at eight or nine but may go all the way up to
ten. Currently, my favorite seat is seat five, but never become too
attached to one seat. You never know which seat you’ll have to start
playing at, and attachments can lead to feelings of jinxes which
must be avoided. That said, you can ask for a seat change button if
you’re horribly uncomfortable and playing a cash game. With a
tournament, you’re stuck with the seat you’ve been given. We’ll talk
about the nitty gritty details of each of these table positions later.

This is far more practical than many, drier introductory texts. Sara conveys much of the real game and the concerns of its new participants. That’s the “good for poker” stuff everyone yammers on, right there.

When it comes to the strategy discussion in New Queen’s, my response is a little more complex. I think of Dan Savage’s “campground” rule, where he posited that in certain relationships, you must leave your partner better off than you found them. In essence, much of my coaching practice lays in correcting concepts and their misapplication. Does A New Queen’s Guide to Poker and other such novice guides to strategy help or harm the player in the long run? Does she follow the campground rule?

I tend to think the answer is that there is little harm here in the end, and that Sara answered my question during the podcast well enough. Things are going to be wrong, inevitably and everywhere; you’ll recover from your middle school texts no matter how careful they are in addling your brain. The so-called “ladder of learning” is not just straight up and up – the process of learning and relearning also matters. That’s real enough and leaves the writer some reign to describe things that need to be introduced even if those things will need to be corrected later. And of course, I like teaching poker and its theory! Bring on your confusions.

Really, though, I want to skip all that and focus in on what I liked hearing about at the end of the pod: Sara’s coming poker fiction. Ideas start with books and stories, and usually only then proceed to reach popular culture and its bigger, more splashy mediums where huge profits and big picture trends develop. The current debate over poker media is reductive and misguided, as I have written, in both how influence works and what makes it work.

So, if Sara is going to give us some “smut,” it’s good news because she will be generating “content” that really matters to real people with real desires, rather than doing what the poker world flagellates itself to do every few years: weakly manipulate culture with “PR” no one wants. The writer or communicator is the usual if hidden origin point of cultural products and movements because the word is the basic unit of shareable thought.

You can contact Sara on X or at her website.

Coming next, popular mental game and performance coach Jason Su returns to the Zoo with a new book – The Joy of Poker.

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