What do poker players really care about?

I suppose that all bloggers, from time to time, get curious about what searches bring people to read their posts. Fortunately, tools such as Google Analytics make it easy to track such things.

Not surprisingly, the most common search terms that direct people here are variations on "poker grump." But what is surprising is what comes next.

Is it concern about how certain nausea-inducing online poker sites have been cheating their customers and lying about it? Is it questions about rules or poker etiquette? Strategy advice? Poker news? The egregious rules violations and bad floor decisions at our game's premiere event, the World Series of Poker? My dozens of poker room reviews and suggestions about where in Vegas to play?

Nope. None of the above.

tom dwan gay
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"tom dwan" gay
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"tom dwan" sexuality
gay poker players
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I assume that these searches led to this post, in which I commented on that possibility specifically, though the larger point was not about Dwan in particular, but rather the absence of "out" gay professional poker players generally.

This inquiry was only for the last 30 days. I assume that Dwan being on two consecutive new weeks of "Poker After Dark" is what raised the question, apparently, in the minds of so many Google users.

But after excluding the search terms that indicate that somebody is looking for this blog specifically, when I extend the inquiry to the entire time that I have had Google Analytics watching the site (that means back to last October), "tom dwan gay" is still the number one thing people are looking for when they land here, with "is tom dwan gay" and "tom dwan is gay" also making the top ten.

So now we know what poker players are most interested in. Weird, eh?


There were some other search terms of interest:

62 people have looked for "pokergrump t-shirts." Never thought about that before, but it's an interesting idea.

12 people came looking for information about Heather Esquin. I didn't recognize the name, couldn't remember ever writing about such a person, and had to search myself to find the post in question.

Another one that completely baffled me was the search term "genomeboy poker." Turns out that "genomeboy" is the alias of a guy who has left a few comments on posts here.

"Chris Ferguson mole" leads to this post. Odd, but I guess if it caught my attention enough to write about it, I can't accuse other people of bizarre interests for searching for what might be written about it. For a bit of amusement, click on that link and check out what Google ads pop up alongside the post.

There have been at least 83 searches for James Klosty. I've written about James a few times, in his role as floorperson or poker room manager at three different place in town, as well as host of a poker-themed radio show for a while, but I was still surprised that there would have been that many people looking him up.

Yet another search term that I didn't understand at first was "lucymagem." But she was one of the players who got caught cheating Betfair out of money by exploiting a temporary glitch in their software.

There are countless variations on search terms involving some combination of "phil gordon" and "howard lederer's mom," really too many for me to add them up separately. But together they make up a pretty big chunk of the search results, undoubtedly because of this post.

It's all very strange. The things that I care most about, have written the most about, and think that my best and most original writing has centered on make nary a blip in the Google searches. It's the weird, one-off, minor things that bring in the searchers. I suppose that's because it's those offbeat subjects that get precious little attention anywhere, so whatever I've said about them is a good portion of what one can find.

Still, it all pales in comparison to poker players' apparently insatiable curiosity about Tom Dwan's sexual orientation.