One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.

Just now the New York Times is running yet another profile of a young geeky guy making and losing millions at online poker. If this were the first one, that'd be one thing, but I've seen quite a few such articles - here, on Hacker News, in my RSS reader.

It's starting to trip my general 'bubble' pattern-recognition system. This reminds me of the original Internet Bubble where you would read about young people making ludicrous sums for crap work or no real reason at all, and so everyone piled into computer science programs (or into law schools, for that matter).