I’m Nath. If you are old enough to have been an online poker player circa 2005-2008, you may know me as Cap’nJackpot. You might know my full name, but that’s not important – I decided to combine my first name with my old poker name for what I’m doing with this project.
I also wanted the idea of this site as a hangout place when I named it, but “Captain’s Lounge” was too vague. So I took the other part of my old screen name for that. And then I discovered captainnath.com was a lot cheaper / more available than jackpotlounge.com, which is why we’re at this domain, and why the site has such a Ruth’s Chris Steak House ass name.
I was away from poker for a long time after Black Friday, but found myself, during a stretch of unemployment during COVID, both wanting a way to make money and missing doing something I was good at. Discovering it was possible to play online from America again, and that enough people were playing while staying home during quarantine that the games were pretty good, I got back into it, and found myself really enjoying learning the game again and putting work into it, something that hadn’t been the case for years even when I was last still playing.
So I’ve spent four years and change working on modernizing my game and playing both online and live sometimes when there’s a tournament series at one of the casinos here (I live in Colorado now). And I’ve been winning overall, but not enough yet to break back into the ranks of where I can solely do this for a living.
So my site has a twofold purpose: One, to document my attempt to return to the game and how it’s going, and hopefully create enough entertaining / worthwhile content, blogs and vlogs and maybe live streams and commentaries, to be worth your while and get enough of an audience to make this financially viable.
Cards Speak
The second part of that project is a podcast I’m starting. I still know a lot of players from the old days who have reached and are still at the the upper echelons of the game. My podcast, Cards Speak, will start with interviews with as many of these players I can convince to come on. My hope is that we get more in-depth with these interviews than might be typical of a poker podcast. A lot of poker content talks about news, hands, or strategy, and that’s valuable, but I wanted to do something unique, something that wasn’t being done already.
My vision for the show is similar to what WTF? with Marc Maron became, but for poker players instead of comedians. (Well, I’ve written and performed enough comedy in my life that I should hope I can be funny and entertaining as well.) That is to say, while the common starting point will be our shared background as poker players, I intend to get into deeper conversations and on subjects beyond poker strategy or news.
I think there’s a mistaken conception that a lot of modern high-stakes poker players are GTO robots with no personalities. The top players I know have a lot of outside interests and personality, are great conversationalists, and have fascinating life stories both in and out of poker. I’d like to get in depth with them on these topics and have meaningful conversations beyond just the game itself— what their other interests are, what experiences have shaped them, what matters to them in life, what motivates them to keep working day in day out after reaching the heights they have, and more. (And hopefully be pretty funny from time to time, because I don’t think I can totally avoid at least trying to be.)
My hope is, if we get some good early interviews and traffic, that’ll snowball into us being able to get even more interviews. Right now, I’m going to start with some free shows, in hopes we can build an audience, but at some point, there will be bonus shows or certain episodes only on the Patreon. (And hopefully in the meantime, you and many others will sign up anyway out of goodwill and support!) If we get enough of an audience and enough interested guests, I’m hoping to expand to two a week in some way such that I can follow the “one free / one Patreon” format so many other podcasts do. That’s a long way down the road, though, and we’ll see how it goes. (I am planning to always at least put clips and highlights of any Patreon-only episodes of the podcast out for free, to encourage people to subscribe, and all the other content— the blog, the vlog, any live streams— will be free as well.)
Anyway— here’s hoping we get enough support from you that this turns out to be viable and we get some great interviews and other videos and writing from it. It’ll be slow going at first while this is still a one-man shop, but with enough support, we can grow into a more professional operation. Thanks for visiting; please subscribe to the Patreon to support us (me).
If you have any questions, head over to the contact page.