The DRF poker column was not only poorly-conceived, much of it was very bad advice. I have been a moderator on a similar poker forum for a major publisher of poker books, and the kind of advice which was discussed on DRF would have been ridiculed. They took the approach often taken by inexperienced poker players of assuming nothing of your competition and bemoaning bad beats. I was shocked to see the degree to which the same writers who have a relatively sophisticated sense of the inherent variance and difficulty in horseplaying had little concept of the same features of poker.

I think the idea of having comparably-sophisticated discussion of different forms of potentially positive-expectation gaming is a good one. But the fact is that there simply are not many people who have the time or energy to be both great handicappers (I am certainly not one) and great poker players (I'm trying to get there) because both are so difficult.