My thoughts in this topic...

I used to be an avid backgammon player before I switched over to poker. I was very obsessed with the game; I played it any time I could spare and read about a dozen books about it. I studied statistics, probability theory, and game theory just to improve my game (this mathematical background has helped me immensely in poker as well). After about 4 years I was approaching expert level of backgammon play. I switched to poker because poker was new to me, more challenging, more popular, and from what I'd heard, quite a bit more profitable (this turned out to be so true =).

But anyway, the reason I bring up my backgammon history is because it was during the last 15 months of playing backgammon that my skills improved dramatically. This was right after finding a website called gammonline.com that included a backgammon forum. You have to pay a membership fee, so there were only 200-some posters on the forum, and only a couple dozen regular posters.

Yet, even though there were so few members, this forum was by far the best backgammon forum available on the web, simply because the regular posters always gave thoughtful responses, were always willing to help anybody (even the newest members who didn't know what a doubling cube was for), and even when disagreeing about something to the bitter end, they would be courteous to one another. It is important to note that nearly every thread was useful or interesting to read, and nearly every post was relevant; the forum was not cluttered with nonsense.

The moral of the story...a dozen good contributers and no bad ones is far better than two dozen good contributers and two hundred bad ones. I like FTR just the way it is. I've only been a member for a few months but this forum is helping me improve my poker skills as rapidly as the gammonline forum helped me with my backgammon skills.