The Rail was born from a blend of two loves, poker and podcasts.

I’ve been an avid poker player for nearly 10 years and just can’t get enough of the game. And one thing I do regularly is play pub poker.

I’ve also been in to radio for as long as I can remember. I’ve always wanted to be in radio and after doing numerous courses and sending out a million audition tapes, I finally gave up the dream. You can only get told “you have a great voice and would be awesome, but you just don’t have enough experience” so many times before you say fuck it, I’m done. Over the years I have constantly been asked, “Are you on radio?” or being told, “You should be on radio!” Amazing how the people that listen to the radio want me on there but the radio stations won’t give a guy a shot.

But then something amazing happened to the internet a few years back. Apple gave people somewhere to share their radio shows. If you missed the morning show on your favourite radio stations, you could download it later and listen to it at your leisure on your iPod. Wasn’t long before people realised they could create their own shows as podcasts and that in fact it was fairly simple to do. You could create a show about any subject and put it out on the downloadable airwaves for anyone interested in your subject. As a result you can now download shows about anything, from model train sets to any number of different sports, the sky is the limit.

Now we also had a platform for people like myself who couldn’t break in to the radio industry to not only get heard, but also weren’t restricted in what they could say. No station producers telling you can’t say this, or you can’t do that. If you want to do it, as long as you’re not hurting anybody or breaking any laws you can do it.

For a while I’d been inspired by Kevin Smith and the endless amounts of podcasts he was producing, all brilliant and all funny. My dream of being on the radio wasn’t too far off and finally all those lessons at radio school were going to pay off!

I just needed to create a show about a topic I knew something about. Poker was pretty much the only topic that made sense.

So I set about seeing who out of my mates would be interested, luckily for me my good mate Ben, who is a poker god, there’s no two ways about it, without an ounce of experience in radio, jumped at the chance. And before we knew it, The Rail was born.

We’re over a year in to making The Rail and we’re still kind of finding our feet, but we’ve almost settled into a format that we both love and that works for the show. And we love it, it’s amazing fun. We get to talk about pub poker and poker in general and we have a good laugh. Hopefully the listeners find it entertaining, pokercational (that’s my new word educational poker) and maybe get the odd laugh or two.

I’m in the process of creating a new podcast, so stay tuned!

But for now, head over to the Rail’s website at www.therail.com.au and download an episode. Let me know what you think.

Swanky.