Clearely, if the question “Are there professional rook players” interests you, you are a true fan of rook. To get the answer, I must compare the question to a similar field. What makes a professional card player?
- They spend a significant amount of time playing or promoting their card playing.
- They make a significant portion of their income from card playing.
- They likely do not have a side job, and purely use card playing as the main source of income.
These comments lead me to find out, how exactly might someone who loves to play rook, and may even be very good at it, be a professional rook player? Well, quite simply, there is currently not a way to make this happen. OK, yes I have heard of some decent size rook tournamants where the winning teams gain some nice lawn chairs or even tickets to a football game, but not quite the payoff that someone might get from say a major poker event.
The truth is, the rook card game just was not meant for making money. And the crowd that follows it is not that much into the idea of making money off playing cards as well. You have to realize that some people refer to rook as missionary poker becuase the missionaries that played it did not believe in playing with regular decks of cards.
In all likelyhood, there would need to be some major deal with ESPN or something like that to get enough of a following for rook to actually think about ever becoming a professional rook player. Until that day, we will just have to enjoy tailgaiting at our football game with our new lawn chairs!
Hello,
Not sure if anyone is still here but I can think of nowhere else to ask this question. Several years ago there was a PC version of Rook called “Nate’s Kentucky Rook” which I used to play all the time (since I no longer have any real life friends who play Rook or are interested in such). So after getting a new PC recently I tried to go find a download for Nate’s Kentucky Rook but none exist on the ‘net. There is nothing but broken links to the old NEB software site (the company or many went out of business I guess) and bloatware spam downloads (and NONE of these have the game itself).
Does anyone no of some secret plae where I can download this again? I know of no pother PC Rook games aside from this one (and one WAY older game called “Whiteraven” which disappeared back in the early 1990s).
I’m not too sure about a PC version of rook. I do know some people play online at duel board.
http://www.duelboard.com
There is also an app called blackbird for some phone versions.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.donwilson.blackbird&hl=en
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackbird/id563960217?mt=8
I had someone contact me years ago that had created a game that plays just like rook, but under a different name. It was called boat.
http://boat.soft112.com
This might be a good option for you if you need to have a PC app although I’ve never actually tried it.
Thank you for your quick reply. I am sorry for posting this in an obviously wrong area but I am kind of desperate here. I am not looking to play online against real people though for a number of reasons but I will definitely bookmark the duelboard.com link you gave and check it out. I was just looking for a PC Rook game I could play by myself (and re-familiarize myself with the game I loved but haven’t played in many years now) without having to be online. Nate’s Kentucky Rook was the most popular and accessible for this which is why I am so shocked that it has vanished completely from existence.