Days of Shame and Disappointment: Michael Bay’s Existential Relevance to This Year’s World Series of Poker

In a very general sense I’m somewhat happy with myself. I could definitely be doing much better in many different ways, but overall I’m able to sleep at night. Nonetheless, I’m not a man of great “accomplishments.” I have never swam the English Channel or founded a culture changing website.

However, there are two small things I have done. I do not talk about them much, but I have taken personal pride in them over the years. What I'm proud of is that I have never once been knocked out of the World Series of Poker on the first day, nor have I ever seen a Michael Bay film. At least that’s how it used to be.

This year, for the first time in the 7 years that I have been playing the world championship, I did not make it to day two. I won’t bore you with the specifics of the hand I went out on. I will just say that it was one hour before the end of the first day. I had 15 outs twice and if I were a better tournament player I would have hit one of them. I would have won the hand and ended the day with well over two times the average stack. But that didn’t happen. I could use one of those “I was trying to win the tournament and not just survive it” rationalizations, but I think that’s a cop out. I had just been moved to a new table and I didn’t have nearly enough information on my opponent to make the play I did. It wasn’t a horrible tournament play but it was a little sloppy and unnecessarily risky. To win an event of this size there’s not much room for sloppy play. You have to be, as I once heard it described, shit-house lucky (a term, the origin of which I do not know but that I understand nonetheless) or you have to be flawless in your play. I was neither.

As I’ve described before, getting knocked out of the WSOP is a particularly unpleasant moment for a poker player. And this year for me, going out on the first day, was the worst in a while.

And on top of that, I found out that sometimes when you’re not happy with yourself you’re not so concerned about taking care of yourself. “Screw it!” you think. Who cares. Sure, you promised your son you wouldn’t drink this weekend, but since you already had one beer (it would have been rude not to) another one isn’t going to change anything. And yeah, now you’re drunk. You hate yourself so much for lying to your son, the only person who’s ever believed you, that you’re just plain numb by the time you use that stolen Unicef money to pay for the tranny hooker. Naturally, one thing leads to another, and before too long you think “yeah I always did want to kill a hobo” and that’s when bad things start to happen.

So that’s the state of mind I was in waking up this morning. That’s the place I was at that allowed me to say “Ehh, maybe I’ll catch a matinee of Transformers.”

Now, just for the record, I have nothing against the film director Michael Bay. There’s no logical justification for taking pride in never having seen one of his movies. It’s just that, in the most insignificant of ways, it made me feel like I was beating the system. The Michael Bay film represents something fairly powerful. It isn’t even the movies themselves so much as the brute force marketing of them. When a new Michael Bay film is about to come out, I want to see it. Saturated by the trailers, and posters, and the articles that show up in the Sunday Times, I start to feel the illicit pull of the siren’s call.

I just naturally assumed I would have to see Pearl Harbor, one of the most expensive movies ever made, or something or another to that effect. It was supposed to be Titanic but with even more things blowing up. The Island: Ewen McGregor, high concept sci-fi, how wrong could that be. But with each movie I resisted those first weekend screenings. I was able to put off seeing it just long enough for the reviews to come out. The reviews offered an immunization of sorts. And after that opening weekend the TV commercials died down a little, and room was made for the next weekend’s premier, and for some reason seeing Pearl Harbor no longer seemed so utterly imperative. For whatever reason, this made me feel as though I had accomplished something.

Transformers though, I knew Transformers was going to be tough to beat. The Transformers cartoon was not an integral part of my childhood, but it is something I remember. I’m in no way ashamed to say that, as a young boy, I enjoyed seeing giant robots beating each other up. Obviously, the giant robot stuff coming out of Japan, Macross/Robotech and the like, was far more advanced than the half hour toy commercials we got here in America. But I remember watching the Transformers cartoons nonetheless. And, sure, it was cool to see cartoons of robots slamming into each other, but there was always that nagging fantasy of what it would be like in real life. At nine you realized that that would be the ultimate in cool, actual 30 foot robots, actually punching each other in the face, and blowing things up with laser cannons. And of course that is just what Michael Bay spent over a hundred million dollars to taunt me with.

Naturally, it was a silly point of pride, never having seen a Michael Bay film. But nonetheless it did make me feel good that I wasn’t going to let the studio’s marketeers tell me what movies to watch. As I said though, I was not in a very good place this morning. Hence the matinee.

Walking over to the Palms’ theater, I feel dirty. Through the trailers, through the opening credits, I sit alone in the theater saddled with a sense of personal failure. But then the movie starts, and I watch an unidentified army helicopter being escorted by jet fighters to a Middle Eastern military base. Once there, the copter starts to whirl and shift and transform itself into an evil robot, and it starts to rain down unholy robot vengeance upon the puny humans and their primitive military technology. It is a short sequence, but it is about as cool I would have imagined unholy robot vengeance would be. I start to think that I’ve unfairly misjudged this Michael Bay guy.

But then we cut away from the giant robot blowing things up. We cut away to people talking; and that’s where things start to fall apart. Within a couple minutes of this I begin to wonder why we can’t just have the robots blowing things up without all the jibber-jabber cluttering it up. For almost two hours people keep talking to each other. Some kid buys a car and bags a girlfriend far hotter than he should, and the African American kid cracks an alien super code with about 15 keystrokes on his home computer, and because he’s overweight he eats a whole plate of doughnuts, and other stuff happens, and hopefully John Turturro gets a really big paycheck.

Eventually however, as though Mr. Bay had read my mind, the entire last half hour happily tosses all the jibber-jabber aside. The evil robots attack the good robots and mere anarchy ensues.

There is a sequence where the evil jet-robot flies through a squadron of human jets and tears them apart, jumping from one to the next, transforming between robot and jet as it does. But besides that, there unfortunately isn’t very much carnage of a really creatively holy gee-whiz sort. And sometimes it’s a little tough to tell one giant robot from the next. The hard to follow blur of “real life” robot action occasionally makes me long for the more stylized Japanese cartoon action.

I think one of the good robots got killed but I’m not entirely sure. It just got ripped in two and being a robot I would think that might be more or less fixable. Of course, if I was following the action correctly I think that the robot who died was the “urban” robot that liked to breakdance and talk in that rapping grandma sort of way that white people sometimes write black dialog. So I may not actually be too upset if that robot doesn’t show up for the inevitable sequel.

And then a bunch more things get blown up, and a plane flies through an office building, and eventually the kid from the first Project Greenlight movie shoves a box into one robot’s chest, and I guess that’s as good a reason as any to end the movie.

In all honesty, I have obviously seen worse movies (Silent Rage still exists). Taken as a popcorn blockbuster for the kids, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Transformers. If this was some little Korean film that I had discovered at the video store, I would have thought, wow, it’s a little flawed but it definitely has it’s fun moments.

So part of me is perfectly happy to ignore the stupid and say “Ehh, it could have been worse.” And when I first went to bed after getting knocked out of this year’s WSOP, that’s pretty much how I felt about the last hand I played. Ehh, it could have been worse.

But when I woke up the next morning and really did the analysis, I was struck with a far more burdensome realization. Obviously, the painful part is not that it could have been worse, it’s that it could have been better, it should have been better.

And I suppose that’s the fundamental existential question that seeing Transformers throws in my face. If you make a hundred and fifty million dollar action film, are you trying to make something as good as James Cameron’s Aliens or are you just trying to make something that is not as bad Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla.

If I had never seen James Cameron’s Aliens, then sure, I might not know how good an action movie can be. But I have, and to pretend that Transformers is the best you could hope for is deceitful. Transformers is not evil by any means. But to not acknowledge and criticize its lowest common denominator aspirations is a sad surrender of sorts.

As it happens, I have some idea of what my poker capabilities are. I know I could have played that last hand better. Was the play I made Roland-Emmerich’s-Godzilla-horrible? No. But, was it the best possible play I could have made? Not really.

There’s nothing wrong with coming close. Being almost good is obviously better than being bad. But being almost good is by no means the same as being actually good. Sometimes it is important for me to be reminded of this. For that I thank you Mr. Michael Bay. Please keep trying.

The People Prevail! Brodie Boycott is a Success.

Just in case you hadn’t heard, since my boycott was a success I am now ending it and have gone to Vegas. As you may or may not know, I boycotted this year’s World Series of Poker in protest of Richard Brodie being barred from Harrah’s. Unfortunately, I was a little busy and never quite got around to telling Harrah’s about this. Nonetheless, when Harrah’s ran their first $1,500 no-limit event and the turnout was a paltry 2,998 as opposed to the 2,999 that it would have been had I been there, it was obvious that they felt the sting. I am proud to say that thanks to my actions, Richard is once again allowed at Harrah’s.

Now I know what some of you have said. “Didn’t they lift that ban weeks ago?” Yes, they did. But I personally felt that I had a duty to carry on the boycott just in case Richard happened to get banned again. Certain hardened cynics have said that I had ulterior motives in waiting to come to the series, that the only reason I kept pushing back my Vegas plans was because Christi and I were so enjoying our summer in the city. Obviously that’s meanspirited speculation that devalues the sacrifices I will make for a disenfranchised working-class everyman like Richard Brodie. I suppose that for every one man that chooses the path of altruism there will always be 50 others who seek to question his motives. Such is the world we live in.

Furthermore, I normally find it to be in bad taste to talk about my charitable works, but since you brought it up, I guess I should probably let it be known that it wasn’t just Harrah’s that I boycotted in support of Richard. For the past month or so I also boycotted making blog entries, eating brussel sprouts, putting money away for retirement, and flossing. That’s just how I roll.

Take Me to the River (or Mike May: “neurotic and slightly balding”)

If you could take both the wisdom of Solomon and the strength of Hercules and somehow turn them into a bubble gum, that bubble gum would probably have the powerfully satisfying taste of Take Me to the River, the single greatest piece of literaturousity ever put to page.

All right, I might be exaggerating. In fact I'm not sure how objective I could really be in reviewing this book. The problem is that the subject of the book is something that I find myself eternally fascinated with day in and day out: myself.

I always knew I was vain but it never occurred to me how much more I would enjoy the reading experience when one of the little people running around inside a book was actually me. In fact, I so enjoyed this book, I may never again read books that are not specifically about me. I understand this will radically limit my reading choices but I'm a pretty slow reader anyway.

Of course technically the book is about my friend Peter Alson, but if you can read between the lines it's pretty easy to see what it's really about.

The focus of the memoir is on a writer of questionable maturity taking tentative steps towards responsibility. With a marriage coming up, as well as a child, he realizes that changes have to be made. The willy nilly finances of a freelance writer just aren't going to cut it anymore. He understands that he needs money, reliable money. So, accepting that he is now an adult, he does the adult thing. He goes to Vegas.

Ostensibly, it's about Peter going to the 2005 World Series of Poker to make money for his upcoming wedding/new life, the wacky characters, the ups, the downs, etc, etc. Ostensibly.

But if you can read between the lines it is pretty clear what Peter is trying to get at. There's a character that pops up occasionally, a friend of his by the name of Mike May. Now this friend of his is barely a minor character, and he doesn’t really do or say anything all that interesting, but personally I thought he was a powerful presence within the book. I felt a crackling jolt of electricity whenever I read about him.

Again, this may be a fairly personal reaction but I think that a sophisticated reading of Take Me to the River will show that, in essence, it's a book about the powerful sexual prowess of Mike May. You have to read between the lines, pretty, uh, pretty far between the lines but that was my initial reading.

As I mentioned, your reading may be different than mine but I like mine better. The problem is that my life is not so fascinating that I get to see it in print so often. So when it does happens, and I don’t come out looking like an ass-monkey, it’s exciting for me. Of course, I suppose not everyone is such a whore for attention.

A friend of mine read Peter’s book and gave him a wonderful if backhanded compliment. He told me how incredibly happy he was that he’s never ended up in one of Peter’s books. Knowing most of the people in Peter’s book rather well, my friend felt that Peter did an eerily accurate job of describing who they really were. He wasn’t sure how he would feel about having a similar portrait of himself flapping about in the domain of the public.

I thought about this for a little while and once the initial excitement subsided, of seeing that there are no slanderous untruths (or more humiliating actual truths) in Take Me To The River, I did have a secondary reaction, a weird anxiety that I may have just dodged a bullet.

Personally, my narcism usually trumps my fears of public embarrassment. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little scared about this book coming out. I gave Peter the key to my room last year, so that he could store a couple things while he jetted back to NY for a week, meaning that he had unsupervised access to my life at the Gold Coast. He could easily have written about the rancid smell of legionnaires disease wafting about my old laundry, the NakkidNerds.com bookmarks on my computer, or any of the many more inditing things that he might have found, and that I won’t incriminate myself by mentioning here.

Luckily though, if you take out the stuff about S and M clubs (which Christi was none too thrilled with), the portrait Peter painted of me was thoroughly benign. Nonetheless, it did remind me how dangerous it can be for someone with control issues to have friends who are writers. In fact my obsessive need for control was one of the vast many reasons I started this whole blog thing in the first place. So even though it predates Peter’s book, the very existence of this blog can, in a way, be blamed on Take Me to the River.

A while ago I was interviewed for a book on Jon Finkel, a different friend of mine. When this book came out I rushed out to pick it up and tore through it. It was reminiscent of the moment in The Jerk when the Steve Martin character sees his name in the phone book. He starts to jump around flailing his arms frantically, yelling "Look! I've made it, my name's in print!!! I'm somebody!"

Of course, later, I looked back at what was actually written about me in the Finkel book and I saw that I was introduced as Mike May "neurotic" and "slightly balding". I realized that while "neurotic and slightly balding" will probably turn out to be the most concisely comprehensive description, ever put to print, of who I actually am, it nonetheless may not be what I would have written myself.

This turned out to be one of the fulcrum point moments that allowed me to understand how much my industry was changing. By most poker metrics I'm really something of a nobody. While I am quite content with the career I've had, my TV resume is less than inspiring. And yet here I was being interviewed and finding myself in print. When nobodies like myself were subjected to a spotlight (no matter how faint it might be) it became apparent a new facet of poker had entered the industry.

Reading about myself in the Finkel book was a strange experience. While it was exciting to have someone care about my story enough to write it down, it was disorienting to realize that someone besides myself would have final edit on it. I thought about how many more people would get to know Mike May through this book than would actually meet me in person. How very strange.

So to stave off any possible lawsuits it seemed as though it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to premptively put my side of the story, whatever that story might be, into print. Hence, Mike May: The Blog. And that’s why I blame Peter, and the various other writers who have tried to bring the poker subculture to the masses, for this blog’s creation (in a rather roundabout way).

So if you at all enjoy this blog you may want to thank Peter for it's creation by picking up a couple copies of Take Me to the River. Even if you hate this blog with a passion that will not die you might want to give Peter a try. And especially if you can't make it to the World Series of Poker yourself, you should definitely read it and make a vicarious trip via Peter. Of course, come to think of it, the 7 or so friends of mine who make up the readership of this blog were all at the Series last year, so I guess that might not be the best sales pitch.

Instead, lets just work with simple economics. It’s actually very expensive to play in the final event of the World Series, and I’m not just talking about the $10,000 buy in. Consider for a moment all the expenses:
-10,000 dollar buy in,
-travel to Vegas,
-food,
-hotel,
-back waxing to look good at the pool,
-hookers and blow,
-lawyers fees once you realize that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" doesn't actually apply to federal statutes,
-bail,
-hastily purchased ticket to undisclosed south and/or central America country,
-rental of beach front bungalow,
-monthly retainer for Paco to keep "them" off your trail,
-hush money to cover that local incident that was simply a misunderstanding, and it wasn't your fault what happened to Paco since he totally should have expected you to run, considering how it came down,
-the Viking funeral for Paco (really it was all he ever asked for, and clearly something he deserved),
-dry cleaning,
-and of course tooth paste, you always forget to pack tooth paste for some reason.

You add up all these expenses, and I have no idea what it comes out to, but it's probably a heck of a lot more than the $16.32 it costs to buy Peter's book from Amazon with this link. So next year bag the trip yourself and just lounge by the pool with a relaxing copy of Take Me to the River. Let Peter do all the work for you.

And if that isn't reason enough for you to buy the book I should mention that if you use this link and buy Peter's book, I think (if I set the link up correctly) I'll make something like 60 cents in Amazon kickback payola which will be the first penny I’ve ever made off of this blog.

Yay Peter!






Peter Alson hard at work experiencing things
and then writing about them, so you don’t
have to go through the trouble of experiencing
them yourself.

The Dream is Dead

All right, don't spend too much time scanning today's results for my name. The dream is dead. Perhaps I'll post about getting knocked out at some time but it's not really that exciting. I was a 75 or so percent favorite when the money went in so it was an honorable death, and I did cash, but still the details are probably not worth your time.

Right now I'm a little on the tired side, but I do want to give a fast thanks to everyone who wished me well and a special thanks to Andy, of Dealt Out fame, for letting me pimp this site on the MSNBC blog. Take care everyone.

Also, if for some reason you would like to actively shun the blog of the person that knocked me out then definitely don’t go here.

Above Average!

As I left the World series tournament area last night I checked to see what the listed average chip stack was.

The listed average: 72,376
My stack: 73,200

Awww yeah! That’s right, above average.

Of course there were fewer players in day 2A than my day 2B so once they combine the two fields and crunch the new numbers I should come out right where I generally belong, slightly below average. But for a couple hours at least I will bask in the glow of my above averageosity. In your face, Average! I am so 1.138 percent above you it’s not even funny. Suck it!

Harrah's, Heck Yeah!

Considering that I’m trying to write more while out at the World Series of Poker, I feel a little guilty about not actually writing about the WSOP itself. Unfortunately I don't do very well with real time in this blog. I didn't finish putting up my coverage of last year's WSOP until some time in the middle of January. So to keep you informed about this year's series, or more specifically what Harrah's is screwing up this year, I will simply direct you to 2 posts that other people have written. The problems covered run the gamut from simple "I remember going to class at the old school, it was so much cooler than this new school" issues, to the confusing level of incompetence and lack of consideration that Harrah's has shown to those people dumb enough to be in the middle of Nevada in July.

I guess I always understood the concept of an efficient corporation being a ruthlessly self serving entity. But the life I live tends not to put me in the corporate world very often. Watching the WSOP evolve over the last 3 years has been rather educational. Harrah’s leaves no stone unturned in the hopes that there might possibly be a penny under it. I am impressed.

The posts I'm linking come from Dr. Pauly (here) and Shane (here). I link them because they are both informative and well written but much more importantly because they save me from witting about this crap myself.

I also want to take this opportunity to give Shane temporary favorite person status. Shane has given me what is easily the best link I’ve gotten yet in describing me as "like the Terrence Malick of bloggers." Of course, I am going to make the assumption that this is a reference to the lush and awe inspiring vistas that my cinematographer and I create and not a reference to my being a lazy load that only produces something once every decade or so. Either way it made me smile.

The only thing I’ll add to the WSOP discussion is how amused I was by the double-plus-ungood rights that Harrah’s has granted us this year. Last year there were draconian cell phone rules and if you wanted to play an event you lost the right to use the F word (which I will not sully your eyes with here). This year however those loses of freedoms have been replaced with rights.

The second event I played opened with a rambling speech over the loudspeaker that told us about all these new rights. Apparently we now have the right not to have anyone at our table use offensive language and by offensive language I mean the word "fuck" and only the word "fuck." I checked and luckily this new right does not cover the words "ass-monkey," "cock-munch," or any racial slurs whatsoever.

And we have also been granted the right to not have someone at our table carry on a 20 minute conversation with a stock broker over his cell phone. Of course with this also comes the right to have your hand declared dead if you look at the screen on your phone to see what time it is (which I first thought was an urban legend until I actually saw it happen.)

This later proved a source of amusement for me as I watched a new dealer in a live 100-200 game tell the big blind, with an impressive level of indignation, that since he answered his cell phone his hand was dead. The other players tried to explain that this new right of ours only applied to tournament games. He was having none of it though and refused to continue the hand until the floor came over.

And after that I watched a security guard go to a 10-25 pot limit Omaha game and tell some European players with cell phones sitting on the table that they couldn’t have them out in plain sight. The amusing part was that the Europeans complied and just laughed it off with an I’ll-never ever-ever-ever-play-in-this-silly-place-again look on their faces. Apparently they’re not afforded the same rights in Europe that we have here.

Shorties at the Big Dance

This isn’t necessarily my favorite photo from the World Series of Poker, but it’s up there. Of course, the first thing you might notice about it is that it does not involve degenerate gamblers, badly dressed old men, or crushed dreams. Therefore you might ask: what the hell does it have to do with the World Series of Poker? Well, that’s exactly what I asked as I walked to the Rio Tournament area one day. I showed up and everywhere I looked it was Jon Benet Ramsey-day. It was all sequined shirts and strained smiles as far as the eye could see. I’m still not entirely sure what was going on but it had something to do with small children dressed as figure skaters and possibly a dancing competition going on in one of the sections of the convention center the WSOP wasn’t using.

At first, it somehow just didn’t seem right. Of all the things I think of when I think of the WSOP, unbridled youthful enthusiasm usually isn’t at the top of the list. Looking back though it starts to make a little bit of sense. More so than others, I guess 2005 actually was a year of youthful enthusiasm. And I’m not just talking about the throngs of 17 year old internet players sitting behind towers of black chips at the triple draw lowball tables. This year the final event had over ten times as many players as it did the first year I got to go, over 2500 as many players as last year’s event. That makes for a lot of first time players, a lot of people untainted by the taste of soul snapping defeat that comes from busting out of the final event.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to think I’m still far from being jaded about the final event. I consider myself fortunate every time I get to play it. Come summer people are always asking me if I’m playing the final event and I’m always amused by the number of people who think I’m joking when I say I don’t know. The money to monkey ratio is insane and traditionally it’s one of my luckier events. Nonetheless, I’m not ashamed to say that $10,000 still seems like a lot of money.

I was watching Desperate Housewives last year and I remember a scene with a private eye who said that for $5,000 he could have someone hurt and for $10,000 he could make them disappear. Now, I really flipped out when I heard this. What this meant was that for the same $10,000 it cost to play the World Series every year I could have been having people bumped off. (At first I wasn’t sure about the veracity on that price quote and I decided to ask around the New York poker clubs. This didn’t really work out though as the few people who actually would have had privy to such information all gave me exactly the same answer: "I, uh, wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, and we, uh, never had this conversation.")

Even if $10,000 isn’t the exact cost of a hit though, it still helps to put things in perspective. Money in itself tends to lose some of it’s meaning for poker players. Occasionally I find it helpful to instead convert the raw numbers into more concrete things as in "this weekend I lost 3 new laptops, a Tivo, and 2 weeks in Tokyo with my girlfriend." I mean, if on the first day of the tournament someone asked for a show of hands on who would be willing to give up their seat in exchange for the chance to have a cap popped in someone’s ass you might find yourself at a somewhat smaller event.

All I’m trying to say is that I still understand what a privilege it is to be able to participate in the final event. And while I’m still excited every year, I would be lying if I said it is ever like it was my first year. The abject terror at the thought of making a million dollar mistake, the awe inspiring possibility that I could become a champion of the world, these were still virginal experiences. I did feel like a lucky child swept away by the fantasy of it all, so very excited to have a chance at playing the big game.

I look back and think about what it felt like for me that first time, and what it must have felt like for the thousands of people in Vegas for the first time this year, and all of a sudden those wide eyed kids in their shiny little costumes that were skipping around the Rio don’t seem so out of place.

Twirl on tiny dancers. Twirl on...

Alternative Lifestyles

Imagine sneaking up behind Jules Verne, clocking him with a lead pipe, and stuffing him into a freezer. Then thaw him out almost two hundred years in the future and show him videos explaining the fax machine, the atom bomb, and Paris Hilton. Now look at that expression of slack jawed, bewildered disbelief on his face. That was the expression that I wore for about 43 minutes the day before the final event of the World Series started. That was when I first laid eyes on the 1st annual Poker Lifestyles Exhibition, a convention hall full of vendors that you had to walk through to get to the tournament area in the Rio.

Now it may come to pass that in the far future my reaction will seem very confusing. Not so many people find it bizarrely jarring to walk into a Foot Locker store and see Michael Jordan sports jerseys and other NBA merchandise. Perhaps my initial reaction to all this poker marketing will seem very dated very shortly but for me the Poker Lifestyles gig is still a little disorienting.

Sure there has always been a "poker lifestyle" but it just wasn’t really something that you wanted decent folk to even see, much less ask them to buy. Not very long ago the poker lifestyle was somehow being able to scrounge up enough money to play Twister with hookers in your hotel even though you were living out of the back seat of a ‘92 Lincoln. Now, believe me, I’m not saying there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. I’m just saying I didn’t think it was something for which you would get your own bobblehead doll.

Anyway, here’s a couple quick snapshots from the inaugural Lifestyle exhibition:

In case you were wondering what you would get if you applied the acute aesthetic sense of a poker player with the stylish world of high fashion I imagine it might look something like this.

As promised: bobbleheads! I just checked the website and the Mel Judah bobblehead has officially sold out. The funny part being that I’m not kidding. Way to go Mel.

Here I am actually standing next to Mr. fancy pants acclaimed author PETER ALSON. Or as we used to call him at the club in New York: Peter.

Here’s Peter researching his upcoming book on this year’s WSOP, a book about trying to win the money he needed for his pending wedding and the life he’s starting with his new wife. What does that have to do with playing poker with trade show hussies? I haven’t quite figured that out myself but since I think the readership of this blog consists solely of my parents and you I don’t imagine Peter’s wife will see this.

Now having this at the poker show actually made a lot of sense. When you think of poker lifestyle what do you think of? Exactly, you think of filthy tax cheats. Sure you could put stacks of hundred dollar bills in a safe deposit box at a bank but who wants "The Man" knowing you’ve got a box somewhere that could possibly have something in it. That’s where the Sovereign Solution comes in. The only I.D.ing that they do is through biometrics. Instead of giving them an address and driver’s licence you just go through a retina scan. No paperwork to link you to whatever you want to lock away in the Sovereign vaults. Of course if you’re ever in a horrible Lawn Jarts accident and lose your scanned eye I’m not quite sure what happens to your vault.

Ans speaking of taxes, this is an actual picture of my actual accountant at the Bodog booth. I can smell the audits from here.

Hand for Hand

This is one of my favorite moments that I wasn’t personally involved in from the final event. We’re starting the 3rd day. I think we have about 569 players left at this point. 560 players are being paid so the decision is made to start the day out going hand for hand. If you don’t know what going hand for hand means then go ahead and skip to the next photo. If you have played in tournaments though and have had to go hand for hand with one player before the money, everyone clinging desperately to their last chips, and maybe 3 tables left, you know that it can take some time. Now imagine that there are over 60 tables left and you have to wait for every one of those tables to play their hand out before you can deal the next hand at your table. In 2001, the first year I played the final event, there were a total of 613 players. Going hand for hand with 560 plus players would almost be like starting the first day of the 2001 final event and having to wait for every single table to finish every single hand before moving to the next. We knew it would take a while.

What they decided to do was to have every dealer in the room to stand up once they finished the hand they were dealing. Already exhausted from working double and triple shifts they now had to deal a hand sitting down and then stand up for minutes at a time as they waited for everyone else to finish. At first I really felt for the dealers who had put up with so much over the last 6 weeks. However, after looking over to the table next to mine I realized who the real victims of this hand for hand tedium were: the degenerate gamblers.

I looked behind me and my heart went out as I thought of poor Sammy Farha sitting there and not being in action for minutes at a time. I’ve had some brief experience with the man and, my lord, I don’t even want to know what that eternity between hands must have been like for him. As it turns out though my fears were somewhat unfounded as Farha is plenty resourceful.

After his table’s hand was over he told the dealer to spread the deck. He then randomly drew a card, the 4 of clubs. Sean Sheikhan, who was also at his table, drew a 10 of hearts. Sammy peeled $1,000 off his wad of hundreds and said "double or nothing." As we waited for the next hand to start $1,000 became $2,000 and then $2,000 became $4,000. Eventually the floor came over and was simply aghast at the idea of bets being made without the house getting some kind of cut. The floorman explained that if they make the dealer do this again he’ll lose his job. No problem. Sammy reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a quarter. Sheikhan calls tails and it comes up tails. This goes on for a little while. By the time the next hand is about to start though Sammy has finally had enough and he nonchalantly pulls one casino chip out of his front pocket and flips it over to the young man who had been taking his action.

Now the thing to remember is that we’re still on the bubble in the largest poker tournament in the history of the world. I’m sitting there in excruciating desperation clawing my hair out at the thought of making the mistake that will cost me the $12,500 bottom money.

Of course at the table behind me, after a few high cards and coin flips, the young man goofing around with Farha proudly displays the $25,000 Bellagio chip he just won; and then we all sit down to play our next hand.

The Single Most Important Picture of this Year's World Series of Poker

All right, I know the photo above doesn’t look like much. On a personal level though, this may be the single most important picture from this year’s World Series. I’m going to make an attempt at explaining why. It might not work but bear with me.

For context, this is from the 3rd day of play in the final event. The people looking into the camera are all friends from New York. The person they are looking at is the person taking the picture, me. Also helpful is the following photo which gives a geographic context:

The important part of this second picture is that empty space in the middle. The people in the 1st photo are on the left of this empty space. I am on the right. Now at first glance the empty space in the middle may not seem that large, a space of maybe 3 feet. But if you look a little closer you’ll see that the distance between the two groups is over 56 million dollars.

At the instant that the top photo was taken I’m in the money in the largest poker tournament that has ever existed. Everyone sitting at a table to the right is guaranteed some portion of the 56 million dollar prize pool, anywhere from $20,000 to $7,500,000. Guaranteed. The people on the left get jack. Granted some of the people in that 1st photo are smarter than I am, and some of them are far wealthier, and one in specific has significantly more anonymous gay sex than I do. But right now they are left side people and I am a right side person. For this brief shining moment I am special and I have friends who are happy for me and it’s actually kind of cool. (As the top photo empirically proves.)

Of course at the time I took it all for granted. I was a little busy and didn’t really have time to wax philosophic. The day after I got knocked out though it hit me. Before catching my plane, I went back to the Rio to cash out a couple chips I had stashed in my room. As a left side spectator I watched the tournament for a minute or two. That’s when I actually noticed that empty space in the middle, that one-way membrane that separates us common folk from the people who could still become this year’s world champion.

I try to explain what it’s like to get knocked out of the WSOP final event. It’s been said that the worst day of every poker player’s year starts the moment they get knocked out of the final event. There’s a little truth in this but I don’t know if it translates. I mean, I imagine it’s got to blow to get shanked in the kidney with a sharpened screwdriver but until I lose a prison fight I don’t know if I’ll fully understand the actual pain.

Try to imagine the best Christmas you’ve ever had. You’ve got the friends, and the family, and someone actually put some thought into a present that you actually love, and you’re all ‘nogged up, and you’re thinking "this really rocks." Then you hear a buzzer go off. A referee steps in and escorts you outside. All of a sudden you’re standing on the lawn in the cold. Now the worst part of it is that everyone else is still having Christmas. You look in through the window and everyone is still laughing and getting presents and everyone is having way too much fun to care that Christmas just ended for you. That kind of describes how it felt to go back and be there on the left side and watch everyone else play.

Of course, this year, to console my delicate sensibilities I did receive something:
This blurry sealed bag that happens to contain a couple years worth of rent, all in casino chips. Naturally they can’t just give you cash or a check which you would put in your pocket. No, the Harrah’s Corporation has to take one last shot at you as you’re walking out. They give you chips and make you walk through the casino in the off chance you might decide to let it all ride on red 5 before making it to the cage.

I succeeded in keeping Harrah’s hand out of my wallet but you know you can never get away completely clean. I couldn’t dodge the post game dinner shakedown at the Wynn with some friends. And of course I want a special thanks to go out to Richie "the Dwarf" Bell for telling the waitress "ehh, just bring me whatever you recommend," when she asked him what kind of sake he wanted. There’s nothing like picking up the tab on a $50 glass of sake.

So then finally, you’re in Vegas with a few friends and you’ve just outlasted over 5,400 people in the largest poker tournament ever, what could you possibly do to top it? You bowl the crap out of that town, that’s what you do! The roll of film with all the photos of the, uh, hookers and the blow and whatever else it is that cool people do when they win money got misplaced. Here’s an exciting bowling pose though.