The Service Industry

I like the Borgata, the hotel casino in Atlantic City. It’s very nice as far as casinos go. Just take my word for it. However, don’t try to get a tuna melt there. Apparently they had a meeting. (The following is the actual conversation I had with the nice woman at the poker room snack bar.)

Her: What can I get you?
Me: Could I get a tuna melt?
Her: No.
Me: I can’t?
Her: Nope.
Me: I was here two weeks ago and I had a tuna melt then.
Her: Since then we’ve had a meeting.
Me: You had a tuna melt meeting?
Her: It was a general meeting. Tuna melts came up.
Me: Oh. (I walk away dejected.)

And when you’re done not getting your tuna melt don’t try to buy 5 black chips from the cage. They have a 5-10 no limit game with a $1,500 cap on the initial buy in, so I went to the cage to buy some chips.

Me: (handing $1,500 to the cashier at the cage) Could I have $1,000 in $25 chips and $500 in $100 chips?
Him: I can’t give you 5 black chips.
Me: I can’t buy 5 black chips?
Him: You can buy $2,000 in black chips.
Me: The maximum buy in is $1,500. I just want 5 black chips.
Him: I can’t give you 5 black chips.
Me: Oh. (I walk away with $1,500 in green chips.)

Apparently there is a new Borgata and/or New Jersey Casino Control Commission rule that says you have to buy a full stack of chips. For reasons that I’m sure are apparent to someone besides me you can only buy in increments of 20, not 5. Apparently the customer isn’t always right.

However I did meet one person in Atlantic City looking to satisfy the customer. I had a terse but interesting encounter on the way back to my hotel room. I step into the elevator late Friday night along with a group of 4 young men and 2 surgically enhanced young women that I don't know. Out of the blue, one of the young men says to one of the women “Yeah, but he’s not with us,” in reference to me. To which another asks, “but how much for him too?” The woman runs her gaze up and down my body and finally comes up with a figure she’s satisfied with. “A hundred bucks,” she answers.

Now, I don’t remember the interaction word for word but I think the phrase “party” was used and she inquired as to whether I would like to join them. I thanked her for the offer but explained that I was actually very tired. She explained that she could wake me up quite effectively and I replied “that’s what I’m afraid of.” I really don’t know quite what I meant by that but it was the first response that came to mind and she accepted it. If she felt unduly shunned she did not show it.

They exited a floor below me and I said something fairly inane. “You kids have fun,” or something to that effect. And that was the end of it.

The next day I talked with a friend who has knowledge in such areas and inquired what specifically I could have expected to get for $100. “At the Borgata or the Taj Mahal?” he asked. I explained the situation and he gave me a couple broad possibilities but thought that $100 was fairly cheap for the Borgata, unless there was some sort of group discount being offered. I mentioned that there were two women and it might have simply been a performance piece of some sort. I don’t know.

All I really do know for sure is that all of a sudden I really do want to know exactly what I was offered. I really doubt it was anything I would have bought (and the chance of Christi authorizing such a purchase would be rather slim) but still I am curious. At this point I wish I had offered that woman $20 just to explain exactly what the $100 was for. I’m not saying it was necessarily anything really good, like a “tuna melt,” but the fact that I’ll never know does vex me. Oh well.

My Underwear as it Relates to the Inevitable Destruction of the Poker Industry

As if I didn’t have enough to irrationally fear: the bird flu, religio-fascism of various brands, Vice-Presidential buck shot. It’s a scary world out there. And apparently to add to all this I now have to worry that my sole source of income will be completely eradicated. Lately it seems that every other month there’s a new rash of mainstream headlines assuring me that the poker industry is going the way of $0.99 gas and Lawn Jarts.

This doesn’t make me all that happy. Among the many things that the poker industry has done for me over the years there are two that are paramount. It has allowed me to live in Manhattan without government assistance, and it has made me even more unemployable than I might otherwise have been. Now, I’m not saying I haven’t learned anything from poker. I’m just saying that I don’t know how the lessons I’ve learned would look translated into black and white words on a resume. I mean, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how many HR people are going to be so blown away by my ability to not overplay Ace-Queen under the gun.

So naturally all these Casandraesque headlines were a little disturbing. Luckily though I took the time to read one of the actual articles the other day and I feel a little better. Apparently, these "Dismal Outlook for Poker Industry" articles were talking not about poker players but rather the people who rushed in to exploit poker players. It turns out that, surprisingly enough, there is not quite the market for Hold ‘Em branded car seats that some people thought there would be.

As it is with many issues, I think my underwear might help to elucidate things. A while back Christi, as she is wont to do, bought me some underwear. In particular "Texas Hold ‘Em" boxers. I’ll try to keep this rant to a minimum because I’ve posted similar sentiments before, but it’s just that I still find this mainstreaming of poker fascinating.

I remember the first time I found Doyle’s original Super System in a Barnes and Noble. Since you used to have to call up the Gambler’s Book Shop in Vegas to find it I was pretty surprised. And the first time I saw an entire 11 book Poker display prominently placed near the checkout line I was blown away. Then it just started to get strange.

I walked into a local grocery store a Christmas or two ago. Standing among the various tomatoes and Twinkies there was a large display with exactly two items. These two items had nothing to do with groceries at all. If you’ve ever been to a local Manhattan grocery then you know how tiny and cramped they tend to be and what a premium there is on space. Yet the owner of the store had figured that if there were any non-food items in the world that he might be able to hawk it would be these two: the new Harry Potter novel and of course a set of Texas Hold ‘em poker chips.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues I can’t post the picture I took of that display. Also currently undisplayable is the picture of the poker cologne set I took at J.C. Penny. I guess nothing says sexy odors quite like poker players do. But of course nothing says inappropriate over-branding quite like the one photo that I can display, the Hold ‘em gum ball machine. Not since the creation of the candy cigarette has there been as clear a statement on responsible marketing.

What does this have to do with my poker branded underthings? Well, in this case it’s not so much how responsible it is as just how sloppy. Whoever designed these boxers either has a wonderfully dry sense of humor or is an idiot. If you look closely at my undershorts you’ll notice that it’s populated entirely with power hands like the King Fiver, and the Jack Seven off. Not quite the iconic celebrity hands, the Ace-Ace or even the Jack-Ten suited, that one tends to link with Hold ‘em.

Now, as it happens I would love to live in a world were I could believe that the designer of this garment wanted to show the actual type of poker hands that you will most often see and by extension was making a deft statement about the less compelling negative space that lies between the rarer moments of excitement that make up our lives, a reflection on the sheer volume and therefore the existential importance of the mundane. However, this may be a bad read.

Possibly more likely, I would imagine a designer who has no concept of poker at all and asks his boss to explain what the eff Texas hold-them is. "I don’t know, it’s some game where you get two cards. And I think the two cards sometimes burst into flames and/or sprout wings. Just run with it."

And I like to hope that it is this type of gratuitous over-branding that is getting people into trouble. Poker as a fad more than poker as an industry, the idea that if I include the word "poker" on my cologne I can sell more. Reaching a saturation point in mainstream penetration is not actually the same as a complete industry wide collapse.

There was a period in the late 90's when CNBC became like ESPN, with throngs of unfinancial-type people following and betting on their favorite stocks like they were sports teams. At the time this may not have done much for the stability of the stock market. But while there were a few post millennial corrections there actually is still a stock market and some of the smart people still do make money.

For better or for worse I think we are stuck with poker for a while. I mean people still haven’t gotten bored with golf and I don’t believe that that’s a bad analogy to draw.

Now don’t get me wrong I am still quite confident that a harsh rain’s a-gonna fall. The poker correction is coming. I’m already hearing anecdotal stories of parents getting calls from Vegas requesting a plane ticket home. Hindsight might show dropping out of college and moving into the Orleans as possibly not the single most farsighted career plan ever.

I don’t think that anyone in the know believes the current environment is completely sustainable. Obviously the majority of truly bad players have to either become better or become broke. But the total apocalypse may still be a while off. And one way or another I still can’t wait to see what the Poker Lifestyles Expo will bring to us this year.

Timely Valentines Day Post

So I run into Dollie, of Jane and Dollie fame, and she tells me that she has been reading my blog. My particular type of narcism being driven by insecurity, I ask her what she thought of it.

Dollie- "Oh, I loved it!"
Me- "Oh yeah."
Dollie- "Yep. No it was good. I mean, you know, I liked it. I mean I didn’t read the whole thing."
Me- "No?"
Dollie- "No. It was just kind of like, you know, it was kind of like a lot of... long."
Me- "Oh"
Dollie- "Yeah, I mean I guess it makes sense. You’re always, you know with the stories, and they kind of...you know they kind of... Oh yeah, I liked it. It was just... you know, a lot."

All right, all right. In an attempt to keep the Blah, Blah, Jibber-Jabber down a little I’ve decided to run this year’s Valentines’ Photos with only minimal commentary. Instead of going to a swanky restaurant this year, we went to a fancy pants hotel for Valentines Day. A special thanks to Jor for getting us a decent rate at the Standard in downtown Los Angeles. I told Nick Dileo we were staying at the Standard and he told me how much he despised it. It’s one of the new breed of "hip" hotels and I can imagine it being a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. I don’t remember whether Nicky hated it because it was too pretentious or because it was too silly. But the more I think about it, that’s probably exactly why Christi and I liked it. Somehow it was able to be both pretentious and silly at the same time, which isn’t so easy. Anyway, with far less commentary than the Japanese photos, here are a couple shots from Valentines day at the Standard.

Scenic rooftop pool:

The cabanas were these funky molded red plastic things that for some reason all had actual waterbeds in them:
From here we could wave at Jor across the street in his oversized window office:

Luckily since this is minimal commentary I will not have to explain why there might be a giant black foam foot in our bathroom:

And of course, in case there was any confusion, this is the paper you use when you take a poo:

Bada Butt

A couple months back I’m having dinner with Gene, a friend of the family, and obviously I get peppered with some poker questions. Gene is not really a player but he does ask an astute question. With these new tournament fields being as large as they are, he says, you probably are not going to sit down with many people you know at all. So if that’s the case then how can you cater your game to someone’s style of play if you know absolutely nothing about them or how they play?

I allowed that he had a point. It is very different than even a couple years ago when the band of nomads traveling from tournament to tournament wasn’t quite so large. I remember TJ writing about what an advantage he had because he could remember every player he’s ever played with and how they played. Still though, I explained to Gene, you never know absolutely nothing about the people you see. The second someone sits down at your table they are generally drenched with information of some sort or another. What they’re wearing, who they’re talking to, how they hold themself, it all helps to give some sense of how they might play.

For instance, if you are sitting down to the first day of the 2006 World Series of Poker and the guy next to you is wearing a souvenir 2006 World Series of Poker shirt, 2006 WSOP jacket, 2006 WSOP baseball cap and has a plastic WSOP card protector, there’s a decent possibility that he may not be a stone cold 20 year veteran of the series. (Of course if you sit down to a similarly attired player 6 or more weeks into the series it may have less to do with the fact that he’s a star struck 1st year player and more to do with the possibility that this guy just hasn’t left the casino in 40 days and is too lazy to do laundry.) Likewise, if you sit down and the guy to your left spends 5 minutes dissecting a hand he played last night in a home game with Lee Watkinson this is also going to give you some insight about what level of game he plays. Obviously these are not things that will tell you the full story of how someone plays, but they do give you a starting point to think of their game.

This conversation that I had a few months ago, on the information that players wear, was at the forefront of my mind last night. You see I missed something about an opponent at my table that may have been more informative than any tell I’ve ever run across before, and more obvious than any tell I’ll ever run across again. Having played the poker circuit off and on for a couple years I pride myself on being able to size up an opponent fairly quickly. The more subtle cues may occasionally elude me but I have no trouble catching the obvious stuff. Or so I thought.

So I’m playing a single table satellite last night and across the table from me is a young woman, cute, short hair, spaghetti string top revealing a somewhat tattooed left shoulder. I play with her for about 35 minutes or so until she calls all-in on the river with no pair/jack high and, not surprisingly, gets knocked out. Well, at this point she gets up from the table and being the Clouseauesque master of observation that I am I just then notice the one thing about her that probably would have told me everything I might ever need to know about her game. As she walks away from the table and towards the bathroom, what I so keenly observe is that the woman just happens to not be wearing pants. Yep, no jopke, staring right back at me, nothing but bare ass. When I see this, the all in call with jack high starts to make a little more sense.

I had a friend who once used the phrase "it was like playing in a dealer’s game" i.e. that it was a game where all the players were professional poker dealers, i.e. that it was supposed to be a soft game. See, the general belief is that if a poker dealer were a good enough player then they wouldn’t have to deal to make a living. Therefore poker dealers are lousy players. Beyond just being condescending this is a characterization that just isn’t true. Michael "The Grinder" Mizrazi, Mike Matasow, Robert Hanley, Scotty Nguyen, a number of the best players in the world were all once dealers. In fact to make such a broad generalization about any diverse group of players is obviously dangerous. With all that in mind though I will still give you one piece of infallible advice. If anyone ever offers you the opportunity to play in a high stakes strippers’ game then by all means run, don’t walk, to the nearest pawn shop and hock whatever you have to to buy in, strippers not generally being know for their keen understanding of implied pot odds.

Now, why am I playing poker with a stripper? Well, that has to do with something called (the oddly apostrophied) Bar Poker Pro’s.

Having slogged from sterile hotel to hotel, grinding out this "easy living" for so long I sometimes forget that a lot of people actually like to play poker. They actually do it not for the rent but rather for some kind of fun. And that’s the idea behind http://www.barpokerpros.com/ a business that offers poker as entertainment. Instead of hiring a band or a DJ to get people into a bar or restaurant you hire a poker game. The Bar Poker people bring a table and a dealer and they advertise for a game. People who might not have frequented your establishment come by to play poker and while they’re there they of course might buy a few beers, order a burger, whatever. Playing is free. You get league points for how high you finish and at the end of the season there is a championship for the people with the highest point totals. Then the winner of the end of the season tournament gets a WSOP seat.

They run these little games throughout South Florida, in various bars and restaurants. Next week the game closest to my father is at a fancy steak house. This week however the closest game happened to be at a rustic little pub by the name of Bada Bing. Now I was not familiar with the Bada Bing chain before this and I’m not even sure if it is a chain. For all I know it may just be an unrelated group of bars that haven’t gotten around to suing each other for having the same name. I didn’t ask.

Anyway, I pull up to the Bada Bing with my father and the first thing that I notice about the decor is what looks to be a homeless man sleeping in front of the building. Upon closer inspection though I see that said man is not moving and the police tape cordoning him off would seem to imply that the gentleman is not sleeping so much as dead. Finally though under closer closer inspection I realize that said man is not only not alive but is actually not even a man. It’s actually just a mannequin dressed up to look like a dead guy.

See the Bada Bing is not only a nudie bar but a nudie theme bar, the theme being gangsters chic. You walk in and all the TVs are playing old gangster movies, the VIP room is called the Godfather Suite, etc, etc. Of course my favorite decorative touch was not gangster specific. It was in the bathroom where someone had taken the time to take a red cloth napkin and place it on top of the toilet. For some reason this just really impressed me. I mean I’m lazy. I know lazy when I see it. Sometimes though I find myself impressed by a sheer artistry of sloth and it sticks with me. It was obvious that someone cared enough to think "what might make this space more inviting?" They might have thought about maybe putting plants in there or repainting it or even just occasionally mopping it, but no. Out of all the things that could improve the aesthetics of a dank and dingy space someone said "yep, red napkin, that’s definitively the way to go. Problem solved," and walked away.

Of course I don’t imagine that environmental aesthetics are really what draw most people into strip clubs. It’s all about the ladies, which Bada Bing had plenty of. In fact when we arrived at around 8 o’clock there had to be more performers than patrons. And to make matters worse the six or so patrons that were there were poker players. As the evening went on the place filled up a little more but at first it was just six patrons and two off duty strippers sitting at a poker table.

This of course didn’t turn out to be too profitable for the working strippers since poker players can be a little single minded during a game. When you’re in a hand, once the flop comes out, everything outside of the game temporarily goes blank and ceases to exist. I’ve long believed that a monkey and a one armed midget could be having a knife fight and once that flop comes out not an eye would be on them. While I haven’t had the chance to test this particular hypothesis yet, I can give you one piece of empirically proven truth, cards do seem to trump boobs. Two feet in front of our table: nubile young womany parts; Two feet to the side of our table: another stage with another woman jiggling her junk. Yet not once did I see a player even look up from the game much less miss a hand due to the nudeness around them. Poker players are strange people.

And the really weird thing was that everyone seemed to be having fun, even without playing for cash. I mean no one was losing grotesque amounts of money and yet everyone was still smiling. Strange people indeed.

Meta-MiniPost 1.2

All right hopefully this will be my last meta-post for a little bit. However I think it’s important to mention that I’ve actually started to read a few of the blogs I spam and I think I may have found 3 that I am perfectly comfortable with giving the Mike May Seal of Blogpproval (by which I mean 3 more blogs that linked to me with only a moderate amount of groveling on my part.) The three lucky recipients of these kudos (of a verbal kind as opposed to the more desirably chocolate coated kind, sorry) are the too cute to be playing poker Jodi, the too wealthy to still be blogging Chris, and the very much way too cool to be linking me Jane. I hope the sudden tsunami of readers that will come from this high profile publicity doesn’t collapse their respective servers.

Mission Accomplished!! (Metapost 1.1)

Unfurl the banners. I’m proclaiming Operation Back Door Thunder (as outlined in the last post) to be a resounding success. The hard work of putting random comments on random other blogs has paid off generously, to the tune of one pity link from Ross on a Rush. The chemist/poker player market is not an easy one to penetrate but with this new link I now consider it conquered and will move on to other markets. Of course the fact that I was originally linked as http://http://mikemay.blogspot.com/ instead of the correct http://mikemay.blogspot.com/ makes the utility of this new link a little suspect but I will take my victories where I can. Break out the champagne, the battle is joined.

Meta post #1

Before I do anything else I think I should take a moment to thank all the people who have used space on their own blogs to link to this blog and recommended it to their readers. So a big shout out to this growing group of helpful folks that so far consists of nobody. That’s right in the half a year or so that this blog has been up nobody has seen fit to recommend it to someone else. Thank you nobody. It’s good to know that as always nobody is there for me. I couldn’t have done it without you. (Actually I just double checked and found out that my friend Jor has actually put up the first link to this blog. However I still think "nobody" is funnier than "Jor" so I’m leaving that first paragraph as is.)

However, nobody linking me didn’t really bother me until I read this New York Magazine article on blogging. In short it said that you can have two different blogs both specifically dealing with the political economy of media as it relates to East Timor, one of which is written by MIT’s Noam Chomsky and one by Different Strokes’ Todd Bridges, and in short if Todd has more incoming links he’ll have more readers. End of argument.

So apparently these link things are important to getting readers and nobody wants to give me any. What exactly does that mean? Well, two things actually.

First in a vindictive retaliatory action, for the time being, I will be actively not linking to other blogs. Screw you all. You guys have no idea just how hard I'm not linking your asses.

And secondly I will be bypassing the blog writers who so brazenly snub me and instead will be courting their readers directly (in a roundabout manner). My plan is to attack through the comments section of their blogs. It is my hope that if I put comments on other people’s blogs some of their readers might see my name and say "Hey, I loved Shut Up And Deal," and click on my name.

Now of course I’m a little too lazy and/or self absorbed to actually read other people’s blogs much less write stuff on them so to simplify this operation my comments will consist of 3 phrases which I can cut and paste randomly to other blogs. Until someone comes up with a better idea these 3 phrases will be:

1) "Personally, I think I would have just moved all-in." As it turns out this is generally my response to 93% of the poker questions I get asked, but don’t actually listen to. So I figure it should apply to a majority of the posts dealing with specific poker hands.
2) "Awwww, yeah! You put the B in blog, beeyotch." This was actually Christi’s suggestion and I think it is rather sufficiently generic enough to cover a wide range of posts.
3) And of course anything that isn’t covered by the first 2 comments will be handled by the ever reliable standard: "Zoinks!!!"

Wish me luck.

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.

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 1 (The Why)

A while back American Airlines ran this incredible promotion. In hopes of building loyalty and combating JetBlue on a couple of their most popular routes AA offered a free ticket to anyone who made two trips from New York to California or Florida within one year. Between the number of decent LA tournaments I could go to and the fact that both my parents and Christi lived in Florida it was the perfect promotion for me. I easily completed the two required trips and was mailed my free ticket. Now the thing that made this offer so impressive was that the ticket was good for anywhere in the world that American Airlines flew to. I looked up the world map on the AA website and found that every continent short of Antarctica was positively littered with tiny red dots representing cities you could get to using AA. All I had to do was take two flights to places I was going to anyway and I would get a free ticket to anywhere in the world, it seemed too good to be true.

Now, as it so happens I’m not all that well traveled. I’ve seen a fair cross section of the large and lushly diverse country that I call home. I’ve lived in Michigan, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York. I’ve taken various road trips out west, along the Eastern seaboard, from Florida to Chicago, and so on. If it’s a state with a major legal casino I’ve probably made a business trip to it. However, I’m not so much a world traveler. I've never even made it over to Europe. I did spend about a month in Ethiopia in ‘99 but beyond that I'm not so much a member of the international community.

Luckily I’ve a fair number of friends who are far better traveled than I am and I spent almost a year interviewing them on what I should do if I had the chance to fly anywhere in the world for free. I received a decent range of suggestions but with the parameters I set one country came up more than most of the others, Thailand. So I called up American and told them "I’m going to Bangkok!" to which they replied "No you’re not."

What I quickly discovered was that American Airlines defines "anywhere in the world" fairly differently than I do. While the world map on the AA website was littered with tiny red dots that represented AA cities, the subtle difference between a Codeshare City, a Oneworld City, and an AA/Codeshare had eluded me. While you could get to Bangkok through AA it was not the specific Bozo type of city required for my ticket.

Well, I had backup and I told AA that I’d go to New Zealand instead. Now, the woman on the phone didn’t actually laugh out loud at me but there was a moment as she tried to figure out the best way to convey not only that I was not going to New Zealand but that it was a pretty dumb question in the first place and to convey all of that without insulting me too much. She got the first two ideas across but failed slightly with the third.

From there the conversation went: Australia? No. China? No. Singapore? No. And eventually I just gave up and asked "what’s the farthest point I can get to with this ticket?" She thought a second or two and said "Tokyo. I guess," to which I replied "Lock it up!"

And that more or less is the short explanation of why I ended up in Tokyo. Now just in case the idea of me trying to wade through Tokyo alone not knowing a single person or a word of Japanese wasn't silly enough I actually convinced Christi to put aside her debilitating fears of earthquakes, Asian bird flues, and having the only person she knows on an entire continent be me, and I dragged her to Japan as well. This all resulted in the following photos: Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Part 1 (The Why): here

This was the Japanese Inn we stayed at our first night.

The room was small but we liked the room service.

The view rocked as well.

This is Christi riding the subway. As you can tell all she had to do was throw on a black coat and she was indistinguishable from everyone else on the train.

This is Christi so hopped up on unfiltered Sake that she pretended to be a painted fiberglass bear...

...and then a sumo, where she yelled "FIGHT ME!!" and challenged the confused locals. Luckily, after about 20 minutes she eventually got bored.

This is Christi either at a Buddhist temple or in 1940's Germany.

Here's Christi at Shinjuku Train Station which made Grand Central look like an Amish buggy junction.

I didn't get any decent pictures of the neon of Shibuya so here's a stock picture of Time Square that's blurry enough that you can pretend it's Tokyo.

Here's me in front of a building with a giant bug crawling up the front of it. I'm still not entirely sure why there was a giant Japanese cockroach on the terrace but somehow in Tokyo it didn't seem too out of place.

As it turns out the whole city is pretty much laid out like the West Village, which makes it great for cruising around and randomly exploring little neighborhoods but not so good for actually finding anything specific. The fact that they choose to not even name most of their streets, much less list them in English, doesn't help either.

This impressed me though. It's not enough that you can buy a can of sake in any 7-Eleven. Their cans of sake actually have a button on the bottom of them that you can push and within a minute you have steaming hot sake no matter where you are. Those little bastards are crafty!

And speaking of crafty bastards, I stepped out of the shower and I couldn't understand why the area over the sink hadn't fogged up. Then I touched it and realized, heated mirrors. These fricking guys and their high tech mirrors. As you can clearly tell though, we westerners still have them soundly dominated on the hirsute front.

Completely by accident, we ended up in Japan at pretty much the exactly perfect time for all the touristy spring time activities. The weather was perfect for seeing cherry blossoms...

...and shrines...
...and gardens...

...and of course giant radioactive spiders.

This was where we ate the first morning.

And this was what we ate (after putting some wasabi on it). The restaurant was about 50 feet from the fish market that supplies all of Japan. It seemed pretty fresh.

This was one of our favorite restaurants.

It was almost like being in the Japanese pavilion at Epcot Center but it felt even more real.

Here's another of our favorite restaurants. All pampkin, all the time. We tried the pamkin pizza and pamkin curry. Actually very good.

This is a gratuitous shot of me on our picnic in order to show off my new haircut.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I thought pachinko would be somewhat less dumb than slot machines. I was wrong.

This was of course great for my allergies.

I still have no idea what this thing is but the picture fits very well into the "Things Growing Out of Our Heads" series of shots, which also includes...

this...

...and this.

And speaking of things sticking out of heads, the only thing cuter than a giant robot shaped like a panda is of course a giant panda shaped robot with a little panda pilot sitting in it's head. These people do love their cute.
For Culture we hit the Kubuki theater. As you can tell, the Gaijin seats were pretty far back. Those little tiny colors in the distance are a bunch of Samurai's and Geishas and crap like that. We had headphones that were supposed to translate the play into English. However, what happened was that someone on stage would go into a 15 minute Shakespearean monologue and then at the end, through the headphones, all we would hear was "Let's go boss!" I imagine some of the nuance fell to the wayside.
This was an instillation piece at the Mori Museum. What was great was that the white things on the floor were hundreds of plastic cups arranged aesthetically. Two different times during the 20 minutes I was there I actually heard a shattering crash as some older Japanese lady would accidentally barrel through the cups. A very crafty people, the Japanese, but perhaps not so coordinated.

And finally, this was the view as we sadly journeyed back to our empirically inferior Caucasian country.

Here's Christi miserable to be back wallowing among the muddied, miscegenated, masses of New York.