ADVENTURES IN LAS VEGAS

Hello, voyeurs!

Been a long time since I've blogged.  Wouldn't really be fair of me to raise the subscription price since I've been so inconsistent, huh?

Vegas's former number one cheesy photo op, and
 a once thriving hotel in the disco era suffers disrepair...read: Bargain prices!

Anyway, yes, I'm here in Vegas with my ol' standbye roommate, Senor Monkey.  Got in Monday night and yesterday, June 4th, I got to SMELL a WSOP bracelet.  Just a whiff...    just as if it were a  passing dream...  



Yes, I came within five people of capturing one of the highly coveted fifty-nine gold bracelets available to the players this year.  Instead, a consolation prize (like a parting gift for a game show loser) of sixth-place money would have to do.  You'll hear it a million times  -- the agony and bitterness, and the apparent disrespectful ingratitude of how anyone could be so miserable to make such great money in one day. " Sixth place?  Great run! Congratulations!"

Whatever.  I lost.

The Zen masters have a saying.  "In a journey of a hundred miles, ninety-nine miles is about halfway."



The Riviera's theme?  Broken glass!  Bring the kids!

If you've ever played a poker tournament, you totally get this saying.

Three hundred fifty-seven players slapped down $1500 four days ago for the Seven Card Stud tournament.  As has become tradition it seems, the worlds biggest leg-humper would be placed to my immediate left.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term (I'm pursuing a trademark on it), a leg-humper is someone on your left who will CALL for any price, thereby leaving your large bet unprotected, and giving pot-odds for anyone who wishes to join the fray, in a now completely unmanagably large pot.  Your split Aces or pocket Kings now have to survive a four way drunken chip carnival, and their highly-favored-holding status is completely diluted by a large pot, and worse, Stud is a LIMIT game.  You can't just throw a grenade into the pot and expect everyone to stop, drop, and fold.

So I've learned here to completely SKIP betting on fourth street; it's a small bet that only works against you when the pot is so large. (Apologies to those of you already falling asleep with the idea of Seven Card Stud being discussed...I understand).



Long story short, it got to the point where every time I would four-bet on third street, the rest of the table would begin to openly laugh at the guy calling my raise.  I'm showing an Ace.  It's not like all three cards are hidden.  You can actually SEE what I have.  Even if you omit deductive reasoning from your mind about what four bets could possibly mean in this situation...dude...you still SEE I have an Ace.  Even small children with poor attention spans can put two and two together in this situation and decide to fold. 

Hump.  Hump.  Hump...    Here he comes again along for the ride, bringing everyone else in with him...

Because of him, within about six hours I'm down to half my starting stack while the field is getting whittled down and everyone else has tripled up and is stacking chips.

And as I'm boiling over angrily about this guy...who has no plan other than to CALL himself into a Mutually Assured Destruction scheme for the both of us, and as I'm wondering HOW, HOW do I get this insanity to stop, he looks at me and says, "Huh huh huh...I remember you from last year!  You were buying everybody shots and you were a lot of fun!"



Yeah, the guy whose very flesh I'm imagining covered in a pack of angry, rabid Dobermans amped up on a cocktail of PCP and Red Bull, is just having himself a good ol' time.  Not too concerned about winning, mind you...at all...just here for the social aspect of the whole thing.  And apparently, according to him, I've Butterfly Effected myself a monster from some forgotton drunken late night 1-2 NLHE game from last year in Vegas!

So he's become the ultimate pest.  The pest who is not only destroying your plans for chip accumulation, but who actually LIKES you.   Ugggghhhh...

I went for a run that Thrusday morning, hours before the start of the tournament.  I think a long run before the start of any tournament is the best thing that one can do.  Gets out all the funk, hate demons, tension...but most importantly, I try to go for a distance a little further than I'm comfortable with. It kind of programs the brain to get into the mode of thinking "marathon; not a sprint."  Every tournament I've done well in, without fail, was played after an early morning long distance run.

For that morning's run, I deliberately picked the worst possible route from our hotel, The Riviera.  Um, yes, we're truly doing the "budget" thing this time.  I ran the crack corridor in between the Riviera and downtown Las Vegas.  The area known as NOTS...north of the Stratosphere.  I wanted a little motivation that the artificial sunshine of the Strip can't provide.  There's a perverse beauty in that area with all its tattoo shops, pawn stores, peep shows, bail bonds, street walkers, street sleepers, immigration lawyers, ethnic food dives...it's the ghetto hammocked between the two of the fakest areas of the planet.  It reeks of reality, has a few areas even Clark Griswold and his family would avoid, and makes for a good run.  In fact, you might find the motivation to run even faster.  I run past The Sahara.  Despite numerous reinventions of iteslf and reinvestment, the Sahara is now permanently "dark."  I run past the Rummell Motel, advertising "Non-smoking rooms  Hourly rates!"  Classy place.  All the freaks, povs, pervs, and weirdos Travis Bickle crusaded against surround me.  Suddenly I get chills how the randomizer on my iPod has chosen the Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Tell Me Baby."  It's an amazing song about the Sunset Strip and those trying so hard to "make it," while the city eats them alive.  The Sunset Strip and the NOTS corridor are like mirror images of each other.  I jog deeper and deeper into the 'hood.



Bad day to go jogging in a red t-shirt...
time to head back!

It's funny...if some Vegas resident had made a bet in the 1970's as to what would last longer, The Sahara, or the careers of Cher and Tom Jones, anyone would have arrogantly taken The Sahara.  Eventually, as you see from the picture to the right, I came to the conclusion that I've run far and deep enough for the day.  The back of my throat is cracked from the dry air, the sweat evaporates off me instantly as I'm panting, and I decide that I've had enough and start to head back.



But I still look for the Gambler's General Bookstore in that area, which I couldn't find that day on foot.  Back then, in the early 2000s, if you wanted ANY poker literature at all, you had to come to this place to get it.  It was like a trove of esoteric knowledge cleverly hidden in a little known store hidden in a cess pool of humanity.  Only those strange enough to want to gamble for a living but too anti-social to get themselves on a blackjack card counting team pursued poker.  Some of you probably remember this store.  Ha!  Nowadays, of course, ample poker literature is in every bookstore.

As I finish my run, I cross the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard when there's no traffic.  The street creeps all look up at me at the same time with a look of condemnation and astonishment.  I forgot!  No one on the West Coast jaywalks.  Ever.  Suddenly, to everyone around me, I'm the criminal and weirdo...

So I attribute my outlasting the Leghumpapotamus to gearing my brain properly from that early morning run.  He finally busted out!  Whew.  A little while later the field has been cut in half.  Feels like we are about half way there...  But with the forehead vein protruding frustration built up from his presence over the last several hours, towards the end of the night as I'm involved in a big three-way pot, I snap verbally at a new guy at our table who pairs his 10 on sixth street.  "Awesome!" I scream sarcasticaslly.  "Just Awesome!" after he bets into us.  I think I mumbled that he's a bananahead or something totally uncool, since the guy is right next to me, but deep down I know that he had the right odds to call at that point. I'm just very frustrated and behaving in a way I never do.  He's a quiet, polite clean cut Jewish guy talking about living in Israel with another Jewish guy at the table.  He scoops a big pot, and looking down his nose at me for my little fit (which I never throw...if that tells you the effect leg humpers have on me) and asks what limit I usually play.  "2-5, 5-10 Hold 'em, 20-40 stud...why?"  He just scoffs at me.

A few hours later we're bagging up our chips for the day.  I peek over at his bag as he writes "J-o-s-h  A-r-i-e...."   Ooops.

The next day I skip the run but do lots of sit ups.  I have a ill-formed new age theory that the gut is a primitive brain, and the more sit-ups one does, the better tuned your "gut" instincts will be.  I realize that I have opened up a window for anyone to make fun of me for that theory, but it's ok.  I'll accept it.  That's actually about as weird as I get, despite the fact that I once frequented the Gambler's General Bookstore.

Tom Dwan, Shannon Shorr, and Josh Arieh are assigned to my table, but if anything, I'm encouraged by that.  I've been playing Stud longer than the first two for sure.  I get Aces full of Queens to take a good sized pot off of Dwan, but realize that I missed a bet along the way, attempting a greedy check-raise.  Those little value mistakes cost you tournaments.  In a scene no one would have guessed, the amateur microstacks devoured the pros at that table with a good bit of luck.  It's the middle of day two and it kind of feels like I'm halfway there.



We're well into 2 a.m. when Shaun Deeb gets moved to our table.  We have to fade about twenty more people to make the money.  Then just ten more.  Deeb takes two murderous bad beats from the pudgy British kid on my left, who I've named "Devilboy."  He seems to take an unholy liking to his new nickname, and I wonder if I've encouraged this calling-station too much.  Yes, I have.  I really have.  He slaughters Deeb, clearly the best player at the table, giving the cards and the players intense concentration.  First Devilboy two outs him.  Then he two outs him again.  Deeb is brooding is his chair; once the chip leader, he now sees his fate as a min-casher.  His fuming behavior reminds me a lot of myself when I take bad beats.  After several minutes of steamng, he reaches for his cellphone and rapidly thumbs at it, then puts it down, feeling a little better.  "Facebook or Twitter?" I ask, kind of smirking.  "Both!" he almost shouts, "...and I was way too polite about it!"

The energy of day two was heightened by all the commotion going on at the Main Stage right next to us.  In a highly billed match, Jake Cody took on Yevgeniy Timoshenko head up.  But since Timoshenko is a Full Tilt representative, and since there were about two hundred British hooligans in the audience, the loudest most creative chants for Jake Cody and heckles againts Timoshenko rocked the entire Amazon pavillion room at the Rio.  The drunk British hoolgans would chant "USA! USA! USA!," which was funny enough in itself, but purely amazing in the fact that the heckling and chanting kept up solidly for at least seven hours!  Every chant was funny, perfectly and spontaneously coordinated, and set to no less than few hundred base melodies!  It was like being at a rowdy soccer match overseas.  I made sure to join the fracas on any one of my breaks, and they welcomed me and fed me lots of Heineken from their own individual kegs.

We finally make the money and my friend sweating me, Greg Grivas, brings over a big shot of encouragement to me.  The guy my friend brings over is an acomplished player, almost blinded this past winter by riding and crashing motorcycles in Vietnam.  He's a pretty energetic guy.  Not bad for seventy-one years old.  Men "The Master" Nguyen suddenly greets me right next to my table as we are re-starting.  The greeting was one of two hands held out to clasp my single handshake, then pull me into a big hug into his tiny frame.  He was greeting me like I was a long lost relative come to pay the rent.  Pretty nice of him, since we only have a mutual friend in Greg.  The hug gives me instant credit at my table, as he knew it would, and gives me some encouraging words.  He won the $10K Stud event last year, and is second in WSOP cashes only to Hellmuth.   The guy is radiant; a very charasmatic energy comes out from him.  Men has had an illustrious poker career probably most analagous to Pete Rose's career in baseball.  Men, one of the best ever, is now hungry to take the lead and recently encouraged to leave a better legacy for himself, each day diminishing that asterisk on his stat sheet.  And with the amount of energy and vitality the guy possesses, I'm here to tell you it won't be long before he takes the lead.

 We bag up our chips once again and come back for day three with twelve of us left.  The last nine of us would make the final table.  As we do, we're taken to the "kiddie table" of final tables, off to the side of the casino, a far cry from the glorious production set of the televised final table area.  I understand...it's Stud.  Boring enough to play, definitely nothing anyone wants to watch on TV.

I'd run card dead the whole day.  That's just the way it goes sometimes. As if a cruel joke, I'd once look down at rolled up Aces (5525:1 against ever seeing that hand) to watch everyone fold behind me. I'd get half way through the last days field of twelve people, crashing and burning out at sixth place.  It may have felt like halfway, but really only second place is half way.  And big congratulations to cosmonaut Yevgeniy "Eugene" Katchalov for his victory making it all the way.  His patience and concentration were top knotch throughout, and a very hard man to read with his icy cold Russkie demeanor.

Sixth place and the scent of a WSOP bracelet is a hard pill to swallow, but the consolation prize of money in my pocket, some of which was Negreanu's, Dwan's, and Arieh's just days ago is a little comforting. Stud is my best game and I hope the growing lack of interest doesn't kill it in the near future...

Anyway, I hope to come back to Vegas for another shot at this year's WSOP soon.  We will see how things go back home in Mississippi...

As always, thanks for reading my blather, and have an awesome day!

Full of giggles.  Daily.

Lastly, the booky stuff...



Here's my two highest recommendations for the month.  First the brilliant book Hollywood ruined last month by dumbing down the script to a vapid romance film.  Written in a simplistic, almost Hemmingway style, Water for Elephants exposes our own necessary needs in life for illusions, and the destruction it causes.  Brilliantly parallels the pains of growing old, the circus, hardships, and poverty.  Next up, Havana Nocturne.  Another serious page turner.  Expertly researched about the mob, gambling, Batista, Castro and the Revolution (wan't that a band?), Havana Nocturne takes you back in time to a very real and very scary world just a few miles off our own coast.  Despite yourself, you'll find Castro very intelligent, heroic, and likable...if not only because of how over-the-top awful his own enemies were.