Back in the day when I did a short stint as editor at PokerPages, I had a vision of providing a collective home for poker bloggers; a place where a diverse and irreverant group of writers could ply their trade.  I was disappointed to leave before that vision was realized.  When Linda Geenen approached me with her idea for PokerWorks, I knew I had met someone with the same shared vision. 

While this experiment, of sorts, is coming to a close, I am still left encouraged.  Although we each wrote about our separate rants, raves, bad beats, and personal victories, I felt part of something different - something united.  It was sort of like my second dysfunctional family.  I suspect it was not just the idea of the collective that made me feel this way.  A collective is made up of individuals and on this front I had hit the motherload.  While I had always respected and enjoyed the work of the “new bloggers,” Joe Speaker, Maudie,  Change100, and Grubby, working alongside them in this venture gave me a renewed appreciation of their talent and dedication to the poker blogging ideal.  I also enjoyed getting to know Ken and Craig, who were both so gracious and made me feel welcome in “thier home.”  And then of course there was Linda.  Many people have a vision - few have the fortitude and drive to see it through.  And I’m sure dealing with our little group of bloggers was akin to herding cats on quaaludes.  Thanks darlin’.

So I’m heading back to my home, AimlesslyChasingAmy.  Y’all are welcome to come by and visit.  I’ll miss my little corner here at PokerWorks, but I promise I won’t be a stranger.            

Jose Conseco and some pals insisted on playing in a women’s only tournament at the Commerce, resulting in one poster over at 2+2 speculating that steroid use had shrunk his man parts to the point where he is now technically a woman.   The Commerce decided to let the guys play rather than fight a potential discrimination claim.  The gals didn’t seem to mind as they promptly relieved them of their dead money buy-ins.  

The World Series of Poker in Europe didn’t have a huge draw - but it was definitely an elite draw.  The field was clogged with bracelet winners.  In the end, however, it was 18 year old Annette_15 that took down the main event.  While normally the industry would be exploiting and promoting the boob angle associated with a woman taking down a main event, I think Annette’s age and playing history have them in a bit of a quandry.  While legal to play in Europe, she is still a few years away from the US age limit - and they won’t be able to pimp her in the US WSOP until then.  And the fact that she apparently honed her chops as a decidedly underage 15 year-old has the industry grinding their teeth.   Perhaps worst of all, she is primarily an online player - words that are now only whispered in the states - which isn’t something they feel comfortable pumping up in a press release.  But for all of us that have been watching Annette tear it up online, it was really only a matter of time before she won a B&M tourney boobs down. 

Poker pro Jean Robert Bellande may survive on this season of Survivor, but the audience is wondering if they’ll survive the continued exposure of his man boobs.  I did not watch the first episode, but I haven’t read this many posts about man boobs since Hellmuth’s televised shirtless balcony shot.  C’mon guys.  TV adds pounds (and apparently cup sizes).    

Pam Anderson reportedly racked up a $250,000 poker debt at the tables recently.  She was abe to find some sucker Rick Salomon (of Paris Hilton sextape fame) to erase the debt for a little ”make out” time.  No matter how you define making out, I still think she struck a good deal.  Kinda makes Brandi look like she was giving up more than she had to for mere satellite buy-ins.

And lastly, Bryon Micon has outed himself as a boob, detailing how he got scammed for $12K by an alleged con artist.  If anyone is interested, scamming Micon looks pretty easy; make up a Beverly Hills address, rent a fancy car for the day, claim your gazillion dollar bank transfer got hung up, and pretend to be amused when Micon throws $300 worth of one dollar bills down on the dance floor of Rain.  If this was just a hoax for traffic - kudos.  If not - how sad.               

Like a lot of pros did this year, Matusow headed over to the WPT’s Bellagio Cup when he busted out of the WSOP Main Event.  The WPT had made some structure changes that the pros were very positive about; allowing them to play deep stack poker and a game with a little bit more finesse.  An hour before the end of Mike’s first day, he pushed his last remaining chips to get himself back to where he started the day; and one of the shortest stacks going into Day Two.  He went from about 20K to 332K on Day Two.  Not a bad day’s work.  Long story short, he made the final table and finished second behind Kevin Saul, when his straight flush draw didn’t come in.  But I think the second place only made Matusow hungrier.  In his speech at the end of the WPT taping, Matusow congratulated Saul for his wire-to-wire victory, but candidly (like Mike would be guarded?) confessed how much he wanted a WPT win.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mike is at the Borgata this week on his mission for a WPT win.  I spoke to him yesterday at the start of the dinner break.  There were still seven players left - one more to lose before the final televised table.  Mike was one of the shorter stacks and was also one of the players who pushed for a dinner break instead of playing through.  He confessed that he had a monster headache, but still thought he was playing “above the rim.”  I suspect he thought he might be able to lose the headache over dinner.  Today he’s heading for another WPT final table.  He’s third in chips, but practically tied with second place.

You can say what you want about players like Matusow and Hellmuth (and people do).  But I’ve never met two players who absolutely hate to lose as much as they do and who are always hungry for the win.

Good luck in there today Mikey.                

It seems Dan was featured on a recent Quick/DFW Girl Talk podcast.  If you ever saw Dan’s rhinestone encrusted sun glasses, you’ve probably long had your suspicions.  But listening to the 9/12/07 podcast entitled “The Balancing Act” will convince even the skeptics that Dan M is indeed one of us.  Call me later this week Dan, and we can exchange some make-up tips.

Perchance to Dream….

Otis is one of my favs.  He’s a terrific writer, a mischievous boy, a responsible man, and a pretty great human being all the way around.  So I like that we have a lot of vices in common.  I view my smoking, drinking and poker playing as some of the key elements that bond us as blogging brothers.

There is one thing we share that I know each of us would prefer we didn’t; neither of us can sleep worth a damn.  During the 2007 WSOP, Otis and I exchanged sleep reports.  While we each seemed to improve as the series played on, it was still rare if either of us posted 6 hours/night.  And right now, I’d settle for five.

I could sleep when I was young and I come from a long line of sleepoholics.  My parents could snooze long after the Saturday cartoons had run their course.  I have no clock to punch or classes to attend.  I want to sleep.  I like sleeping, damn it.  But after four hours, I’m wired for sound.  I’ve tried drinking before bed.   I’ve tried a relaxing jacuzzi before bed.  I’ve tried a drunken jacuzzi before bed.  I’ve tried both going to bed early and staying up late.  Nada.

So if anyone has any ideas that don’t involve prescription drugs, let me have ‘em.  I gotta find a way back into dream land.

So far in 2007, Bill Edler has had the kind of year every player dreams of.  He started out in January with a 13th place finish at the Borgata’s Main Event.  He followed it up with a first place finish in the PokerNetCast Heads-up Challenge in February.  In March he made TWO final tables in championship events; one in the LA Poker Classic and the other at Bay 101.  He apparently slacked off in April and May :).  He won his first WSOP bracelet in the Short Handed NLHE event in June.  He finished 23rd in the WSOP Main Event in July.  August was a slow month for poker, so you can’t hold a blank against him.  Last night, Bill Edler won the WPT’s Gulf Coast Poker Challenge.  

With 17 players left, Bill Edler had just two $1000 chips; one of which had to go into the ante.  It was then that I was reminded of a dinner I had with Bill, Gavin, and Peter “Norberg” Feldmen.  It was their Day One of the Main Event.  They were on dinner break and we high tailed it over to a good Thai restaurant.  Well it might have been good if the AC was functional.  At any rate, none of the boyz had much of a stack yet.  There was some debate as to what their chip stacks should be at the end of Day One in order to consider paying the $10,000 buy-in at the Bellagio as a back up.  (As an aside, all of these players finished Day One in good position and all of them went on to cash in the Main Event).

During dinner, one of the topics that came up was what it meant to have “game.”  I thought with this crowd, I might hear a lot of talk about aggressive play and taking risks.  But ”game” to them meant never giving up in an event; to always keep your head in the game, no matter how low your stack got and no matter how far away you were from the money.

Edler has always had “game,” but perhaps never demonstrated the concept as handily as he did last night.  He was positively stunning.              

I remember when I had meetings at IBM with the marketing people.  They would spend three hours debating the exact shade of charcoal the new servers should be.  When they’d ask for my opinion, I’d say I didn’t care if they were puke green as a long as they worked.  They’d then spend the next hour discussing if the buying public was ready for puke green.  I would roll my eyes.  And cold calling?  Forget about it.  I got kicked out of the girl scouts for “lack of motivation,” which I think translated to “not a cookie seller.”

When I went back to graduate school I had to write; a lot.  And I liked it; a lot.  When I realized that people got paid to write about poker, something I was already doing for free, I wanted in.  And all of a sudden, those charcoal color nit pickers made sense to me.  Doing research about what people wanted.  Finding the right niche for your product. Networking.  Cold calling.  I did them all.  When I started out, I actually would dedicate one hour each morning to marketing - or what I began calling my “shameless self-promotion hour.”  It took time, but it slowly paid off.  And the more jobs I got, the more writing and less marketing I had to do, which was the objective after all.    

I have a number of acquaintances that don’t write for a living, but feel they could.  There’s one guy who I’m pretty sure thinks he is a far better writer than I am and that I don’t deserve the gigs I’ve been able to get.  How do I know he feels this way? Because he’s said, “I’m a better writer than you are and I could have gotten those gigs,” about a dozen times.  He might have talent as a writer, but he sucks at hiding his feelings and subtlety is also apparently not his forte.  The first time he said it, I was a little taken aback.  All the rest of the times, I told him the same thing.  “You might be the best damn writer in the world, but until you actually write something and market it, no one’s going to pay you a dime.”  And somehow this leaves him feeling that the world is an unjust place, where talent continues to go unrecognized and I, apparently, continue to be the poster child for all that he deserves. 

I often hear the same song here in Austin, where we probably have more musicians per capita than any other city.  Once a week I hear some wanna be musician claim they are a bigger talent than [fill in the blank with any recording artist].  Invariably they don’t have a demo, haven’t performed in even an open mike, and have never talked with any clubs about what they’re looking for.

Life is short, boys and girls.  If there’s something you want out there, you gotta find a way to just do it.  And I’m not just talking about writing.  Do you want a promotion at work?  When was the last time you updated your resume (just one more marketing tool) to reflect the skills you have that fit the next job that you want?

You think you can’t market yourself.  Think again.  Think poker.  You market on the felt all the time.   You establish a table image.  You think about positional advantage.  You study your target market and figure out what hands you can sell and to whom.  You have to have a real hand against a calling station and almost any two, with a raise, will do against the rock. 

And you also know that if you’re going to win a hand, you’ve got to get in there and actually play one.        

Writing affords me a very flexible schedule.  I can go grocery shopping on weekdays.  I can talk with people anytime I want without a boss looking over my shoulder.  But when my friend wildbill recently wished me a happy long weekend, I had to stop and think about it.  Was it one of those weekends?  I pretty much work every day - and each day is pretty much like the last.  Sometimes a tournament is going on.  Some days are more poker newsy than others.  But pretty much, if it’s a day, it’s a writing day.  If there’s something on television I want to watch, I pretty much have to TiVO it ahead of time.  It’s not that I don’t have time watch when it’s on - it’s just that I never know what day “today” is.

Another hazard is communication.  I suck at corresponding in a timely manner.  Just today, I responded to four emails that had been sitting in my inbox for over two weeks.  One of them was to Gene, looking for advice on a camera purchase.  When I apologized for my tardiness, he confessed that he too suffers from the same problem.  Apparently his friends want to know why it takes a writer so long to write back.  Excellent question.  My friends have that same question.  I guess it’s just hard to take time out from writing to write; strange but possibly true.

My other occupational hazard is poker.  Writing about poker leaves one with suprisingly little time to actually play poker.  It’s the worst when I’m actually on location covering a tournament.  Hearing chips splash into pots and watching cards hit the board just creates the expected Pavlovian response.  I’ve been doing a lot of writing these past weeks, so other than sneaking in for a few hands of HORSE on Full Tilt here and there, I’ve been card dead in the literal sense.  And I’ve been meaning to try duplicate poker, but I still have anted up yet.  Sigh.

Hope y’all are having a good labor day.  And I’m glad wildbill reminded me, otherwise how would I know?  Play a few hands for me if you get a chance.

We can debate the semantics of whether poker is a sport, but the fact of the matter is that it is being tracked into a sports media model.  For the last two years, Harrah’s has sold exclusive reporting rights to the WSOP.  In 2006, Card Player paid for a level of exclusivity for tournament reporting. This year, Bluff Magazine, who subcontracted through PokerNews, coughed up the bucks for the rights.   Recently, the WPT has sold out to an exclusive reporting provider.  Card Player has exclusivity for all WPT championship events, which precludes reporters from other media outlets to go inside the ropes (technically they can ask for a WPT escort for 15 minutes inside the ropes, but a tournament can’t be reported under those conditions).    

But until the final table, or the rare heads-up tournament, there is no one single playing field in poker.  A poker tournament evolves from a base of dozens, or in some cases hundreds, of tables; each table providing its own separate drama.  There aren’t nine or eleven players on a team.  There are hundreds to thousands of players.  Even with a plethora of reporting outlets cooperating with each other (as they traditionally have) to provide readers with the richest experience and most accurate details, a poker tournament represents larger challenges than most sports.  Reporters don’t just enhance the experience, they decide what it will be.  With so many players (known and unkown) and so many tables, selection dictates how the event it perceived.  It’s not just the details they report; it’s how well they make their decisions on what they report.  In the case of poker, exclusive media just ends up to equating to limited coverage; where the readers end up with reports that are often biased toward professionsals over chip leaders and scewed by the many business relationships media providers have with individual players.

My rant today was brought to you by PokerWire’s withdrawal from the tournament reporting space.  PokerWire basically set the standard for chip count coverage and accuracy in tournament reporting.  When Tim Lavalli and I wrote our series of articles on the 2+million extra chips introduced into the 2006 WSOP Championship event, we relied heavily on PokerWire’s data because we knew it was likely to be the most accurate.  PokerWire’s radio show was creative, informative, and fresh.  They gave a lot to our “sport,” but feel that with the growing number of media restrictions in poker that they can not continue to provide what they feel our game deserves.  I suspect their decision will be mirrored by others in the future. 

There are more losses than gains with exclusivity.  The readers certainly lose.  And truth be told, the exclusive online media provider loses.  They usually pay a pretty nice buck for the privelege, and don’t really gain incremental traffic.  Most viewers, if they were anything like me, had windows open to multiple media providers and read them all anyway.  Harrah’s and the WPT get short-term monitary gain from these contracts - but lose visibility to the events and sport they are supposedly trying to promote as more media providers toss in their poker reporting towel.                     

Pam Brunson (pictured above with David Levy during the 2007 WSOP Main Event) is a pretty fantastic woman all the way around.  But it was her poker prowess, and not her winning smile and fun loving personality, which got her the last berth for the WPT Ladies night.  It looks like a pretty entertaining Ladies Night this year as Brunson will be joining Linda Johnson, Mimi Tran, Kristy Gazes, Melissa Hayden, and JJ Liu.  This is not going to be a quiet or demure group. 

Pam, who is only an occasional player when compared to her father Doyle and brother Todd, cashed twice in this year’s WSOP - including a nice finish in the Main Event.  I noticed that she had borrowed ”Casper” as one of her good luck charms.  Casper is a lighter with the Ghost Busters logo on it, inscribed with the name “Dolly.”  Casper is one of the most coveted good luck charms in poker - so much so that Howard Lederer actually bought it from Doyle.  Doyle would only sell it to him with the understanding that Doyle would retain ownership of the charm until his death, which is why Howard Lederer and Casper are in Doyle’s will.  Howard says he hopes he has to wait a very long time to take possession of Casper.

Well I have no idea what my good luck charm is - but I know where it is; McCarran Airport.  I had always assumed the video poker pay tables would suck at the airport, so I never even looked.  Then one time, my flight was delayed and while killing time I checked them out - and they weren’t that bad.  In fact they were better than the strip properties and almost as good as off strip.  I played.  I won.  Since then, I always try to sneak in a few hands of VP before my flight.  I’m 9-for-9 in winning sessions.  My flight back on Tuesday was delayed for an hour.  I didn’t get to play very long, however, because I decided to get up from the machine after just 12 minutes and $225 richer.   Video poker and free wifi - damn I love that airport.     

It’s not because I’ve bellied up to a poker table at almost every casino; fondling cards and and kibitzing with the locals - although that’s part of it.  To me, Vegas is now like the lines on my grandmother’s face; something both fragile and familiar.  I understand its history and know that, in some small way, I’ve become a part of it.  It’s like family.  Like blood.  I know its flaws and it knows mine, but our bond prevails.

While I have plans and things I’d like to do in Vegas, I’ve come to let Vegas set my pace.  I wade into her waters and let a current move me through my stay.  Sometimes it’s a fast current that crashes me over rocks, swirls me into eddys and barely let’s me come up for air.  Other times, it drifts slowly through the backwaters, allowing me to study a piece of her shore in a new and enlightened way.

My stay, this time, will have some personal time for poker, but sprinkled through my real agenda.  I’m here to finish up some interviews with Mike Matusow for his upcoming book.  I’ve really enjoyed spending time with Mike on this project.  And I smile every time I stand at his doorstep and look down at the mat that says, “Wipe Your Paws.”

Mike has two cats; Flash and Aces.  Maybe because Mike is bipolar, it’s too much of a cliche to say that there are two sides to Mike.  And it’s probably even more a cliche to say that pets and owners take on each other’s personality.  But Mike’s cats are very different from each other - but both are very much like Mike.  Aces is a big strong cat; independent, confident, and has a read on everybody.  He likes company, but is basically in the zone.  Flash is unabashed about both his need for affection and his ability to be affectionate.  Flash isn’t young anymore, but he loves to entertain with a playful exuberance that represents far more kitten than cat.

So today, I might try to sneak in an Omaha hi/lo tournament at the Orleans and then spend a little more quality time with Mike, Aces and Flash.  And after that?  Who knows.  Vegas will tell me when she’s ready.