Quest of a Closet Poker Player

Sweetie had me booked with a packed weekend of childcare as I had a chance to fill her role for a weekend.

The former neighbors who we visited in England were in town, so last week was a madcap time of sleepovers and errand running for all of us.

Saturday, Sweetie had and all-day training class at church, so I had All-In, The Little Guy, and two of the visiting boys for the day.  We headed to see Transformers, which The Little Guy saw for the second time (he’s three, remember).  I hadn’t seen it, and it was really very good.  Mr. J, the husband, arrived Saturday around 8:00 (at our house), and we headed to El Porton to satisfy his Mexican craving.  He went through about eight basket of chips and ate anything that got near to him.  We ended up back here fairly early, then I crashed around 11:00 or so Saturday night.  Honey’s friend Murph came in town from Hilton Head late Saturday night as well, her best friend in the world.

My dinner conversation with the couple illustrated the paradox of the Christian poker player.  I told them the story of John Armbrust and Jerry Yang, and both of them didn’t understand much of either of them or me for that matter as Christians and poker players both.  I’ve written about this extensively, so I won’t go over well-trodden ground here.  The tournament poker player is especially similar to really any professional individual sport where their tournament winnings dictate their income, even moreso than golf or tennis where sponsors put up the prize pool.  No one would ever question the late Payne Stewart or Tom Lehman’s faith, yet as a poker player the Christian seems to always straddle their two worlds.

It’s still been a pretty rough time of sleep for me, and The Little Guy had me up at 5:30 or so Sunday.  We had church and nursery, which wipes me out for the most part.  Headed to Whole Foods for lunch, then I had to take The Little Guy to Nicole’s Princess Birthday party (her third birthday, one of his classmates from preschool).  He was the only boy, and the first hour was spent clinging to me as I would shove him back in the midst of the cookery and Nora the Explorer playsets that the little hotties were playing with.  He balked at participating in the Pin-The-Tail-on-The-Donkey game after Nicole somehow got her tail to stick inside the dotted-line outline of said tail on said donkey.  Live Pin-The-Tail-on-The-Donkey is rigged.  I saw my first boob enhancements since Vegas, compliment of the neighbor who kept chatting me up about The Little Guy’s beautiful eyes and blah, blah, blah.  CC:  Every woman’s dream, every man’s nightmare.

The Little Guy finally started opening up after licking birthday cake then hitting a rogue balloon in the air for thirty minutes.  Nicole’s grandfather kept stealing my NY Times that I’d taken as a security blanket, and I kept having to snatch it from wherever he hid it in the living room.  The dad kept chatting with me, which I appreciated as I looked like a pretty horrible father when the mom’s would grill me about The Little Guy.  When asked for the fifteenth time if he was going two days a week or three in the upcoming preschool school year, I said, ” I really don’t pay attention to them until they start soccer, I’m just the Dad.”

We finally split, and The Little Guy was asleep before I cranked the car.  Sweetie and Murph were headed to see The Indigo Girls for the 38th time last night, so I had the boys plus one of the imports with me for the afternoon/evening.  We headed to the Japanese restaurant for dinner after I woke up The Little Guy from his 150 minute nap.  He was terrified of the fire and hid for most of the meal but seemed OK after his eyebrows were burned off early in the meal.  The Big Guy ordered Ramune, a Japanese soft drink that has a marble in the bottle.

I took the garbage out, which included ten bags of fermenting lawn grass which left my hands wreaking of ick.  Boys in bed by 9:00, and I headed back to the basement.  I watched Greg “fossilman” Raymer finish in the Top 50 of the Sunday Million on PokerStars (ok, I actually opened Stars, opened the tourney, he was 3rd with 650 or so players left, then I fell asleep for the next four hours).  Sweetie woke me from the computer, hauled me upstairs in her tipsy state, chatted with Murph for fifteen minutes.  Then Sweetie took me upstairs and ravaged me.  I slept until 8:30 this morning, the first good night’s sleep since I came back to the ATL.

I also was notified that my four-tabling just jumped me to Gold VIP status on PokerStars.  Now, what do I do with that and the FPP points?  The big things that jump out to me with my almost 50k in points is to either buy into a WCOOP event (33k), same for a Sunday Million (33k), take $285k in cash (25k), or let it ride to jump up to a 32″ LCD TV (75k).  All thoughts appreciated.

I hope to get the WSOP merchandise out today that I bought for various folks.  I’ll email you if I did that.  Thanks as always for stopping by, and talk to you later.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized.