Michael Craig's Journal

I’m just getting around to reading The Right Stuff. Yeah, even though Tom Wolfe writes in my genre, I decided to wait just a couple decades to check it out. I’m almost goofy-happy right now, but exhausted. I slept just 4 hours last night, and 1 the night before.

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As I’ve made painfully clear, if not by saying it in so many words, the folks who pay me would like to see me convince you to open up an online account at one of the links on the left or elsewhere on this site. Somehow, they make money from that. I don’t understand it, but I DO understand that I make money from from saying, “We’ll pay you 80 pesos to write for us for another month,” and that’s all I need to know.

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President Bush signed the Safe Ports Act into law this morning, like everyone else ignoring that this ineffectual anti-terrorism measure, naked posturing in advance of mid-term elections, threatens to wipe out several multi-billion dollar businesses, turns the banking system into a quasi-police force, and threatens the privacy of Americans doing legal things within the privacy of their homes.

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12. You can find Clonie Gowen on Full Tilt Poker.

There, that didn’t seem like a transparent pitch, did it? But I’m not trying to whore for Full Tilt. I’m trying to whore for all online sites that have the guts to make their millions in this environment.

Really, I think the best way to fight the chill in the environment is to keep playing, doing what we want in the privacy of our own homes. If PartyPoker doesn’t want your business, there are plenty out there who do.

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I am nothing if not responsive to the public wants.

That’s Katie Lindsay with Clonie, by the way.

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So, my October 9 deadline has come and gone. My 143,533-word manuscript, 476 pages sits in front of me on my desk.

I’m still not done.

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In these depths, it’s hard not to look for omens and portents. When you have slept less than 10 hours in the last 72, seemingly insignificant details take on great importance. The deadline for this book is October 9, 2006. The deadline for my last book was October 9, 2004. I’m depressed as I write that. Has it really been 2 years between books? No wonder I spend so much time thinking I’m an impoverished failure.

Wait. I don’t spent any time thinking I’m an impoverished failure. I’ve been awake so long that I think I can see the color of my fingers as they become a blur over the keyboard, and it dawns on me that I better read the manuscript of the FULL TILT book, especially the Chris Ferguson post-flop hold ‘em chapter very, very, VERY closely since I’ve written it all in the last 3 days.

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It was a strange place for a strange meeting.

I met Chris Ferguson on Tuesday in the L.A. office of Full Tilt’s software company. It was our 12th and final interview on a book project that I have pursued for nearly a year. A day in advance of a photo shoot he was doing for BLUFF, I also needed to figure out what text I should write to accompany those photos, one of which will probably grace the cover of the December issue.

The 4th floor offices felt abandoned.

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Andy Beal, one of the title characters of my book, The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, is one of the smartest business minds of the last quarter century. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations (I did write a book called The 5 Minute Investor about how to read big-corporation financial statements), Beal Bank is worth over a billion dollars, and maybe a lot over. I owe him a phone call anyway and I’m going to ask him what he thinks about all this business involving Congress outlawing online gambling.

But here is what he MIGHT say:

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Other than going to synagogue to pray on Yom Kippur - apparently now, for the sin of maintaining an account on Full Tilt Poker - I don’t have much else to do but survey the carnage (current and potential) from the Senate’s midnight passage on Friday night of the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, a/k/a, the Port Security Act. If you aren’t paying attention, I hope to see you at a poker table someday (assuming it is still allowed) because you will be easy to steal from.

Unless you despise the concept of people being able to play poker, your life was changed near midnight on September 29, somewhere between materially and significantly.

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