Michael Craig's Journal

PokerWorks has a program that allows me to see how many people are coming to my site, what they are reading, and where they are coming from. (Incidentally, except for the the last few days of the Main Event, this month has been my best month and this week has been my best week. And thank you for that. I hope you’re enjoying what you’re reading.)

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I assume most people have heard at least the initial news: Two private equity firms have reached an agreement with Harrah’s board of directors to acquire all the company’s stock for $90 per share. That comes out to about $17 billion, plus they are assuming $10 billion in Harrah’s debt. I started my legal career in deals like this - usually, trying to butt in and break them up or improve the terms for selling shareholders - and wrote a book about business deals, so it’s a subject I can probably tell you a lot about.

It’s going to take me some time to do the homework (plus it may take some time before the documents are available online), though I may speculate a bit in the meantime.

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J.K. Rowling just announced the title of the seventh, and last, Harry Potter book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’m a little disappointed that the word “of” does not appear in the title, and I’ll tell you why.

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I spent an inordinant amount of time playing tournaments yesterday on Full Tilt. I was in fine shape in the $500,000 Guarantee tournament - satellited in at the last minute, survived getting no cards for 1 1/2 hours, worked my way up to 3d in chips with 400 of the original 1,400 left - and got worked over by the system, bad. In that tournament and about a zillion that followed, I took a bunch of notes, not all (thank goodness!) on my tournament play.

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Last Sunday morning, I ventured to Mike Matusow’s house. We would play the Full Tilt $350,000 Guarantee, watch the Sunday football games, and supposedly work on ideas for turning Mikey into a movie. I knew only to expect the unexpected.

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Poker blogger and retired cryptographer Falstaff successfully made sense of Pamela Anderson and won a cool $20 on Full Tilt. I issued the challenge on December 2 to decode Pamela Anderson’s explanation of why she got involved in online poker. It was a job tailor-made for the code-breaker, and he beat out eight other eager competitors, including a Classics Professor at Georgetown University, the inventor of the formula for Elmer’s Glue, and the site administrator for a Ted Forrest fan site.

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Saturday, 10:05 PM - Just woke up. I cancelled out on dinner with Richard Brodie. I needed the sleep but I’m not sure it helped. A company named PokerTek has developed automated poker tables and is demonstrating them - with cocktails - at the Imperial Palace. I am tempted to go back to sleep but nothing interesting happens when you’re sleeping. I rouse myself and decide to walk from Paris to the Imperial Palace.

I bring one of my Moleskine pads and decide to blog the evening, writing it down as it happens.

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I have reaped many rewards as the author of The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. The greatest - and I am completely serious about this - are the things that people I respect tell me about the book.

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I eventually settled on a solution to my problem of two tournaments - the Full Tilt Ironman Freeroll and the Blogger Tournament - taking place at the same time. Freeroll? No thanks, I’ll pay.

I decided to play the Blogger Tournament, doing everything in my power to assure that I would not get busted holding A-A for a third time. I entrusted my friend Ted Corse with the job of playing the Freeroll for me online.

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USA Today reported last week, “Consumers flocking to health food stores for the latest elixir of life — the red wine ingredient resveratrol — might want to wait a year or two, experts say.”

Nonsense, say the poker bloggers. A year or two for a “wine pill” to prolong their lives? What about people - well, the bloggers themselves to start - who don’t have a year or two?

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