Joe Speaker

The second half of mine and AJ’s Spring Break Road Trip has been cancelled due to an inclement X. I’m never gonna be rid of that bitch am I?

Regardless, if there’s one thing I learned over the past year-plus, it’s that whole thing about door closing and windowns opening. Last night’s window was a blogger table at Full Tilt

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Hell Week is over. It really hasn’t been that hard. Over the weekend, I had just one moment where the urge to smoke was strong.

My own damn fault for playing Razz.

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A year ago today, I was in Vegas with Pauly, change100 and Grubby. We gambled, went to Scores and were later joined by a whole mess of other bloggers for a near-all-Friday-nighter, followed by a long trip back to LA for an engagement at the Playboy Mansion.

This year, I’m at work, not smoking and turning down dial-a-shots.

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This morning’s coffee selections in the work cafeteria were described as a choice between “nutty and balanced” or “smoky and smooth.”

Don’t I know it.

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On the first day, my body was surprised.

On the second day, it rebelled.

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I’m just gonna come out and admit it: My favorite college basketball program is Stanford. That performance today was…well…searching for the right words here…it was fucking garbage.

Not that it was any surprise to me. I figured they had to beat one of Arizona, UCLA or USC down the stretch to ensure a bid. They didn’t, winning only one of their last 4 conference games (against one-win bottom feeders ASU). So I guessed they needed to win their first-round PAC-10 tourney game against USC to get a bid. Didn’t do that, either.

Yet, the Cardinal are not rightly placed in the NIT and they get an undeserved 11 seed in The Dance (which tilted CJ so it wasn’t a total loss). They promptly stepped on their own feet, fell and spilled punch on the pretty girl’s white blouse.

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Ah, March. This has always been my favorite time of year. The NCAA Basketball Tournament provides the two best days on the sports calendar with wall-to-wall opening round games. A gambler’s dream. Baseball is working out its kinks in Arizona and Florida, stretching muscles and devising ways around random drug tests.

Best of all, Southern California’s brutal two-week winter is mercifully over.

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Even though I’m not playing much poker these days, I seem to gravitate toward the game somehow, often in mysterious ways.

For instance, twice in the last months, I’ve had divorced women tell me one of the reasons for their failed marriage was their husband’s fascination with online poker. While one of them was trying to recover a not insubstantial debt dumped by her Ex at the virtual tables, the other railed at how much time hers spent playing on Yahoo! For play money.

Then there was Saturday night.

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Let nobody say I am not a man of ideas (or a fan of the double negative). I’ve been stuck for things to write. I write for a poker site.

Play poker. And write about it.

DING!

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As mentioned in the previous post, events in the life of Joe Speaker are swirly and chaotic and currently private, not yet in a position to be discussed in this forum.

Which is crappy on so many levels. There’s actually THREE “pressing and interesting events” now and I’m praying at least one of ‘em comes to a public head here pretty soon or I’ll be reduced to writing about my cats. And I don’t even have cats.

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