Happy Memorial Day

Went out to play a little 2-5 NL at the Bellagio the other night. It was Memorial Day Weekend and the strip was packed. It took almost an hour to make it the few miles to the Bellagio. Once there, it was about another hour to wait for them to start a new 2-5 NL game.

The room was packed with poker heroes. Jennifer Harmon and Ted Forrest, Crystal Violet, the Mizrachis... it was pretty cool just walking into the poker room, which was completely full even at 2am. If ever there was a poker heaven, it's got to be the Bellagio.

I wore a lucky red shirt and took the 2-5 NL game for a $100 before jetting. Just need another hundred or so sessions like that one and I can put myself in the 10k event. Actually, one of my buddies is putting up three grand for three entries into the single table satellites they're going to start running. I figure I have a good shot of getting into it with one of those... gotta get focused.

Like a Rolling Stone...

Two cool things. First off, I just got off the phone with a New York fact checker for Rolling Stone magazine. A few months ago, a writer named Ivan Solotaroff approached me about doing a story on The Crew. Ivan is a crazy interesting cat... he's an ex-chess master and Scrabble savant from New York. He says he remember playing chess with Howard Lederer back in the eighties... he mainly works for diamond magazines these days, but freelances articles for some bigger magazines. He's the author of a few books, including a pretty well-received book on the death penalty, and a collection of stories called No Success Like Failure (I'm about 2/3rds of the way through... it's good). We started talking on the phone and eventually met up in Vegas last October.

Long story short... it looks like the article is actually going to make it into Rolling Stone in about a week and a half. It's going to be a pretty honest look at myself and The Crew, talking about stints in mental hospitals and runs at the gold bracelet. I'm a little weary because I've been a little burned by reporters before, but I think it's going to be an awesome article... especially because he spends a fair amount of time fleshing out the other members of The Crew (who with the exception of Scott usually go without a lot of limelight). Definitely check it out.


Second cool thing. I stumbled across an article today on Netscape which says that a scientific study has shown that you win more if you wear the color red. Here's the article. I guess from now I'm wearing red all the time... every edge counts.

Grinding...

Playing the $10k guarantee on Party Poker... wish me luck and say hi if you happen to be on there. Screenname is Kid_Dutch. Greets out to dchangd and lawdog...

Star Wars

Went to go see the new Star Wars tonight with Joey Bartholdi and a few other friends, Brandon and Dan. It was good... definitely worth a watch. I'm not a HUGE Star Wars fan... I wouldn't wait in line or anything for tickets. But I do remember seeing the original ones when I was a little younger... and when Episode I came out my brother and I saw it on opening night in San Jose, complete with a bunch of fans in costume doing the light saber battles...

Hopefully going to be playing some satellites soon for some WSOP seats... the first event is quickly approaching and I really want to make a dent this year. Last year I cashed in about 20% of the events I played... got really close to some final tables (three top 18 spots) before finally making the Razz final.

Check out this picture that Gianna took... it's so ultra cool. She has such an eye for making ordinary things intense.

My Personal Themesong

I found this old song somewhere on the internet, and I'm adopting it as my new personal themesong. Check it out and see if you recognize it. You'll get mad cool points if you do...

The Themesong
Playing the $200 NL on Party Poker... first place is $50k. That would pay for a lot of the WSOP events, so I'm really hoping I take it down. Got about a week and half to put together a solid bankroll for the preliminary events. Definitely an uphill battle. But as Parappa the Rapper says...

The Backer - Excerpt #2

NOTE : If you haven't read the first excerpt, skip down a little bit to the previous post... this is the second installment in the story.

Tunica Part One (sorry bro I am out)
by sheets

One of the problems with an investment like this is determining just what level of transparency to demand of the player. I guess I could just ship him the cash, and after the 2 weeks have him let me know how we did. That was certainly not enough. Likewise, I suppose I could have demanded text messages every single hand as well, but that was asking too much for sure. So we just settled on having him call me when he either got knocked out or when he was in the money. Well what this turned into was a daily ritual of staring at my cell phone, praying it wouldn’t ring....a classic case of "no news is good news."

Tourneys start at noon....day 1, 2:45 pm...."hey bro, I just got knocked out of triple draw...stood pat with a thingamajig and someone drew to a queen low something or other and I am out." Day 2....3:12 pm...."hey bro, I just got knocked out of the stud....someone filled up on 6th street and got there against my 2 pair....later"....and so it went for 4 days. He didn’t SEEM in particularly bad spirits. After all, it's only a few events. And that brings us to day 5, POT LIMIT HOLDEM.

The dreaded phone call hadn't come yet and it was already 5pm....sweeeeet. We got ACTION! My phone was working and I was PSYCHED! 7pm passes....no call....NICE. I know that the money doesn't get paid out in this event until its down to 3 tables, so I called Tunica and asked how far along they were....they told me there were about 6 tables left, but they couldn't check for me on chip counts....10pm!!!!! Still no call....woohooo....I am a genius....gank owns, and we are so gonna cash. I called tuinca and they said they were on the bubble....12 MIDNIGHT AND THE PHONE IS STILL SILENT. I can't take it anymore....I tried calling gank's cell and got a machine...."DUDE I AM SO PSYCHED....PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR CHIP COUNT, I AM SO PSYCHED."

About 15 minutes later, the phone rang...."hello?" "Hey bro, sorry about that....I didn't really feel up to playing today, so I slept all day."

Now Linkoping is a very quiet place. Not much happens. But if one looks in the archives, he will see a 3.0 earthquake registered at about this time. Verizon stock went up ever so slightly as my phone smashed into a million pieces against the wall. I really did not know what to say....all I could come up with was...."ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND??????????" Granted it wasn't the most tactful approach, but that's really all I could think to say.

Apparently Gank had been demoralized just a little by the losses so far, and he needed one of what would become known as the sheets pep talks. Now these come in many forms and have different effects on different people. With Scotty, I would have to get into a huge fight with him about something meaningless for him to get his game back. With Brett, it was the opposite. I assured him that my confidence was high, and that gank owns, etc. etc. etc. etc... He is a very emotional guy, and he really felt bad that he was losing me money. I assured him that I was a big boy and could take it, and that he should JUST FUCKING PLAY!!!!! Well I was due to arrive myself in a few days anyway, so he pretended to be motivated by me and got back to playing.

When I arrived, Gank had still not cashed, but I really wasn't too worried. As I said before, I know very little, but I know talent, and I knew this kid was destined for a wsop bracelet and more. When I arrived, he introduced to me to Scotty and Dutch, who were trying to grind out some profits here and there in some of the smaller events going on at the Grand. Scotty had cashed for something and Dutch was just chilling out. I got a chance to talk poker and life with all of them, and I was impressed with all of them on many levels. I will go into more of this later, but suffice it to say that they were all very unlike each other, but all brilliant in their own ways. It was on this day that I would make one of the decisions that, to be perfectly honest, helped change the poker world, and helped these kids become famous.

To be continued...

The Backer - Excerpt #1

So here's the first excerpt (1 or 2 so far) from the piece that my friend and backer, Sheets, is working on. Sheets can call the collection whatever he wants once it gets published, but for now I'm going to call it "The Backer". It's copyrighted and it's a work in progress. Again, if you are a publisher or have any good lines on one, shoot me a line.

Gank Owns
by sheets

..."so it's a cold a snowy day in linkoping, and i am playing a small tournament online, and doing pretty well. Out of nowhere comes an emergency call from my daughter's school, saying that school is cancelled, mrs sheets is unreachable, and I have to come pick her up. Well I had been only playing on this site for a week, so i knew almost no one who played there who could take over for me. I called the one person who i thought could find me someone, the now famous Phil Laak. (as an aside, I refuse to use his stage name of "unambomber". I have known for over 10 years, and for at LEAST 4 nicknames). Now it must be understood that most gambling stories begin with Phil Laak. They dont "begin and end " with him though, as the oft used phrase suggests, because the thing with Phil is, he is like a small tornado...he comes whirling in, does his thing, and then disappears before anyone realizes what happened, I remember Phil and I spending 3 hours concocting complex backing and swapping arrangements for a 50$ backgammon tournament which neither us could probably afford to play.

In any case, I got a hold of him in the middle of some cash game he was playing in some weird place with some bizarre rich people, and asked him if he knew anyone who could take over for me. He said.."dude , no problem, i'll get gank to do it"..."GANK??? WHAT THE HELL IS A GANK????"...at this point i didnt care..i gave phil my password to pass along to the GANK or whatveer it was and i asked him how much this "gank" would want of the winnings. Phil told me..."dude he'd probably play for nothing...". This is the essence of Gank, as I will describe many many times throughout this story." I said ok fine whatever and left.

When i returned form my errand, gank was just about to go out with AK VS ACES on the bubble when i got a hold of phil and asked who this gank was?...He told me that he was roommates with dutch boyd and some other poker players and phil had been staying with them for a while, and that gank was the number one player on the site based upon their points system. Now, gank had long since busted out when I was still googling him to figure out who the hell was playing for me. It was at this point that I first learned of the crew, which was known about by maybe 6 people. Young kids trying to take over poker???I LOVED THE PASSION.

Now gank sent back the small fee i tried to force him to take, (although phil still inisted on his finders fee of 10$), and I did some more homework on this whole crew thing. I had spent a good part of my youth trying to dominate non traditional occupations as well, so something about what they were doing really struck a chord. I dug up ganks email address through some creative poking around and asked him to get in touch with me . At the time , i was to learn, he was looking for someone to put him in the poker stars wpt event, and phil thought i might be interested, so we hooked up pretty quickly..

I basically asked phil If i should maybe include the whole crew in a backing offer, and let them pick which game should be played by each player, not knowing whrther one player had a particular speacialty. Phil told me that all that bologna didnt matter, becuase gank was the best player at all the games, so I should proabbly just back him. Phil, by the way, is very rarely wrong.

Something about backing him in one tournament didnt sit well with me, as the whole invesment can go up in smoke in one hand. So i sugeested that he go to tunica, Mississippi for the world poker open events, and i would put him in all of them. This seemed counterintuitive to some, as I was putting up 3 times the stake in my scenario. However, I would rather increase my overall stake and diversify the results a little bit. He asked if I would give him maybe 10% of the winnings. He told me he just wanted to play. WOW!. Standard deals called for the player getting 50%, so i basically FORCED him to take 25%. As the tournament was going to start in 6 days, he had to get his act together and leave right away so his train from LA to Tunica Mississippi got there in time. HUH????? He was gonna take a train??? Through CHICAGO no less. He just didnt feel like flying.

He told me he was all pumped...he was gonna play 30k worth of events, all games of very type..maybe 17 tourneys total including the main event ,..He was completely in the zone and ready to kill. Also, just to make sure he had some support down there, he called his friend scott fischman and basically offered to match scotts bankroll if he went with him to tunica. (about 500$ at the time as I recall)Dutch was going to be there too, as poker stars had just refused to allow him to play the wpt cruise event...(thats a whole other story). I was going to go as well for the last few days of it.. I was PSYCHED! I had GANK goin to tunica, ready to clean up, and continue my streak of NEVER BEING WRONG about identifying genius. ...what could go wrong?.......

(to be continued)

Hanzi Smatter ???

Came across a pretty funny site the other day. It's called HanziSmatter.com and is a blog where readers send in photos of chinese and japanese tattoos and the blogger translates what the tattoo actually means. It's hilarious. I guess it's starting to be a problem... all of these western youths trying to be cool by getting chinese and kanji tattos. But they aren't getting them from chinese or japanese tattoo artists, which ends up being pretty funny. Allegedly, Brittney Spears got a tattoo on the back of her neck that she thought meant "mysterious" but actually means "strange". The newest post is about a wrestler named Chance Prophet who has some sort of symbol attached to him that is a way of measuring grams. Check it out.

Bill Fillmaff came out with a new video. If you're on highspeed, it's worth the download. The best part is the first few seconds, though, when he's chilling in a kiddie pool and talking about ESPN's Tilt.

On to some business. One of my poker friends, who most people know online as "sheets", is starting work on a book. He's largely responsible for Brett, Scotty, and I all breaking out of our low-limit obscurity last year at the WSOP. He backed us all in a lot of the events, and each one of us ended up doing some pretty cool things for him and ourselves. He's writing about the whole experience, and I gotta say I think he's telling the story pretty well. He's a good writer. I'm going to post some of the excerpts from the first few parts of the story. Keep in mind it's a work in progress. But if anyone out there is a publisher or has a good line on a publisher, shoot me a line. This is a story that should be told.

Life in Vegas...

Friday was the night from hell. I'm in three different online tournaments for about $350 worth of buy-ins. Things are going pretty smooth. Bobby and I don't have our DSL hooked up at this point yet... it's wired but we didn't get the DSL modem. So we're "borrowing" the network connection from one of our neighbors. The houses are packed so tight in our neighborhood... spaced about three feet apart. So we get a couple network signals that reach a certain room in our house.

So there I am crusing along and BANG! the borrowed net connection goes out. I scramble trying to pick up another one, but don't have any luck. So I walk outside with my laptop around the block, but nothing is coming in. Scotty lives about two minutes away, so I pack up my laptop and drive over. He's not around because he's having a mother's day dinner with his family, but Gigabet is chilling there... I plug in and his internet is down too. Must be a neighborhood thing.

I get back in my car and drive to a Wal-Mart so I can pick up a phone cord and use my Earthlink dialup (still didn't have a phone cord at this point in the new house). The Wal-Mart turns out to just be a grocery store instead of your standard all-in-one stop... back on the road to a pharmacy where I finally find the phone cord. Rush back to my house... plug in... this is about an hour now that I've just been blinded off. I log back in and have less than 500 chips in each of the tournaments. Might as well just burned $350. Put a bad taste in my mouth all weekend and I didn't play much poker. We got our own DSL hooked up yesterday so hopefully I'll never be disconnected in the middle of three tourneys again. It was so sick.

Saturday, Joey Bartholdi came over to hang out a bit. He brought his guitar and sang a few songs he's been working on. Him and Justin (who came down for the weekend from New York) and I went to go see Kingdom of Heaven later that night. That movie blows. About an hour and a half through I kept wishing for it to finally end. Yeah, it had some good battle scenes... but it was pretty hard to really feel anything for any of the characters. And a lot of the characters that you thought were going to be having a big part in the movie didn't last too long... or only had a few little scenes. It was no Gladiator.

Scott got back from the WSOP Circuit event in Tahoe today... he finished 13th. Was kind of disappointed it about it, but at least he qualified for the $2m freeroll that ESPN is putting on after the WSOP Main event in July. The last chance to qualify for it is in New Orleans. I'd so love to go down there and play the $10k event, but the bankroll is pretty light these days. I'm not even sure if I'm going to be able to buy my way in to the main event at the Rio this year. I really I hope I'll be able to pull something together... first place is probably going to be $10 million. Wouldn't surprise me if everyone at the final table walks away a millionaire. Bobby already qualified for his seat... so if I don't play it, at least I can live vicariously through my little brother when he takes it down.

Tonight I went over to Beth's place (Scott's sister) with Justin and we played Scene It... which is a DVD game where they ask movie trivia questions and also play little snippets of movies and ask you questions about them. I've seen a lot of movies and figured I'd be a shoe-in to take it down... so Justin, Beth, Carrie (Beth's cool London friend), and I each plopped down a five and played a winner-take-all. I didn't count on Beth being so good at movie trivia. She even knew the questions about older movies like Paper Moon and older actors like Buster Keaton. I think that she probably memorized all the question cards so she could hustle me out of five bucks. Those Fischman kids... I swear... I don't think it's possible to overestimate their skill at anything.

Probably going to be playing live tomorrow with Justin, since it's his last day in town. And sometime this week I'm going up to Fire State Park. I got a line on a really cool meditation spot there from a guy named Billy who checks the blog once in awhile. He says an hour there solves all his problems... so I'm going to go check it out and do some meditating.

Adjusting to single life has been pretty tough lately. I feel like John Favreau in Swingers... all I feel like doing is staying in at my house, watching blockbuster, playing the occasional poker tournament (online... not live), and stacking up pizza boxes and soda cans in the kitchen. It doesn't help when friends tell me there are plenty of beautiful girls out there, especially in Vegas. I don't want anyone else... just my beautiful girl. I'd choose her over a hundred gold bracelets.

I put all of my pictures away of her, though. Kept thinking of Vince Vaughn telling Favreau that the way it works in this world is that the ex-girlfriend won't want you back until you've gotten her out of your mind and don't want her anymore... and that's the rub. Justin agrees. He says he has an ex who broke up with him years ago, and for seven months he was an emotional wreck trying to get her back. Even bought her a ring to prove his love (which is slightly less drastic than the tattoo I was thinking of getting). Finally she's out of his mind and she starts calling again and semi-stalks him. But by then it's too late... he's moved on.

I'm not sure if that story was supposed to make me feel better. It didn't. I mean, the kid's twenty years old... what's he know about love and relationships? Seriously, though, I don't think there is any getting over true love, which is what I have for this girl. I think I'll be an old man, a grumpy old eighty-two year old man, and still feeling rejected and wounded. It's like the lyrics of my favorite Streets song, It's Too Late :

Sat down I got a fat frown
Weeping drowning my senses
For this love game's expensive
I walk in a trance
Got a wounded soldier's stance
The everyday geezers stares throw me off balance
Now nothing holds significance
And nothing holds relevance
Cos the only thing I see is her elegance

So that's it... that's my life right now. I gotta get a haircut and start shaving again. And I definitely have to layoff the cigs.

Just Took One Down!

Score one for the good guys... just took 1st in a $27 speed rebuy tournament on TheFishtank.com. Played it under Kid_Dutch. Good for a $1260 score. I'm stoked about it... been on a dry spell for a few days and started thinking that I'd never win a tournament again. Sign up and say hi... the super-secret affiliate code is "Dutch".

Chilling at the Fishtank

Two cool things have happened. First, I signed a one-year lease in Vegas. I'm right off Las Vegas Blvd on the south side... and only about two minutes from Scotty. We're actually in the same subdivision. So now I'm officially a Nevadan. It's going to be pretty good out here for me I think. I've got Bobby staying with me and we've been hunkering down and playing tons of poker... I probably put in 60 hours last week. It's nowhere close to the time that Scotty puts in, though... I swear, he never leaves his livingroom. I asked him the other day what his goal is, and he kind of looked at me funny... like waking up, playing poker, ordering pizza, playing some more, and going to bed just to repeat it the next day wasn't somehow completely fulfilling. Like that's what life is supposed to be once you've made it.

"You want to go out to a club tonight, Scott? Meet some good looking Vegas girls and get a little buzz on?"
"No."
"What about a movie then? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy just opened up... supposed to be funny."
"Can't do it, man... I'm in six tournaments and I'm just about to make the final table in two of them."
"Ok... well... when do you think you want to take a break from poker?"
"Dude... never. I never want to take a break. If I could skip sleep and just play 24-hours a day I would do that, but I can't... I'm cursed to have to continue eating and sleeping or I won't have the energy to click my mouse."

It's crazy... but I guess for Scotty that's what the dream was and now he's living it. ;)

Second cool thing that happened, though, is that Scotty opened up a new cardroom called TheFishtank. I've been playing on it a bit, these days, under "Kid_Dutch". They have some guarantee tournaments that are usually pretty good and they're giving away a few WSOP seats. I talked to Scott and he's hoping to get most of the crew playing on there and do some crew-invite tournaments... and do some things with a tournament leader board. He also wants to get the site spreading H.O.R.S.E. and also run some online lectures. I hope it becomes a pretty cool site instead of a ghost town like a lot of the other new ones. So far it has some pretty good action. Scotty swears there are some pretty big fish in the 50/100 limit game that tilt hardcore and give away thousands of chips. That is a little above my head these days, though.

Sign up and let me know what you think of it... still in the building stages so I can pass off a lot of your ideas over to Scotty and probably make them happen. If you do sign up, use affiliate code "Dutch1" so I can credit for sending you there... plus I think you get some sort of deposit bonus for using it. And if we ever get crew-invite tourneys and lectures and what not, you'll be invited. Come say hi... I'm playing under Kid_Dutch.

In a Fisthank $20 NL tournament right now with a $2k guarantee. Built my stack up to 7k but just lost with QQs against TTs all-in preflop. One thing that kills me about this site is that when you're all-in, it deals the cards out slowly one by one... all looked clear until "car jockey" hit his ten on the river.... slow and painful.