Long Time No Blog

Not too much happened? Well, things have happened, I guess, but very few “blog worthy” things have happened. I’m out of the Niagara Falls tournament obviously. I ended up going broke in the first level with KK against QQ. It was a bizarre hand and I’m saving the details for a future CardPlayer column. Rather than hang out in Toronto I decided to take the next flight out and head back to Las Vegas. The next day I played in a new NBC show called “Poker after Dark.” The guys behind the show are the same guys who’ve brought you High Stakes Poker and the NBC Heads Up Championship so you can expect a quality poker show. Not only that… they have Shana Hiatt! No kidding! It was great to see Shana back in the poker world again. She is such an amazing person in so many ways and the poker world really missed her. Aside from her obvious beauty, her personality is very light hearted, funny, and she seems to be genuinely honest. Her role on this show is more involved than what you’re used to seeing on the WPT. The show is like no other show that’s been on television before. Expect to see more of the player chit chat and less of the voice over commentary track. The structure for the show is pretty simple, it’s essentially a $20,000 sit n’ go with six players at the table- winner take all. It’s a sit n’ go with loads of play, though, as they run about six hours long. 20,000 in chips, starting at 100-200 blinds for 40 minutes. In my heat, I played against Mike Matusow, Doyle Brunson, Gabe Kaplan, Jerry Buss, and David Grey. Unfortunately, I don’t have permission to tell you what happened, but I can tell you that I was happy with my play. I did make two mistakes, though, and should have known better. It’s been a recurring theme with me lately as I’ve had stretches of brilliant play followed up by a silly mistake. What else happened… hmmm, oh right- my wife and I hosted an engagement party at the house that went well. After that, it was all about catching up on my Tivo. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday on the couch catching up on some TV. I watched a few episodes of Saturday Night Live… very disappointing. I then switched to 60 Minutes and wasn’t all that interested in most of those topics either. This chick from HP sued for this or that… blah, blah, blah, I couldn’t even follow it. There was one story that was tough to watch. It was a story about the genocide happening in a city called Darfur in Sudan. The Muslim dictatorship there is pretty scary. Villages are being burned. Lots and lots of innocent people are dying. So much of it resembles what happened in Germany during the Holocaust. They won’t let outsiders come to Darfur, obviously they don’t want the rest of the world to see what is happening there. President Bush knows about it and has publicly called it a genocide. Things are tricky, though, since the Sudan government is apparently providing the U.S. government with information relating to Bin Laden and Al-Queada. You see, Bin Laden used to chill in that country. So, they have carte blanche to rape and pillage the villages of Darfur since they know the U.S. government needs valuable information from their government. It’s a difficult situation for the U.S. president and I am in no way judging his reaction to what’s happening there. Catching Bin Laden is obviously a top priority, I just hope that in the process thousands more don’t have to die in the meantime. Andy Rooney, known for funny commentary, wasn’t so funny in his last bit. He was condemning the president for this current war and pleading for the troops to be pulled from Iraq. Rooney feels, as do many in the world, that the North Koreans pose a more immediate threat to the U.S Ok, enough politics. It’s virtually impossible to discuss politics without causing a riot so I’ll stop there… or wait, maybe one more thing. We all know that Bill Frist doesn’t like poker right? Well, on November 7th there is an important election and I’m really hoping that the Democrats take control of congress. If for nothing else, the simple fact that it would be better for poker, and more specifically online poker, if the Democrats made up the majority of congress. Ok, I’m done now, promise 🙂 So now we hit Monday. I watched the Real World/Road Rules challenge and man, is this ever a cool concept this season. It’s not a team format as it usually is. Instead, there will be one male winner and one female winner, every man for himself. If you win a challenge, you are safe from going into the “duel.” Also, you pick a person from the opposite sex who is now safe from the duel. That next person picks a person, and so on, and so on until there is just one person remaining. That person must go to the duel and potentially face elimination. The kicker, is that they can choose anyone they want to face them in the duel. The winner stays, the loser goes home. Each episode is either a male elimination day or a female elimination day. If any of you actually watch the show, how sweet was it when Tina clocked Beth in the face! Nice. It’s 6:00pm right now and I’m about to do a radio show. After that, I’m headed down to the Bellagio to play some poker. There hasn’t been a game in ages, but I got a phone call this afternoon letting me know that there will be a game tonight. It’ll likely be $2000-$4000 mixed games and I’ll probably put in about a six hour session.]]>