Posts Tagged ‘Personal’

The second installment of my trip report from the 2011 World Series of Poker main event is now appearing in the September edition of 2+2 Magazine. It covers my experiences on Days 3, 4, and 5:

There are people who are good at poker, and then there are people who are downright intimidating, players who are ready to fight for literally every pot that they believe they can win. A player like that is not someone you want on your left when you have a lot of chips. I tightened up my game pre-emptively, folding hands I otherwise would have raised because I knew that Gonzalez was waiting to attack me and I needed better than average cards to stand up to him. I watched him give hell to a lot of others at the table.

If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.

In other news, the weather here in Canmore has been fascinating. Last week it was warm, sunny, and clear. This week clouds rolled in, blanketing the valley in fog and rain. Today they started to clear, and through the breaks in the clouds you can see all the snow that fell in the mountains. I never realized the extent to which the weather could be both cloudy and sunny at the same time!

I’m about to leave for the airport, and it occurs to me that I haven’t actually posted about my Main Event plans! I’ll be at the 2+2 party tonight and then playing my first day on July 9th, Day 1C. I’m in Vegas until at least the 12th, hopefully longer, so please let me know if you’re in town. I don’t have a lot of plans past the 9th.

Despite the record-setting turnout in the preliminary events, I’m predicting a smaller main event than we’ve seen in recent years. I think the influx at the prelims is largely due to relatively serious American players who in past years skipped the prelims to play online but this year didn’t have that option. I believe most of the players were already playing in the Main Event, so there won’t be the same surge of new players. Add to that the lack of online satellites for US players and I expect to see fewer than 6000 this year. Of course I hope to be proven wrong.

I know the Twitter account hasn’t been too active lately, but now is a good time to start following @thinkingpoker, because there will be plenty to say while I’m in Vegas.

Wish me luck and stay tuned!

Today marks the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s declaration of “war on drugs”, a quagmire that has proven far more expensive and deadly than the Vietnam War that he inherited. Put simply, the war on drugs is an ongoing decision to address America’s drug problem as a fundamentally criminal, rather than for example a medical, one. This means that low-level distribution and even possession of certain drugs can land you in prison for surprisingly long periods of time, particularly if you happen to be poor and/or non-White.

Needless to say, mass incarceration has done little to stem the tide of drug use and distribution. Many argue that it has in fact made the problem worse in many ways:

1. Connecting Criminals: One plausible explanation for the globalization of the drug trade was the war on drugs’ simultaneous imprisonment of large numbers of African-American and Latino-American gang members. The connections they made in prison gave the African-American gangs access to suppliers in Latin America and the Latin American gangs access to a distribution network in the inner cities. In other words, more effective criminals were created.

2. Destroying Employment: It is extremely difficult for ex-convicts to find well-paying jobs. Drug dealers are often the only people willing to hire them, making it difficult to leave the trade even for those who would prefer to do so.  Read the complete post...

One of my co-workers introduced me to the workplace cliche that “this job wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the customers,” which in my naivete I believed to be both original and uniquely applicable to my job. Today, instead of a single story, I’m going to share a number of brief complaints and observations:

1. I wear a green smock and make minimum wage. Do you really think they let me set or change the prices? If you think it’s expensive, go shop somewhere else. I could give a shit. A woman once came up to the counter with a two-liter bottle of generic soda, which rang up as 89 cents. She pointed out to me that it said 75 cents on the bottle. “That’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price,” I explained.

“So you just choose to charge more than that?”

“Well, I don’t choose it, but yes, that’s what the store charges.”

“Well then I’ll go buy it at the grocery store,” she told me bitchily, leaving it on the counter.

I couldn’t help myself. “You’re going to walk across the parking lot and through the grocery store, then stand in line, to save 14 cents? I mean the gas alone…” but she was already out the door.  Read the complete post...

This is one of those stories that, though amusing, doesn’t have much of a point to it and so didn’t make the cut for “Three Days in Madrid“. I think you’ll get more out of reading this if you’ve already ready that article.

Mitesh and I were leaving the Parque del Buen Retiro with Nico on our first day in Madrid when a good-looking girl, about 18 years old give or take, ran up to Mitesh waving a clipboard. “One sign! One sign!,” she shouted.

Mitesh waved her off and kept walking, but she persisted, thrusting the clipboard and a pen into his chest. “Speak Engish! Please! One sign!”

Laughing, Mitesh attempted again to brush her off gently. “No, no, I’m not signing anything.”

She continued more aggressively, stepping in front of him every time he tried to walk around her. Finally, frustrated but feeling playful, Mitesh did a full-on (American) football rush, faking left and then spinning right to circle around and run past the girl. As Nico and I laughed, he ran a few steps down the sidewalk, spiked an invisible football, and started doing a touchdown dance.

The girl stared angrily after him for a moment, then turned and started to walk away. Hearing our laughing, though, she looked back over her shoulder and shouted “Fuck off! Suck my pussy!” in her broken English, which only caused Nico and me to laugh harder.  Read the complete post...

Part trip report, part sequel to “Gray Friday“, “Three Days in Madrid” is my latest article for the Two Plus Two Poker Magazine:

My heart beat eagerly as my eyes scanned the waiting crowd at Madrid-Barajas Airport. It’s nice to know that, after nine hours of traveling, there is a friendly face seeking out you amidst the anonymous crowd, but there was more to my anxiousness than that. The face I was looking for wasn’t exactly familiar: I’d seen it only once, in a photograph. But if Nico wasn’t here, I was going to be seriously screwed, with little money, even less knowledge of the local language, and no plan for getting to my hotel.

It tells the story of my first three days (though actually most of the best stories are from the nights) in Madrid, including significant hands that I played on Day 1A of the European Poker Tour Grand Final. Of course, I spent more than three days in Madrid, but the article is long enough as it is. I plan to share a few more stories on this blog in the coming days, so if you enjoy the article, keep any eye on this page for bonus material!

Last week, I posted plans to play a few of the early WSOP preliminary events. I was scheduled to leave for that trip this morning.

I woke up feeling miserable this morning, so much so that I didn’t feel up to the long flight from Charleston, SC to Las Vegas, nor was I confident that I’d feel up to playing the $5K tomorrow, which was my primary reason for going. After looking over my schedule again, it didn’t seem worth it to fly out there for just a $1K, a $1500, and a small-field $10K, so I just canceled the whole trip.

Despite having reservations for a flight and a room at the Rio that together amounted to more than $800, it cost me barely $50 to cancel everything. I lost my first night at the Rio, which was wicked cheap because it was a weeknight, and the cost of my flight is fully reusable within one year. Heart Southwest Airlines!

My biggest regret is that I was planning on meeting a few of you in Las Vegas, and that isn’t going to happen now. I’m very sorry to miss you, but hopefully some of you will be around during the Main Event as well, which I still fully intend to play.

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

The camp scheduled field trips one day a week, every week for all of the kids. Mostly they were to educational city attractions like the science center, the zoo, etc. The most ambitious trip we took was to a beach that was more than an hour’s drive from the camp.

For logistical reasons, they scheduled and planned these trips far in advance, so we didn’t have the option of postponing or rescheduling for bad weather. The day that our group went to the beach, it was windy and overcast, not exactly swimming weather. Kids being kids, though, many of them wanted to get in the ocean, and of course that necessitated that most of the chaperons be in the water as well.  Read the complete post...