As some of you may already know, my girlfriend Emily has accepted a job doing public relations and marketing work for an adventure tours company based out of Las Vegas. Believe it or not, Vegas was in no way my idea, and in fact I was not thrilled to hear she was considering it. I don’t want to be a career poker player, and I feel like my window of post-graduation loafing is closing. The next few years are going to be important in terms of setting my life on a trajectory, and Vegas just isn’t the direction I want to be going. Truthfully, it is tempting in some ways, so I guess it’s more accurate to say that isn’t the direction I want to want to be going.
Some background: Emily and I went to high school together, though we didn’t start dating until she was in college at Boston University and I at the University of Chicago. We had a long-distance relationship for three years, seeing each other every few weeks and living together during the summer (once in Boston, once in Maryland, where we’re both from originally).
After graduating, I turned down a full time job working with the Chicago Debate League and the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues so that I could move in with Emily in Boston. At the time, she was working for one of the few Republicans in the Massachusetts Congress, and she later worked on Kerry Healey’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.
Even while making money playing poker, I made an effort to spend a lot of my time doing stuff that I felt was important. I ended up starting an urban debate league in Boston, which has been the equivalent, time-wise, of a pretty substantial part time job for the last three years. The League has come a long way in the last three years, but there’s a lot to be done. If I were to leave Boston now, a lot of the time and money I’ve invested in the League in the last few years would go to waste.
So when Emily first asked months ago about my plans for the near future, I told her I wanted another year in Boston. Healey’s loss to Deval Patrick in the gubernatorial race meant that come December, Emily was without a job. Frustrated by months of unanswered applications, she started looking for interesting summer jobs, something that would be a break from the office/political work she’d been doing.
What she found instead was this job in Las Vegas, where her prospective employers seemed like pretty cool people who were very eager to hire her full time, year round. I wasn’t happy about it, because I felt like I had given up a very appealing job in Chicago to move to Boston where she had a job lined up, only to get attached to something in Boston and have her looking to leave again.
But I was also forgetting how frustrating it was back a few years ago when I was applying for job after job, pouring hours into scanning listings and sending out resumes to get not so much as an acknowledgement that my application had been received in return. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to end up in a situation where I can make very good money doing something I enjoy, accountable to only myself, and with enough free time for another project that is substantial, fun, rewarding, and valuable. It’s only understandable that Emily wants to find something similar, a job where she is appreciated, where she likes what she is doing and who she is doing it with, and where she isn’t selling her soul to make a living (remember, she’s been working in Republican politics).
It’s hard to begrudge her those things, when I’ve been so fortunate. I make enough money to pay the rent myself, my schedule is flexible enough to allow extended visits with her, and if I’m going to have a home away from home anywhere, it might as well be Las Vegas! It would be pretty selfish of me to refuse to use those benefits to help someone I love achieve similar satisfaction.
So I’m going to spend one more year in Boston while Emily is in Las Vegas. It’s far from certain that even after another year the Boston Debate League will be able to survive my departure, but it is a sure thing that it would fall apart if I left now. I honesty thing another year of advocacy will give it a fighting chance, and even if it doesn’t work out, I will still have introduced that many more students to a valuable, potentially life-changing activity.
Emily is packing now, and on July 7th, we’re going to start a week-long drive to Vegas, taking our time along the way to spend a few half days in places like Niagara Falls and Denver. Unless something comes up to require my presence in Boston, I’m going to stay out there with her through the WSOP main event in early July. I have a lot of research to do, but I’m also looking forward to playing some live tournaments and some internet tournaments on West coast time (100K guarantee starts at 6PM there!!!).
A week ago, I was speculating about some of the non-HE WSOP prelim events and whether I should play them if the conflict with the NLHE ones. But I actually think I have that bass ackwards. There are going to be better NLHE tournaments going on during the same time period (Venetian Deep Stack Series, Binion’s Poker Classic, Bellagio Cup III, Orleans Open), with more generous structures and buyins better suited to my bankroll. But often does one have the opportunity to play a big buy-in Razz tournament? Actually, there are some more affordable non-HE games in those series as well, so I may not end up playing many WSOP prelims at all, especially since I want to play some live ring games as well.
I may not update much during the week we’re on the road, but hopefully we’ll have some fun experiences worthy of a trip report.