Change of Plans

Well I am supposed to be on my way to The Borgata for their 2k event, but instead I'm sitting on a Southwest Jet on my way back to Vegas. I am beginning to feel like I'm renting one of these seats full time. This time I'm headed to The Venetian to do a story for Men's Health magazine. One of their reporters whom I haven't met yet is interested in playing in a tournament and wants training. To that end I will be doing 3 days of instruction in the Venetian poker room to bring him up to speed. I am not sure of his starting skill set, which will obviously influence the direction I will go. Tournaments are a bit of a crap shoot when you are playing just one so he will need to get a bit lucky. I will give daily updates in the blog of what we are covering and the progress we make, and of course how the tournament goes. The Venetian will be providing me with a dealer, a table and chips to do the instruction (I wonder if I can keep the chips at the end). I will also do some online training on Full Tilt so I can play a few small buy in tournaments with him and we can discuss the play along the way. Although the way my online tournaments have been going lately who knows how much help I will really be. I have always liked the poker room at the Venetian and will give you my thoughts about it as well as the hotel where I will be staying for the first time. I have only played in the room a couple of times so it will be interesting to spend some time there. It has always seemed like a spacious well designed room.

Last night I played the first FTOP's event and was amazed to see almost 6,000 players. The first hand I played I flopped the nut straight from late position against the big blind heads up. He unfortunately flopped a flush. When you are heads up it is hard to put your opponent on a flush even with three to a flush on board. I put him on a pair with a draw to a flush. No more flush cards came and off went most of my chips. I know everyone says it only seems like you get the really sick bad beats and coolers online and it's only because you see more hands, but still, on the third hand dealt to me flopping the nut straight against the queen high flush seems a little suspect. I will be playing a bunch of the FTOP's events and will be hosting a six handed knock out event, which I'm excited about.

I was kind of sad leaving the Adirondack Mountains and the place where I spent the summers of my yoot (uh what's a yoot? Never mind just got lost in an old movie). It was great fun catching up with my brother and his family as well as childhood friends I have not seen in more than two decades. The lake, Schroon Lake was just as I remembered it as a kid. Very little if any development and it seemed as clean and unspoiled as ever. In some ways It felt like old times being back, in other ways I felt older. Watching the kids play as we use to only reminded me of the time that has past. It was great fun catching up with friends from years ago. One of them Jeff who was one of my closest summer friends had a son who was at Duke and a poker player. I think he was somehow amazed that a contemporary of his father could be a professional poker player.

I will be back again next summer for a couple of weeks and am already looking forward to it. They did have a poker game up there which I stopped by to watch. They played all those games we used to play like anaconda and follow the queen. Everyone stayed in every hand until showdown and I was happy not to play. The stakes were such that if you got killed all night you might lose $25. I instead went to the movies with my brother and his wife seeing the new Batman movie The Dark Night for the second time. I enjoyed the movie as did my brother, however my sister in law said it was too complicated to follow, go figure. A discussion of the demise of Heath Ledger soon followed and it was suggested that playing a dark villain depressed him and drove him to suicide. I hate to be cold and insensitive but come on. Then how come the actor who played Batman didn't go onto to do noble things and just got arrested. I won't go in to a tirade about the privileged, over paid, hero worshipped, outspoken, spoiled Hollywood crowd. Thank god we poker players are just down to earth regular people. I hope my limo is waiting for me at the airport, the butler has my suite well stocked, and that Layne Flack has taken care of the entertainment