Snubbed for 2009 NBCHUPC + Feb workouts complete

Sigh, the 2009 NBC heads up poker championship lineup was released earlier this week. 64 of the world's "best" poker players will compete in a 20 thousand dollar buy-in heads up tournament for half a million dollars first place prize. I will go on record (as I did after the 2006 calendar year) as saying I'm shocked that I don't make the list. After very closely examining the list, Michael Binger, Nam Le, Sebastian Ruthenberg, Vivek Rajkumar, Amit Makhija, Adam Geyer and Hevad Khan are probably somewhere wondering WTF! as well. No one in the poker tournament industry besides Nam Le, JC Tran, and David Pham has matched my consistency over the last 3 years on the tournament circuit and in that time I have NEVER been selected to play the NBCHUPC. As most of my readers know I'm pretty low-key and don't exactly go looking for recognition, but I just feel like I deserve this. There are atleast a dozen (without mentioning names, and GOD how I want to) people who aren't even close to deserving. I know that a lot of these media-selected type of invitational tournaments recognize the players who are most marketable for TV, and I understand that. If I was in the poker entertainment industry, I wouldn't select a boring, shy Alabamian like myself either. I hope this rant won't prevent me from being selected from said events in the future. It looks also like I won't be a Shooting Star at WPT Bay 101, in which case I won't play the event during U of Alabama's spring break. God knows what kind of numbers I would have to post at this point to be sponsored by one of the major sites. I'm prepared to catch all kinds of heat for this post, but anyone who knows anything about tournament poker can't honestly say I'm not deserving. Not to mention, I have played my own money throughout my career and would fall out of my seat to post the 20 dimes of my own while a significant part of the field will go scrambling for backers and people to buy pieces. I'm yet to make a major televised final table, and I understand that has a lot do with it.

/end rant

In other news, earlier today Mike and I both finished our required workouts for the month of February. We'll take tomorrow off and then begin the task of knocking out 18 workouts in March's 31 days. From a personal standpoint, I have an exciting month of March scheduled that will include The Davis Cup in Birmingham, Spring Break somewhere, and a spring training trip with my Dad to central Florida later this month.

SS