Back to School

Sorry about that little hiatus, friends.

Well it's been 2 weeks. Where the fuck have I been? I only have about 20 minutes to tell you.

I covered the WPT Legends of Poker and Ladies Night IV at the Bicycle Casino last week for my new gig at Pokerblog. All of my articles can be found here. My favorites of the pieces I did that week are my WPT Ladies Night IV Preview and the one I wrote about witnessing a High-Stakes Chinese Poker side game with Layne Flack, Phil Hellmuth, and Gavin Smith. Special thanks to Wil for linking up my coverage on Card Squad.

Spaceman came to town to cover Legends for Bluff, and Pauly jetted to L.A. for a vacation after his long weekend in Colorado seeing Galactic with the Joker and Professional Keno Player Neil Fontenot. We spent a lot of the week relaxing up at Zuma Beach in Malibu. Showcase, meanwhile, met a new woman and I'm thrilled to report that she's absolutely lovely. Instead of picking her up drunk off her ass in a sushi restaurant, this time he met his girl at an obnoxious bar on Sunset Blvd. that he'd have never gone to had he not been hanging out with a new friend with great drugs. She was there entertaining an out of town friend and the rest is history. Only drawback? She lives in the valley.

The universe continues to send me signs that I should not play poker. They come in the form of having me lose set over set on the VERY FIRST HAND of a Full Tilt tournament (that was today) and bubble untold numbers of SNGs with dominating hands (that was last week). Not dominat-ED. Dominat-ING. It's like being a little kid who reaches up to the countertop to take a cookie off a plate only to have her hand slapped away. It stings and I'm hungry.

Last night I watched a lot of the WSOP coverage and spotted a lot of friends lurking in the background including Pauly, Tuscaloosa Johnny, Jen Browning, Dan Michalski (I think it was your pink shirt), Mad Harper, and Spaceman. The real stars of the show, however were Ryan and C.J. Ryan busted a world champion in Chris Ferguson and looked totally classy and sportsmanlike in the process, while C.J. got more airtime than world champion Tom McEvoy as he sweated day 2 chipleader Dimitri Nobles. My heart jumped as I heard Nobles call "C.J.!" and give him a totally manly bump-hug alongside the T.V. featured table after his A-8 brutally sucked out his opponent's K-K. One great luckbox deserves another.

The next six weeks will be full of intense writing for me. In addition to Pokerblog, I have a few pieces due for freelance clients, but more importantly, I've carved this six weeks into my schedule in between trips and big poker events to get as much work done on my screenplay as humanly possible. Perhaps even finish the first draft. It's what I'm trying for. So it's probably not a bad idea to play less poker. I have the next two days to sort of re-organize my life and my apartment and watch a few movies I need to watch to get myself re-absorbed in the tone of the piece. It's almost like getting ready to go back to school.

On the same note, I sent a "hey what's up" email to Charlie yesterday with that same subject line and his reply this morning started with the line "DEAR LORD! I thought you were going back to school!!!"

So maybe it's a lousy metaphor. But my 20 minutes are up.