A few important notes…and a not-so-important note.
First: BOB=THE NUTS. Congrats to the guy who snubbed me during a 3am Pai Gow binge in Las Vegas last winner for winning the WPBT sbo Event #2 satellite.
Now…
1) Good luck to all the WPBT members playing on PokerStars tonight. I’ll be on the rail watching the action.
2) I’m a jerk sometimes. Maybe more than sometimes. Nonetheless, I unintentionally pulled a screwjob on the good folks at LasVegasVegas. No need to go into the details. The issue has been worked out. Regardless, it reminded me that I’d been meaning to push our readers over to LasVegasVegas. These guys are the hardest working poker bloggers out there. Go on over and be sure to check out the Poker Player Newpaper, which is by the far the most comprehensive poker news site on the market today. They’ve been kicking every other site’s ass all week at the WPT.
3) There’s a new blog out there and this is something I’m pretty proud of. When I joined Stars, I wanted to find a way to introduce poker blogging to the Stars community. The brand new Official PokerStars Blog was the answer. We launched it today. Wish me luck on this one. It promises to be a lot of work, but something worth the effort.
4) When I registered PokerPapers.com last year, I had a few ideas about what to do with it. Since then, it has gone through a couple variations. Now, I’ve turned it into a sort of portfolio site for myself. If you give a damn, go take a look. It’s not finished yet, but it’s okay for public comsumption.
Again, good luck to everybody tonight. I can’t wait to see who’ll be joining me in Event #2 of the WSOP.
Recognizing Otis
If you’re not one of those people who believe there is a certain balance to the world, I’m not sure how you wake up in the morning. Without the “even-Steven,” yin and yang, Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett nature of balance, I don’t think I could bear to breathe. After all, it’s the “what come around goes around” mantra that lets us all believe that eventually karma will turn our way and that prick who laughs everytime he sucks out on us will eventually lose while holding quad aces.
Of course, this the only way I can explain (and, yea verily, accept) the fact that my one-time rush at the large buy-in tournament tables has slid to a grinding and blue-balling halt that has served to turn me into an introspective and often grumpy individual. After six for eight money finishes in tournament with buy-in of more than $150 (including two final table appearances), I have fallen into a hole that I’m fairly sure I dug.
Rule number one: When you’re running well, don’t talk about it. If you do, you’ve invited the fates to kick you squarely in the boys.
Outed on Empire
It was during this backslide, a tumultuous and nasty run of poor concentration and carelessness, that I found myself in a little $75+$7 on Empire. I justified the entry because it appeared the overlay for the $10K guarantee was going to be susbstantial.
Within the first ten minutes, yessir, within the first level I had dropped from my initial T1000 starting stack to a mere T20. How does that happen? Well, Otis catches a queen high raggedy rainbow flop with AQ in the small blind. A queen on the turn ain’t the nuts, but it feels like it. Of course, my opponent holds a pocket pair and flopped a set on the turn to beat me with a boat.
On the verge of giving up for the rest of April, I managed to build my T20 up to T100. And then the T100 up to T400. And then up to T1000. By the end of level two, I was back up to my starting stack. By the second break I was sitting at T5000.
It was about this time that I enjoyed a moment bloggers like Dr. Pauly and BadBlood have written about. A reader (hey, Poker Diver) who knows Otis lore from this blog and PokerStars blogs, popped in to wish me luck.
In the end, the luck moved around the table the wrong way. Once we reached the money, I felt like I had a decent shot at the final table. Sadly, I got all-in preflop with my pocket kings and my opponent flopped a queen to match the two in his hand.
Seventeenth place paid a rocking $100, handing me an $18 profit for my time. In short, the only thing I got out of it was a good chip/chair story.
I tossed the laptop in a full laundry basket and fell alseep to restless dreams about my wife going homicidal and lawless. Seems like every time I have these dreams, I find myself running from the law in some way.
