Welcome, Visitor!

Am on the run today and thus not able to post too much at the moment. Spent part of the day traveling down to Jacksonville, Florida for the start of tomorrow’s World Poker Tour event, the bestbet Jacksonville Fall Poker Scramble, a $3,500 buy-in tournament that will continue through to next Tuesday.

Was trying to remember if I had ever been to Jacksonville before and could not recall. Got a friendly welcome from the shuttle driver who lives here. She overheard me telling Josh -- one of my partners in crime this week -- how I had tweeted “Touchdown, Jacksonville” upon landing then joked that those two words have been rarely used together this season. “Hey, we won last week!” interjected the driver, alluding to the Jags’ upset victory over Tennessee and I laughed, duly chastened.

Looking back at last year, it looks like this event drew 477 entrants total (including re-entries), with Florida native Noah Schwartz taking top honors and a little over $400K for a first prize.

Speaking of Schwartz, Michelle Orpe has been doing a weekly interview series over on Learn.PokerNews called “Orpe’s Top Ten” in which she’s talked to numerous poker pros about how they got started. They’re all pretty cool, but Schwartz took a lot of time and thought with his responses, making his interview worth checking out if you’re curious. (More good interviewees coming soon, too.)

Have now checked into what will be the home-away-from-home for the next several days, waiting at the moment to connect a little later with some of the others who’ll be helping me report on this one, including the aforementioned Juice Box Josh as well as Milkshake Mickey. I’ll likely be sending along a few brief reports here as we go, so more to come from the Sunshine state.

Meanwhile, I noticed this morning a milestone of sorts arrive for Hard-Boiled Poker. When logging into Blogger lately I’d been seeing this figure for “pageviews” (somehow a single word in Blogger’s vocabulary) creeping closer and closer to the 1 million-mark. Finally today it got there, and after tweeting a screenshot earlier I got a lot of very nice replies in response.

In truth, the tracking of hits only goes back to May 2007, which is about a year after I started the blog. The traffic wasn’t all that heavy during the first 12 months of posting, though, so I’ll guess the actual crossing of the million-view milestone wasn’t that long ago (like just a few weeks at most).

I know “hits” doesn’t always equal reads -- and in fact more often than not equals “hit-and-runs.” But I’m grateful nonetheless to have people continue to stop by and thus that number of views continue to go up. Thanks again for all those nice messages on Twitter today, and thanks to you, too, for coming around today to add one more to the total.