Hard-Boiled Poker 2010 Year in Review (3 of 3)

We’re almost there.

Like the rest of you (I’m guessing), I was also marveling yesterday at the buzz surrounding all of those announcements coming from UltimateBet. Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth are leaving. Joe Sebok is staying. And apparently Prahlad Friedman -- who’d once been gutted by the cheating on UB back in the day -- is apparently joining the team as a newly-sponsored pro (not confirmed, although UB.com did accidentally post Friedman’s name on Duke’s old bio page for a short while yesterday).

Having been caught up in this business of recapping the year at HBP, I realized I hadn’t written a heck of a lot here about UltimateBet in 2010. The fact is, while the departures of Hellmuth and Duke are certainly notable, some of us left UB long ago. And I mostly stopped thinking about the site this year, my last genuine comment about UB coming back in January when I spent only part of one post alluding to the ongoing troubles with the hand histories. Also wrote a little back in November about the speculation surrounding Hellmuth’s future with the site in a post titled “Signs of the Times: Hellmuth & UB.”

All of which is to say, while I understand how the sponsorship soap opera and the machinations of top pros are of great concern to many, I’m mostly ambivalent these days about who is a UB pro and who isn’t. As I noted in a post in the fall of 2009 -- after that hardly-final “final decision” on the UB insider cheating scandal was issued by the KGC -- my reaction to a lot of UB-related news tends to be that it’s “none of my business.”

Let’s get this sucker back on the road, then. On Wednesday we made it from January to April, then yesterday from May to August. That brings us to...

September

In September I was largely preoccupied with the World Championship of Online Poker on PokerStars, writing a few times about the WCOOP in between reporting on it.

Think I’ll point to some posts on other topics from the month, however.

Speaking of Prahlad Friedman, early in September I wrote a post responding to that infamous “countdown hand” in which he was involved from the WSOP Main Event, the one in which Friedman appeared to have made a call prior to being timed out -- a call that would’ve ended his tourney run -- but benefited from a favorable ruling. The post, titled “Finding the Right Angle,” argues against the idea that Friedman was angle-shooting while also touching on that blown call from earlier in the summer which took away Detroit Tigers’ Armando Galarraga’s perfect game.

The connection? Humans screw up sometimes.

Football season started, which meant I’d once again joined a “pick’em” pool in which I was trying (and mostly failing) to pick NFL winners. Got me thinking again about the differences between sports betting/gambling and poker, and I ended up producing a couple of posts on the theme: “Kicking Myself (Rather Than Letting Someone Else Kick)” and “The Search for a System.”

Speaking of gambling, Rep. Barney Frank appeared on Jay Leno to talk about various topics, including legislating online gambling in the U.S. In “Online Gambling in the Mainstream Media; or, Getting Frank with Leno” I discuss their conversation, responding in particular to some curious comments by the comedian.

Mid-month I reported that the “2010 Poker Hall of Fame Ballot Has Arrived,” and discussed all 10 candidates at length as I contemplated my vote.

Had a couple of occasions to talk about the WSOP this month. In “Minding the Gaps in World Series of Poker History” I noted how even the most significant details of some of the early WSOP Main Events appear to have been lost. And in “Are WSOPE Bracelets ‘Real’?” I addressed that controversy over the WSOP Europe bracelets, revived again in September as the WSOPE played out.

I also found myself writing more than once about poker books, specifically how they seem to be fading from the culture (along with books, generally speaking) in “Have Books Lost Their Hook?” and “Anybody Here Ever Read...?”

Let me also note one other, kind of funny post from this month -- “Stop! Thief! Who, Me?” -- in which I tell the story of my having mistakenly stolen a lady’s shopping cart, an act I compare to making a not-so-well-disguised bluff attempt.

October

Began the month fretting over having endured a long stretch of “Break-Even Poker.” Meanwhile, I was becoming distracted like everyone else by the ever-building WSOP Main Event “November Nine” hype. In “Stacks Get Big, Emotions Run High: ESPN’s Coverage of 2010 WSOP Main Event Continues Tonight” I comment in particular on having covered eventual fourth-place finisher Filippo Candio in the Main Event.

“Poker & Pop Culture, Revisited” compiles a number of columns I’ve written over the last couple of years about poker turning up in non-pokery contexts. “Secret (and Not-So-Secret) Identities in Poker” talks from a reporter’s perspective about how so many players have a couple of different identities -- online and live. And “From the Mayfair Club to Poker’s Most Exclusive Club: Harrington, Seidel Newest Poker Hall of Famers” reflects a bit on how that HOF vote turned out.

I crossed another milestone this month, reaching the 1,200th post here on HBP. That occasioned some reflection about the blog in “The Urge to Keep Writing” and “The Urge to Keep Writing, Continued.”

Speaking of writing, I published a short story over on Dr. Pauly’s “Truckin’” site in October, a mean little hard-boiled tale titled “Burial Detail.” Wrote about it a little in a post titled “Tournaments Are Like Short Stories, Cash Games Like Novels.”

Other posts from October included one called “Robot Rights (and Wrongs)” that responded to the discovery of (a lot of) “poker bots” on Full Tilt Poker, another titled “Physicists & Poker” that draws some connections between the two disciplines, and a response to an episode of “The Big Game” titled “Robl, Negreanu & Tony G Play Poker (and Other Games) on TV.”

November

Like many, I spent the first half of November mostly riveted by the exciting conclusion of the WSOP Main Event.

Early in November I talked about “Watching the Affleck-Duhamel Hand,” noting how incredibly well-staged that little human drama turned out to be when it was finally aired on ESPN.

In “Nine Lives: WSOP Main Event Resumes Tomorrow” I pegged Joseph Cheong as a final table favorite, then soon was writing about the hand that ultimately broke him in “2010 WSOP Main Event Final Table: Cheong Strong? Or Just Wrong?” I then talked about how heads-up saw the WSOP “Limping to the Finish” before running through all of the hands featured in “The Finale on ESPN.”

Speaking of the WSOP, you probably heard that 2008 WSOP ME champ Peter Eastgate sold his bracelet (for charity) on eBay. I considered the significance of his doing so in a post titled “On Eastgate and the Bracelet; or, Must WSOP Main Event Champs Do Our Bidding?”

I spent a couple of posts -- under the heading “No Cannes Do: On the Disqualification at Partouche” -- discussing the cheating scandal that occurred at the Partouche Poker Tour Grand Finale, the one in which a German player named Ali Tekintamgac employed some pseudo-bloggers to help him unfairly maneuver his way to the final table. The first post shares details of the incident, primarily drawing on Benjo’s excellent reporting of it. The second post then adds some commentary, primarily concentrating on the ethics/responsibilities of reporters.

The end of November saw me travel to Marrakech, Morocco to help PokerNews with its coverage of the WPT event. Was another memorable adventure, for sure. My travel reports from that journey spilled over into December, but I’ll collect all them links right here: Arrival, Day 1a, Day 1b, Day 2, and Day 3.

December

December began with some good news for your humble scribe -- Hard-Boiled Poker had been “Nominated! Bluff Reader’s Choice Awards (Favorite Poker Blog).” No shinola!

Voting is still open for that through January 16, 2011, by the way. Click here to go cast a ballot.

I took a “shot in the dark” and wrote about “Audacity in Poker,” drawing upon James M. Cain’s great hard-boiled novel Double Indemnity to do so.

Then came the so-called “Reid Bill,” that failed piece of legislation to license and regulate online poker in the U.S. Offered a few commentaries on that, including “Getting a Reid on the Situation: On the ‘Prohibition of Internet Gaming, Internet Poker Regulation and UIGEA Enforcement Act’,” “Adding to the Cacophony: More on the ‘Reid Bill’,” and “Zombie Bill Dies, UIGEA Monster Lives.” Related discussions come up in “The Future... What Can We Bank On?”, “The Status Quo,” and “The Search for New Players (and Hats).”

Isildur1 recaptured our attention in December, as evidenced in “Stars Scoops Isildur1” and “Haxton Takes First SuperStar Showdown.”

I wrote about an NFL coach tripping a player running down the sideline and other forms of cheating (conscious or otherwise) in “Thoughts About Not Thinking,” a curious sequence on “The Big Game” in “The Not-So-Loose Cannon Folds Aces,” and a cool new web-based show in “Everybody’s Watching ‘The Micros’.”

Hey, it looks like we’ve made it! Just in time, too, as the tank was getting dangerously close to “E.”

Big thanks once again for riding along with me in 2010, and best of luck to you in your travels through 2011.

Hard-Boiled Poker 2010 Year in Review (2 of 3)

All right. Let’s get back on the road here, why don’t we? Time’s running out on 2010, and we’re not even halfway there.

Yesterday I recapped the first four months of the past year of Hard-Boiled Poker. Today we’ll drive through August, a trip that will carry us through Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker, as well as south of the equator for a week in Lima, Peru to join the Latin American Poker Tour.

If we make good time today, then tomorrow we should finally get where we’re going, I imagine. That’s barring any unforeseen detours.

Which’ll come up now and then, dontcha know.

May

May began with me finally quitting the day job, an event noted in brief in “The Brain Kept a-Rollin’ All Night Long.” I reflected a bit further on the situation in “‘What do you do?’” -- the title of which alludes to that question we’re often asked, especially when first meeting someone.

The first part of the month my attention was mostly taken up with PokerStars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker series. Then the focus turned to the WSOP.

Had a number of SCOOP-related posts. “On Deal-Making; or, Everybody Wants a SCOOP” compares the relative smoothness of deals I saw being made at both a high-stakes buy-in event and a low-stakes one. “Iambic Pentamenter Is Not As Easy As It Looks” shows me translating one of the events’ final tables into couplets. And “Draw Poker Drama” shares the story of a nearly-monumental misclick by a player while heads-up.

Team PokerStars Pro Pat Pezzin went deep in a SCOOP draw event, and after watching Pat standing pat I wrote a post titled “Is Punning a Vice, or Vice-Versa?” Then in “Talkin’ Tourneys” I relate how I actually scored a seat in the “low” version of the SCOOP Main Event -- satelliting my way in for just three bucks! -- but didn’t manage to cash in the big one.

Moving into the latter half of May, the WSOP began to occupy us all. Prior to heading out to Vegas, I had an idea to host a “WSOP Bloggers Roundtable” over on Betfair Poker, inviting a dozen blogger/reporters who’d covered the WSOP in the past to discuss their experiences and talk about the upcoming series (details here).

Then came my trip out. Was given a nifty pair of noise-canceling headphones for the plane ride by Vera, her mom, and my mom, which inspired “Canceling Out the Noise.” Once established at the home-away-from-home I got an early “Wake-Up Call,” then got to enjoy some “Fun and Games” over at the Doyle Brunson Beer Pong Invitational III before work began in earnest.

In “Day 1: Exile on Hotel Rio Drive” I chat with Benjo about the Rolling Stones’ best album. In “Day 2: The Grand Games” I opine about all of those $1K buy-in, no-limit hold’em events. And in “Day 3: Groundhog Day” I discuss covering events with multiple Day Ones.

June

Speaking of detours, after just a few days at the WSOP I took a big one, traveling from Las Vegas to Lima, Peru where I spent a week helping Otis cover the LAPT event there for the PokerStars blog. Was a fantastic trip, chronicled here in travel reports: Arrival, Pregame, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and Departure.

A coupla weird coincidences occurred there in Lima. One was the winner of the Main Event, Jose “Nacho” Barbero of Argentina, just happened to have won the previous LAPT event, too, in Punta del Este.

The other coincidence was decidedly more grim. Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the murder of U.S. teenager Natalee Hollaway in Aruba back in 2005, apparently killed another woman right there in Lima just a couple of days before we arrived -- on May 30th, in fact, the five-year anniversary of Hollaway’s disappearance. He fled to Chile, where he was promptly arrested.

Back in Vegas, I recapped my week away in “Days 4-11: Catching Up,” then began filing daily reports. I’ll just pick out a few of the posts to mention here, but if you click here you can see a compilation of all 44 of those posts (including summaries).

“Day 12: Rejoining the Spectacle” tells how Shannon Elizabeth tweeted a picture of me. (Well, perhaps not of me, specifically....) “Day 13: The Real Tournament of Champions?” marvels at the field in the $10K 2-7 NL Draw Championship. And “Day 16: On Covering the Ladies Event” and “Day 17: Ladies Event Final Table” describe my experience covering Days 2 and 3 of the Ladies Event. I hadn’t been there for the first day of that event when a handful of men decided to play, causing a mighty ruckus. But I’d certainly heard a lot about it, and was very conscious of the many related issues being debated as a result.

In “Day 19: The Day One Debate” I discuss the relative merits of fussing over the reporting of chip counts on the first day of a multi-day event. In “Day 23: The Act You’ve Known For All These Years” I tell how Vera and I got to see Cheap Trick’s “Sgt. Pepper” show. And in “Day 26: Observing Obrestad” I talk about finally getting to cover the Norwegian phenom in a live event.

In “Day 29: Fun and Games,” an impromptu game of paper toss in the media box gives Benjo a chance to tell me my balls are too small. “Day 30: “‘You’re Winning This One’” tells of Gavin Smith’s bracelet win, foreseen a day earlier by FlipChip. And in “Day 32: The Grand Games, Part 2,” I revisit that discussion of the $1K events, lengthily reflecting on their significance as well as the many interesting stories that emerged in the one I was then covering (Event No. 47).

July

Continuing with the WSOP, “Day 35: In Person” tells about meeting and reporting on neat people like Kara Scott, Jena Delk, and Mike Johnson -- folks I’d known before but hadn’t met face-to-face. “Day 36: On the Schneid” recounts a dinner with 2007 WSOP Player of the Year Tom Schneider in which he shared some insights about the long grind that is the Series. And “Day 39: From Where I’m Sitting” gets into some of the issues regarding media access and restrictions on such, issues which were starting to heat up as the Main Event was getting under way.

Speaking of the Main Event, “Day 42: Day 1d Anecdotes” shares a handful of stories from early in the tourney. “Day 43: Following the Action” tells of a weird hand involving Chris Moneymaker and Bryan Pellegrino (with the latter commenting on the post). Then “Day 44: The Return of the World Poker Tour” reports from a press conference at the Bellagio where I got to meet Mike Sexton, Vince Van Patten, and a few other folks with whom you might be familiar.

Out of 130 entrants, I somehow made it all of the way to finishing third in the WSOP Media Event this year. I celebrated by going to see Snoop Dogg, ’cos that’s how I roll. Read about it in “Day 45: Tournies & Trophies, Gin & Juice.”

“Day 46: The Odd Couple” talks about Robert Varkonyi and Vanessa Selbst, two very different players seated next to one another on Day 3 of the Main Event. “Day 48: The Long Walk” recalls that old Stephen King novel (written as Richard Bachman), drawing a comparison between its story and the WSOP Main Event. Then on Day 49 things really start to get “Intense,” on Day 50 we were “Almost There,” and on Day 51 we’d finally reached “The End.”

Back home again, I refocused on legislative issues in “Oh, Right... the UIGEA,” then again in “House Financial Services Committee Passes H.R. 2267.” I also took a couple of “shots in the dark” with a post about “Competence in Poker,” then another titled “Time Isn’t Holding Us, Time Isn’t After Us.”

That latter one -- evoking the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” -- is another self-reflective post about how we all make our meanings as we drive along through this life. Speaking of, let’s continue our ride through summer and into...

August

Early in August came a post called “Dam Bluffers” in which I relate a funny story from the online tables, one that illustrates in another way how we each see the world a little differently. Actually I hadn’t been writing a lot of “on the street” posts about my own play, something I reflected on a little in “Hands & Happenings (In Search Of).”

Vera Valmore and I took a vacation mid-month, and quite unexpectedly ended up seeing a KISS cover band. In “The Hottest Band in the World (Sort of),” I wrote a little about the show, and also about the idea of “originality” as it applies to poker/poker strategy.

During ESPN’s coverage of this year’s Main Event, Mike Matusow threw out a hard-to-believe-sounding-claim that in the 2008 ME only one player in the top 100 of the chip counts after Day 1 went on to cash. I had to investigate that one, and shared my findings in “The True Story: Day 1 Chip Leaders at the WSOP Main Event.”

As the month drew to close I began “Thinking About the Poker Hall of Fame, Class of 2010,” primarily because this year I was asked to participate along with a handful of other poker media and cast a vote. Daniel Negreanu called Annie Duke a name, which I couldn’t help writing about in “Negreanu and Duke’s War of Word.” Then I spent the last two days of the month sharing several of the points appearing in an interesting article from 1963 by John Lukacs called “Poker and American Character.” Had to split that one into two parts -- Part 1 and Part 2.

Well, we’ve made it. Get out and stretch your legs. Still have a ways to go. See you back here tomorrow and we’ll take it the rest of the way.

Hard-Boiled Poker 2010 Year in Review (1 of 3)

Year’s almost up. Gotta get me a new calendar. For 2010, Vera Valmore bought me this cool one with pictures of covers from old issues of Spicy Detective and other 1930s hard-boiled pulp mags. Most featuring damsels in varying degrees of distress. And sometimes undress.

Might have to get something tamer this time around. Although now that I think about it, the past year definitely had a lot a spice for your humble gumshoe.

I made it back to the World Series of Poker for a third summer. Was in Vegas as well for the NAPT Venetian, then managed to hit a couple of other continents to help cover tourneys in Lima, Peru and Marrakech, Morocco. Continued to contribute also to various sites, including Betfair Poker, Woman Poker Player, the PokerStars blog, and PokerNews.

Add that to all the scribbling happening here at Hard-Boiled Poker, and it perhaps ain’t surprising that I took the leap to full-time freelancing, in mid-year finally leaving a full-time job I’d had for some time. Was not a simple step, though. As I was talking about at the end of yesterday’s post, poker players well know how sometimes the correct move is plain to see, but it is still hard to make it.

Before turning the final page on that 2010 calendar, I thought I’d take a trip back through the 12 months and point back to a few of the 284 posts from this year.

You say you wanna come along? All right, hop in. I’ll drive.

January

One of the first posts of the year, “If at First You Do Succeed,” took a look an old gambling-themed episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Recalling the plot of that one makes me think of a line from Rick Bennet’s 1995 poker novel, King of a Small World (which I wrote about just last week) -- “if you win a jackpot the first time you pull a slot handle, you’ve got the devil on your shoulder, not an angel.”

Speaking of, this idea that somehow winning leads to losing came up again in another context later in the month. A serious study of online poker had appeared in the Journal of Gambling Studies, then got summarized poorly in USA Today. I wrote about both the study and the summary in a post titled “An Academic Approach to Poker (Gets Dumbed Down).” One of the mistakes the USA Today writer made was to misrepresent a point made in the study that “a high win percentage (i.e. the percentage of total hands won by a player) is negatively correlated with win rate.” That post elicited a lot of response, actually, including from the study’s author, Kyle Siler, and from poker pro Andy Bloch.

In January I finally became aware of the Poker Table Ratings site and considered some the effects of having one’s online play comprehensively chronicled and available to all in “Keeping Track of Those Keeping Track.” Came back to this issue later in the month in a post titled “‘My Observations Tell Me’” in which I recount an incident in which a player at my table read off another’s stats (from PTR) as we played.

The much liked and respected Amir Vahedi died in early 2010, and I noted his passing in “Live, Laugh, and Love: The Life of Amir Vahedi.” While I covered Vahedi in tourneys, I never met him personally. But many of my poker reporter colleagues did, and they uniformly spoke fondly of the cigar-chomping pro.

Rush Poker debuted on Full Tilt Poker in January. I tried it out. Wrote about it a couple of times -- “Riding the Rush” & “More Rush Poker....” Incidentally, I made out like a bandit during my first several sessions of Rush Poker (PLO25), then did not fare so well afterwards and have rarely played it over recent months. (I have heard a number of people had similar experiences with Rush Poker.)

The month ended with a response to an interesting New York Times Book Review piece by the Russian chess master Garry Kasparov in “Talking Chess, Poker, and AI,” some brooding “On Poker and Driving,” a reconsideration of “The Amateur vs. the Professional” debate, and a reflection on the life and death of the author of The Catcher in the Rye in “Salinger’s Game of Solitaire.”

February

Poker pro and “Amazing Race” alum Tiffany Michelle appeared on MSNBC in late January to talk about health care reform. Yeah, I know, sounds odd. But there it is. The appearance predictably featured a ton of poker-related metaphors, giving me a chance to evoke George Orwell and write about “Poker and the English Language.”

“Play the Game Existence to the End of the Beginning” is a “shot in the dark” post about this weird need we all feel sometimes to get even before quitting, and how the significance of such is often quite private -- a good example of existentialism in poker, actually.

I see a post early in the month about “A Mistake at Cake” in which I discuss an instance of the software malfunctioning at the site. Another foul-up happened there again a few weeks ago, by the way. In fact, Lee Jones has very recently left his position as the site’s Card Room Manager, saying that Cake’s “management has made some decisions with which I’m not comfortable.” Serge “Adanthar” Ravitch also left his spot as Cake’s tournament director. To say things could be going better at Cake right now is perhaps an understatement.

You remember the Super Bowl, don’t you? And how New Orleans decided to open the second half with an onside kick? Still marvel at that gutsy decision. Wrote about it then in a post titled “When the Saints Go Marching (All) In.” Talked about poker and sports in a different way later in the month in “The Olympics, A Chance to Contemplate the Significance of ‘Sport’” -- a post that features a picture of our buddy B.J. Nemeth and his famous friend and traveling companion, Rhapsody.

“Talking ’Bout Women, Men, Poker, and Horses” tackles the issue of women and backing. “Who Has the Power?” responds to Bluff Magazine’s list of the most powerful people/entities in poker. And “The Flitcraft Parable” finds me discussing one of my favorite passages in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon -- with reference to poker, natch.

February ended with my trip to Vegas to help cover the NAPT Venetian Main Event and High Roller shootout for the PokerStars blog, an adventure chronicled here in travel reports: Arrival, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and Postscript.

Probably my favorite moment among those posts is an exchange between myself and F-Train that occurred as we crossed paths between the tables on one of the later days.

“So, have you found the meaning yet?” asked F-Train of me. “I have,” I answered. “But it’s private and no one would really understand it.”

March

I heard a talk by Gloria Steinem, and afterwards wrote a post about men and women called “Poker and Stereotyping.”

Was as shocked as everyone by the news of a robbery at the European Poker Tour stop in Berlin. I’d had the chance to help cover an earlier event on that season’s EPT tour (in Kyiv, Ukraine), and of course a lot of my friends and colleagues were there in Germany at the time of “An Unscheduled Break: Bedlam in Berlin.”

Vera Valmore and I took a fun trip down to West Palm Beach, Florida in early March. I had a chance to play a bit of poker (a few months before the limits were raised there this past summer). Wrote a lengthy report of my experience: “Live Poker: Palm Beach Kennel Club, West Palm Beach, FL.” Speaking of the lovely Vera, in “Finding the Time” I contemplate how to respond to her question “If this were yesterday what time would it be now?” I also talk about why I prefer cash games to tourneys.

Over in the “high society” category (i.e., posts about professional poker players and tournaments), I remarked on “Something Noteworthy: Duke Wins NBC Heads-Up,” talked about the new TOC planned for the WSOP as well as the old ones in “The Tournament of Champions 3.0,” and noted “The Return of Isildur1.” Also under this heading, I reflected on a comment by Mike Matusow regarding those mind-bogglingly high stakes games on Full Tilt (such as those involving Isildur1) in a post titled “Not Real Poker.”

I made a couple of attempts in March to comment on the ever-changing legislative situation for online poker in the U.S. in “More Uncertainty: Legality and Online Poker” and “Thinking About June 1 (& the UIGEA).” And there is one “by the book” post from this month to note: “Webster’s Poker Book (1925)” shares the contents (and a lot of cool illustrations) from an old poker book sent to me by my friend Tim Peters.

April

Played in some of those funny April Fool’s “novelty events” (with the screwy structures) on PokerStars on the first of the month. And I wrote about ’em, in “Fool Me Once, Twice, Three Times (Yes I’m Slow... Yr Point?)” and “Fooled Around and Fell (Into the Money).”

I am a UNC Tarheels fan. And therefore a Duke hater. Goes without saying, then, that last year’s college hoops season wasn’t the greatest from my perspective, what with UNC barely making it into the NIT and Duke winning the big one. Couldn’t let the latter go by without remarking on “Another Title for the Phil Hellmuth of College Hoops.” And there was more sports talk in “Baseball, Poker, and Taking Your Time,” where I wrote about the start of baseball season and complaints about the length of games. Talked some there about how the pace of poker sometimes resembles that of a baseball game.

“Women and the WSOP” offers an historical overview of women who have succeeded in open-field bracelet events. “Hooray for Boeree, Remembering Richmond,” occasioned by Liv Boeree’s EPT San Remo win, explores similar territory.

I get etymological in “Picking Out a Bluff,” trying to seek the origin of that poker term. And in “The Skill of the Players, The Skill of the Game” I tackle the old “skill-vs.-luck” debate again, this time trying to address the issue of whether a game can be regarded as “skill-based” or not according to the abilities of the players who play it. Perhaps sounds a bit abstract, but the post is more grounded than that summary sounds, I think.

Speaking of abstract thinking, in “A Metaphysical Check-Up” I have some fun responding to a post by Dr. Pauly titled “Mental Mazes” in which he catalogues some character types often found in poker.

Finally, near month’s end I marked an anniversary in “Detour: Four Years of Hard-Boiled Poker,” a post which reflects on the blog’s beginnings, talks some about the low-budgeted, hard-boiled noir film from which “Shamus” got his look, and talks a little about the future -- including that aforementioned decision to leave my full-time job and take this life detour to write full-time.

What’s that? You say you need to make a pit stop? No problem. Take your time... we can continue down this road later.