Defending MyStack

On the way home from Florida yesterday I listened to the latest episode of the always interesting and entertaining Two Plus Two Pokercast (episode 283). Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz spent a lot of time at the beginning discussing this week’s tournaments down at the Seminole Hard Rock, focusing in particular on the $100K WPT Alpha8 Florida event I’d been there to cover and the $10 million guaranteed SHRPO Main Event that finished up yesterday.

During the discussion of the SHRPO ME the pair became very critical of the PokerNews MyStack App, kind of railing against it somewhat unfairly, I thought, although it seemed as though their comments were based on a misunderstanding about PokerNews’s coverage of the SHRPO ME. (By the way, I was not there for PN, but rather reporting on the Alpha8 for the World Poker Tour.)

Used to the usual full-blown live reporting, chip count updates, and reports of results that PokerNews generally provides for tournaments, I think Mike and Adam were expecting something similar when it came to this event, although in truth PokerNews didn’t send a full crew to Florida, instead only having Rich Ryan file some feature stories each day (which I thought did a pretty good job of updating readers about what was happening day-to-day). That is to say Rich wasn’t doing the typical live reporting of hands and action nor was he updating chip counts, although the PN site did enable the MyStack app to be used by players if they wished.

Rather, the SHRPO hired a team to do the live reporting which could be found on their own website. Included in that coverage was a feed that came via PokerNews included player-entered MyStack updates, which I think understandably caused some confusion for those who casually followed the coverage on the SHRPO site.

At a glance one saw a list of chip counts on the front page of the SHRPO site (with “MyStack App Chip Counts” noted above), but those were only the counts players had been entering with the app. In fact, even though the tournament ended yesterday, that list is still visible on the landing page, although now with no players listed as I assume the feed has been stopped.

So the same list of “MyStack” counts was being shown on the SHRPO site and over at PokerNews as the tournament played out, but that list was never a full one and was a little misleading insofar as it looked like a regular chip counts list but only included a small percentage of players in the tournament.

Meanwhile the SHRPO team was providing their own counts -- gathered by their reporting team -- which did not incorporate the MyStack counts. This is where some misunderstanding arose, I’m sure. If one poked around the SHRPO site one found two sets of counts, but only the reporter-created one was really representative of the tourney (i.e., had the leaders’ counts and most players’). I only casually followed the coverage on the SHRPO site while reading a lot of Rich’s articles on the Main Event along the way, but I saw enough of the set-up to understand why it could be confusing, and why Mike and Adam sounded a little frustrated about following the counts from the event.

Like I say, in Mike and Adam’s brief discussion about the chip count issue they spent most of the time dismissing the MyStack app as a worthless tool that hurt rather than helped tourney coverage. But in my view they arrived at that conclusion incorrectly, basing it on the probably not-so-great experiment with the app that was tried at SHRPO. The fact is, the app was used to great effect all through the WSOP (I thought), where the players’ chip counts updates were incorporated into those being entered by those of us reporting on the event. (I wrote about the app back in May when it was first introduced.)

In their discussion Mike and Adam seized on the example of Terrence Chan having entered his chip count at some point with the app, then later busting from the tournament and not bothering to update his count to reflect he was out of the tournament. Since the MyStack counts weren’t being incorporated into a larger, reporter-updated list of counts, his stack was never changed to “0” and thus gave the wrong impression that he was still in the tournament.

That was not a problem at the WSOP this summer, because if the same scenario occurred with Chan one of the reporters would bust him from the counts. Other issues with the app that Mike and Adam described -- e.g., players reporting themselves as having more chips than they actually had, players not reporting chip decreases and only increases, etc. -- weren’t really issues at all at the WSOP thanks to the fact that reporters were monitoring the players’ updates and ensuring there wasn’t anything out-of-the-ordinary happening with the counts.

That’s not to say the reporting of chip counts was flawlessly performed at the WSOP -- by players or reporters -- but it did seem to me the MyStack app worked fairly well as a significant supplement to the reporting, and probably shouldn’t be rejected as worthless (especially based on how it was used in connection with the SHRPO Main Event).

Travel Report: WPT Alpha8 Florida, Day 2 -- Florida Finale

The second and last day of the $100,000 buy-in World Poker Tour Alpha8 Florida event played out in relatively rapid fashion, with play starting a little after noon yesterday and wrapping up around 11 p.m. or thereabouts. Steven Silverman ended up winning the sucker, outlasting current WSOP Main Event chip leader J.C. Tran to take the title after a brief heads-up battle.

That up above is a shot Joe Giron took yesterday for the WPT from up in the bleachers looking down on the playing area I was describing before. Kind of an uncanny-looking scene from that vantage point.

Josh and I arrived and set up late morning, then mostly were behind the laptops entering hands, our day broken up a couple of times by breaks. One came early on after Bill Perkins busted in ninth, at which point the crew took some time setting up to shoot the official eight-handed final table. Then another short dinner break came later after start-of-day leader Matt Glantz busted in fourth for a “min-cash” of $243,180.

During that first break Josh and I took a walk around the Seminole Hard Rock property, taking a look at the modest water fountain show play out (kind of a mini-version of the Bellagio’s) while noting the small lizards positioned in the greenery around the water’s perimeter. With temps in the 80s it’s definitely a pleasant time to be in south Florida, and I can imagine a trip to the Seminole might offer a lot to entertain visitors with its sights, shopping, shows, and of course, the casino.

Following that second break for dinner Jeff Gross went out in third for a $364,770 cash. Silverman led Tran slightly to start heads-up play, and Tran even grabbed an early lead before Silverman earned a big double-up and then finished off Tran shortly thereafter. Tran took away $526,890 while “Zugwat” won $891,660. (Hell of a year playing out for Tran, eh?)

Silverman also won a huge trophy shaped as the number “8” -- not sure what it is made of, but it looks silver, man.

None of the four cashers had re-entered the event, and none of the three players who bought in twice cashed. Isaac Haxton was one of those who’d fired twice, and he unfortunately finished fifth after leading with five to go then experiencing some misfortune to fall on the bubble.

As I was saying earlier in the week, more Alpha8 events are certainly in the works, so it’ll be curious to see how this “super high roller” tour fares and whether it ultimately manages to attract the participation of those who regularly play the six-figure events elsewhere during the year.

After all was done and the final interviews were shot, the whole “WPT family” assembled around the table for a final group picture and before too long we were packing up and heading back to the hotel. Got a reasonable night’s sleep, then this morning was able to meet an old student of mine who lives in the area and had contacted me not long ago. Kind of a highlight of the trip to reunite and catch up with him.

Overall it was a fun few days and I got a kick out of getting to know some of the WPT folks and seeing how a yet another group -- an especially well-seasoned and talented one in this case -- puts on and covers a poker tourney.

Looking forward now to getting home and resting up today and tomorrow before flying to Spain on Friday where I’ll again see a lot of the players and other media folks who were here in Florida this week. I guess this was sort of an end-of-summer bash for a lot of folks, with “school” (or the regular curriculum) about to be back in session starting with the always popular EPT Barcelona stop.

Then again, to paraphrase that Emerson, Lake and Palmer quote on the wall at the Seminole Hard Rock, the traveling circus that is the professional poker tourney circuit is kind of the show that never ends.

Travel Report: WPT Alpha8 Florida, Day 1 -- Lights, Camera, Action

Was a long one yesterday, starting well before noon and not ending until around 2:30 a.m. as the first day of the two-day, $100,000 buy-in World Poker Tour Alpha8 Florida event played out at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida. Will probably be another lengthy day today as a winner will need to be found from the nine players who remain in the event.

The day started quietly with only seven players gathered around one of the secondary tables. Soon a couple more showed and they redrew for two tables, then several more trickled in to build a total field of 18 unique players. Three would end up re-entering the event, making 21 entries altogether and a prize pool of just over $2 million.

The final total might have been higher if not for the fact that a few players were still alive over in the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open $10 Million Guaranteed Main Event. For example, both Justin Bonomo and David “Doc” Sands might have played had they not continued their runs over there into yesterday evening (both are still among the 21 still fighting for the $1.7 million-plus first prize over there). In fact Matt Glantz who currently leads the Alpha8 might not have been able to play if he hadn’t been knocked out late in the afternoon in the SHRPO at which point he came over to late register.

The tourney is being held in the “Hard Rock Live” arena where concerts are staged. Posters of Diana Ross, Lionel Richie, and some others due to perform there in the coming weeks greet players and staff as they enter and walk past the box office. Once inside there are tall bleachers rising up all four sides of the large space, with the tournament housed inside curtained walls in the center of the floor. Within those walls are tables with the main feature table sitting in what almost resembles a high-end living room with a large area nearby for the show’s presenters to shoot their segments.

The small field and lavish set helped create a somewhat unusual atmosphere for a poker tournament. At one point Josh mentioned it reminded him of the high-stakes poker tourney in 2006’s Casino Royale. Later we ran over to visit the guys covering Day 3 of the SHRPO Main Event and I mentioned to B.J. Nemeth how the bright white chairs and spotless set seemed kind of like sterilized environment, resembling one in which surgery is performed.

The scene appeared quite relaxed especially early on when the stacks were all super deep (they started with an average of 250 big blinds). Even when players began getting short and eventually busting, there was little drama or theatrics from anyone with all being friendly and professional throughout as is often the case in these huge buy-in events.

Meanwhile the table talk came and went, and was often interesting to overhear.

Tom Hall -- a.k.a. “Hong Kong Tom” -- talked some about the big games in Macau, comparing notes with others who’ve made the trip and also contrasting those games with other big ones around the world.

Isaac Haxton shared an idea with his table for re-entry events that involved giving players who re-enter after the blinds have increased more than the original starting stack, something which seemed to intrigue the others.

Philipp Gruissem told Matt Glantz how they’d played against each other in Gruissem’s first ever “high roller”-type event, the $25K 6-max. at the World Series of Poker back in 2010.

The always entertaining Bill Perkins was there, too, surviving to today albeit as the short stack. He often had tablemates smiling and laughing with his banter, and indeed the general mood was reserved but upbeat throughout.

I haven’t even asked anybody specifically about that name -- “Alpha8” -- although watching the action yesterday it became somewhat apparent that besides the reference to eight-handed play, this was kind of an “alpha” group of players we were watching, both in terms of talent level and having the rolls with which to play in an event such as this one without being affected too greatly by the expense.

The reporting side of things went well, with lots of support from the very friendly and helpful World Poker Tour folks who have had many years of putting on tournaments. More than once I’ve had people referring to the “WPT family” as they welcomed me and offered whatever assistance I might need. Speaking of the WPT regulars, I saw and spoke briefly with tourney director Matt Savage who I’m very glad to report seems to be doing well following that scary water slide-related injury he suffered not long ago.

As mentioned nine made it through to today, although only the top four will be making the cash. At eight-handed they’ll begin the official final table, at which point the live stream will crank up over on the WPT website. They were shooting all day yesterday for the later Fox Sports 1 showing of the event, and that will continue in earnest again today, too.

Should make for another interesting day, I think, and as I say likely a long one, although not as long as had been originally anticipated had the field turned out to be twice the size it was. Joining Glantz and Perkins will be Haxton, Daniel Alaei, Steven Silverman, Jason Mercier, Joseph Cheong, Jeff Gross, and current WSOP Main Event chip leader and November Niner J.C. Tran.

If you’re curious to see how it plays out, click over today to the WPT site for both the live updates and the streaming video.

Travel Report: WPT Alpha8 Florida, Arrival -- High Rolling

A travel day yesterday as I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale for a quick trip to help cover the inaugural Alpha8 event at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood that starts today.

As you’ve probably heard, these Alpha8 events are all going to be “high roller” -- or, really, “super high roller” -- tourneys with big, big buy-ins. This one is for $100,000, with re-entries possible, too, until the start of the fifth 60-minute level (I believe). Other stops haven’t been announced yet, but I know there are more coming.

Got in early afternoon and after hanging out for a while at the nearby hotel where I’m staying finally got some dinner and went over to the SHR for a quick looksee. A very nice property, with a nifty outdoor pedestrian mall which was quite pleasant to walk through on a warm Florida evening. Looking up at the open sky I was reminded of the Venetian’s faux ceiling and couldn’t help making a joke to Eric and Josh, my partners in crime on this adventure.

“The sky looks so real! Uncanny!”

Our visit last night included stopping over at a party at Matarano’s to socialize a bit and watch Steve Matarano himself deliver a quick lesson how to make mozzarella (or “mooz-arella” as he calls it). We also ran by to see the now-completed, immaculate Alpha8 set. (That’s a teaser pic above tweeted out from the @WPT_Alpha8 account yesterday.)

The tourney will be televised on Fox Sports 1, and so there’s quite the set-up in place in order to capture all of the action. There will be live streaming over on the WPT site tomorrow for the final table as well, which will give those who are interested a chance to get a look at how everything has been staged.

The Alpha8 is actually positioned on the opposite side of the casino from that ongoing $10 million guaranteed Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open which did, in fact, successfully attract more than 2000 maniacs to play the $5K tourney and thus met its guarantee. We took a stroll over there, too, to visit with Mickey and Paul and some other familiar folks as that tourney played down to 100 players last night.

Our event will begin and end before the SHRPO completes on Wednesday, which means we’re definitely going to be having a couple of super long days both today and tomorrow in order to complete the Alpha8 on schedule. No idea how many entrants there will be. I’m hearing estimates ranging from 20 on up to 40, so it will definitely be an intimate gathering with many of the usual high-rolling suspects involved.

Kind of interesting to be here, and fun to reunite with lots of buds while meeting some new ones among the WPT crowd. Does feel like the great majority of the poker world has descended on the Seminole Hard Rock this week, as they’ve snuck these events in during a convenient gap between other events and tours, with that $10 milly guarantee having done the job getting players’ attention.

Click on over to the WPT site today for our live updates as Josh and I report and our friend Joe Giron snaps the pics.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

A half-century ago, a former English professor turned movie maker named Herschell Gordon Lewis collaborated with a carnival worker named David Friedman to make what at the time were some of the most popular and most vile films to receive wide distribution. They’d already collaborated on a few so-called “nudie cutie” films by then, but it was their launching of what would come to be known as the “gore” genre with 1963’s Blood Feast that ensured them a permanent, curious place in B-movie history.

Blood Feast presents a crazed food caterer named Fuad Ramses who butchers a lengthy series of victims in preparation for the feast of the film’s title, some sort of sacrificial meal designed to further his worship of an Egyptian goddess, Ishtar. The film stars June 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason whose acting ability is as severely limited as most of the others in the cast. The script is laughable, the direction incompetent, and the story only barely coherent.

It was an enormous hit. With a budget of $24,500, the film is said to have made about $4 million at the box office, mostly at the hundreds of drive-ins then in operation. All because of the film’s outrageously graphic gore effects and subsequent word-of-mouth that worked a lot more effectively in those pre-VCR days.

The pair would swiftly produce a second “gore” flick starring Mason, a kind of demented reworking of the famous musical Brigadoon in which some unwitting Northerners get themselves lost in the deep South, ultimately getting lured to a strange town called Pleasant Valley where some sort of centennial celebration is happening. Turns out the town is full of crazies seeking vengeance for a Civil War massacre that occurred at Pleasant Valley a hundred years before. Bad news for the Yankee tourists!

The film’s title you might have guessed -- Two Thousand Maniacs! It’s better made than Blood Feast, although so are most home movies. It’s also a more genuinely disturbing film, or at least it was when I first saw it as a teenager many years ago. Again with a miniscule budget (just $65K), they filmed it in two weeks down in St. Cloud, Florida. And once again the movie made a huge return at the box office, helping further establish a template for low-budgeted horror that has been followed repeatedly ever since.

Like Deliverance, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and countless other “hillbilly horrors” would later do, Two Thousand Maniacs! portrays the South as a nightmarish hell which those from the North should avoid at all costs. Ironically, the film was hugely popular in the South, especially around here in North Carolina where Charlotte and the surrounding towns were a kind of focal point for drive-ins during their heyday.

Speaking of people traveling south and taking risks, this Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open that got underway yesterday has interestingly grabbed the poker world’s attention, the tournament playing out about three-and-a-half hours south of St. Cloud. Most of the buzz stems from the fact that the $5,000+$300 buy-in event is sporting an eye-popping $10 million guarantee.

That means in order to make that guarantee they’ll need to attract exactly 2,000 entries. Madness incarnate!

Or is it? Yesterday saw 634 entrants all told, and it sounds like they’ve already got more than 500 during the first couple of hours today. There are three Day 1 flights. Players who bust the tournament are able to re-enter as many times as they wish, including re-entering on the same day if they’ve yet to reach the dinner break when late registration closes. Those ending one of the first two Day 1s with less than the starting stack can forfeit their stack and re-enter on a subsequent Day 1, too, with the full starting stack.

Will they make it 2,000 entries? Appears as though they might. In a piece yesterday for PokerNews, Rich Ryan sounds like he thinks they’ll get there, with one of the reasons being the significant growth of poker in Florida of late. Indeed, poker has been booming in the state over the last three years since the passage of legislation to allow for uncapped no-limit games.

I’ll be traveling down to the SHR this weekend to help report on the first ever Alpha8 tournament being staged there by the World Poker Tour, a $100,000 buy-in event that should attract a few of those maniacs already there for the $10 milly guaranteed. Looking forward to that as well as to get a glimpse of the other action and reunite with my many buds already there.

Will be on the lookout, though, for any sketchy-looking detour signs on the way down.

Cards and Communism

My ongoing Nixon studies have led me to spend time lately reading about the “red scare” days of the late 1940s and 1950s, that period during which Tricky Dick launched his political career. Like many of the day, Nixon presented himself early on as a strident opponent of Communism thanks especially to his service as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee and his prominent role in the Alger Hiss case.

It was a popular and winning strategy then for many political candidates to portray themselves as fighters of Communism while casting their opponents as either soft on Communism or “reds” themselves. From this distance, it might be hard to appreciate both the rise in popularity of Communism in the U.S. during the years leading up to WWII, and also the hysteria associated with identifying and casting out those suspected of adhering to the ideology afterwards. But it’s impossible to think about U.S. politics of that era -- or, really, the culture in general -- without recognizing the importance of that issue.

In his memoirs, Nixon describes himself as having been basically ambivalent about Communism until 1946 and Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech (delivered after a somewhat famous poker game, incidentally). Then, of course, as happened with many, Nixon becomes fairly consumed by fighting this enemy within. The Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy would of course become the legislator most wholly defined by that fight, his identity being absorbed into a counter-ideology of its own, “McCarthyism.”

My interest in Nixon was first fueled by his poker playing, and as it happens McCarthy was also apparently an avid poker player. Around the time Nixon was attending law school at Duke during the 1930s, McCarthy was in law school at Marquette University and it was there he is said to have devoted a lot of time playing poker with his Delta Theta Phi fraternity brothers.

In When Even Angels Wept: The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair (1973), historian Lately Thomas wrote about McCarthy’s competitiveness in school, with boxing and poker being a couple of the contexts in which he would often display the trait. Thomas writes of how McCarthy earned respect from others thanks to his intensely “demonic poker playing.”

“The game was no pastime to him, but every hand a life-and-death struggle,” writes Thomas. “He bluffed so outrageously it was impossible to outguess him, and consequently, when he won, he frequently won big.” He continued to play after graduating and during his first few months as a struggling lawyer “his poker playing managed to keep him going.”

Later on after McCarthy was elected to the senate in 1946 (the same year Nixon won his first seat in the House), it sounds like he experienced a kind of letdown after having accomplished the goal of becoming a senator. Thomas suggests “he kept up his addiction to roughhouse poker” in order to satisfy the urge to compete while feeling otherwise “boxed in.”

“Since achieving his goal, he had been without direction," writes Thomas, "flitting restlessly from the frivolous to the dubious... and finding the most congenial outlet for his fiercely competitive energy in marathon sessions of cutthroat poker.”

But as with Nixon, Churchill’s speech gave McCarthy a new focus and before too long a volatile kind of celebrity as he took up the anti-Communist cause with greater enthusiasm than anyone, being as “demonic” in that pursuit as he’d been with poker. Not only did his new campaign provide an outlet for what proved a dangerous, high stakes variety of competition, but also one in which he would engage in a lot of big-time bluffing, too.

There’s more to the story of McCarthy’s poker playing. If you’re curious, a column from Poker Player Newspaper about him from several years ago shares some more anecdotes from his card-playing career, including one revealing him to be a willing cheater, too.

One of the ways poker gets identified as an especially “American” game has to do with the way the game kind of mimics the system of free enterprise and other hallmarks of capitalism that were understood by many half a century ago to have been threatened by Communism. Not such a coincidence, I guess, to find vociferous opponents of Communism like McCarthy and Nixon to have been devoted poker players, too.

Making and Breaking Rules

The great crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard passed away yesterday at age 87.

I’m acquainted with a few Leonard titles, although wasn’t as huge a devotee as some. I remember reading several of his books long ago, well before I was old enough to appreciate either the writing or the genre, although I did enjoy them.

Later on one of his books, one with a card game-related title, 52 Pick-Up (1974), did provide some inspiration for my Same Difference both with its subject matter and ’70s setting. I suppose also Leonard’s famously “lean” style was something I tried to demonstrate in my novel, too, although I had other authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford, and Jim Thompson more consciously in mind as models.

Noticed a lot of people passing around Leonard’s 10 rules for writers yesterday, which contains a few good reminders not just for fiction writers but those attempting other kinds of writing, too.

Raymond Chandler was another favorite who I tried to ape, a writer whose style is decidedly not-so-lean when compared to these others. One of Leonard’s rules is “Never open a book with weather” and another is to “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” Chandler breaks both rules in the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep, and to great effect, too.

Of the nine rules in Leonard’s list, four start with the word “never,” two with “avoid,” one with “don’t,” and the other two warn about keeping one practice “under control” while indulging in another “sparingly.”

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” which also includes a lot of advice about trimming unwanted fat from one’s prose, including a similar catalogue of do’s and dont’s. Orwell ends his list with a final rule to “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous,” and I think it’s clear Leonard also at least indirectly qualifies all of his advice with the unstated disclaimer that rules can be broken in special circumstances.

In poker we often encounter strategy writers doing their best not to put forth rules that suggest one should “always” or “never” do this or that. But in truth, it is sometimes helpful -- in writing and in poker -- to start with an absolute as a kind of guide or default strategy, then permit yourself to do otherwise although with full awareness that you are breaking a rule.

So I might indulge in a detailed description of a character every now and then, just like I might occasionally call a raise from out of position. But I’ll do so consciously, knowing just like Philip Marlowe knows when he walks into General Sternwood’s place in the second paragraph of The Big Sleep that trouble might await.

Poker All Over As Tours Start Back

Taking note these days of the various tours all starting to crank back up now that the 2013 World Series of Poker is now just a speck in the rear view mirror.

The 2013-14 World Series of Poker Circuit is off and running with the first of 22 scheduled stops already completed. Like last year, each stop of the WSOP-C is following a similar format with 12 events highlighted by a $1,675 buy-in Main Event in which the winner earns a spot in the season-ending WSOP National Championship along with the first prize cash.

The Foxwoods Main Event completed yesterday with Jason Strasser topping a field of 591 to earn the ring and $186,600 first prize. Seems like I was just at Foxwoods for the last WSOP-C ME there, won by Kevin “BeL0WaB0Ve” Saul back in April, one of the last stops of the 2012-13 WSOP-C campaign. Saul beat a field of 615 to win $194,178.

Was perusing the WSOP’s live updates from the Foxwoods event today and saw the inclusion of a nifty replayer in which one can watch all 218 hands from the final table. That’s in addition to extensive reporting from all three days of the tournament as well. Seek that replayer out among the WSOP site’s live updates (I can't link directly to the replayer).

Here’s the full 2013-14 WSOP-C schedule:

Aug. 8-19, 2013 -- Foxwoods (CT)

Sept. 5-16, 2013 -- IP Casino Resort & Spa (Biloxi, MS)

Sept. 19-30, 2013 -- Horseshoe Cincinnati

Oct. 3-14, 2013 -- Horseshoe Southern Indiana

Oct. 17-28, 2013 -- Horseshoe Hammond (Chicago)

Oct. 24-Nov. 4, 2013 -- Harveys Lake Tahoe (Stateline, NV)

Oct. 28-Nov. 8, 2013 -- River Rock (Vancouver, Canada)

Nov. 7-18, 2013 -- Horseshoe Bossier City (Lousiana)

Nov. 13-24, 2013 -- Casino Montreal (Montreal, Canada)

Nov. 29-Dec. 9, 2013 -- Harrah’s Atlantic City

Dec. 5-16, 2013 -- Harrah’s Rincon (San Diego area)

Jan. 9-20, 2014 -- Choctaw Durant (Dallas/Oklahoma)

Jan. 23-Feb. 3 2014 -- Harrah’s Tunica (MS)

Feb. 6-17, 2014 -- Palm Beach Kennel Club (Florida)

Feb. 20-Mar. 3, 2014 -- Caesars Palace (Las Vegas)

Mar. 6-17, 2014 -- The Bicycle Casino (Los Angeles)

Mar. 20-31, 2014 -- Horseshoe Cleveland

Apr. 3-14, 2014 -- Harrah’s Cherokee (NC)

Apr. 10-21, 2014 -- Horseshoe Council Bluffs (Iowa/Omaha)

Apr. 17-28, 2014 -- Harrah’s Philadelphia

Apr. 24-May 5, 2014 -- The Lodge Casino, Black Hawk (Colo.)

May 8-19, 2014 -- Harrah’s New Orleans

May 2014 -- Caesars Atlantic City, National Championship

Meanwhile, the World Poker Tour’s Season XII has already gotten underway with the bwin WPT Merit Cyprus Classic at the Merit Crystal Cove Hotel Casino in Kyrenia, Cyprus.

Today they played down to a final six-handed table from a starting field of 262 in the $4,400 buy-in event with Alexey Rybin leading. Rybin led at the end of his Day 1 flight and at the end of Days 2 and 3 as well. First prize earns $258,000 in that one.

From Cyprus the WPT hops over to the Bicycle Casino in California for the Legends of Poker then the WPT Foundation Ladies’ Night Invitational, then continues to hop around from continent to continent until the season ends with the $25K WPT World Championship at the Bellagio next May.

Here’s the schedule for the first half of WPT Season XII:

Aug. 16-21, 2013 -- bwin WPT Merit Cyprus Classic

Aug. 29-Sept. 4, 2013 -- WPT Legends of Poker (Bell Gardens, CA)

Sept. 5, 2013 -- WPT Foundation Ladies’ Night Invitational (Bell Gardens, CA)

Sept. 15-20, 2013 -- WPT Borgata Poker Open (Atlantic City, NJ)

Oct. 25-30, 2013 -- bwin WPT Grand Prix de Paris

Nov. 7-11, 2013 -- WPT Emperors Palace Poker Classic (Johannesburg, S. Africa)

Nov. 15-19, 2013 -- WPT bestbet Jacksonville Fall Poker Scramble

Nov. 19-24, 2013 -- WPT Caribbean (Maho Bay, St. Maarten)

Nov. 29-Dec. 5, 2013 -- PartyPoker WPT Montreal

Dec. 6-Dec. 11, 2013 -- WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic (Las Vegas, NV)

Dec. 16-19, 2013 -- WPT South Korea

Dec. 15-21, 2013 -- bwin WPT Prague

The WPT also has a pretty full “Regional & National Schedule” of events with a dozen stops all over the U.S. and in Morocco, Spain, France, and China. The WPT additionally has that new “Alpha8” schedule of high-roller tournaments with buy-ins of at least $100,000 that gets going next week down at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. I’ll be heading down to do some reporting for that one, actually, and like many am looking forward to seeing how that new series plays out.

Finally, many in the poker world are excited about Season 10 of the European Poker Tour getting underway next week in Barcelona, Spain. All of the EPT 10 stops feature many events, with the Barcelona one including 27 different tournaments plus eight more Estrellas Poker Tour events going on as well.

Highlights from the EPT Barcelona stop will include the €50,000 Super High Roller event, a €10,300 regular High Roller event, and the €5,300 Main Event. I’m actually getting a chance to go report on the EPT Barcelona Main Event as well, and so expect I’ll be sharing some observations from that trip here, too.

Here’s the full EPT Season 10 schedule in which the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure gets included:

Aug. 26-Sept. 7, 2013 -- EPT Barcelona (Spain)

Oct. 2-12, 2013 -- EPT London (England)

Dec. 8-18, 2013 -- EPT Prague (Czech Republic)

Jan. 4-13, 2014 -- 2014 PCA (Bahamas)

Jan. 22-Feb. 1, 2014 -- EPT Deauville (France)

Mar. 12-22, 2014 -- EPT Berlin (Germany)

Apr. 6-16, 2014 -- EPT San Remo (Italy)

Apr. 23-May 2, 2014 -- EPT Monte Carlo (Monaco)

A pretty packed calendar for tourney players, and that’s not even including the many other tours, including the the Latin American Poker Tour (Season 6), the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (Season 7), the United Kingdom & Ireland Poker Tour (Season 4), the Heartland Poker Tour (Season 9), and others already ongoing.

Links on the Links (Poker and Golf)

Not too long ago I was writing about golf and how unlike poker it was a sport that readily appealed to spectators who weren’t necessarily players. I wrote mainly from experience -- or should I say, from non-experience -- seeing as how I’d only played golf a couple dozen times in my life and not for around 15 years.

Well, last Friday I broke my lengthy streak of non-golfing by playing a full round with my father and brother, something the three of us had actually never done before. Like me, they’re both casual golfers although both have been playing now and then over recent years, with Pop having gotten back into the game a lot more since he retired a few years ago. (That’s him up above putting.) But we’d never had a golf outing together, and so besides being fun just spending time with them there was an added novelty to the day as we wound our way around the lengthy course one stroke at a time.

The only time in my life I ever played golf regularly was in grad school at Indiana, joining some buds at a Par 3 many times and occasionally playing the regular course where students could play on the cheap. Lining up my first tee shot on Friday, I had little confidence I would remember how to swing and strike the ball, but kind of stunningly managed to hit it perfectly about 140 yards right down the middle of the first fairway.

Of course, things became decidedly less simple as I struggled to recall how to use the irons and wedges, and indeed I can’t really say even after 18 holes that I’d figured out how to handle the middle game. But I did drive okay all day, even hitting a green on a par 3 (the highlight of the afternoon), and while my putting was erratic I at least didn’t feel incompetent once on the greens.

We didn’t really keep score, and in fact on the back nine decided to play “Captain’s Choice” (a.k.a. “scramble golf”) in order to help speed things along. Again, we were playing my tee shot usually, but after that it was Pop getting us to the greens and then usually one of them getting us to the hole.

I found myself thinking occasionally of various parallels between golf and poker, of which there are many. At one point I remembered a “Pop Poker” piece I wrote for PokerListings a while ago in which I talked with Tom Schneider about some of those connections as well as “Why Poker Pros Love Gambling on Golf.”

It’s pretty easy to think of a single hole of golf as being like a poker hand, and when I say I was fairly comfortable with my tee shots but not so much afterwards it does feel a lot like saying I knew what to do preflop, but would get a little lost on the flop, turn, and/or river. (Indeed, I literally got lost in the river more than once -- that is, the small water hazards that dotted the course.)

There are myriad other connections between the games, too, perhaps the most obvious being the way both incorporate skill and luck, with the more accomplished players being necessarily less affected by the games’ chance elements, and the novices being more needful to get lucky in order to succeed.

Both games feature sometimes complicated rules and layers of etiquette. Both are usually played on a soft green surface. Oh, and of course, in both players occasionally need to be mindful of the rake. (Rimshot.)

Not really seeing myself becoming a regular golfer any time soon, which perhaps evokes yet another personal poker parallel with my choice to remain a “recreational player.” But I definitely was reminded of both the game’s appeal as well as forced to appreciate how mentally and physically challenging the game can be.

The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, Episode 21: Lucille Ball

Years later, my podcast has returned! Episode 21 of The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show has now been posted. If you click over to the show’s blog you can see the entry with my “show notes.” You can download the show there (or just listen to it online), or you can just click here. It ought to be turning up in iTunes as well before too long, I imagine. (All of the previous 20 episodes are still there.)

This episode features the great Lucille Ball and includes some stories about her and Desi Arnaz, a full episode of an old time radio show in which she starred, as well as a couple of funny poker-related excerpts from I Love Lucy. There’s also a pretty humorous (and catchy) song from the Andrews Sisters in there, too, called “Strip Polka.”

I started the podcast with great enthusiasm long ago, pumping out episodes every two weeks or so there at the beginning, then slowing down the pace but still getting all of the way to Episode 20 fairly quickly. Then a few months passed, I claimed the show was on “hiatus,” and before long it became clear I was drawing thin to ever revive the sucker.

Not really sure what exactly inspired me finally to pull together a new episode this week, other than having a little bit of free time in between tourney trips and other obligations.

I actually had ideas for new episodes on multiple occasions over that long period of procrastination, even recording segments and pursuing themes on a couple of occasions. Once my buddy the Poker Grump and I even recorded a conversation about A Streetcar Named Desire that I’d intended to use in an episode, but I never got around to bringing that idea to fruition.

We’d both written posts about the movie, which in fact incorporates poker in fairly significant ways. Incidentally, here’s his post about the film, titled “Poker, ‘this party of apes,’” and here’s mine, “Men, Women, and Poker in A Streetcar Named Desire.” We both discuss how the film uses poker as a context for exploring the movie’s broader themes regarding men and women and cultural expectations or “gender roles” for each.

That same topic actually comes up in the old time radio show I highlight in Episode 21, an episode of My Favorite Husband. As I explain on the podcast, the radio show which ran from 1948 to 1951 featured the same sort of situation that would later get picked up and used for the I Love Lucy show that premiered in 1951 -- that is, a domestic setting with Ball starring as a housewife and getting into funny situations with her working husband. In fact, the TV show even borrowed some of the plots from the radio show, including the one I play on the podcast.

As you might have guessed, the episode finds Lucy -- on the radio show playing a character named Liz Cooper -- jumping into her husband’s poker game, a men-only sphere in which her presence creates some conflict. However, unlike in A Streetcar Named Desire, the result of the conflict are lots of laughs and no tense-filled drama.

Anyhow, check out the show if you’re curious. Despite all the time passing, I basically made the episode without any significant change to the format and without even making too much of a deal of having let so much time go by between shows. The idea for the podcast all along has been to create shows that weren’t time-bound in any way, meaning you could listen to them at any time and they’d still make sense and be as interesting or entertaining as when they were first created.

If you do happen to listen, I’d love feedback either here on this post, over on the post on the HBPRS blog, or via reviews in iTunes. Would also like suggestions, too, for future shows, if anyone’s got ’em.