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#336 – FTOPS VII Event #8 Preview – Meet Julius Goat (Again)
I’ve got a horse in $120 + $9 NLHE KO FTOPS Event (#8) on Sunday at 14:00 ET. Or a goat.
It’s Julius_Goat, the runner-up in the “Michael Craig is Giving it Away” contest. (And yes, I will be writing about all the other entries, as well as a more complete report of the action in Event #1, but I’m friggin’ busy here.)
Julius (a/k/a Andrew) has a blog, The Goat Speaks, and a great sense of humor. Flimsier qualifications have supported poker-writing careers.
Andrew is declaring the rest of February “Michael Craig Month” (though he may rip me off by calling it the more accurate but less melodious “Michael Craig Three Weeks”) so once you’ve read every word in MY blog, you should see what he has to say about ME. We also have an extra deal in the KO event: if one of us gets at least 5 scalps, they have to share their bounty money with the other player. This is actually a great bet to make and LOSE, because you have a legitimate reason to gloat to someone else about busting people out.
Andrew has been writing The Goat Speaks since the beginning of 2007. He actually started his blog because of a bad beat. Late in a big tournament he got some guy with A-6 to move all-in against his pocket aces and the guy made a straight. He decided to put his rage to constructive use by writing about it and that became the beginning of his blog. (I’m thinking I’d much prefer that to the torrent of abuse most players unleash. On the other hand, if the Internet is in any capacity a finite space, all the complaints of poker players could conceivably cripple the system.)
Andrew works for a small publishing house where his writing is of a technical nature but supports his wife and three children, along with a blog, an occasional poker habit, and a wicked sense of humor. In our few discussions, we’ve already touched on favorite SNL sketches (his name on one former site was Bill Brasky) and Simpsons jokes (I asked him if he would tell me the plot of a novel he self-published or whether I should merely write, “It’s about a killer robot driving instructor who goes back in time for some reason.”)
Another thing Andrew specializes in is providing parody-explanations of bad play. He writes these as excerpts from his book “Stupid/System”. It’s an intelligent and constructive way of dealing with the body blows routinely dealt the poker psyche. And some of it is very funny.
