#565 - London 2008 #72 - WSOP-E - Night of the Living, Conclusion - Howard Lederer is Still Alive

Howard busted at 3:03 AM in third place. I stuck around with Andy Bloch and Jennifer for a few awkward minutes. I couldn’t come up with anything to say to Howard but something lame, and said it anyway. I shook his hand and said, “It’s useless for me to even say, ‘you played well Howard’ because you played tremendously and it didn’t have a thing to do with the outcome.”

Clearly, we haven’t seen the last of Howard Lederer. In fact, I think this may mark the beginning of a greater commitment by Howard to playing poker. Perhaps this is meaningless but I recently received a notice from him that the Full Tilt-related address at which I’ve been communicating with him is no longer active. He now has a gmail.com address and, if I want to reach him, that’s the address I have to use.

I’ve covered a lot of ground with Howard since May 2004 when we first e-mailed and in June 2004 when we first met. He was the title character in one of my books and a collaborator in another. I’ve interviewed him at least fifteen times for these projects and he has opened to me both his life and his thoughts about how to play the game.

All those sessions, though, only scratch the surface of my images of Howard Lederer. I met his mother Dede and talked at some length with his sister Katy. In addition to hundreds of pages of magazine articles and tournament reports and internet profiles about Howard, Katy’s POKER FACE was an incredible window into the lives of a remarkable family.

I’ve spent many, many pleasurable hours - though not as many as I would have liked - talking with Howard’s father Richard and Richard’s wife Simone. Although Richard Lederer and I have many subjects other than Howard of common interest, I certainly learned a lot about Howard from his father, sometimes just by observing Richard.

I consider Howard’s sister Annie one of my best friends and, after my wife Jo Anne and my mom, one of the clearest proofs available that God loves men, because he created women. My friendship with Annie spans many shared interests, but her brother is clearly one of them.

I adore Howard’s wife Suzie and have become friendly with several of Howard’s good friends, like Steve Zolotow and Erik Seidel. They’ve given me additional insights into the man. I’ve even known some people who don’t like Howard for one reason or another and, even if/when I thought they were wrong, I evaluated their experiences and the conclusions drawn therefrom.

In sum, when I see an image of Howard Lederer, I can read a lot into that image. Some could be speculation. Some could be wrong. But to me, every image of Howard Lederer is worth considerably more than a thousand words.

I’ve shared these images with you, trying to cover the depth and bredth of my impressions of Howard, for a specific reason.

I’m cleaning house.

I think Howard Lederer is entering a new period of his life, one that will be filled with a lot of new poker experiences. I hope to be a part of those experiences but whether I am or not, the old experiences, imagines, and insights will be no more than prologue.

Howard is not the most demonstrative guy in the world. (He might be one of the LEAST demonstrative in poker.) Nevertheless, I join the rest of the poker community in waiting for the new images, which will undoubtedly tell us new things.