On Sunday, December 21, at 18:00 ET I am hosting a $5 + $5 No-Limit Hold ‘Em tournamnet on Full Tilt. From each entry $5 will go into the prize pool and $5 will go to Scottsdale Relay For Life. Jo Anne and I are actively involved in this cancer charity and Full Tilt was nice enough to let me host the tournament. (If you are nice enough to enter, the event is listed with the private tournaments, and the password is “relay”.)

Let me share a little information about this cause to encouarage you to participate. I’m primarly interested in getting everybody who reads this to play the tournament, but I would love it if you are in Scottsdale on May 8-9, 2009, to participate in the Relay.

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In 1965, Wilson Pickett and legendary bluesman Steve Cropper collaborated on the modern blues standard, “In the Midnight Hour.” (Cropper also cowrote “Dock of the Bay” with Otis Redding.)

I’m gonna wait til the midnight hour
That’s when no one else is around

Back in 1965, that might have been an apt way to describe a poker pro’s working conditions. In 44 years, poker emerged from its murky back rooms into the blinding lights of television and the ever-present eye of the internet. Ironically, the regulators of poker have moved to the hazy darkness of the midnight hour.

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They say that every great story is really just one story. Gilgamesh, the Aenid, Don Quixote, Back to the Future – all the same story. Although the embroidery differs, every great story has the same elements: hero, mentor, journey, villinous obstacle, contribution from the gods, return.

As a reader, a storyteller, and a student of history and literature I ‘ve always assumed this to be true.  And now that I’ve asked you for your favorite gambling stories, I know it’s true. Every great story you told me – and there were many – had its antecedent in some other legendary story. Of course, in this case, the original heroes weren’t Beowulf or Hercules or Luke Skywalker but Ted Forest, Huckleberry Seed, and my dad.

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The contest to write an essay about an idea for how to become a cash game killer was difficult – difficult to enter, difficult to judge. For example, just about every theory or idea in poker has a counter-argument or criticism. So if someone says, for example, “always enter raising,” like Chris Ferguson, Ted Forrest would tell you the limits that puts on your game. But if Ted told you to see a lot of flops cheap, Chris would explain what you lose by doing that compared with raising.

This was a hard one to judge, and none of these tips come with a money-back guarantee.

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I was especially interested, in running the contest asking about who you would choose as your Main Event final-table coach, if there were any consensus picks. There were, predictably, a wide variety of coaches chosen, but some interesting results emerged.

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Last Sunday I played the Main Event of FTOPS X. I brought my usual baggage to the table (a horrible career FTOPS record) and also a personal 2 month losing streak and a general panic from being behind in the blog, in the essay contests, in paying my bills, etc. etc. etc. As if this wasn’t enough, a half-hour into the tournament Phil Ivey was plopped down into the seat on my left.

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I just completed the kick-off event for a cancer charity in which Jo Anne and I are actively involved, Relay for Life. This has two consequences for all of you: (1) I would like you to sign up for my Relay For Life tournament on Full Tilt, on December 21 at 19:00 ET. The password is “relay”. A future blog will describe what the charity is about in detail. (2) Now that this is concluded, I can get back to the work of writing the blog, and I have a lot of catching up to do. I’ll start by covering some things right away:

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I honestly could not give this entry the prize, even by my subjective standards. Chris L. wrote:

My Poker Guru?

Why, Michael Craig of course.

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This is all about Essay Contest 3B, “Tournament Star”. I judged this one first because it had the most entries. I will judge the entries in the other two contests, Cash Game Killer and Enigma, is quickly as I can. (WARNING: I have to finish losing my ass in FTOPS X first, and then the Relay For Life-Scottsdale Kick-Off is Tuesday night and, as a committee co-chair and the husband of the event co-chair, it will be uncool if I don’t devote some time to preparing and attending that function. But soon as I can, okay?)

The next several posts are (my) Observations and (your) Excerpts from Tournament Star:

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The judging for this essay contest, in which entrants were asked to choose a coach for the final table of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker and describe payment and responsibilities, was very difficult. There weren’t any killer jokes to make an entry stand out, though some tried. There wasn’t a “right answer” – though if I had entered I’d have told you otherwise (see next post on the contest for the right answer). And the reasoning for the entrants was generally pretty similar.

Still, the entries were extremely interesting to read and fun to tabulate. Based on my subjective opinion, the winning entry was that of AlanRubin81.

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