FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#924 – Friends in High Places, Part 1 – Blight in Blythe

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

[The week before Thanksgiving, I went to Los Angeles to play in Annie Duke's Celebrity Poker Night, to benefit the Decision Education Foundation. It was an eventful trip and an interesting tournament, so I have written an account of the experience, which will appear in this Blog, in somewhere between five and eight installments, depending on how I write the concluding material and cut/divide the stories. It comes with some great photos, though, for reasons that should become apparent, I didn't get any pictures for Part I.]

1 AM – Outside in the Cold, Blythe, California. What could I have been thinking? I am supposed to play in a charity poker tournament with Annie Duke tomorrow night in Los Angeles. I was going to make the drive on Thursday, the day of the event, but got happy feet at about 9 PM. Annie’s tournament doesn’t start until about 8 PM tomorrow, which would give me plenty of time to make the 400-mile drive. But then I made the mistake I often make in these situations.

I started thinking.

If I just DID things, my life would pretty much work out as it has. But when I get some time, I start to THINK about things, and that just makes everything worse. And the more insignificant the thing, the worse I make it by thinking about it.

Tell me I have ten minutes to decide whether to buy a house and I’m fine. Tell me I have to decide overnight about taking a new job in a new city and it’s no problem. But I turn into a mental case if I have to decide my departure time for (a) a 400-mile trip, (b) with bad traffic at the end, (c) for a tournament starting at 8 PM, (d) with pre-tournament activities starting at 5:30 PM, (e) with some good friends to visit, (f) some new contacts to make, (g) the Commerce Poker room to check out, (h) a couple of stores in LA that I like to check out, and (i) so on. To keep a long story from getting longer, I left for LA at 10 PM Wednesday, with the idea that I would get a room in Blythe. That way, I could sleep later, not worry about LA traffic, and be better rested for a possible late night. Also, I prefer driving at night.

But now I’m in Blythe California. Its pitch black, the strip of hotels off the interstate is not an especially nice area, and it’s about 25 degrees colder than when I got in my car in Scottsdale.

I am negotiating my one-night room rental with this establishment’s hotel clerk through bulletproof class. I don’t know for a fact that the glass is bulletproof, but I don’t know any aesthetic purpose it could possibly serve. The hotel’s lobby doors are locked and I am outdoors behind the hotel. Francine, the clerk, has more facial piercings than I have ever seen on a human. I counted seven though I never got a real clear view because of the thick glass. When she asks for my ID and credit card, it dawns on me that maybe they don’t take American Express. (They did.) These I had to slip through a narrow slot in the bulletproof glass. (To give you an idea of HOW narrow, imagine the width of a bullet. Now think narrower than that.)

Francine took these items away to photocopy, leaving me standing there. In the cold. In the dark. Behind the hotel. In this bad neighborhood. In the middle of this task – there were TWO images to photocopy – she received a phone call. I couldn’t hear through the slot in the glass but it must have been a personal call because it took five minutes.

I hope it helps my street cred that my thoughts wondered only once to the scene in THE GODFATHER where Sonny Corleone is gunned down on the Causeway while waiting for the toll collector to let him through. But eventually, Francine determined I was a reasonable credit risk and passed me back my license and credit card, along with a room key, through the slot.

I managed to extricate myself from Blythe at the crack of noon and got back on the road. The “Blythe Arms” turned out not be as scary on the inside as it was on the outside. (Frankly, that was hard to believe because it looked pretty bleak from the outside. And I admit to living a pretty privileged existence, but I’ve stayed in more than my share of fleabags, including one down the block from a very remote prison I was visiting and another that was across the street from a murder for a book I researching about a serial killer.)

In fact, the only unusual thing that happened was 3am text message from Ted Forrest asking, “R u in Vegas?”

As any regular reader of this Blog knows, any communication from Ted Forrest is loaded with possibilities. After I woke up on Thursday and saw his message, I paused to respond just long enough to start thinking about whether I would abandon Annie and her charity tournament if Ted needed me for a Las Vegas adventure. More specifically, I wondered HOW MUCH I would have to contribute to Annie’s charity to get me off the hook.

As I told you, though, my problems tend to arise when I start THINKING. So I abandoned this and simply sent him a message back with my whereabouts and a question about what he had in mind.

Forrest’s response highlighted the benefits of DOING rather than THINKING: he didn’t respond (nor did I hear from him when I asked him again the next day. I still have no idea what Ted wanted).

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