FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#938 – Where Did 2009 Go? – Part I

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

It was with great reluctance that I said good-bye to 2009. I had a dreadful year playing poker online, but even that was not without its highlights. I had a great time at the World Series last summer working with Shauna and had my best-ever finish, runner-up to Jeffrey Lisandro in the Razz. And I feel like I showed that I was still at the top of my game in covering the Final Table of the Main Event. But because I was LIVING all these things (or at least writing them), I didn’t reflect much on whether they made good literature.

Guess what? They do! My chronicles of 2009 formed a weird and skewed, but generally entertaining, commentary of an exciting time to be playing poker.

I started January feeling antsy and ended it in Biloxi; I’m not sure which was worse. I traveled to Mississippi to find fresh material, catch up with some Full Tilt pros in the New Year, and maybe play a little poker.

I made the Final Table of the HORSE event but that led only to a series of posts I called “The Road to Ruin.” I finished sixth, too low to afford a buy-in to the Main Event, but high enough to give me a taste. I then proceeded to play satellite after satellite, my mood souring as it got later and my losses became more absurd. I was so addled by the time I played the Last Chance Mega Satellite that I wrote a brief history of Mississippi gambling between hands to stay grounded.

Finally busting (for the third time that day) in the wee hours of the morning, I debated hitting up Erick Lindgren for a stake or shedding my demons by visiting the Crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil to create the Delta Blues. I did neither, but instead followed the Full Tilt pros in the Main Event. Although I was already friends with Gavin Smith and even visited his house, I was shocked and impressed by what comes out of his mouth at any random moment.

After the last Full Tilt Pro busted short of the Final Table, I committed to my family to return a day early. This led to series of posts titled “Escape from Biloxi.” It was only then that I discovered such things as (a) flights leaving Mississippi cost two to seven times as much as flights arriving in Mississippi; (b) even though the airport shuttle was named Hotard, its excellent service cost less than one-tenth the price of a trip out to the New Orleans airport; (c) you should never smell the underside of a limo seat; and (d) New Orleans’ reputation for excellent cuisine does not extend to its airport.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the highpoint of my February was getting robbed. Jo Anne was awakened by a phone call Scottsdale Police Department at 5:30am. Here is a transcript of the call, in its entirety: “We need to talk with you Mrs. Craig. Can you please come to your front door?” This led us through a tangled path through Jo Anne’s past driving record and a procedural nightmare from which we learned that everyone, from police to credit card companies, is much nicer to deal with when something is lost then when it is found. For me, the worst part was being awoken from a dream in which I had turned my poker “celebrity” into a gig managing a pint-sized professional wrestler named Paul Bunion Junior.

I did have some tournament success that month, though of an unconventional nature. I won a pair of tournaments on Full Tilt. In the first, I described the numerous lucky breaks I received, without which I couldn’t have won. In the second tournament, the Midnight Madness, I set a world record by going from 15 chips on the second hand to winning the tournament over more than 2,400 opponents.

One of my yearly highlights, at least as a reporter, is the NBC Heads-Up Championship in March. Huckleberry Seed, who has made the Sweet 16 in all five Heads-Up Championships, won a popular and dramatic victory over Vanessa Russo in the final, but the epic match of the tournament was the Huck Seed – San Farha semi-final. That match, along with the Forrest-Farha fourth round match of 2007, should live on as two of the longest and most exciting matches in the Championship’s history. (One of the reasons I like collecting this information is because I was a first-hand observer of both matches – as, through this blog, were you – but television missed certain elements that appear in my accounts and missed the 2007 match all together.) In addition to my unique vantage and view of the news, I was able to capture some uniquely fun and personal moments. In 2009, that included serving as an audience of one for a 45-minute comedy routine by Brad Garrett during the untelevised portion of his match with Glen Chorny. I also broadcasted in the blog that Orel Hershiser had better bring me an autographed baseball or I was going to wreak petty, whining vengeance.

As the picture at the top of this post indicates, Mr. Hershiser was a class act, transcending my bitchiness and giving me a super-cool memento.

During the first part of April I stayed barricaded in my fortress like office working on a number of posts about poker strategy. The one titled “Six degrees of tilt” provides, I think, an excellent explanation of why poker players tilt and how to avoid it. At the end of the month, I took a trip to Las Vegas for the end of the Bellagio Five-Star, the WPT Championship. Seeing the recession-scared poker landscape, I posted a reminiscence of my “first day” in poker, five years earlier at the first Bellagio Five-Star. I ended up missing the Championship, however, thanks to an ill-fated tryout I gave to a prospective assistant named Kevin, who insisted on being called Keevo and who I thought I was hiring as a favor to uncle Tilty. Kevin turned out to be careless, reckless, crude, and addicted to bargain porn. It also turned out he had worked for Full Tilt before and uncle Tilty hated him. I extracted a promise from uncle Tilty for an assistant as long as it wasn’t Kevo.

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