We chose this path

I have no one to blame for the sick feeling I have in the pit of my stomach but myself. The greasy sack of shit in the 2 seat who called my huge all-in raise with an open ender despite the terrible odds, and the prick of a dealer with a shaved head who so conveniently conjured up the requisite suckout card, are simply nausea-inducing lowlifes that come with the territory, and shouldn't really affect me. Yet every so often there is a perfect confluence of circumstances whereby my well-entrenched embracement of variance seems to vanish. Like at the Aria now.

Poker Hall of Shame IX

On Sunday I played for 6 hours at the MGM Grand poker room, not by any means a long session for me. They have a cheap, primitive, non-swivel, non-adjustable chair, the designers of which deserve to be publicly flogged. Today my buttock muscles were sore for the first time in the 10 years that I've been playing poker in Las Vegas. I'm walking around like I've shat myself.

Howard Lederer breaks his silence

The Lederer Files, a video interview Howard Lederer did with PokerNews, was released this week. The 7-part series can be seen on YouTube.

Throughout this whole saga, my policy has been to refrain from any serious commentary that could jeopardize the prospects of the players getting repaid, and I continue to keep the Full Tilt ad on my blog to this day. Anything I had to add was usually of a lighthearted nature. In keeping with this practice, I present some choice snippets from the Lederer Files :

A Big Thank You!

Without going into exact details (though it does involve a rather nasty bad beat), I dove headfirst into the Grand Canal at the Venetian late last night. I would like to personally thank Greg, the quick thinking and courageous young gentleman who jumped in and saved me from almost certain drowning.

Career update

Unfortunately, Big Six Wheel dealer training is proceeding at a very slow pace, much like the motion of the wheel itself. I have no problem with the physical aspects of actually spinning the wheel, nor with the payout calculations. However, I don't see why we have to master such advanced topics as angular velocity, acceleration and kinetic energy, and effects of friction, some of which require solving third-order nonlinear partial differential equations.

Colon hydrotherapy is starting to look good again.