DOJ

Jack Tripper Stole My Dog – The Podcast and Trailer

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

Six months ago I recorded a podcast with my girlfriend and the lovely Change100 asked me questions about the origins of my first novel — Jack Tripper Stole My Dog. I recently re-uploaded the original podcast to Sound Cloud. If you haven’t heard the five minute podcast yet, well, here it is…

Jack Tripper Stole My Dog – Podcast Episode 1: The 10-Day Novel by taopauly

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If you haven’t seen the trailer, here it is…

Jack Tripper Stole My Dog would be a great stocking stuffer. The novel and even a Kindle version are both available on Amazon.com.

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No Mas Turkey Cup

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

Circa 1979
Turkey Cup is nevermore. The annual online tournament that I hosted every Thanksgiving will not happen this year as a result of Black Friday. If you were looking to get you’re online poker fix, it’s not going to happen. Blame the DOJ and the corrupt puppets in DC, who thrust this confusing situation upon poker-loving Americans.

It really pains me that we’re not going to have Turkey Cup this year. The mighty contest spawned out of a tradition that I created with my brother. I taught him how to play hold’em one snowy Thanksgiving shortly after 9/11. We played heads-up in his apartment and he quickly picked up the nuances of the game.

When I joined the traveling circus and hit the road with the tournament circuit, I found myself spending less and less time in NYC and away from my brother and family. After I re-located to the West Coast, I wanted to keep the tradition of post-turkey poker. Luckily, PokerStars helped fill the void with a private tournament. Hence, Turkey Cup was born. The tournament grew in popularity, not just among Canadian and British friends, but among friends and readers whom were stuck/trapped in family situations and snuck away for an hour or so to donk it up with the rest of us.

Yeah, it saddens me that I won’t be firing up PokerStars tonight to play poker with my brother and friends. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to play again next year on a new site — pending legislation. Until that day comes when Big Brother allows us to play online poker… the Turkey Cup is on perpetual hiatus.

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Full Tilt Poker’s License Revoked

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

Here’s some recent developments in the recent Full Tilt Poker scandal (via the gang at Subject Poker)… Alderney Gambling Control Commission revoked Full Tilt’s gaming license. Also, the DOJ released a statement about FTP, specifically regarding a possibility of the DOJ paying back players.

And this just in… Full Tilt released a new statement. More hot air.

And here’s one of my favorite scenes from Syriana…

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Absolute Morality and Full Tilt Ponzi Links

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

It’s been a wild 48 hours ever since the DOJ attached the pariah-like words “Ponzi Scheme” to their investigation into Full Tilt Poker. Whenever I have my mom waking me up with a frantic call, grilling me about if I was swindling money from people in that “Tilty Ponzi Poker”… then you know it’s a big fucking story.

Anyway, here’s a few items of note that you should check out…

Terrible Tuesday Podcast: F Train and Chops chat about Terrible Tuesday. (Wicked Chops Poker)

Full Tilt’s New Brand Identity: More proof than my girlfriend is a better writer than I am with this gem Full Tilt’s New Brand Identity: Ponzi Scheme. (Pot Committed)

A Poker Ponzi Scheme?: Writer Alec Wilkinson spent some time with Jesus and he shared some of his thoughts including one line that stood out…“The Justice Department people I spoke to were clearly burned at not being able to shut sites such as Full Tilt down.” (The New Yorker)

Durrrr In the Well: Tom Dwan answers questions about Full Tilt Poker on the most famous poker forum in existence. (2+2)

What Does It Mean? Shamus had an excellent post about What Does Poker Mean Today? (Hard-Boiled Poker)

DOJ’s Civil Complaint v. Full Tilt: Barry Carter and Matt Kaufman posted a thorough index of the complaint, which also includes a video of Tom “durrrr” Dwan on Fox Business News. (Poker Strategy)

Talk About Red Pros: More thought-provoking fodder from Shamus about Full Tilt and the DOJ. (Hard-Boiled Poker)

Where to Next? Bill Rini has some thoughts on the next step for Full Tilt Poker. (Bill’s Poker Blog)

* * *
One day, you’re the toast of the town, and the next day, you’re kicked to the curb with yesterday’s garbage.

Al Pacino pontificated about morality during an exquisite scene from David Mamet’s masterpiece about shady real estate swindlers in Glengarry Glen Ross…

All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it. That’s the worst thing that I can confess. You know how long it took me to get there? A long time. When you die you’re gonna regret the things you don’t do. You think you’re queer? I’m gonna tell you something. We’re all queer. You think you’re a thief? So what? You get befuddled by a middle-class morality? Get shut of it. Shut it out. You cheat on your wife, you did it. Live with it. You fuck little girls, so be it. There’s an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don’t think so. You think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won’t live in it. That’s me.

You can video that clip here…

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Full Tilt Ponzi Poker

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

PokerStars is looking a helluva lot like Wall Street giant JP Morgan, compared to Full Tilt Poker mirroring JT Marlin, the chop house investment firm in the film Boiler Room.

Unless you’ve been in a coma or trapped in a mine the last few weeks, the big news of the day — the DOJ called out Full Tilt Poker as a global Ponzi Scheme. Man, I know something really bad happened in the poker realm when non-poker friends are emailing me Wall Street Journal articles, such as…. U.S. Alleges Full Tilt Poker Was Ponzi Scheme.

Ponzi scheme? Full Tilt Poker? Full Tilt Ponzi Poker.

Shouldn’t the DOJ be knocking down doors of 200 West Street or 23 Wall Street and locking up the real career criminals responsible for the financial collapse of 2008 and bilking taxpayers for billions in bailouts?

While thousands of disgruntled Americans are protesting in the streets of the financial district in a movement called Occupy Wall Street, the DOJ is focusing their attention on Howard Lederer and Jesus Ferguson. It’s not JP Morgan head vampire, Jamie Dimon, that the federales are after, but rather, public enemy number one, two, and three were a former computer geek and bookie who teamed up with a semi-successful day trader, Ray Bitar, to pull off the greatest incident of fraud in the poker realm with the inception of Full Tilt Ponzi Poker.

I knew Rush Poker was too good to be true.

Yeah, by now we know that some of the guys running Full Tilt Ponzi Poker were crooked greedheads from the get go, but then again many of us in the insulated online poker world thought we were untouchable and assumed manna was going to rain out of the heavens for the next decade. Maybe some of the management at Full Tilt wanted to clean shit up once regulation occurred, or maybe they never intended on cleaning things up and instead were hoping to dump the company for a sack of cash and gold bullion, then let the new owners worry about cleaning up the books?

Then again maybe, just maybe, the shysters at Full Tilt Ponzi Poker were over their heads and the Full Tilt Ponzi Scheme got too big, too fast, and they couldn’t keep up with what was going on. The poker boom was a swift beast that swept through Las Vegas and sent shockwaves reverberating throughout the world. Even to this days, some places on the planet are experience aftershocks from the Moneymaker Effect — over eight years later.

I’ve seen what excessive sums of money generated overnight does to people — in Vegas, in Hollywood, on Wall Street — it drives some people crazy, and makes others do horrible things. What exactly happened at Full Tilt Ponzi Poker? We’ll never know. Maybe someday we’ll find out, like the other mysteries of the world like who shot Kennedy and did aliens really build the Pyramids?

If you haven’t read my initial thoughts on Black Friday, don’t forget to take a peek at Black Friday, Vampire Squids, and 100 Masturbating Monkeys in Washington .

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By the way, I’m starting a hedge fund in San Francisco. Who wants in?

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Rocketman and Welcome to the Ice Palace

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

“What the hell was that lunar stuff?”

“Huh?” I muttered waving a soupy cloud of smoke away from my face.

“You know,” Big Dog gestured, “That strain the astronauts grew up on the space station?”

“Oh, the Lunar Kush. If you got stuck up in the international space station for months on end without anything to do, you bet your ass I’d grow my own weed. You couldn’t smoke it because a lit match would blow the entire fucking station to smithereens, but I betcha they made a lot of ganja desserts. Where did you think the term — space cake — originated? The Lunar Kush.”

“Ah… Lunar. Kush. Cosmic. Woof.”

“Rocketman. You know that Elton John song? That’s all about growing weed in space.”

A long pause was broken by stoner-like laughter.

“I’m gonna be high as a kite by then…” I belted out in my best Elton John falsetto.

“Lunar Kush?”

“Yeah, you get the gist,” I said as I shuffled the cards. “It’s muthafucking cold in space. You gotta eat space cakes to keep you warm until you finally get to return to Earth.”

* * * *

I’ve heard some of the most peculiar and fascinating conversations at a poker table. At the Imperial Palace in Vegas, I almost saw two guys come to blows over an innocuous chat about labor unions. At the Taj in Atlantic City, I got bogged down in a discussion on where exactly Roman centurions hammered nails into Christ’s hands during the Crucifixion. One guy said all the iconography and crosses in Church were inaccurate — because you couldn’t hang a person with a nail through each hand because the weight of the body would rip the flesh off the nails. He insisted they nailed Christ through a spot in between a couple of major bones below the wrists. That conversation lasted a hour. The Jesuits at my high school would’ve been pleased that I held my own during a post-modern symposium debunking of crucifixions.

The conversations in my new home game are a hodge podge mainly because of the eclectic nature of the players. A city like San Francisco is filled with unique people from all over the spectrum and Halli’s home game is representative of the diverse nature of my new city. Her game has been running on and off for over seven years — just around the time Chris Moneymaker became poker’s messiah — and on Monday nights you could always count on a game being played in the back of the Ice Palace hosted by Halli and her brother, Skye.

Why the Ice Palace?

Because it’s fucking cold, cold, cold. It’s like stepping into a freezer. The back of Halli’s ridiculously spacious apartment could be used to store a month’s worth of steaks for Peter Luger’s. She lives on the entire floor one of those picturesque Victorians that are synonymous with San Francisco. Change100 and I were thisclose to moving to Colorado this autumn when Halli offered us a sweet deal to share her apartment in the Slums of Pacific Heights. My girlfriend fell in love with the place and any thing was better than living in Vegas or hellacious Los Angeles, so we jumped at the chance to stay with Halli for a couple of months. In addition to a kick ass apartment, we also inherited a weekly home game. Hence, the Ice Palace.

Sure, I have an itch for online poker, but online poker is antisocial in nature and often feels more like playing a video game. I stopped playing video games (er, Tiger Woods golf and chess) in favor of online poker because I felt if I was going to waste my time zoning out at a computer screen, then I might as well make some money at it. I was never good enough at chess to hustle for dime bags in Washington Square Park, and in real life I’ve only broken 100 once on a golf course. Once I realized I lacked the necessary passion, skills and discipline to become a true professional poker player, I found a regular day job whoring myself out to various tentacles of the murky online poker industry (disguised as “media outlets”) to pay my bills and support my art, and looked at online poker as a profitable hobby to help pay for my insatiable desire to travel and do cool things with friends. But ever since the inception of the UIGEA and the subsequent “pulling of the plug” on Black Friday, the broke-dick used car salesmen in DC insist that online poker is the root of all evil, just like running with scissors or wearing white pants after Labor Day. Without online poker, I’m bummed out that I have to turn to live sports betting (don’t even think about online sports books, because the DOJ is in the corner gunning for you!) and make trips to Vegas sports books to help fund my addiction to traveling and music, but part of me doesn’t actually miss the vacant feeling of sitting alone in the dark, worshipping the muted glow of multiple LHE tables, which induced frothing Pavlovian responses to the slightest alert sounds.

I’m still enraged with the cowardly political decisions that prevent me from exercising my right to liberty and pursuit of happiness by playing online poker, however, I don’t actually miss the physical act of playing online poker. I was never that obsessed with online poker that I’d relocate to Canadia to play. But if I was a sensational MTT player like Shaniac or Matt Stout, you bet your ass I would’ve set up shop overseas within 90 days of the introduction of the UIGEA. There’s a part of me that wants to be able to place sports bets on Pinnacle or The Greek, so I entertained the thought of re-locating to Vancouver (they have great nugs there and too many civilians are dying in Mexico because of the atrocities of the losing War on Drugs, but that’s a whole other series of posts that would be better suited for an in-depth report on Tao of Fear). But at this point, I’d rather rent a lake house on Tahoe and make a short trip to Reno or Stateline to bet on football and hoops.

I don’t have an itch for online poker, but I deeply missed playing social poker on a weekly basis. It’s funny in a sad way (like when a alcoholic clown dies of liver cancer), that the original attraction to poker for me was the social element and interaction with opponents in an egalitarian way, but one of my favorite past times got ruined because my work/play worlds collided and all of a sudden the lines were blurred between two opposing aspects of my life that I should have walled off from each other. I was foolish and thought I could mix the two, but as a result, the toxic concoction nearly killed me in more ways than one.

I lived the cliche — one day after a couple of years on the circuit, I woke up and realized poker wasn’t fun anymore. What used to be fun had become a job, and by all definitions jobs suck. It happens to all of us at some point — whether you’re teachers or chefs — you have a passion for something like teaching or cooking, but all of a sudden society thrusts labels on you as the responsibilities grow exponentially and instead of an educator or a cook, you’re now a Sixth Grade Science Teacher or Executive Sous Chef. You quickly forget about the passion that used to flicker inside you like a raging volcano, and you’ve become like every other working class stiff who loathes their job and constantly watches the clock tick down to the precise moment they can act like Fred Fucking Flintstone and run down the tail of a brontosaurus to get the fuck out of the gravel pits and race to the closest bar where you celebrate happy hour by soaking your brain in cheap booze while you grovel with other malcontents about how much everything sucks.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I hated going out to bars infested with douchebags and Snookis. Change100 and I always wanted to host a home game, but everyone who played wouldn’t be able to get ripped to the tits because they’d have to drive home, and if you live in LA, then you know that “parking” is a fucking deal breaker, especially in our neighborhood of the Slums of Beverly Hills, which had no available parking so we were shit out of luck with a home game. That’s part of the reason why I enjoyed hosting Saturdays with Dr. Pauly on PokerStars to have some semblance of a weekly gathering with friends to hang out, bullshit, and have a blast without worrying about carrying around the weight of the world’s problems.

I entered the traveling circus as a member of the poker media, which meant that I leapt out of the “normal linear life” that many of you lead, and accepted a life of constant movement and uncertainty. Once I left NYC in the Spring of 2005 to move to Las Vegas to cover my first WSOP with Flipchip, I essentially kissed a regular home game goodbye. In the last six years or so whenever I heard the intro to Monday Night Football, I always had flashbacks to the Blue Parrot, the Midtown location of the weekly Monday game. Our host Ferrari always made sure the football game was always on in the background. I met a couple of amazing people at Ferrari’s weekly home game like F Train, Ugarte, Coach, Swish… just to name a few. It’s also where I met the infamous Dawn Summers — and I almost spit out my entire Red Stripe on the table when she frowned upon playing Stud and begged to play “that game with the floppy thing in the middle.”

That was then. The Ice Palace is now. I’ve played a few times and on one evening we had two tables of players with a waiting list. I expect to write more about our weekly hijinks in the upcoming months. I sincerely missed playing in a regular home game and I even missed writing about the highlights the next morning. When I first started playing at Ferrari’s in 2004, I recapped the games on Tao of Poker, mostly for the regulars in the game to share a few laughs and talk smack. For the dozen or so readers I had at the time, I gave them a glimpse into my Monday night madness. I’m hoping I can kick it old school and return to where it all began.

Life flew by in the last seven years and I encountered so many rapid changes both personally and professionally that I really lost touch with the original poker fire inside of me. I’m hoping that some time in San Francisco can help me get reacquainted with one of my former passions. And if it doesn’t, then so be it. I can’t resist change, I can only adjust to the changing conditions. The Taoists and Zen Buddhists have a saying… Life is like water — it can flow, or it can crash. Surrender to the flow.

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2011 WSOP Main Event – Prelude to the Killing Fields

By Pauly
Las Vegas, NV

The calm before the storm.

That’s the best way to describe the peaceful, tranquil, and serene Amazon Ballroom an hour before the doors open and Main Event players trickle into the tournament. Las Vegas Blvd. was constructed on unattainable hopes and aspirations, so much show it should be called the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. But even though everyone who flies or drives into Las Vegas knows the house almost always wins, there’s a glimmer of hope as bright as the flickering lights of the Strip that perhaps this day will be the day when all of the gambling gods pull your number out of the ginormous bin of white ping-pong balls. While thousands of seasoned pros, jaded vets, donks, emus, ocelots, and tourists are led to their slaughter, nine people (percentages and history says it’ll be nine dudes unless a woman kicks ass and makes history) will emerge as the next biggest swinging dicks in poker. The goal is to become one of the last nine standing otherwise known as The November Nine.

Only a couple of thousand or so gamblers, dreamers, and degens have the cash and testicular fortitude (or ~~clitoral~~ ovarian fortitude — not to alienate my female readers) to take a shot at the big time. After all, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

In today’s instance, the lottery ticket is a receipt for the 2011 WSOP Main Event Championship. Last summer’s numbers were the second highest on record, but a little wrinkle called Black Friday nearly killed the lofty expectations of this year’s Main Event as the entire online poker landscape was decimated in one single indictment by the DOJ. But once the 2011 WSOP began, the number of participants in cash games and preliminaries were up from last year. Some of that surplus is directly associated with the lack of opportunity to play online poker — those damn junkies needed somewhere to get their fix! But would those surging numbers continue through to the Main Event? How would Black Friday affect the number of Main Event entrants that would have been fed through online satellites? I guess that’s why you’re here to tune in and find out.

Today marks the seventh year in a row I’m covering the WSOP Main Event. I wish it could be like the halcyon year of 2005, in the age before bogus “exclusive media” rules, where I could post whatever I want and whenever I want on my blog. Alas in 2011, I’m still restricted to the “one update an hour” due to Draconian and utterly retarded media rules. Even if I flirt with the elasticity of the rules and post every 59 minutes, I’ll get flagged (like I did the last two years by those fucking Nazis at PokerNews who hired rats specifically to monitor who broke the one hour rule). I know, I know… it’s bullshit in Tao of Poker’s case because when was the last time I actually covered the actual poker tournament?

Anyway, I promised the suits at Harrah’s (er, Caesar’s) that I’d behave this year, so you’re going to have to follow me on Twitter (@taopauly) for random updates throughout the day. I will do my best not to clog up your timeline with mundane and useless fodder, but if something odd, crazy, or just plain weird happens, I’ll let you know. So follow @taopauly on Twitter for Main Event updates throughout the day.

Will I be doing a semi-live blog throughout the day? That’s a great question. I wish I had the answer. I guess you’ll have to tune in to find out. But rest assured, you’ll get a proper end of day recap where I highlight all of the best of the best stories from throughout the day.

I’m gonna thank you in advance for religiously following along Tao of Poker this year and in previous years. The diehard fans are the ones whom I’m dedicating this year’s coverage to. Due to recent events in the online poker industry and the ever-evolving, brooding artist within me seeking out new projects to work on, I honestly think this will be my last complete WSOP. I say that every year out of frustration, but this year is different. So many things happened that I didn’t write about or may never write about, but a lot of heavy shit went down behind the scenes that altered how I perceive the WSOP and my role within it. Of course, if someone offers me a suitcase full of cash, I will write about anything — even savants, douchebags, brokedicks, and inbred twats setting their money on fire. Besides, I’d rather just come out for the 2012 Main Event because can’t imagine spending seven weeks in the trenches next summer. To quote Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon:”I’m getting too old for this shit.”

Alas, enjoy the musings on Tao of Poker while it lasts. It’s been a fun, bizarre, and wild ride and I wouldn’t have traded it for any other experience. With that said, I need to step away from the press box, blow some lines of Adderall in the bathroom, and hope that I don’t walk around the Pavilion or Amazon Ballroom with orange boogers hanging from my nose.

The 2011 WSOP Main Event is upon us. Are you fucking ready to get this show on the road?

Stay tuned for who the hell knows what!

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2011 WSOP – Day 21: A Day in the Life; Hellmuth Denied 12th Bracelet (Again)

By Pauly
Las Vegas, NV

I had a dream that I was in a random hotel room somewhere and a maid was pounding on my door, except it wasn’t a dream, it was reality, just a few hours ago. My head was pounding and I was disoriented because I was in a random hotel room and couldn’t figure out what day of the week it was or even the actual date. On the night stand was a plethora of orange and white pills, a couple of Gold Coast chips, and a sports betting ticket from the Rio. Apparently I had bet on the Colorado Rockies and had no idea if that game already happened, or if it was yet to happen.

Did I mention about the woman who barely spoke English who was pounding on my door like a Swat Team with a battering ram trying to bust up a mobile meth lab?

I had one of those Vegas nights.

It’s not a night what I would consider and epic adventure, but it wasn’t exactly a normal night either. It fell somewhere in between. Alas, it’s one of those nights that happens to us at least once a week. To quote my buddy Otis, “This is what we do.”

In this instance, I really don’t know how to tell you this story about my Monday, other than to stop from the top.

* * *
I woke up in a fog. My house was empty. My French roomies were AWOL. Benjo took off for a weekend trip to Death Valley. Vincent the video guy had crashed at the Cosmo. And my girlfriend was still in the City of Angels after going home to visit her old man for Father’s Day.

I had knocked myself out the night before to catch up on sleep. When I’m at the WSOP, I push myself to the brink of exhaustion. I can’t stop. It’s just how I am. Alas, the addicts life applies to everything I do. I have one speed — fast. I go balls to the wall when it comes to working and partying. Vegas is dangerous because the two aspects of my life blend into each other.

I have chronic insomnia and when you’re plugged into Vegas, it’s difficult to unplug yourself. I can’t explain it other than the energy swirling around this city is not only toxic, it does everything in its power to keep you from powering down. Luckily my girlfrined left a jar of Xanax in the medicine cabinet. I ate the equivalent of 1.5 Xannie bars to make sure I stayed asleep. It worked too well because when my alarm buzzed, I was caught inside the Xannie morning fog.

I showered, waited in my empty house until I was coherent enough to drive, and then headed to a local cafe where the waitresses don’t know me by name, but know what I like to eat whenever I come in. The fed me as I zoned out and sifted through that morning’s twitter static. I had that “Awwww, fuck….” reaction when I realized that… 1) I never finished my Tao of Poker recap from the night before, and 2) I forgot I had an interview with a documentary film crew set for noon.

I wolfed down breakfast, sped to the Rio, and walked into an empty Amazon Ballroom. It was not noon yet and the room was eerily quiet. I knew that withing two hours the entire room would be buzzing with various restarts. A couple of suits held a meeting in the corner. I ignored them and they ignored me as a random tourist wandered in and snapped cell phone pics of empty tables.

My buddy Friedman is one of the associate producers for Boom, a Jay Rosenkrantz and Taylor Caby’s documentary about the poker boom and subsequent fallout from Black Friday. They asked to interview me and I kinda forgot they blocked off two hours of my time. I was dragging serious ass so I did what anyone would do in that situation — I broke off half of an Adderall and swallowed it down with overpriced bottle water.

The interview went great. The director Ryan seemed pleased with some of my answers. I have no idea what they’ll use, but assumed that most of it would end up on the cutting room floor. At the least, I wanted to help them tell the real story about the poker boom. I was just one of the million cogs in the massive poker machine, but they wanted to hear my tweaked view on the last few years. I kinda joked with them that it would be incredibly cool (and fucked up) if they were actually undercover agents for the DOJ and FBI.

I wandered back downstairs to the pressbox and attempted to crank out Day 20′s recap. Unfortunately, I got caught in that rut where everyone who stopped by was preventing me from writing. The constant bombardment of questions involving rumors that Benjo had quit had gotten old. I had been under siege for a week and couldn’t take it any more. I snapped because all those legit questions and concerns was preventing me from doing my work. I rushed out of the pressbox in a huff and hid inside the press room, where I cranked out Day 20′s recap.

Snoopy, one of my older friends in poker and one of my favorite scribed from the UK, stopped by to check up on my well being. He finally arrived into town and had that “fresh” and “eager” look to him. Meanwhile, I was on my 15th day in a row without a day off. Even though I took off a couple of days to see Phish in Ohio near the beginning of the series, I was up partying for two straight days — so even though I had a break from poker — my body didn’t get a break. I had been running ragged for three weeks straight. That’s why I desperately needed sleep and forced myself to rest for at least eight hours the night before. The only downside of all that rest was that I was going to be overflowing with abundant energy. Little did I know that would be my downfall.

With all of my work done, it was finally time to check out the actual tournament. The Stud 8 championship was playing down to the final table and the field was stack with plenty of familiar faces including Phil Hellmuth gunning for bracelet #12. I told myself I wouldn’t care until he actually made the final table. But the Poker Brat was inching closer and closer to me actually giving a shit.

Benjo pinged me and said he was flying back to France in the morning and wanted to meet up for a quick goodbye drink later that night. He was on his way back from Death Valley and I knew one drink was not going to suffice. I made a wise decision and booked a room at the Gold Coast for the night. Due to my staggering Pai Gow losses, I get a couple of free a month. The one shitty thing about my girlfriend heading back to LA for the weekend meant that I had to rent a car and drive myself to and from work. I super responsible when it comes to operating a vehicle and I won’t drink or dabble in any pharmaceuticals if I get behind the wheel. As a result, I was dead sober the last few days (and utterly miserable, obviously, because I was unable to dull the pain of dealing with assholes and fucktards). I welcomed the opportunity to get shitfaced and not worrying about driving home.

I checked into my room at the Gold Coast. They gave me one of the top floors — a smoking floor at my request — and when I stepped off the elevator the entire floor reeked of weed… and it wasn’t me.

I returned to the Rio and wandered through the Pavilion. I noticed a huge crowd gathered around the cash game section. Bob was standing on a chair and I asked him what was up. “Huge pot with Farha,” he said. “At least $200K.”

With people six and seven deep on the rail and a security guard blocking the entrance, I pulled a veteran move and walked around to the other side. I flashed my badge to the other security guard and muttered something like, “This is official business.” He didn’t blink and I walked right up to the $100/$200 PLO table as an random Euro with greasy long hair, hipster jeans, and white shoes was raking in the pot and pulling back a couple of hundred dollar bricks. Farha sat across from him shaking his head in disgust.

I headed into the Amazon Ballroom and the final table of the Stud 8 was set (Ted Forrest, Phil Hellmuth, Al Eslami, Joe Tehan, Russian chess writer/poker scribe Mikhail Savinov, David Benyamine, John Racener, and Eric Rodawig). Hellmuth had made it and was gunning for #12.

Photo by WhoJedi
Regardless if I liked/hated Hellmuth, I had to be there if he won the bracelet. I rooted against the Poker Brat to bust early so I wouldn’t have to wait around for the outcome. Selfish, I know, but I didn’t really care about being an impartial member of the media. I only wished for an early death because I didn’t want to miss Benjo’s last night in town. If he was truly quitting poker media, it was going to be one hell of a bender. Normally, I tell my friends to fuck off because work always took precedent in the summers, but in this instance, I was very conflicted.

If I had to cover a final table that included Hellmuth, there was no way I was going to do that sober. With a hotel across the street secured, I said hello to my dear friend Mr. Percosett. We’ve had lots of fun times together and he makes any dull situation extraordinary. I was cooking on Addys and Percs, which is the equivalent of eating chocolate-dipped bacon — it tastes so fucking good at the time, but in the end it will catch up to you and you’ll end up like bloated Elvis — a career pill popper who croaked in the bathroom and found face down, ass up after choking on his own vomit.

Fuck Elvis, I thought. I can dodge bullets just like my pal Phil Hemlluth. With the warm fuzzies exploding through my body as I hung out at the final table and shifted back and forth from the press area and hiding my press badge and embedding myself in the audience. I found a contingency of Russians sitting in the corner, including my buddy Ilya, who was sitting with his fellow countryman. Ilya gave me the straight dope on his friend and colleague Mikhail Savinov. What I liked about Savinov was his graphic t-shirt with a silhouette of Bob Dylan. Savinov also sported Chuck Klosterman glasses and looked more like a hipster riding the L train to Williamsburg, than one of the unknown (yet Dangerous) Russians who invaded the WSOP this summer.

I was supposed to meet Benjo at 11pm at the Gold Coast at our usual spot where our friends hang out (or hide out) after a long day of working at the Rio. At that point, six players were still left including Hellmuth. I decided to take off and would monitor the situation via Twitter and my CrackBerry. My friends Shirley and Halli came to get me in the pressbox. Shirley was all smiles after she chopped a single table HORSE satellite for the 10K Championship (set for the next day). Halli is one of her good friends and travel companions. Our common friends like to joke that they are lesbians because making fun of lesbians is always fun. They are not lovers, but sometimes I like to beat a joke to death, like those dead horses they whip the hell out of and then grind up the meat for burgers in the Poker Kitchen.

I headed to the Gold Coast with my fake-lesbian friends and found Benjo sitting at the bar in between KevMath and AlCantHang. Talk about a motley crew that sounded like the opening to a bad ethnic joke — “So I walk into a bar and see KevMath, AlCantHang, and an angry Frenchman…”

The booze began to flow. I ate more Percosetts and that’s when the memory became a little — foggy. I watched KevMath play video Keno. That’s been his latest vice and we recorded a Tao of Pokerati episode (stay tuned for that epic recording) in which KevMath explained his simple, and profitable system to destroying Keno. The gang at The Micros poked fun at Erik Seidel being a cyborg (Seiborg), but after watching KevMath interact with the video poker/Keno machine, I was convinced he was a real cyborg. It’s true KevMath is half-man, half-machine. I saw it with my own eyes. No wonder he never sleeps. He might be the only one I know who sleeps less than me.

I also watched in astonishment as WhoJedi employed KevMath’s Keno System and walked away $500 richer. This shit works. We’re going to publish a book (I get to write the introduction) as soon as I introduce KevMath to my buddy Professional Keno Player Neil Fontenot and they hammer out the final draft.

I got word that Hellmuth was about to be heads-up against Eric Rodawig. I smoked a joint in the parking lot and hit up the 24-our store inside the Rio. I wandered into the press area and got made fun of by the Poker Cougar.

“You must be high and have the munchies,” she said.

“Is the bag cookies and the Chunky bar the dead give away?”

“Well that, and you smell like a skunk.”

Hellmuth was down 3-1 in chips when heads-up started. The match didn’t last very long and Rodawig prevailed. The entire crowd gave Hellmuth a warm ovation as he shook hands with the new champion and rushed out of the Mothership. I did the same and returned to the Gold Coast with WhoJedi. We joked that we’d find Timtern playing Pai Gow, but when we walked into the casino, we spotted him at the end of the craps table.

As I got closer, Chip Bitch magically appeared. I was still ten feet away and could smell the booze emanating from his mouth. He gave me an awkward, drunken half-hug. He was half in the bag when the roller at the end of the table tossed the dice and it danced across the felt. Craps out.

“Fuccccccccck,” bemoaned Timtern as he pointed at a wobbling Chip Bitch. “That fucker cost me $300!”

“Time for Pai Gow,” I said and pointed to an empty table.

At this point, it was a few minutes before 4am. We had the entire table to ourselves — myself, Timtern, WhoJedi, ChipBitch, and Homer. Apparently, Chip Bitch knew one of the Pai Gow dealers, an elderly, saucy Asian woman with decades of experience dealing to schwilly idiots.

“How you doing?” she asked, like a loving aunt.

“Great!” screamed Chip Bitch. “I fucked a stripper the other night.”

“Shut up!” the dealer scolded him, obviously not approving of his use of profanity. “So, how much did that cost you?”

Zing. She knew how to handle us and dished the shit right back at us.

Whenever Homer, who is from the U.K., spoke to the dealer said something like, “You talk funny.”

“That’s because he’s drunk,” I muttered. “And he’s from Australia.”

Somewhere along the way, Homer and WhoJedi spread the rumor (which became fact by the end of the night), that they were long lost brothers from Madagascar. This might sound incredibly stupid and childish while you’re reading this, but if you’re crocked to the tits on rum and pharmies, you’d find it absolutely hysterical.

When Chip Bitch tried to hit on the dealer, she scolded him, “My son is older than you. I’m 61.”

“61?” slurred Chip Bitch. “How about 61 going on 69!”

Oh lord. We were destined to get 86′d. If we weren’t spewing chips, they would have kicked us out hours earlier. Especially after Chip Bitch screamed “If I lose this hand, I’ll suck my own cock!”

At that point the saucy dealer would beg Timtern to smack Chip Bitch every time he cursed.

“Tim,” she begged, “Hit him hard.”

We created a special low-hand bonus. If you drew a 9-high Pai Gow, then everyone at the table paid you $5. If you got a 10-high Pai Gow, then you collected $1 from everyone at the table. Over the course of four plus hours, the low bonus hit only once when Homer squeezed out an abysmal 10-low.

The oddest thing we saw at the Gold Coast at 5am (and believe me there’s tons of weird shit to see at that bewitching hour) was the lanky Asian man who wandered around all of the gaming tables with his arms folded. He constantly sweated our table and preferred to stand right behind WhoJedi. He was visibly irked and rightfully so. WhoJedi had to say something to the pitposs and asked them to run off our only railbird. We had been loud, raucous, and belligerent — easily the loudest gamblers in the pits — and everyone wanted nothing to do with us, that is, except the weird Asian guy with the crossed arms. When the coffee stand opened up at 6am, I saw him starring at the assorted pastries in the display window — with his arms crossed and giving the muffins the same blank stare he gave us.

At one point, we all shipped a huge bet after the dealer busted with a Jack-high Pai Gow.

“This is an easy game,” proclaimed WhoJedi.

“No it isn’t,” snapped our dealer. I knew what was up. She was a local and a total degen Pai Gow player herself. She only dealt Pai Gow to cover her massive losses. Deep down, she must have really hated our inebriated asses.

At some point, Chip Bitch knocked over Timtern’s vodka-Red Bull and the floor handed us a towel to wipe down the table and clean up the cards. Their patience was growing thin.

By then, everything out of Chip Bitch’s mouth was quote worthy and/or an incendiary f-bomb. But we finally reached the tipping point when a dealer in training sat down and asked us how we all knew each other.

“We’re all brothers,” I said with a straight face. “All from the same mother. Different father’s, obviously.”

“Yep, same momma,” added Chip Bitch. “We’ve all tasted the same pubes on the way out.”

The female pit boss was in stitches. She couldn’t stop laughing, but when she finally regained composure, she cut him off. She pointed to the haggard cocktail server and shook her head. We got cut off for an hour.

At that point, I was falling asleep and actually nodded off for a few seconds at the table. I had two choices — suck it up or eat more Adderall. I opted to eat an apple fritter and a big assed iced tea at the coffee stand. That perked me up a bit and kept me going until the buffet opened up at 7am.

Somehow, Timtern finagled us a couple of food comps for the buffet. I really think we got them because the pit boss wanted to get rid of us. Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf blasted over the casino’s sound system. I told everyone it was a sign to end the gambling session and go eat a shitty buffet. Half the group protested –out one-hour penalty was about to be up.

“Only ten more minutes until we can drink again!”

Thank God AlCantHang wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. Otherwise, one of us would have died.

Alas, we gave up on the pits and shuffled toward the buffet, like a menacing hurricane about to reach landfall. We sorted out the comps at the cashier and cheered when we saw that they had a special — $1 PBR. As the famous movie quote from Blue Velvet goes, “Heineken? Fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon!

I warned the hostess, “We’re schwasted. Please seat us next to the crabbiest, grumpiest, bitchiest table of old people in the buffet.”

“You just described everyone in here,” she said without missing a beat.

I pulled out a $5 bill and handed it to her. “You fucking rock.”

We were seated as close to the food as possible and drew scathing looks from the early bird octogenarians. They frowned every time we hooted and hollered. We filled our plates with horrendous greasy breakfast food stuffs. I would never eat the Gold Coast buffet while sober, but while cooking on a pharmie cocktail, stoned to the tits on a strain called Hulk Kush, and rum pumping through my system, I didn’t think twice as I devoured a mound of bacon and a biscuit so fucking hard, it could be used as a doorstop.

Why? As Otis would say, “This is what we do.”

I don’t remember anything after the plate of bacon.

Support indie writers by buying Pauly’s book Lost Vegas.

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New Tao of Pokerati Podcast: Mothership Stench (Ep 18)

By Pauly
Las Vegas, NV

Timtern and I were covering the final table of a Donkament inside the Mothership and we recorded an episode of the quickest poker podcast on the intertubes…

2011 WSOP – Episode 18: Mothership Stench with Timtern (2:43) – Pauly and Timtern are in the press section inside the Mothership, while sweating the final table of the Donkament. Timtern shares a story about a couple of railbirds who put him on mega-tilt, including the guy who took off his shoes. Pauly also describes the sketchy, yet pungent scene inside the Mothership.

For more episodes, visit the Tao of Pokerati archives.

Support indie writers by buying Pauly’s book Lost Vegas.

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Bluff Videos: Finding Phil Ivey and The Doctor Is In

By Pauly
Las Vegas, NV

The gang shooting the videos for Bluff Magazine are killing it this summer. Kudos to Marty, Sueann, and Michel for their stellar work. Check out the latest installment of BLUFF Live @ the WSOP, especially the hysterical segment of Finding Phil Ivey.

Oh, by the way, because I’m a columnist at Bluff Magazine, they interviewed me about my latest article about the hallways at the WSOP in the current issue. There’s a snippet of my interview appearing at the 4:44 mark.

Watch it here:

And you have to head over to Bluff to view the entire interview that I recorded yesterday. Check out… BLUFF Cover Story: The Doctor Is In.

Support indie writers by buying Pauly’s book Lost Vegas.

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