Why Wasn't I Informed?

Normally, I don't pay much attention to celebrity gossip, but as I was scanning Gothamist today, a quote from the NY Daily News about the A-Rod stripper story caught my attention:

He also goes to a private social club in Chelsea that fronts as a poker club but also hosts wild, after-hours sex romps, a source said.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the truck up.

There's a poker club in Chelsea?

(Also, what the hell does "after hours" at a poker club mean? 10 in the morning?)

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Slice of Baguette

Lisa: Good news, everyone! You don't have to eat meat! I've got enough gazpacho for everyone. It's tomato soup, served ice cold!
Barney: Go back to Russia!

I was waiting for a ham and cheddar panino to be grilled today at a neighborhood deli when a guy wearing glasses walked in and ordered some gazpacho and a seltzer water. After the counterwoman poured him a cup of gazpacho, she reached for a ciabatta to put in the bag along with his soup. Glasses Guy asked her "Is it possible to get a baguette instead of a ciabatta?" The counterwoman obliged.

As Glasses Guy was counting out the money to pay for his gazpacho and seltzer, a woman walked into the deli wearing a light-colored sundress. Glasses Guy exchanged greetings with Sundress, and asked her when she was moving.

"This weekend," she replied.

"By 'this weekend', you mean today?" he asked.

"Well, I'm packing today."

"Ah." Glasses Guy, expecting some further reply, realized none was forthcoming and walked to the back of the store to retrieve the bottle of seltzer water he had paid for. When he returned to the counter, he stood silently for a moment.

"Are you going to eat in the park?" he asked Sundress, referring to the park just outside the deli.

"I guess," she responded.

"Uh oh," he laughed a nervous little laugh, but she did not respond to his joke. He stood there awkwardly for another few moments. "Well, I'll be in the park if you want to talk," he finally said. "If not, that's fine too." Then he walked out.

By this point, the counterwoman was ready to serve Sundress. "I'd like a cup of gazpacho," Sundress said. "Oh, and is it possible to get a baguette instead of a ciabatta?"

I was unable to repress a chuckle, which drew the attention of Sundress. "He just ordered the same thing," I explained, jerking a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the now-departed Glasses Guy.

"We used to... we're exes," Sundress replied. The counterwoman handed Sundress a bag with her gazpacho and baguette.

"I got that sense. It's just funny -- he ordered the *exact* same thing, right down to asking for a baguette instead of a ciabatta."

Sundress looked up at me, but her gaze was directed inward. "Really? How sad," she murmured, before ambling out the door.

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A Little Italian Variance

"You're drawing dead sir."

The 7-seat was a chatty fellow, and instantly recognizable. It had been a long time since I played with him (December 2005, according to my archives), but he had a knack for banter that wasn't easy to forget. I remembered him as a solid player, but this time I felt he was trying to induce a fold to protect a vulnerable hand. On a board of 9-T-3-5, I called holding QT. The river was another 5, eliciting a disgusted snort and a check from him. Knowing that his two pair had just been counterfeited, I confidently led out. The only caller was CK in the seat next to me, sadly flashing JT as I raked the pot.

--

That was the tail end of my session at the Borgata last week. I abandoned CK and the 10/20 O.E. game at about 6am Sunday morning, after playing all night, only to return to the poker room at 11am and find her in a 10/20 LHE game. She encouraged me to sit down and lock a seat before I got some breakfast and before the poker room got too insanely crazy. I had elected to skip the $1,000+100 tournament, but 800 other people did not, and the poker room was rapidly filling as a result. Her suggestion was sound (even moreso when her chips wound up in my stack).

Overall, it wasn't my best trip. I set a goal of 1.5k to 2k for the trip, but a 3-hour visit to the twilight zone on Saturday afternoon, where I lost almost $900 by missing every draw and having every hand be best until the river, killed any chance of hitting the 1.5k mark. I was happy to escape AC with a solid 1k profit, proving once again that the 10/20 limit game at Borgata is about as soft a game as you'll ever find anywhere. An added bonus was getting to play and chat for several hours with CK. She's an addict in the true sense of the word, which is a touch unfortunate, but I think we've all been there at one time or another in our poker careers.

I considered a return to AC this weekend, figuring that the action would be insane for the holiday weekend, but the prospect of fighting traffic on the parkway, and general laziness, prevented me from getting off my duff to make it happen. Instead I searched out the 10/20 half-kill game here in the city last night. My first stop, on the east side, had only a shorthanded 15/30 O8 game going, in addition to two 1/2 NLHE games and a 5-handed 2/5 game. The floor tried to convince me that I really wanted to play NLHE, even going so far as to extol the virtues of his dealers as "the best in the city". His dealers could have offered a Swedish massage with every pushed pot and I still would have left. No-limit holdem and limit holdem are two entirely different beasts, and no amount of cajoling is going to convince me to play NLHE when I left my house specifically to seek out the limit variant.

This left me with a decision. There were two other clubs to check, but in completely opposite directions. Each was about a 25-minute walk, so I could really only hit one before a cab or a subway was going to be involved. I chose the club on the west side - a club that SoxLover and I had gone to a few months back. As soon as I walked in, I knew I was in the right place. There was a board for 10/20 with one table, and one name in the waiting list.

While waiting for my seat, the host of the game introduced himself to me -- none other than the limit king of New York. I had seen a link to his site on 2+2 last month and read through all of his stories of the wilder days of NYC poker. (There was a time when I wouldn't set foot in Playstation because I wasn't confident enough in my limit holdem play for the wild, wild LHE games there.) Limit King held in his hands a rough cut of a documentary on the NYC club scene that was produced by JIL, someone I have linked previously and with whom I went to law school. As soon as I mentioned JIL's name, Limit King and I quickly got to chatting quite freely about a number of different things, and although I didn't out myself, I think that he made me anyway based on the biographical information in my club membership and some of the things I said (and based on the fact that the NYC poker scene is quite small. How small? Jay Greenspan was in there last night in a 2/5 game.)

My brief session there was uneventful, except for having aces hold up out of the big blind in a 7-way kill pot. With a flop of 4-5-6. Incidentally, this made the second time in a week that I've caught aces in the BB, seen a 7-way highly coordinated flop, and had my aces hold up. When you're running good, you're running good. And while I'm running good, I need to get over and into Limit King's game a little more often.

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A Little Italian Village

In honor of Fisch's imminent move to Oakland, I'm heading to AC on Friday evening with the crew -- as if we needed yet another excuse to go to AC. I noticed that the Borgata is running a super satellite ($220 + 30) on Saturday morning for a $250k Guarantee ($1,000 + 100) that's going off Sunday morning. No rebuys, no addons. Starting stack for the super is T5,000, with starting blinds of 25/50 and 25-minute levels. Starting stack for the 250k is T10,000, with starting blinds of 25/50 and 40-minute levels. Despite knowing that there is no way the 250k guarantee will end before 3am Sunday night, I think I might give the super a shot on Saturday. My tournament game is not as sharp as it once was, but I don't mind burning $250 for a chance to parlay it into a couple grand or more. Even if everything goes south on Saturday, the squishy 10/20 and 20/40 games will be there to ease the pain.

As usual, let me know if you'll be in town.

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Seven Things

I feel like this site is slipping back into its non-poker origins. Mainly that's because I cashed out most of my online bankroll, and haven't been hitting the clubs (or AC) all that frequently. I may have to do something about that -- AC is already on the agenda for next weekend.

Meanwhile, the lovely Maudie and our own resident thespian Falstaff double tagged me to do some sort of meme where I'm supposed to reveal seven details about myself that nobody knows. Seeing that Maudie and Falstaff could both kick my scrawny ass (really, who couldn't?), I guess we better get to it.

1. When I was a freshman in college, I lived on the back side of the 16th floor of my building. One day, I calculated how long it would take a bottle dropped out of the window to hit the ground, assuming that each floor was approximately 10 feet and that acceleration due to gravity would be constant at 32 feet per second squared. I then dropped a bottle out of the window and waited to hear the sound of it shattering to see if I was right. It was close, and I decided a variable to account for the speed of sound was enough to fudge my results into being correct.

2. I have something embedded in my right elbow. It is dark, I have no idea what it is, and it's been there as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure that one day it's going to hatch and devour me.

3. My first time was with a girl at a Texaco station in Northern Virginia in April of 1996. I was just shy of 20. I had no idea what I was doing, and she seemed shocked that I had never done it before. In my defense, I grew up in New Jersey. It's against the law to pump your own gas there.

4. I sometimes speculate about which of my three siblings and I will be the first to die. While it may seem morbid, to me it's more about the incomprehensibility of it all, especially as the youngest child. These people have ALWAYS been in my life. I can't imagine any one of us not being there. And yet, somebody has to go first.

5. On a related topic, I saw in the paper a few days ago that new troop rotations for Iraq were announced by the DOD. It made me incredibly uneasy that my brother might have to go back for his third tour of duty. For as complicated as my relationship with my brother has always been -- functionally, he was my adopted twin, but we have not seen eye-to-eye on much in a long, long time -- I would be absolutely shattered if anything happened to him in Iraq.

Turns out he doesn't have to go right now.

6. I have a bit of an OCD complex regarding satin-edged blankets. If I see one, I will take the satin edge and run it between each of my fingers so that the satin passes quickly over the skin that connects each finger together. It is a deeply satisfying sensation. Just writing about it right now has me looking around for a satin-edged blanket.

7. I discovered on Wednesday night that I still know all the words to the first verse of the Humpty Dance.

Now my attempt to tag people who won't do this despite the tag:

Ryan
Grubette
Glyphic
SoxLover
Waffles
Kid Dynamite
Miami Don

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Last Call

Bart: Can I be a boozehound?
Homer: Not til you’re fifteen.

The St. Marks Ale House opened in 1995. I showed up in January 1997 (and if you think I look young now, you should have seen me at age 20), after having split the previous eight months between Washington DC and St. Petersburg, Russia. Back then, the ale house was a small, smoky neighborhood place with an impressive beer list, an even more impressive scotch list, and decent burgers.

Every Friday, because we were poor students, we would pile into the place right at the start of happy hour, order some food and as many beers as we could drink, and then leave as soon as happy hour was over. It was the quintessential form of male bonding -- getting shitfaced while ripping into each other. The bar was three blocks from our dorm and quickly became a home away from home, even after we graduated. We were so enamored of the place that I palmed four pint glasses, each stenciled with the bar’s logo. Three have since broken, but one survives in my kitchen to this day.

Over the last five years, the ale house has evolved from what initially drew us to it. Instead of the comfortable neighborhood bar where you could grab a beer and a burger without any pretense, it has become a sports bar, complete with flat panel televisions covering every square inch of wall space. On nights when there aren’t any big games, the clientele consists of bridge and tunnel types, a reflection of a change in the neighborhood from alterna-punk refuge to something more sanitized. The quality of the beer menu, and the food, has suffered for the bar‘s evolution. The scotch menu was a casualty some years ago.

Our crew has changed over the years as well. During the height of our run, with our poor student days behind us, we could guarantee 10 to 12 people at the table every week, pounding beers from around 6 or 7pm until whenever we decided we’d had enough of the outrageous insults that we hurled at each other. The faces weren’t always the same. People’s lives pull them in different directions, and so as members of our crew flitted in and out of our lives, they added and removed themselves from the table. Through it all, there were the five OGs -- me, Eric, Peter, Andy and Al. Eric moved to Maui three years ago. Peter got married, and divorced, and now owns a few boutiques and can’t do more than pop in periodically. Andy got married four years ago and had a daughter six months ago. We don’t see much of him anymore. That leaves me and Al.

Many people talk about having a “wing man” when they go out on the town. With Alex and I, it was more like we would alternate turns as the anti-aircraft gun. Not that we would willingly cockblock each other; it's just that the bar was our living room, and you had to expect that kind of thing from us when we were in our element. As an example of how bad it could get, I made the mistake once of bringing a female interest to the bar. Upon being introduced to her, Al shook her hand and asked, "So, besides fucking F-Train, what do you do?" Game, set, match. From then on, the only women I brought to the bar were those with whom I was secure in our relationship (friendly, romantic, whatever).

Ten years of these kinds of insults force people to become great friends. Maybe it's just that nobody else can stand to be around us, but we are the last stalwarts of the ale house. Other people make guest appearances from time to time, but Al and I are the only regulars, putting up with the ever-rotating cast of waitresses, the awful music, the televisions that sap your attention at every turn, and the patrons they attract. Many weeks, Al and I are the only ones at the table, and lately we've been ejecting the dinner portion of the evening, choosing instead to dine somewhere that isn't the ale house. At some point soon, one of us is going to show up, have a few beers by himself, and realize the other one isn't coming. After an exclaimed "son of a bitch!", he'll toast the ale house, finish his last beer, and an institution will pass into memory.

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Lunchtime Reading

"poker playing," said Mr. Roth, the screenwriter, "being a defense against loneliness, moreover a fight against the inexorability of time."

Love and Loneliness on the Las Vegas Strip

Add a new movie to the list of gambling movies I must see, right after Intacto. Somehow, I don't think I'm getting out of Spider-Man 3, so Lucky You will have to wait a bit. How many movies is one person expected to see in a year, anyway?

Somewhat late congratulations to brdweb on taking down the Blogger Bracelet Race and a $1500 WSOP seat on Sunday night. At one point I was second in chips at the final table, but I screwed the pooch with AK and it was all downhill from there to an ignominious 8th place finish. At least brdweb was gracious enough to offer 1% of himself to each of the final tablers. Freerollin', baby.

Finally, from the Department of Random Statistics, this is Post Number 500 on this blog. For those people who've been here since the beginning, I can only say, "I'm sorry." For all the rest that I've picked up along the way, "Lucky you."

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