HugePoker

[special note to my Seattle readers: my last post, from a few minutes ago, will be a time-sensitive announcement of a fundraiser poker tournament that I'm running tomorrow night, so if you might be interested make sure you read that]

I meant to write a post-mortem on my NAPT Venetian trip sooner than this, but by the time I left Vegas I was, in addition to being sick of the rotten luck I was having, also physically sick (with just the usual crud that’s going around). Here’s the post-mortem: nothing got any better. OK, that’s not entirely true … since my last report I didn’t have Aces cracked any more, and in fact I cracked other people’s Aces in two different tournaments, so I guess that’s a little better. In one of those, my last tournament at the Venetian, I put together a good run, ending up near the bubble with Chris Moneymaker on my left and Shawn Rice on his left (a pretty crappy position for me to be in, unless I caught some cards to trap Moneymaker with, which I never really did) … but in the end I fell short again. In my final day of poker for the trip I played a couple of single-table tournaments at the Wynn, and actually won the first one – my first and only cash of the entire trip. I put together another good run in the nightly Wynn tournament, and once again managed to crack someone else’s Aces, but once again busted out short of the cash – I think I busted out on some sort of nasty bad beat, but it wasn’t Aces and after the whole string of beats prior to that I don’t even remember the details.

To top it all off I bubbled *BOTH* first-class upgrade waiting lists on the flight back to Seattle – on both flights I was third in line for an upgrade and the first two people on the lists got first-class upgrades and I had to slum it in coach (yeah it was an exit row with extra leg room and all, but I really could have used the free drinks, AND on the second leg I had the largest human I have ever sat next to on a plane sitting in the middle seat, which meant that my back and shoulder were completely twisted and sore by the end of the flight from trying to avoid being crushed by him). For those of you who wonder what the hell I’m talking about when I say that I just “bubbled” a poker tournament – this upgrade list story is a pretty good non-poker parallel (without the extra-large human in the middle seat, though I guess that’s like the agony of bubbling a tournament).

So playing poker at the faux-Italian Venetian tournaments went about as badly as they possibly could have … but … I’m headed for the *actual* Italian Riviera next month to play in the European Poker Tour event at San Remo! I haven’t won a seat into the main event yet, and I guess it remains to be seen whether I would play the main event if I don’t win a seat (it’s a 7200 Euro buyin, so a hefty price tag), but many people talk about this being one of the weakest fields on the EPT trail, so I really hope I get to play the main event, and there are several smaller buyin events I can play in addition to the main. But I will be doing my best to win a seat in the next two weeks, so cross fingers for that. Rachel has some time off so she can join me for this trip (yay!) and we should get to do a little traveling for a few days on either side of the poker tournaments. If anyone has any favorite spots in or near the French/Italian Riviera let me know. We’ll be there from April 8 to April 29 … if you’ll be in the neighborhood, let me know that too.

In my last attempt to win a San Remo seat online, I had Aces cracked by Queens in a massive pot, so the badness continues playing online, but not quite so relentlessly. There’ve been some good results too … nothing significant enough to blog or crow about, but the onslaught of bad beats has at least diminished somewhat since returning from the Venetian.

In non-poker news … I’ve just landed two upcoming acting projects. The first is a very short piece that’s part of Stone Soup Theatre’s original playwright’s festival in mid-May – I’ll let you know more about that when I have the exact schedule. The second one is a bigger deal, and has been a long time coming (over a decade germinating in the fertile – some might say fecund & marshy – brain of Your Old Pal Dan, in fact). Dan had an idea back in the late 90’s to create and direct a play about a group of would-be bank-robbers who almost pulled off the 2nd biggest cash robbery in U.S. history until they got hilariously stupid and got caught. Two years ago when we were all at the World Series of Poker sitting at the pool at Bellagio, Dan brought up the idea as something that Rachel should write the script for and Deb and I should act in … and the idea caught hold. Rachel has indeed written a script, and we’ve had a couple of readings, but we were beginning to despair of ever being able to produce it, until a spot opened up in Annex Theatre’s fall schedule, and they chose us to fill it! We’re all pretty excited about that, and of course I’ll publish more details as things develop, but the performance dates should fall some time in October and November.

This means that I now have my year much more mapped out than is normal for me, bouncing from European Poker Tour to Stone Soup Theatre to World Series of Poker to perhaps a bit of a breather to Annex Theatre’s world premiere production of Rachel Atkins’ & director Dan Morris’ soon-to-be-given-a-new-title “Heist!” (for which I will probably have to pass up on my annual poker pilgrimage to Aruba – just one of the sacrifices one has to make as an artist I guess, sigh) to the Virgin Islands to our New Year’s Eve party and 2011. Those of you who know me know how freaky that is for me to have more than one thing scheduled more than a week in advance. Yikes. Next thing you know I’ll be getting a job or something insane like that. Maybe not.

-huge