I spent a week in Paris last month – completely unplanned but there was a mistake airfare on Delta that I couldn’t resist: $450 round trip from Seattle, and the FF miles got me to Gold Elite status, so it was a total score (some people on the East coast got truly insane fares, like $129 RT to Copenhagen – some of the crazies on Flyertalk.com booked 5 or 6 weekend trips to Europe). I rented a nice little studio in the Marais, and I got to hang out with my dear old friend Patty from the Chateau days … I mean, not really “old” … I mean, still totally smokin’ … she was the original “cougar” in case you didn’t know (hi, Patty). We ate some good food – best meal was at a restaurant called “Pramil” in the 3rd arondissment, where Patty ordered (but I ate most of) a squash soup with a scoop of foie gras ice cream in the middle of it. You read that right … FOIE GRAS ICE CREAM - it was sublime.
I got to play some poker at the Aviation Club, which I’ve always wanted to do. They have a dress code, which I thought meant I needed to wear a jacket, but it turns out mostly to be about the shoes – don’t try to enter the Aviation Club with ratty shoes. They also have the most spook-like security of any card room (or any location, period) that I’ve ever entered … you have to get a magnetic membership card to play, and they take your right index fingerprint. Then when you arrive at the entrance on the Champs-Élysées (a couple hundred meters from the Arc de Triomphe), you hopefully gain the approval of the enormous bouncers and you climb the stairs and you push a buzzer so that the reception allows you to open the first of two heavy, slow, sealed glass doors and enter the airlock. When the (slow) door behind you closes (and only then) the reception looks you over to make sure you don’t look too dangerous or scruffy, and then they buzz you in to the reception area. You then walk up to the card reader on the wall and place your card against the reader, at which point it hopefully gives you a green light, signifying that you are now permitted to place your right index finger on the biometric scanner, at which point it hopefully gives you another green light, at which point you are allowed/required to check your bag or coat or anything else you’re carrying in the coatroom (you can’t carry anything into the club), after which you are permitted to walk down the hallway into the club.
I played a bunch of tournaments and a couple of cash game sessions. I meant to play more PLO cash, but sometimes there was a long waitlist to get into the game, and sometimes they were playing 5-card Omaha, which I’ve never played, and generally I was a little intimidated by the prospect of trying to play Omaha in a place where I don’t speak the language all that well – I can muddle along in French well enough for holdem, but I was afraid of getting into a sticky situation in Omaha and not being able to understand what was going on. I had one good tournament result – a three-way even chop in a 70-player tournament (where I had by far the smallest chip stack of the final three players – it was idiotic for the chip leader to agree to it) for 800 Euros and change ($1100) but unfortunately that was in the smallest buyin tournament I played. At the end of the trip I came out almost exactly breakeven for the poker.
The flight home was long but comfy – thanks to my elite status I got more or less the best coach seat on the plane (bulkhead with infinite legroom) on the int’l flight, and upgraded to first class on the domestic flight, and I didn’t notice any pressure/equalization problems on any of the takeoffs or landings, but the day after I got home I started feeling this nasty intermittent ear-canal pain. I figured it had to be related to the flight somehow, but it just wouldn’t go away. A couple of days later I noticed some bumps on the right side of my forehead and the corner of my eye started hurting a little. I almost called my doctor on Friday, but it seemed like the ear pain was maybe getting a little better. Over the weekend the bumps got worse and more plentiful, and obviously something very wrong was happening to me. I went in to the doctor’s office on Monday morning and the R.N. immediately said “Oh wow, that looks like shingles!”
I barely knew what shingles was (my friend Josh wrote “If you had asked me whether shingles is still a real thing that people get, I probably would’ve said no. For some reason I associate it with like Dickensian times or something” … I think I was perhaps 20% more knowledgeable than that), but I’m pretty much an expert now. Shingles is your friendly old chicken pox virus, which hides out in your nerve roots in your spine for decades and then jumps out and says “boo” when you least expect it. Actually most people might be able to half-expect it, because it often comes up when one has a weakened immune system or extreme stress or trauma or AIDS or chemotherapy or when one is a lot of years older than I am … none of which apply to me. So I have no idea why I was stricken, but stricken I was, and stricken hard. It’s been the nastiest, most disgusting, weirdest, most painful and just generally hardest sucking ailment I have ever experienced. The bumps turned into blisters or pustules on my forehead and up in my scalp, until I looked like a plague victim. After about a week they ruptured and scabbed over, and I woke up one morning with my eye nearly swollen shut. The pain was pretty much hideous – shingles attacks a nerve group, so in addition to the painful stuff going on on your actual skin, you get all kinds of pain signals firing randomly along your nerves. Sometimes it felt like my scalp was burning, and other times it felt like it was stretched way too tight over my skull – both unpleasant sensations. The R.N. gave me a prescription for Vicodin, and I told her that I had taken it before and that it didn’t really do much for me, but she said I could take two at bedtime and then if I couldn’t sleep after a few hours that I could take two more. So I thought OK, that’s permission to take more than I’ve ever taken before, so maybe that will do the trick. The pain was pretty bad by bedtime so I took two, they didn’t do anything, I lay in bed for a while and finally went to sleep, woke up after an hour hurting just as bad, tried to go back to sleep, failed, took two more Vicodin (so now that’s four within about two hours), lay in bed some more, finally fell back to sleep, woke up again after another hour with the pain *slightly* lessened, but now I’m itchy like crazy all over my body. Definitely the worst night of my life that didn’t involve death or a girlfriend dumping me.
The next day I called the doctor and described my night. She said that the itchiness was a reaction to Vicodin, and that it can happen the first time you take it or the 80th, and that from here on out it will always happen. No great loss, since it never seemed to do me much good anyway, but weird all the same. She upped the ante (got to work in a little poker talk in the middle of all this icky stuff) and gave me Percocet, which, combined with some “Tranquil Sleep” tablets – mixture of melatonin, L-theanine and 5-HTP – got me through the night without screaming or scratching. That next day I also went to see my ophthalmologist, who determined that my eye was not in too much danger – apparently the eyes are supported by the same nerve group that goes to the tip of your nose, and since I’ve never had any lesions on my nose, the eye should be safe, which is a relief, all things considered. He also warned me that the eye-swollen-shut thing might happen, so that didn’t cause too much terror. The pain was pretty awful for several days and then has been getting gradually better – my scalp still hurts sometimes, and having the wind in my hair when I put the top down in my car … hurts, which seems sort of pathetic. The blisters/lesions/pustules got a whole lot worse and then scabbed over and got very slowly better, and then the right side of my forehead felt rubbery and oily, and now there might be a little discoloration but I think I’m probably the only one who notices it. Deb is still squeamish about hugging me, though, and cranes her neck so that her head doesn’t get anywhere near mine.
They used to say that you had to be 60 to get the shingles vaccine (which cuts your chances of getting it by about 50%, and possibly lessens the symptoms if you end up in the unlucky half). Very recently some people have started saying you can get it at 50 – fat lot of good that did me. I recommend talking to your doctor about getting it as young as anyone will let you have it. JUST SAY NO TO SHINGLES!
So amidst all that pustulent fun I wasn’t playing much poker, in fact I even had to bail on two short theatre pieces that I was supposed to perform in Nebunele’s “TheatrePoems” (sorry Zach, Alissa). But a couple of weeks ago I started dipping my toe back in the poker water when my head wasn’t on fire. AbsolutePoker hasn’t ever shut out players from Washington State, so I started there, and in the first online tournament I had played in well over a month … I won. It was only a little satellite, but I did have to finish 1st out of 19 to get the $530 prize, and I did. Then the second tournament – another satellite but a bit bigger – I won again, for $1050. So I was off to a good start, and I made sure that the next thing I played would have a much bigger 5-digit prize for 1st, but I didn’t manage to put three in a row together. I did manage a few days later to make the final table in a pretty big event, sadly busting out in 7th on a massive coinflip, but pocketing $2350 for my trouble. I made another final table a few days ago, but that ended even more sadly – all-in preflop with my AK vs AQ, JJQ on the flop and no help on turn or river and I was out in 9th. I’ve also been having some modest success playing PLO online … all in all nothing spectacular but a decent bit of poker winnings while healing from my infirmity.
And then the swarm of locusts … on Friday April 15, the U.S. Department of Justice handed down indictments against Pokerstars, FullTiltPoker and AbsolutePoker for bank fraud and money laundering. They arrested a few executives that they could get their hands on and claim that they will try to extradite several more. They seized or froze several bank accounts and are claiming three billion dollars in damages. Pokerstars immediately shut down all access to U.S. players. Fulltilt was a little slower, but they have basically cut off access now as well. Absolute and Ultimatebet have stated that they aren’t going to cave in, and at least for the moment they are still slinging the internet poker same as it ever was (probably because they hope to pick up the traffic that FT and PS leave behind, and maybe because they would be devastated if they left the U.S. market, while the big two can probably survive).
As you would expect, the entire poker community is freaking out. Some people have hundreds of thousands of dollars in their online poker accounts, and now they don’t know if they’ll see it again, plus there are a lot of 20-year-old boys out there saying “how does one make money if not by internet poker?” I had nothing on Pokerstars, a few hundred on FullTilt and a few thousand on Absolute. I’ve transferred most of my Absolute money to a player in the UK, and I’m reasonably hopeful that it will be safe(r) there. I have managed through some computer trickery to play on my FullTilt account today, in hopes of either making a big tournament score or just busting the account so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Unfortunately the latter road was taken. I have about $100 worth of FullTilt points that I’ll convert into tournament entries and try to play out, but after that I’m felted (as in “down to the felt” or “no more chips”). I’ve pretty much been fired, or my job has been outsourced to “anywhere but here”.
No-one knows how this will play out. It could be the total death-blow to internet poker in the U.S., or it could be the start of a (slow) transition into legalized, taxed, regulated online poker. It is certainly the end of an era, for me and for the whole community. If someone asks me tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to say “I’m a professional poker player”. A good World Series could change that I guess, but for right now I don’t think I can really say that’s what I “do”. I don’t think I’ll be dusting off my software resumé just yet, but if anyone has any hot stock market tips, I’m all ears.
GG internet poker, RIP.
Holy Cow Bro. xo P.
Yikes! I’ve heard shingles can be nasty but your bout sounds absolutely horrific! Has it all gone away now or are you still suffering?
Sheesh! Shingles sounds terrible, but getting fired isn’t much fun either. Good thing bad luck doesn’t come in threes…
now it couldn’t somehow be that you got that dreaded shingles attack (which thankfully, i have never had, but from which many aged others close to me have suffered greatly….) as karmic revenge for getting such a great airfare deal?????????