March 2nd: Epilogue

No, this won't be any sort of return to regular blogging I'm sorry to say, but I have received enough gently-prodding emails asking how things have turned out for me since my last post that I think there's enough of an audience to make an update worthwhile. But I caution in advance that this post probably will probably raise more questions than answers; i.e. I don't think it's going to provide any sort of "closure", at least not in the same way that the last few posts I made before ending the blog. It will be more of a "where-are-they-now" update to give people a glimpse into what I've been up to for the past little while. If you are just discovering this blog for the first time, well it was regularly updated for approximately 3 years, until I decided to stop writing in early 2007, but the archives are (in my hardly-impartial opinion) a treasure-trove just sitting around waiting to be read, and I hope you'll find them worth your time.

Much has happened in 12 months. Where to begin...hmmm. Well, let's talk poker, specifically the 2007 WSOP. I left for Vegas with what I thought were realistic goals:
(i) Play as well as you're able;
(ii) have fun.

That's it. I'm not a tournament player, and I know it. But I figured that with my life being one big question mark, who knew when the next time was that I was going to be able to simply take a 3-week trip to Vegas in the middle of the summer, so I set out for the desert looking for a good time. First WSOP tourney I played in was one of the truly memorable experiences of my life. 900 entrants and I made the final table, and enjoyed 5 minutes of fame on ESPN. Instead of trying to rehash the entire rollercoaster from memory, I've dug up the email that I wrote to friends/family after the first-day of play, and I'm re-copying it here. It's extremely long, but hey, if you've got nothing better to do, give it a read if you want a first-hand account of what it's like to run hot in your first WSOP event ever. If you don't give a hoot about this, skip it and resume reading below.

Subject: "My 9 WSOP Lives"
Body: Alright, you're receiving this email because you've expressed an interest in, contributed to, or otherwise enjoyed the fruits of my degeneracy. I thought I'd keep some of you entertained with periodic reports on me in vegas. It's long, though, so read at your leisure. And if you don't like poker (or me), it will be very boring. Cliff's Notes: I entered my first WSOP NL event today, and right now I'm around 7th in chips out of the 81 remaining players (from around 900 who started).

First of many lives: With about 400 people left, I'm shortstacked and move all-in with 77. One other guy calls and shows AQ, but doesn't hit either, and I double-up, but I still don't have that many chips.

Second life: Still severely shortstacked with 350 or so people left, I move in with AK and get called by a guy with 99. No help for me on the flop, but an ace comes on the turn and again I double-up, but these are the only hands I'm getting so I'm still way shortstacked. I went an entire level and a half (that's 90 minutes) without playing a single hand. I'm doing well being patient, but leaking a ton of chips gradually because of the blinds.

Third life: This one should have sent me to the rail -- with around 300 left, I move in with AT and get called by the tournament chip-leader who shows AJ and I'm in rough shape...first 4 cards come come 22Q9...when no T comes on the river, I start standing up and say "good hand, good luck everybody..." before realizing that the A on the river gave me a chop of the pot since his kicker J no longer played. Whew.

Fourth life: I push with pocket fours and get called by the very same tournament chip leader who shows AK. He hits neither and I double up again. It must seem like I'm doubling up all the time and that my stack would be huge, but i'm getting ZERO other playable hands other than these all-ins and just losing chips to blinds and antes in the meantime so I'm not getting any traction and my chipstack is perpetually at around 6 to 9 times the big blind.

Fifth life: With around 200 ppl left, I move all in vs. the other table shortstack. I have 77 and he has KQ but hits neither. Like all the previous "lives" this would have knocked me out too, had he hit his K or Q. But I'm running good at coin-flips today, and I win this one too. The table has started to take note that I've been all-in like 5 times, and doubled up each time. But I haven't been able to actually "play poker" since very early because I've never had a big enough chip stack to do anything other than push or fold preflop.

Sixth, seventh, and eigth lives: this hand was pivotal, and the only reason I'm still alive in the tourney, and i owe it all to someone else. (FWIW, there really weren't many/any complete donkeys in this tournament...everyone for the most part knew more or less what they were doing, and no doubt fancied themselves star of their respective home games...but the following novice error by another guy saved me) First off, I had just been cripppled because of previous hand: again short-stacked, I get QQ in the big blind. Still with around 200 ppl left, the decent UTG guy raises, and it's folded around to me, and I obviously push all in for my last remaing chips (only around 10 times the big blind). He happily calls and I know I'm behind -- he shows KK, and the board doesn't help me. I had a few more chips than he did to start the hand, so I'm not quite out, but I'm crippled with only 2,800 in chips left, and blinds at 600/1200 with 100 antes...I'm pretty much dead. I pick up JJ the very next hand, and obviously all my chips are going into the pot with it. Here's where things get interesting. 3 other people see the flop (i couldn't really raise anyone out of it preflop with only 2 x the big blind). Board is 2-3-8, so i might be ahead, but if these 3 decide to check it down (like they really should), i'm pretty sure I'd be a goner. The first two people emphatically check, trying to send the signal to the 3rd guy that the gameplan is to just check it down and get rid of me. This really isn't against the rules, and most players know that this is what they should be doing...they can't say out loud "hey, just check, and odds are that one of us will eliminate this other guy who's all in (me) and then we'll be one closer to the money"...it would be collusion if they said that out loud, but it's more or less understood that that's the smart thing to do when one guy is all-in. But for some reason the 3rd guy bets half the pot. The first 2 guys roll their eyes, not understanding why on earth he wouldn't just check (it's not a bad play there if, and oNLY IF guy #3 actually has a monster hand that he wants to build a sidepot with the remaining players with and will knock ME out in the end anyway). Guy #1 annoyedly calls, guy #2 mutters to himself and folds. Turn is another 3, and they both check (looks good for me at this point in that my JJ might be good). River: ACE. Gulp. Worst card in the deck for me, so I think (because Guy #3 had actually raised preflop...for exactly my 2,800 remaining chips and I and the other two guys had just called and that type of action post-flop suggested either a high pair or two overcards, one of which would almost certainly be an ace). Guy #1 checks, Guy #3 now bets half the pot. Yep, looks like I'm going home, and I start to get up. What on earth can I beat now? Guy #1 mutters about having a low pair and folds...But Guy #3 sighs and turns over KQ. What's this? Oh right: ship it to this guy, as my jacks are good and I quadruple up. I basically have Guy #3 to thank for my tournament life, because he made one of the most bonehead moves when in a multi-way pot against one all-in shortstack: he did something called "bluffing into a dry sidepot"...basically, there was NOTHING to be gained from his bluff bets because all they would potentially do is force guys #1 and #2 to fold their hands...and then he'd be left to fight for the pot with me. Sure, this isn't a bad thing IF YOU"VE ACTUALLY GOT A GOOD HAND, but bluffing when there is *no* sidepot to contend for with players 1 and 2 is the cardinal sin of late-stage poker, because all it does is reduce the odds that the all-in guy (me) is going to get eliminated. Why did this save me? Because Guy #2 in that hand had an ace that he would have hit on the river...but he had to fold after the flop because Guy #3 bet/bluffed the flop with his KQ. If they had just checked it down, Guy #2 would have won the pot and I woulda been gone in around 150th place. Anyway, I moved in a few hands later with AQ, got called buy a big stack with JJ...no help until river when I spiked an Ace, and just 5 hands after I had been crippled with my my QQ vs.KK, I now had almost as many chips as I'd had just before (around 18,000 with the blinds at 600/1200 and 100 antes.) Not in very good shape, but alive and with enough chips to make people think twice before calling my all-ins.

At this point, we're down to around 140 players, and the payouts start at 81...you're not supposed to just play conservatively just so u can make it into the money, but the way I'd been shortstacked all day and tempting fate with all my coinflip wins, I am starting to think that I'd be perfectly happy to just make the lowest payout threshold and happily call it a day. But the blinds are now going up, and I simply don't have enough chips to play conservatively...gonna have to make a move somewhere. At this point, I actually get to play with some pros for the very first time. I'm sitting next to Mimi Tran who is annoying as f*ck. The dealer made a small mistake with the antes by taking $25 too much from Mimi, but the table caught it and he fixed it quickly and we were ready to move on. Not Mimi though, who for the next 15 minutes berated the dealer in her broken English about how bad he was. No other way to put it: this is just bush-league all the way, and it got the entire table annoyed and we eventually had to call the floorwoman b/c Mimi was causing such a stir. Worst part about it is that when the floor came over and the other player tried to explain just what was happening, the floor (perhaps with stars in her eyes) thought that it was HIM who was causing the ruckus and basically directed her wrath upon him rather than Mimi. Who cares, Mimi busted out a few hands later, but for someone who supposedly plays a lot, she's got to know better than to berate the dealer incessantly for a mistake that the table quickly caught and fixed.

Evelyn Ng and Phil "Unabomber" Laak are also at my table now and I'm enjoying myself because at least I have a story now about playing with pros. Evelyn is like 6 feet tall, made up to the nines, and sporting some of the biggest, roundest fake breasts you've ever seen. She's shortstacked though and is hardly playing. Laak is a nonstop chatterbox from the moment he sits down -- mostly in an annoying but harmless way -- and me being me, I try to get into the act and give some of it back to him, but he AMOGs the bejeezus out of me, and that's the end of that. Interesting hand comes up with Phil who doesn't have many chips and is playing PSP and not really paying attention when I move all in under the gun with AJ. He simply calls the big blind, unaware that I've already moved all in for about 10x the big blind in front of him. The dealer informs him that I've moved all-in but that he can't get back the 2,000 chips he's already "called" with...so Phil basically can forfeit the 2K in chips and fold, or throw in another 8K to call my all-in. He puts on a prolonged routine and then decides to call and flips over a pair of threes to my AJ. Board comes: 5,Q,Q,K (gulp)......Jack and I double thru Phil; for the first time all day, I actually have a stack to work with (perhaps around 24,000 with blinds at 800/1,600 and 200 antes...still not very strong, but if I can outlast another 40 people I can make the money).

A few hands later, Laak again raises preflop, gets a cold-caller, and I move allin with AK from the big blind. Laak instamucks, and the other guy deliberates agonizingly before calling (uh-oh, I'm not thrilled about this...) but flips up KJ...wasn't a terrible move on his part considering pot-odds, but not too bright in my opinion. My hand holds-up and amazingly I'm now up to 50K in chips, slightly above the average remaining chip-stack.

I'll just mention 2 more hands that I think I played very well...the nerve-wracking part is that we're now down to around 96 players left, so I could probably just fold into the money (15 players later), but I decide that if I see good opportunities, I'm going to have to take them irrespective.

So hand #1: Laak raises for 3xBB from early position, button calls, and I somewhat reluctantly call with 54 of spades. It's a decent speculative hand, but I'm still not looking to take many risks so close to the money after I've exhausted all my coinflipping luck. Flop is 7,8,A (two spades). Hmmm.... I check, Laak bets very weakly (about 1/3 the pot) and button calls. I contemplate making a move here, but button and Laak are playing loose and I think I might get looked up by AK or AQ. Folding obviously isn't an option, so I call, although I'm gonna be shortstacked again if this hand doesn't work out for me. One thing I make absolutely certain of, though, is that I take an awfully, awfully long time to call (like 2-3 minutes...they started complaining actually). I'm clearly getting the odds to call w/ my flush and gutshot straight draws, but a quick call screams flush-draw and I'm trying to conceal that (because anyone in their right mind with a flush draw calls quickly there getting great odds.) Turn is the 6-clubs, filling my gutshot (and I've still got a spade draw to boot). It's very well concealed but I also easily could have had 9-T, which wouldn't be too concealed because I would have been open-ended on the flop...but with the amount of time I took to call, neither one of my two thinking opponents thinks I was on any kind of draw, which was exactly my plan. I'm first to act and contemplate how to play this. I think a check is too risky because a 9 or T on the river might make someone a higher straight, and even if it doesn't it would kill any action I could get (as would another spade). So I count up my 60K in chips and move all in. Laak thinks for a while and mucks...the third guy thinks for even longer and tells me he thinks I hit a set of 8s of the flop (never mind i probably wouldn't have played a set like that b/c flop was so dangerous). He eventually mucks and I take down a big pot. He said he folded AQ, which was a pretty easy fold I think on his part, but I've clearly got him pissed off. I'm very happy with how I played that hand. Very next hand I get KK and 3-bet a raiser and a cold-caller for 1/3 my stack and take it down, so I've now got about 1.5x the average chipstack.

The bubble-boy bursts, and I've now made the money, but we've got 3 more hands before we break for the night. On the very last hand, I reluctantly call a 4xBB preflop raise from the SB with A-T of hearts. Therer was an early position raiser and a cold-caller, so I'm wary that my ten kicker might be in bad shape but I decide to see the flop anyway. So does the big blind. Flop: 7-8-9 with two hearts. Well, if I was gonna play the hand, i don't see how I could have asked for a better flop than that. I check, big blind bets about 1/3 pot, preflop raiser folds, and the preflop cold-caller again cold-calls. I now have a pretty big stack, and I don't see how either the BB or cold-caller could have either a set -- the only thing I'd be worried about, but still be almost 50/50 to win the pot, i think. Even against a made straight I have outs, so I move all in. BB folds, and the big-stacked cold-caller rolls his eyes and folds. He's a nice guy I've been playing with for a while and he tells me after the hand he had KQ of hearts...man, that woulda been fireworks if I'd let him see the turn and it'd been a heart.

Anyway, that was the last hand of the night, and I sit on 111,000 chips, good for around 7th place, I think. The few pros left in the event include Laak, Hellmuth, Evelyn Ng, Steve Dannenman, Norm MacDonald (yes "that" Norm Macdonald)...and a few other guys who play well online.

So that was a glimpse into my first WSOP event -- from the last 80 people, I more or less kept afloat (although there's a few hands I played like a wuss -- pretty sure my tournament inexperience came into play on those, where I was just playing "survival poker" rather than playing to win it. Was a prohbitive short-stack entering the final table, and finally my coin-flipping luck gave out, sending me to the rail with some extra pocket change and a ton of stories. I played two other WSOP tournaments including the main event where I got knocked out on Day 1, but man what a great time. I'm going to copy one more email here, and it's the one I wrote to friends after getting knocked out of the Main Event (no more emails after this one, promise):

Subject: I'm out.
Body: "Bottom line is that I'm very happy with how i played: I think I had my absolute A game going in all 3 tournaments. I rarely found myself all-in as an underdog, and in each tourney, the hand that I busted out with was essentially no worse than a coinflip. Absolutely no complaints whatsoever with the tournaments I played, and all-in-all a successful 1st WSOP. I had a blast.

Anyhow, on to more interesting non-poker aspects of the trip -- last Saturday will rank up there as one of the craziest days/nights of my life. Exhausted after playing 12 hours of poker and busting out of the main event, I was pretty bummed, but resolved to at least try and make a night out of it to raise my spirits. Little did I know what that night would have in store...turning out to be one of the most surreal nights I've ever had. Aaron and I called up our friend from college Paul, who had landed himself a job as a TV sports-anchor for one of the major networks in Vegas: a cool job if there ever was one, and one that fit him like a glove. He looks good on TV, he's well-spoken, and more or less a party animal who has an uncanny ability to talk himself into any nightclub. Aaron and I show up at Tryst, the nightclub at the Wynn around 1am, only to find 300 people in a slow-moving line. I text Paul who's inside, and 5 minutes later he's convinced the bouncer to let us jump the line (with nary a girl in tow, mind you.) The man is truly Batman when it comes to this stuff. We say hello, and he asks me with a big grin whether I want to meet Mayweather. "Who?" Oh, right, Floyd Mayweahter Jr., quite possibly the best boxer of all time, and for all intents and purposes the baddest man on the planet. I wonder just what he means, until he guides us over to a private booth smack in the middle of the club, where sure enough Floyd Mayweaher is sitting with an entourage of around 10 guys, wearing a watch and necklace that were likely 500K+ each. Oh yeah, and he's also got two bricks of cash on the seat beside him the likes of which I've never seen. When I say bricks, i mean *bricks* about a foot tall each. Picture 4 mammoth law books stacked on top of each other. That's how tall one of these bricks was. WTF is he doing with that much cash just sitting beside him in a club packed with 5,000 people? (although as Aaron accurately opined: "who's gonna be the guy who takes it from him?") More on that later.

Anyway, as a network TV sports anchor in Vegas, Paul gets to meet pretty much every athlete on the planet, and since he's just about the most personable guy you'll ever meet, all the athletes love him and remember him every time they come to Vegas, and Floyd's no exception. So while he and his posse (oh, and two 6-foot-4, 350 lb. bodyguards) are being fawned over by every guy and girl in the club, Paul basically walks us right up to this guy's table and I get to shake the hand of the baddest man in the room. Not only that, but he's nice enough to agree to pose for a picture with each of me and Aaron. So Paul takes Aaron's cell phone camera and snaps one of Floyd and Aaron, and then it's my turn but Aaron can't get his camera-phone to "re-set", so this leads to perhaps the most awesomely excruciating 15 seconds of my life: me with my arm around Floyd Mayweather, while Aaron fiddles with the cameraphone, the moment getting more and more awkward with each passing second. After what seemed like an absolute eternity, we finally give up, and Floyd goes back to his booth, as I think about how best to bitch-slap Aaron for not getting the picture.

Just what kind of guy is Paul? Well, about 15 minutes later he received a text, and turned to us to say "Ron Artest is having a hard time getting in, I've got to run out and give him a hand." Yeah, he's the guy who helps grease the wheels for celebrities when their celebrity alone isn't enough. A few minutes later he comes back with a few NBA and NCAA basketball players in tow. Aside: the girls from our group are literally tripping over themselves to go talk to these gangly, average-looking basketballers, while having either ignored me or put up with my idle banter for most of the night. (Note to self: Get Famous.) A few minutes later, we get an answer to just what Floyd was doing with two gigantic stacks of bills, as the DJ puts on Fat Joe's "Make it Rain", whereupon Floyd stands up on the table in the center of the club, and, well, makes it rain, showering everything and everyone within a 20-foot radius with money, and causing a mad scramble among the few hundred people within reaching distance. Alas, we soon realized they were only $1 bills; pretty ballin' nonetheless. I grabbed a few that were fluttering around my head, and pocketed them as my "Floyd money". Later, Aaron and I debated whether Floyd and his posse had pre-arranged this display with the DJ by asking him to play "Make it Rain", or whether he simply walks around with bricks of cash like that and makes it rain whenever the song comes on, irrespective of where he finds himself. Either way, very cool.

Other miscellaneous items from the trip:

- Funniest classic-Vegas thing overheard at the table: a guy in his early 30s gets up after folding to answer his cell phone, and tells his buddy "Hey, would you mind just going up to our room and checking whether everything's alright? I've got around 200-grand in the safe, and Michelle knows the combination. I mean, I trust her and everything, but I've only known her 3 days, so yeah, just go up and make sure everything's OK." Alright, maybe not all that "funny", but in context it gave those of us who overheard it a pretty good chuckle.

- The poker/disability double-entendre moment of the trip: I'm in the $1K re-buy tournament, and the empty seat immediately to my right is soon filled by a guy in his early 40s I'd say, who's in a wheelchair. Real friendly guy, and he and I are chatting it up when he mentions to me that if he makes it deep in the main event, ESPN's going to do a story on him and a pro-am golf tournament he had recently played. According to him, he's a really good golfer, which I thought was pretty cool for a guy who's in a wheelchair, and I wanted to know just how *good* he was, so naturally I say to him "wow, that's amazing, what's your handi...." Now there's a few ways that this situation could have resolved itself without substantial embarassment on my part. #1, I could have just completed the sentence without so much as a pause, and it might have gone more or less un-noticed, other than as a questionable choice of words. #2, I could have called on my brain, flush with $250,000 of education to pre-emptively anticipate the end of the sentence and simply change the question to "what do you typically shoot?". Sadly, I selected neither of these options, and instead stopped dead in my tracks 2 syllables into that fateful word -- drawing contemptuous stares from all of those within earshot (basically the entire table, and some players from tables behind us) -- and earning myself a place in the pantheon of vocabulary choices you wish you could have back.:

So that was my 2007 WSOP. Not an experience I'll be forgetting any time soon. So what am I doing now? I'm a lawyer and I just started working at a well-regarded Toronto law firm a couple weeks ago. Now I don't need anyone to point out the dizzying irony of me accepting a position practicing corporate law after so many of my early posts painted such a pessimistic view of the profession. I don't pretend that I'll be able to completely articulate the thought process that went into the decision in a few hundred words, but if I hope to ward off the inevitable accusations of hypocricy, I think I owe it to my readers to at the very least try. So here is a rambling attempt that might give a little color to my re-entry into the "working world":

I played poker for a source of income for the better part of a year. In law school, I used to play around with some formulas while ignoring the lectures, trying to calculate just how much I could make if I gave the poker thing a full-time shot. I know every poker enthusiast has gone through the same exercise. You know the one that goes "Wow, if I'm playing roughly X hands/hour, and sustaining a Y BB/100 winrate, and getting in Z hours / week, just think if I could instead yadda yadda yadda X+1 / Y+1 / Z+1 = ZOMG $$$$$$$$$$$!" In any case, as much fun as it was making more money last year than I probably ever will again during any year for the rest of my life (depressing thought), you know what I learned? I learned that if x = y, then 3x = 3y. That's it. Now if my tongue-in-cheek algebra was lost on some of you, all I'm saying is that I didn't do much more (from an intellectual standpoint that is) than confirm for myself that 'yes, if I play more hands, I'll make more money.' That's a bit of a simplification, of course, because I did manage to travel quite a bit, made some incredible friends and had some experiences that I'll be talking about 50 years from now, but from an intellectual-growth standpoint, I can't say that I made many significant strides. And I missed it. I missed the challenge of tackling new subjects, even if it means starting at the so-called bottom of the totem pole. The other day, I stopped at an office-supply superstore to buy a new keyboard, and the salesperson, a friendly guy in his mid twenties, whose accent suggested that he was probably a fairly recent immigrant from Jamaica asked me what I did, and I told him I was a lawyer. He asked me whether I liked it, and I shrugged it off, saying it was actually pretty mundane. Increasingly-inquisitive, he asked me whether -- given my apparent indifference -- I regretted the decision I'd made in going to law school, or what advice I'd give to someone who was inclined to do the same. At this point I think I probably smiled inwardly given how much thought I've put into that very question (or perhaps because I wasn't used to such precociousness, nor introspection from supply-store cashiers.) But I admired that he was comfortable enough to ask that most pertinent of questions, and I think I replied with as honest an answer as I was able, which I'll restate here. I've always enjoyed challenging myself. That's a big reason why I went to law school in the first place, and ultimately why I decided that giving the big-firm thing an honest-to-goodness shot might not be the worst thing in the world. In one of the last blog posts I made, I mentioned how I always romanticized the notion of working for Google (since they are a lightning-rod for some of the most progressive and fascinating internet-related litigation around.) Well, last summer I actually found myself in Google's Palo Alto offices, being interviewed by the attorneys there for that so-called 'dream job'. But I didn't get it. The feedback was essentially "Everyone here liked you a lot, and your academic pedigree is easily superior to any candidate we've seen, but listen -- you just don't have the necessary experience. The guy we've offered the job to has been immersed in the kind of legal documents you'd be seeing in this position on a daily basis for the past 5 years. You're smart and ambitious, but we just don't think there's any qualification quite like having DONE this stuff first-hand for the last few years." Hearing that type of feedback got me thinking about what kind of path poker would put me on 5, 10, 20 years down the line. A passion for being challenged is probably why I took up poker and kept at it until I was playing the highest-stakes games around. But it's also what got me feeling a little ambivalent about just what kind of future I'd have in store, intellectually and otherwise. Don't bother trying to dig through the blog archives to find contradictions to what I wrote in the preceding paragraph, because I'll save you the time: you'll find plenty. Yes, I'm a lawyer, but I don't necessarily think that's any sort of fatal indictment of things I've previously written here. I think one of the main selling points of this blog was its authenticity, part and parcel of which is an acknowledgement of the fact that we all learn and grow as time passes, and our outlook on life and happiness evolves accordingly. At the end of the day, I am taking the following gamble: that I will be able to find an acceptable balance between a full-time job and poker. Whether I'll be able to walk that tight-rope remains to be seen. You want my honest guess at whether I'll be able to do it? Alright >> No. I think that's it's going to be extremely challenging to find a good compromise between playing poker and developing as a successful attorney. I had told myself that I would still try and get in 20,000 hands / month, but if my first couple weeks are any indication, I'll be lucky to get in 10,000. But throughout law school, I think I did pretty well for myself balancing poker with a full-time academic schedule and an active social life, and I'm willing to see if I can find the same balance with the practice of law, even if it's a much taller order. Hey, what can I say: I love a good challenge. Thanks for reading.