Heading off for my next poker camp and Bay 101 Shooting Stars
Man, I feel like I am so busy lately. Now that the dispute with the WPT has settled, I am playing a ton of WPT tournaments again. I just finished the LAPC a couple of weeks ago (where I had the most blah tournament ever) and now on Sunday I am heading up to Bay 101 for their Shooting Stars WPT event. They have had that tournament even before the WPT was in existence. It is pretty fun. They ask a bunch of the well known poker players to play with bounties on our heads. The last time I played in that was like 4 years ago because of this WPT dispute so I am actually really looking forward to playing that event again. Joe is going to meet me up there on Sunday night after heading to Ojai for a writing weekend. He has a script he is working on that he just hasn’t been able to focus on and we have a hotel stay in Ojai from a Silent Auction last year that is about to expire. So he is using the weekend as a writing retreat. We were going to use it as a romantic getaway but we just can’t seem to squeeze in that time right now. I know that I will have Tuesday off in San Jose so that will have to do for the romantical stuff 
Before heading up to Bay 101 I am going to Caesars Palace to teach a WSOP Academy. I am doing a two day camp on Saturday and Sunday. This one is going to be a general camp for beginning to intermediate players who want to learn overall poker strategy. At the beginning of next month I will be an instructor at an advanced academy where players can really learn to step up their game. I love doing the camps because I used to be a teacher before becoming a poker player. I left teaching because poker was really what I was passionate about but teaching is still in my blood and, through the camps, I get to combine them both. I am also really excited because an old friend of mine from college, Jamie Berger, is coming. He has been playing a bunch of poker lately and he emailed me a while ago asking what I would recommend he do to step up his game. I was like, ‘Come to one of my camps!” So he is coming! I don’t think I have seen him in 4 years so that is going to be cool. Just about a month ago I got to go to dinner with my old college roomate, Kevin Drury. So this winter is turning out to be a getting together with college friends weekend. Yay!
So I leave for Vegas on Friday night. Joe leaves for Ojai on Friday night too. Then we reconvene in San Jose Sunday night. Bay 101 has a plane going up there from Vegas so I am going to get to go straight from the camp and fly up there with a bunch of people I know, which will be nice. I hope I just have a better tournament than the LAPC though, cause that sucked.
Oh, last night I played in Scott Ian’s home game on UB. He did a game with a bunch of his rocker friends. Obviously, Scott is from Anthrax but he also invited people like Slash, Jerry Cantrell and a bunch of other rocker dudes. Players on UB got to qualify to play in the game and it had a $10K prize pool. Phil Hellmuth and I also got invited to play the three table tournament. Phil showed up late so got kicked off his table before he could even play! That totally tilted him! But I won the thing. Ha ha! I actually had somewhere I needed to be (a charity fulfillment where I had auctioned off a night of poker with me). But since I am a rep of the site I could walk away. While playing the event I also had to bring my computer up to the kitchen because I made 4 individual pizzas for the kids (complete with homemade dough!) while I was playing the thing and sat down a the dinner table with them and my computer so we could have family dinner too. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly expecting to be playing in the thing very long. I thought I would get knocked out pretty quickly. How’s that for multitasking? Played a tournament while making homemade pizza and still managed to win? It was pretty funny because as it got down to just a few players my kids starting sweating me hehe. They really don’t ever see me play poker so it was actually pretty fun for me.
I called the people I was late for and it turned out they were running late too so it all worked out in a kismetty kind of way. I was only 25 minutes late to the poker night and they were late too so no harm no foul. I had a really good time with the folks I was playing with last night and Joe met me over there because the person he was supposed to have dinner with canceled. Around 10:30 we headed home to watch Lost but, doh!, Lost wasn’t on this week. So we watched the eliminations on Idol instead. No surprises there…I predicted the bottom 4.
As a closing note: How bout that Adam Lambert?
Annnie,
I play poker with your Dad in the neighborhood. We are enjoying watching Celebrity Apprentice. What a Hoot!
Needless to say, Dad is proud of his kids!
Best regards,
Bob