Amy Calistri told me today that Vegas Virgins, the reality-meets-poker TV show that I filmed last February (and that she appears in during the last episode) has begun airing in the UK. Word has it that it will show in the USA and Canada this winter, or sometime during the first quarter of 2006.

Here's the show in a nutshell: Ten people who never played casino poker before -- five from the USA and five from the UK -- were whisked away to Las Vegas for three weeks, put up in a first class hotel and provided with poker coaching. That was my job, and it was on camera.

Each night featured a poker tournament and each evening's winner got to select one player to be tossed off the show. Each day the contestants had to perform a variety of tasks (think "Fear Factor:" eating duck embryo, walking a tightrope, you get the picture) and each day's the task performance determined how many chips each players started the nightly tournament with. In alternating fashion, they tossed a Brit and then an American, until just one player from each country remained.

The two survivors played a heads-up match and the winner was given $5000 to play poker against some experienced poker players, each of whom were be armed with less money. The money discrepancy was designed to level the playing field and give the newbie a fair shot at winning.

I'm on each show, giving the newbies poker lessons and broadcasting the play by play of each evening's tournament.

Filming ran 18 days, and we generally began between 8:00 and 9:00 AM, and with a poker lesson. Then there were tasks for the contestants to perform, and a nightly tournament, and filming generally didn't end until midnight.

I also did some post production work in London earlier this Spring, and now I'm eager to see the results. I'm eager for the show to air in the USA or for someone from Lion TV or the Casino and Gaming TV Network sends me an advance DVD of the show.

I'll post more about the show as it gets closer to showtime.

Sponsor Logos Okayed at the World Poker Tour

Late Tuesday evening the Travel Channel and the World Poker Tour announced that players will be allowed to wear sponsorship logos in the preliminary and final table rounds of WPT broadcasts. This decision takes effect beginning with the Borgota Poker Open in Atlantic City in September. This rule change was propelled as a result of the ruckus raised by players regarding the WPT's decision prohibiting logo wear. According to most players, prohibiting logo wear was seen as precluding players from earning sponsorship money that would offset the high costs associated with tournament poker.

The WPT's contract with the Travel Channel was the stumbling block preventing players from wearing sponsor logos on their shirts, hats, and jackets. But now players will be permitted to wear logos that meet WPT standards, which can be found at www.worldpokertour.com/rules. While the rules still preclude players from being decked out like professional cyclists or NASCAR drivers, it's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.

Pictures........

OK, there they are. Six pix from our trip to Victoria.

If you haven't been there, I'd recommend it. No poker, at least none that I could find, on the island, but then again, that's what vacations are for: to get out from whatever we spend most of time doing and jumping into entirely new environments.

Orca in the Water (I missed the shot where they were jumping just 10 feet off the boat's side) 

Victoria's Empress Hotel and waterfront 

It's a 1949 Riley; I want this Car 

Butchart Gardens in Victoria 

Deirdre in Butchart Gardens 

The Inner Harbor from the Empree Hotel's Sixth Floor 

Last Day in Victoria; Win One, Lose One

The Hotel Grows Quirkier the Longer You Stay Here
I’m playing two tournaments at once on my laptop in the Empress, which is fast becoming my all-time favorite hotel, for any number of reasons: its history, its elegance, and its incredible quirkiness. I love hallways that lead nowhere; there are lots of hallways like this at the hotel. There are also a couple of floors that are difficult to reach because to get to any room located above the sixth floor, you have to take the elevator to six, get off and walk down a long hall to another elevator that goes from six to seven and eight, where you reach floors with only a few rooms, so it’s sort of private but very tough to find and tougher still to get to.

Win One, Lose One
One tournament is no-limit hold’em; the other is pot-limit Omaha/8. Early in the tournament someone raises and I reraise with A-K, only to have a third player come over the top and go all in. I hate this but I’m pot committed and I call after the relatively short-stacked initial raiser goes all in. “Oh well,” I say to myself, “I’ll either wind up with a huge stack of chips or very few.” I’m up against pocket sixes and pocket eights, and now I like my chances but neither an ace nor a king fall and I’m the short stack at this one-table event by the end of the hand.

To win a tournament they say you have to win with A-K and you have to beat A-K. I did neither. After clawing my way back to the starting chip count, I am eliminated when my pocket pair of queens loses to A-K when the flop is K-K-7.

Things are going a bit better in the Omaha/8 tournament. I get to see a flop very inexpensively and wind up scooping with the nut flush and A-3 in my hand, when a deuce on the turn counterfeits anyone holding A-2, and gives me nut-nut. Two players go all-in on this hand and both go all-out. One had a king-high flush and I’m not sure what the other held. But I have a nice sized stack, and manage to ride it to victory.

The Best Curry I've Ever Eaten
To get to the Empress Hotel’s Bengal Lounge, you either have to walk through the room where people come — as they have for generations — to have high tea served in the highest of style, or you have to exit the hotel and enter the Bengal Lounge through the rose garden. But the Bengal Lounge, which is evocative of a British officers’ club in India 90 years ago, is where they serve a curry buffet for lunch every day. And if you like curry, this is a place you need to visit. You can sit in comfy leather club chairs and stuff yourself with a variety of curry, chutneys, and assorted other Indian dishes in great style.

From the comfort of the Bengal Lounge it’s off to the Airport, located about 15 miles away from Downtown Victoria. Alaska Airlines is really deteriorating. The quick flight from Victoria back to Seattle on Horizon air is efficient, the little planes are clean and the flight attendants are efficient and effective.

It all changes when you reach Seattle. You get off the plane, clear customs, and immediately have to go back through the screening process to enter the domestic side of the airport. So it’s off with your shoes and jacket, unload your laptop and cell phone and go back through security. It’s not like could have gathered any contraband in the 15 feet between clearing customs and going through the checkpoint again (and we were all screened when we boarded the plane in Victoria), but that’s the process and there’s no way to circumvent it.

Alaska Airlines Needs a Facelift, and Their Employees Need Some Customer Service Training
Seattle is gray and gritty, not my favorite city, and the Alaska Air experience is dreary. The departure gate area is dirty. When they begin to board the flight, they don’t announce “preboarding” so they are left with a woman carrying a screaming infant while pushing a stroller down an isle. Right behind her is another woman who is trying to make her way onto the plane schlepping a drag-along bag while walking on crutches.

Why no preboarding? The gate attendant determined that since the arriving flight was 10 minutes late, they’d board from front-to-back instead of back-to-front to give the cleaning crew a bit more time to service the plane. What a moron. If the plane is late, why not get more cleaning people assembled and have them work harder, faster, and smarter to get the plane cleaned ASAP? Instead, her solution was to inconvenience the paying passengers so that the cleaning crew can treat a late-arriving flight in a “business-as-usual” manner and pace themselves through their work, instead of hustling their asses off to get it cleaned in a hurry.

Once they load the plane the flight attendant has to scurry about to find a place to stow crutches and to fold and stow a stroller.

The crew might have cleaned the plane but it still looks dirty, and the cart they push up and down the isle with drinks and peanuts is either very dirty, in need of a paint job, or both. On top of that, the flight attendants — three people all absolutely devoid of personality and one with the singularly most obnoxious voice I’ve ever heard — need an attitude adjustment too. The difference between little Horizon Air and big Alaska Air is like night and day. Horizon treats their customers like gold while Alaska seems to have forgotten who buys the tickets that pay their salaries.

They May be the Size of Golf Carts, But I Think Those Smart Cars are Waaaaaay Kewl
Finally we’re home. I'm tired. It's dark, and it's late at night. I could have stayed in Victoria another day or two, but instead I fall into bed determined to get up the next morning, answer my email and then check out “Smart Cars” online. They are really cool cars, even if they make VW beetles look large, and look more like enclosed, gasoline or diesel powered golf carts than conventional cars.

Pictures to follow, just as soon as I get them off my camera, into my computer, edited, and published to this blog. Maybe tomorrow.....

Vacationing in Victoria: Whale Watching, Work, and the Life of Riley

Victoria is still lots of fun, and the Empress is a hotel that grows on you. At first staid and appearing to be stuffy and very proper, it continues to reveal itself as quirky, scads of fun, a full of good restaurants.

A Whale of a Good Time
Wednesday we went whale watching off the San Juan Islands. Three large pods of whales spend half the year in these waters, and they’ve all been identified and “named” by scientists who track their movement and study their behavior. Calm seas, sunny skies, warm weather, and lots of whales made for a terrific day. One group of three Orcas swam so close to our boat that I could see them beneath the water as they passed by on the port side. Then they broke about 60 feet from our stern, and although I had a terrific view of this whale close-up, I wasn’t able to get my camera in shooting position in time, so the only photos of this are those etched in my mind.

Work Follows Wherever I Go
I’m trying not to get too much sleep on this vacation, and am getting up early to respond to email and to review articles that will be in Poker Pro Magazine’s Issue No. 3. I’m Guest Executive Editor for that issue, and regardless of where I go, the work follows me and I get it done early in the morning or late at night. Like they say, sleep is overrated.

Sidney and Butchart Gardens
Thursday we rented a car and cruised through some of Victoria’s neighborhoods to get a broader view of the city than we had by just walking around downtown and the harbor. We drove up to Sidney-By-the-Sea, a little town up on a peninsula about 40 minutes north of here. It’s full of retirees, new condos, a lively little downtown, and close to a dozen bookshops within a four-block area.

Sidney is not far from Butchart Gardens so we went there too. Deirdre and I first visited the gardens when our cruise ship stopped in Victoria in June, so this was a return visit to an amazing 50-acre garden that’s been in place for 100 years and is a must-see site if you visit Victoria. We ended the day at the Fan-Tan Café, a small, narrow, tasty, hip spot with nice local art on the wall in Victoria’s small but very old and very cozy Chinatown.

The Hidden Joys of a $15 Parking Ticket
On Friday morning we discovered that the $15 parking ticket we got for leaving our car at a meter Thursday night and not getting to it until 9:30 AM was five dollars less than the cost of parking at the Empress for the night!

We were driving around when we discovered a set of gates and a large mansion housed behind it. We didn’t know what it was but stopped and asked some fifth graders who were selling lemonade and cookies about the place. They told us it was called “Government House,” and we came to find out that it is the home of the “Lieutenant Governor,” who is the Queen’s representative in British Columbia. While you can’t tour the home, you can wander the grounds and gardens, which we did.

The Life of Riley
In the back we ran into the LG’s driver, who had a restored 1949 Riley that really got our attention. He told us he bought it for $70 forty years ago, when it was really a pile of junk, and he showed us the pictures to prove it. The car originally had a frame that was partially wooden, and that was rotted out when he bought it. (If you’re really into old cars you’ll know that Riley’s were not the only wooden car; the Morgan had a frame that was all wood too.) Over the years he’s rebuilt it and has more than $70,000 invested in it. The car has a mixture of parts he acquired through Hemming’s Motor News, parts he had fabricated, and modern equipment, like the Chrysler engine that pushes the car up to speeds of 130 mph without coming close to red-lining. He also had an old Alfa-Romeo in the garage that he just had painted and looked like it was next to be brought back to elegance under his care.

Just How Smart Are These Cars?
Speaking of cars, there are more “Smart Cars” in British Columbia than I’ve seen anywhere. Those are the very little, diesel cars you might have seen, that are two-seaters and as long as the average car is wide, and can be parked two to a parking space if you park them head-in instead of parallel. They look a bit like the A-Class Mercedes that I saw running around Vienna a few years ago. I’ve never seen these cars in the USA, but they are no larger than many golf-carts and yet can top out at 80 mph. It’s not the machine you want to take up I-15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but for cruising around town they are very cool little machines.

Pictures Coming, I Promise
Next week, when I’m back home, I’ll post a few of the pictures from this trip to the blog.

Victoria, BC and How Greed Cost Me a Poker Tournament

Deirdre and I arrived in Victoria, BC on Monday for a week’s vacation and are staying at the Empress Hotel, a landmark in downtown Victoria, right on the inner harbor and conveniently located to everything. Victoria, like all Canadian cities, impresses with it’s cleanness, the hanging baskets of flowers on almost every lamppost, and even though downtown is full of life, and people, with office workers walking, tourists sightseeing, musicians playing on street corners, the city is fastidious in a way that American cities never are.

We hoofed it up to Craigdarroch Castle yesterday, a Victorian mansion built between 1887 and 1890 for Robert Dunsmuir, a coal baron who built his “bonanza castle”– a term used to describe massive homes built by those who became wealthy during the industrial transformation of North America – on the city’s highest hill. Nice place, five stories tall with a pipe organ built right into the main stairwell on a landing between the first and second floors.

The Empress, where we’re staying, is a quirky place. It’s hosted presidents and royalty alike, but we’re up in a smaller garret room on the top floor. The hotel has hallways that seemingly lead nowhere, restaurants reachable only by descending a flight of stairs from another restaurant or by exiting the hotel itself and entering from another door down the street. Although it’s a terrific place to stay, it is quirky in the way that only the British upper class seems capable of achieving, and in many ways makes you think you’re staying at Hogwarts.

We’ve been to the Roots store, and shopped all along the main downtown streets, and today we’re renting a car to drive “up-island” as they say, and see what awaits us in the outer reaches of Victoria and beyond. Tomorrow we’ll go to the Butchart Gardens, a place we visited when our cruise ship stopped in Victoria, but well worth another trip.

Oh, yeah. Some poker content too. I played in the Royal Vegas Poker “Play the Experts” tournament last night and finished sixth, a testimony to my own greed and stupidity. I had a nice chip lead throughout much of the event, but lost a lot of my chips when I failed to really price out an opponent who called and made a flush when four cards of one suit appeared on the board.

I held a pocket pair of kings, flopped a set and was heads up against Brite1, who also had a large stack of chips. I made a pot size raise on a two-suited flop and was called. When Brite1 checked into a third suited card, I knew there was no flush. I wanted all of Brite1’s chips, so my bet on the turn was smaller than it should have been – I should have moved all-in, but I was greedy – and was called. My goal was to put Brite1 all in on the river – in retrospect, that was something I should have done on the flop or the turn – but a fourth suited card fell, we both checked, and I lost.
After that hand I went from being chip leader to an also ran and was eliminated about 15 minutes later. While you can’t win ‘em all, I should have won that one but for the fact that I was seduced by my own greed. It’s a lesson I’ve learned before, but I suppose it’s one I have to learn again.

Are you a deipnosophist without even knowing it?

I love dictionaries. Most writers do. I was leafing thorugh one the other day and stumbled across a word I'd never seen before, one that has lots of applicability at the poker table. The word is "deipnosophist." It's a noun, and a "dyp-NOS-uh-fist," as it's pronounced, is someone skilled at across-the-table chit chat. Synonyms for someone skilled at conversation or chit chat would be a conversationalist, or a schmoozer.

I haven't seen the word in any other form than a noun, but you could construct a verb form of the word by referring to anyone engaging in table talk as "deipnosphising."

It's not a new word, either. Deipnosophist comes from the title of a work written by the Greek Athenaeus in about 228 AD. The Deipnosophistes has been translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner and is a work of some 15 books, in which the protagonist, 'Ulpian' hosts a leisurely banquet in which food, music, sexual mores, pornography, and other topics are discussed. Characters include a handful of grammarians, lexiconographers, jurists, musicians and hangers-on. The work provided much information about both the Roman and Greek world in late antiquity.

And now you probably know more than you ever needed to know about the derivation of a word that I've never heard in a poker context, though it's one that clear fits.

The Pork Wagon (a political rant)

President Bush signed a $286.4 billion, 1,000-page transportation bill weighed down with pet projects to benefit nearly every member of Congress. The bill's price tag was $30 billion more than Bush had recommended, but he said he was proud to sign it.

The highway bill contains more than 6,371 special projects valued at $24 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. The distribution of the money for these projects "is based far more on political clout than on transportation need," said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for the group.

Alaska, the third-least populated state, for instance, got the fourth most money for special projects -- $941 million -- thanks largely to the work of its lone representative, House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young.

The outrage I feel when I see legislation like this is something everyone probably agrees on, except members of Congress. But it's nothing new. The highway bill is just the annual pork wagon, making it's rounds and dispensing largesse to congressional districts, just as it has for years and years.

Thomas Jefferson once opined that this country could do with a revolution every twenty years or so, and he may have been right. The only way to stop pork barrel legislation is to vote for smaller government, but in a nation where so few of us actually vote, that doesn't look like much of a possibility either.

But don't blame me; I voted Libertarian.

Becomming an Adjective, Poker Stars to Move, Poker on TV

Murray Logan Becomes an Adjective:
Well the hangover from BARGE is finally clearing and I've recovered from too much fun and too little sleep in too short a time. My friend Murray Logan, from Vancouver BC, who is a tterrific short story writer, has become an adjective.

That's not something many of achieve in our lifetime. Usually you have to be in the upper strata of something to reach that status. I remember sportswriters describing long home runs as "Ruthian," in honor of Babe Ruth, who probably deserved all the adjectives one might heap on him.

But now Murray has made it into that upper echelon too, because when you're rip-roaring, falling down drunk, you're not just drunk any more, you're Murray-drunk. I'm still hyphenating the word, because it has not yet passed into general usage in the English language, but as it spreads, I imagine that in a few years it will be spelled Murraydrunk -- all one word, in honor of Murray Logan.

Who knows, perhaps some futuristic Paul Harvey will relate the origins of that word as part of "...the rest of the story."

PokerStars Moves to the Isle of Man
On another note, the story that Poker Stars plans to move their entire operation to the Isle of Man hit the business wires today, and the full article can be accessed at this link: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9070-1718638,00.html.

It seems as though a stock offering on the London exchange is afoot, though noting is certain right now. Stay tuned as this story plays out.

Televised Poker
The following infromation is from a post to the newsgroup rec.gambling.poker, by Oliver Tse, a terrific reporter who always seems to have his finger right on the pulse of what's happening in the poker business.

ESPN's Original Entertainment (EOE) SeniorPublicist Keri Potts stated that EOE will only have an Electronic News Gathering (ENG) crew at Tunica. There will be NO full TV coverage of the WSOP Circuit $10Kbuy-in event at Tunica on August 25

The new TV contract between Harrah's and ESPN has NOT been finalized. (As many of you know already, ESPN used its rights-matching option in the last contract to match the reported $10 million per year bid made to Harrah's by News Corp/FOX Sports just hours prior to the Harrah's WSOP press conference at the Rio Pavilion Convention Center on July 6. By matching FOX's offer, ESPN effectively killed off the planned launch of "FOX Poker Channel" by News Corp/FOX.

Not all of the WSOP Circuit $10K buy-in events will have full TV coverage.

The 2005 Harrah's/ESPN TOC is currently on hold pending a number of contractual and logistical issues. The 2005 TOC will NOT be at Harrah's LasVegas in September.

BARGE Report

Wow. I went on break in the BARGE no-limit hold’em tournament and the blinds were $400 - $800, when I returned they were raised to $500 - $1,500. That’s a big jump and I went from having a reasonable stack of chips to being officially short-stacked.

Not only that, the first hand after the break found me in the big blind. With a $1,500 big blind and a $100 ante, plus another $500 and another ante on the very next hand, I was hoping that everyone would have sticker shock at the size of the blinds and fold around to me.

It almost worked. Everyone folded to Murray Logan, on my immediate right, who raised all in. I looked at my cards and found Ks-9s. It wasn’t the best of hands but considering that Murray might have raised with almost anything in his position, I was hoping he raised with a weak holding, or barring that, with a hand that didn’t dominate me to three outs.

I didn’t get anything I was hoping for. Murray had K-Q and I needed to hit a nine or three spades. No help, and I’m out. Lots of fun, but playing for six-plus hours only to get eliminated is frustrating.

In yesterday’s tournament, a format that emulated the short-lived “Tournament of Champions,” one player did not show up and they left his chips on the table for a very long time. While being blinded off, he managed to outlast three or four players at the table.

That’s not bad, considering our mystery player -- someone posted a name placard on the table that said “Phil,” in honor of a celebrated tournament player who typically shows up later for tournaments -- never played a hand. I suppose there’s a message in this bottle that says something about hand selection in tournaments, and that the majority of players are probably overly aggressive and not nearly selective enough. You can, as we saw yesterday, fold every hand you’re dealt and survive for quite a long time before being devoured by the escalating blinds.

Tonight is our BARGE banquet, and Wil Wheaton -- from Star Trek, The Next generation -- will be our guest player. Wil told me that my first book, Hold'em Excellence: From Beginner to Winner, was the book that started him off on his poker playing avocation. Wil has become quite a good player over the past few years. The game is not just a passing fad with him, as it is with many other celebs; he takes it seriously and he knows how to play.

Poker Blogger Pauly McGuire, who provided terrific coverage of this year's WSOP on his blog, The Tao of Poker, will also be there, and he's someone I always enjoy seeing.

On my way to BARGE; Guest Executive Editor of Poker Pro

I'm on my way to Las Vegas today, to attend BARGE, a gathering of the rec.gambling.poker community that gets together every year for a couple of smalltorunaments and a lot of fun and frivolity. It's all sort of like being a sophomore in college again. You hardly sleep. You play too much poker, have too much fun, and get to meet people you may never have met before but know from reading their posts online. A lot of notable poker players have attended BARGE, both before and after they became notable, and the list includes: Chris Ferguson, Andy Bloch, Greg Raymer, Nolan Dalla, Lee Jones, Barry Tanenbaum, Russ Rosenblum, and I know I'm leaving out a bunch of others but you get the idea.

I was also asked to serve as guest executive editor of Poker Pro magazine, and today a press release came out announcing it. I've never edited a magazine before, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. My goal is to keep the magazine content rich, to keep it organized and "sectioned" -- much like Newsweek is divided into sections dealing with "The Nation," "The World," Entertainment," "Sports" -- and I want to encourage as much good journalism as possible.

Whether or not this "guest" stint will develop into anything permanent is an open question, and for right now it's a one issue assignment as guest executive editor, and I'm looking forward to it.