A funny follow-up to my previous post, that had completely washed out of my brains until moments ago, when for some inexplicable reason the theme to Get Smart made me remember:

About a year ago, Anne and I were driving home down Santa Monica near Highland in Hollywood. It was the beginning of afternoon rush hour traffic, so when I saw a person waiting to make a left from a side street, I stopped to let him go across in front of us. See, I try to do nice things like that, because I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone made an effort to do little things, like hold doors open, let people with fewer items cut in front in the checkout, say "thank you" . . . things like that.

Anyway, I stop to let this guy pull out across in front of us, and Anne says, "Dude! That’s totally Fabio!"

"What? Where?!" I said.

"Driving the car you just let in front of us!"

I laughed, because Anne and I occasionally play the celebrity look alike game, too.

We were silent for a second or two, and we both realized that that the car was a Bentley, and the driver was, indeed, Fabio.

"Oh my god!" I said. "It really is Fabio!"

Anne and I decided that this momentous occasion warranted an immediate and vigorous high-five.

Fabio waved his hand at me in the universal "thank you," gesture, turned West onto Santa Monica, and drove into the Sunset. We continued East into our mundane, non-Fabio lives.

When I was in my very early 20s, this girl who I dated and I played this celebrity lookalike game.

Whenever we saw someone who looked like a celebrity, one of us would say, "Hey, there’s Nell Carter" or "Don’t look now, but Kirk Cameron is shopping in Target."

One day, we were eating lunch at this Hamburger Hamlet in West Hollywood, on the extreme West end of the Sunset Strip. I looked up from my lunch to see this totally goofy looking guy, with a stupid mullet, parachute-y muscle pants, and a corduroy hat that had "Someone in Tennessee Loves Me" embroidered on the front.

"Hey," I said, "There’s Chuck Norris wearing a ‘Someone in Tennessee Loves Me’ cap."

We cracked up and complimented each other on our insightful wit.

A few minutes later, a manager walked over to that guy’s table holding a phone on a long cord, like you’d see in the old 1940s movies.

"Mr. Norris," he said, "Mr. Washington is calling from Knoxville."

Last night, I played some micro-limit (.10/.25)
hold’em on PokerStars. Right after I donkeyed into a gutshot on the turn with JTo to suckout on this poor guy who made
middle pair with KQ on a board of A-Q-9 I realized that I’d forgotten to set up today’s WWdN Invitational. While that
guy filled the chat box with things like "****ing moron," and "nice call with a gutshot there, you
stupid ****ing donkey mother******," I got everything set up but the name. I thought of something like WWdN #10:
The Wil Didn’t Play Last Week Invitational, but let’s face it, that sucks.

Luckily for me, my stepson Nolan
walked into my office at that moment, so I said to him, "Do you want to name my tournament?"

"What do you mean?" He said.

I explained how I name the tourney after the
donkey extremely skillful player who knocks me out each week, but since I was /away, I didn’t know
what to name it.

He thought for about a nanosecond, and said, "Yeah! Name it Nolan Rules!" He
cracked up, and was shocked when I typed it in and hit enter.

"Okay," I said, "you’ve just
named the tourney."

"Uhh . . . how many people will get to see that?"

"Thousands," I said. "Maybe tens of thousands, and they will all know that you rule. In fact, it could
be hundreds of millions. I hope you’re prepared for the responsibility that comes with ruling that many people."

He gave me the you’re so lame/you’re insane/oh-my-god-I-am-mortified-that-you-did-that look, which is
pretty common since he became A Teenager.

"Are you serious?" He said.

I laughed.
"No. It will only be seen by fives of people in the tourney, and maybe thirties of people online. And I think most
people will get the joke."

"Okay . . ." He said.

"And even if they don’t, what
do you care? You’re their ruler."

Now he smiled. "Whatever, Wil. Are you going to come play
charades with me and mom now?"

"Right after I finish this orbit," I said. He glanced at the
screen and said, "uh, that guy is cussing a lot."

"Yeah, I put a really bad beat on
him," I said.

"Oh, so you mean he’s saying in the chat box what you say in real life when you’re
in here alone?" He smirked.

Busted.

"Something like that," I said.
"Tell your mom I’ll be right there."

I returned to my game. "Sorry man," I typed in the
chat box. "You’re right. I am a complete donkey, and I totally suck at poker."  On the very next hand, I
was dealt A5c in the SB. Everyone limped in ahead of me, so I completed and saw a flop of 2-3-6 with no clubs. I
checked, the BB raised, and it was folded to KQ guy, who bet the pot. It was folded back to me.

Do I try
for the gutshot again? I thought. Because the Implied Tilt Odds are infinite.

I actually went
into the tank for a bit, until deciding that it was probably stupid to call. I folded, and a 4 hit the turn.

So this is what it’s like to be CJ, I thought, as I picked up my virtual chips, and headed out to the living
room to play with my family.

The last couple of days, I’ve been pretty busy writing stories for CardSquad, including one about the demise of one of Vegas’ greatest dumps, The Klondike, which I think has enough crossover appeal to mention here:

Right after we placed our order, a man and a woman sat down at the
table next to us. I forget what she looked like, but he was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, and was a smelly,
unshaven mess. From their conversation, it was unclear whether he’d been released, or escaped. Either way, the waitress
(who was so drunk at eleven in the morning, we were concerned about open flames) didn’t seem to care. Because we were
all in our very early twenties, neither did we. The as-yet-unawakened writer in me furiously scribbled down every
possible detail of what was clearly a moment in time we’d never want to forget.

There’s more, so follow the links if I’ve successfully piqued your interest. There’s also a story about this really cool thing PokerStars is doing today and tomorrow: revealing hole cards during a television-style replay of the final table of January 8th’s $500,000 guaranteed tourney. I don’t know if it has as much crossover appeal as the Klondike story, but it’s such cool news, I’m mentioning it anway, because this is my damn blog and I can do whatever I want, goddammit:

It was quite a sight, to walk into
any of the WiFi-enabled areas of the resort, and find players packed in, elbow-to-elbow, in some cases playing
battleship-style, in others, sweating each other after one of them had been eliminated, in all, hoping to claim first
place, which was worth over $125,000.

The lobby of my tower was filled with recognizable professional
players, like Evlyn Ng, Alex Todd, Michael Mizrachi, and others. There were also fearsome online pros, and a few
donkeys like me. The energy was just as electric, and the stakes just as high as they were down the hall in the live
poker room, where the main event of the PCA was still underway. The only difference? Players could smoke in the lobby,
while the poker room was smoke-free.

Also, the WWdN Invitational returns tonight, at 8:30 PM EST. I let Nolan name this week’s game, since I didn’t play last week, and was therefore unable to be the victim of a 3-outer river suckout.

What: WWdN: Nolan Rules! Invitational
Where: PokerStars.
When: Tuesday, January 17th, 2006. 8:30 PM EDT
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 18186252
Buy-in: $10+1

Finally, some really exciting news: I talked about the WWdN tourneys with a friend of mine while I was at the PCA, and asked him if he’d consider playing with us one day. He couldn’t commit to a specific date, but told me that if I remind him each week, he’ll eventually have some time to play with us. His name is Greg Raymer. You may have heard of him. (ohmygodohmygodohmygod)

See you all tonight!

It turns out that I didn’t take as many pictures at the PCA as I thought I did. It’s kind of a drag, because Anne and I specifically agreed that, even though it’s a bit of a hassle to carry the camera everywhere, we always appreciate lots of pictures once we get home.

Oh well. It’s just more motivation for me to get fabulously wealthy, so I can justify the purchase of one of those really skinny and ultra-portable digital cameras everyone else has.

Anyway, I uploaded most of the good photos to my flickr account in a nifty little photoset called 2006 PCA. For some reason, there isn’t a single picture of me in the poker room, which makes me sad.