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.

I was doing some research for Games of our Lives at Wikipedia, and I took a look at my entry
while I was there. I’m glad that the days of idiot vandalism are over,
but I also see that the information there is incredibly incomplete, and
there’s a completely incorrect assertion about my relationship with PokerStars
(I don’t provide "advertising services" for them, I’m on Team PokerStars. Big difference.) I would be happy to write up a more complete
biography, including some as-yet-unpublished information about growing
up, my early years as an actor, and some of the things I’ve done in the
last five or six years that aren’t there.

I’m not interested in "spinning" anything, just filling in more
information to make it a more useful and complete entry. I know that
editing one’s own Wikipedia page is frowned upon, but if it’s just
filling in facts, that’s okay, right? Anyone have any thoughts or
comments?

In a related story, someone finally fixed my entry at the imdb. Thank you, unknown editor!

There’s this one corner of my office that’s been completely taken over by various bits of flotsam. It’s the place where things that really need to be dealt with get shoved aside, partially out of sight, but never entirely out of mind.

I’ve been putting off cleaning it up, but just before we left for the PCA, I had this overwhelming and undeniable desire to clean out all the bullshit that is scattered around my house, which has been allowed to pile up and overwhelm me over the last year or so.

This is a powerful metaphor for what’s going on in my life right now.

I am so fucking sick and tired of all this bullshit that’s piled up everywhere that makes me feel like I’m not even in control of my own life, and I’m so sick of making excuses for allowing it to be there, I just attacked it this afternoon. Literally. I grabbed handfuls of books off shelves and piled them on the floor to be sorted. I pulled out drawers from a desk, dumped them next to the books, got the shredder out, and went through almost eighteen months worth of junk and paperwork that should have been filed away or destroyed long ago. It’s been a long, occasionally frustrating, but mostly rewarding day, as I get this shit under control. The end is starting to come into view, and now that I feel like this shit isn’t controlling me, I can enjoy some of the cool things I’ve come across, like a stack of old Star Trek trading cards, my script from CSI, some press kits from Stand By Me, and a bunch of really cool Aqualad figures I’d forgotten I had. I found things that made me angry, like correspondence I sent to
O’Reilly (unsuccessfully) begging them to stop mispromoting Just A Geek, and things that
made me incredibly happy, like a first-edition of Dancing Barefoot,
complete with typo(e)s, and the original hand-drawn layout for WWdN from a thousand years ago. I also found some things that made me really
sad, like one of Sketch’s chewed up rainbow balls. I also found some things that must have seemed very important at the time I collected them, like an envelope with the word "It’s Curvy!" written in my this is hilarious! script, and a seven of diamonds with the pips connected like dots. I also found a bunch of poker chips I thought I’d lost, and well over one hundred polyhedral dice. There are CDs, DVDs, pictures, business cards, notes, and lots and lots of games.Most of this stuff is going into boxes and out to the garage, but a lot
of it will get thrown into the trash with extreme prejudice. It’s
empowering to decide what’s important enough to keep around, what’s
worth dealing with, and what’s just better off going straight into the
fucking trash where it belongs.

For the longest time, the only semi-calm area in my office was about a four foot neutral zone surrounding my computer, but I’ve nearly reclaimed the entire area in the name of Wil, and it feels awesome. Tomorrow, I will continue to expand my empire out into the rest of my house, and by extension, my life. I’m not sure if I’ll be successful, but I’m going to do my very best.

Which is a powerful metaphor for what’s going on in my life right now.