First of all, thanks to The Poker Prof from Lasvegasvegas.com in addition to the rest of his crew, his dad, Santos, and Foiled Coup. They helped get the pros together for the Meet & Greet. And definitely thanks to Dick Gatewood from Sam’s Town. He worked hard to set up the ballroom for breakfast and his tournament went as smoothly as any live one I’ve attended. His dealers and staff were great. We were treated like high rollers! Seriously, everyone’s thanking me for the weekend, when it’s Dick and the Poker Prof you should be thanking. My hat goes off to you for all of your help. Now go read their blogs and sites… there’s plenty of Christmas shopping you can do on their other sites.
Special thanks to all of the professionals who showed up. Ron Rose hooked all of us up with free copies of his book. Charlie Shoten handed out excerpts of his upcoming book and shared a lot of his wisdom in a great lecture. Thanks to Tom McEvoy for enduring a Q&A session with the bloggers. And thanks to Max Pescatori who skipped a Bellagio event to play with us and take all of our money, except Felicia’s.
Prologue
There’s never a perfect place to start a Vegas trip report. You just have to close your eyes and pluck moments out of the air. Ah, and notes are a godsend. I flipped through the first pages of my notebook. I filled an entire small one up with hand histories, overall thoughts, ideas, cell numbers of strippers (just kidding Briana), and even a poem or two. Based on my handwriting, I could tell that I was nervous. I might seem like a guy that acts cool in tough situations but on the inside I was freaking out for the entire week before Vegas. If I wasn’t busy writing a new novel in November, I would have been freaking out some more. Some days I feel like I’m hanging onto life by a tiny piece of dental floss as I’m getting tossed around, when other days it’s the opposite and I feel like I tearing down the open road of life at 100mph in full control of my destiny. I prayed to the poker gods that Vegas would be a trail blazing adventure. After reading people’s trip reports, I’m starting to think it was.
One of the good aspects of my personality is that I feel I can talk to anyone about anything. Individually I was not worried about meeting anyone, even the pros. I love those types of things. My concern was meeting twenty bloggers for the first time (and the more I thought about it, someone like -EV, Bill or Maudie never met any of us before so for them it was meeting 30 people) and not finding enough one-on-one time with everyone. My biggest regret is that I did not get to spend a substantial amount of quality time with… well, pick a name! I wish I could have spent an entire day with everyone one-on-one… walking around Vegas, having a good meal and conversation, and playing at a table with you against tourists, specifically Cowboys. That was tough and as much fun as I had with some people, I felt that I let down a lot the others due to limitations in time, my short attention span, and my precocious gambling and scathing substance abuse problems. Bottom line, I wish I had more time to hang out with all of you but the time we did spend together was special to me. I might do something like HDouble posted jotting down some special memories that I shared with everyone. Yes, I am honored and humbled that everyone took time to come out.
I am also touched to hear how so many folks that could not come out wished us good vibes and were hitting up our blogs all weekend, looking for live updates. Everyone who didn’t come was certainly missed. And that might be my second biggest regret of the weekend… that not everyone got to come. I know that this weekend started the ball rolling for future live events, and I hope that we’ll have a bunch in 2005 so you can pick one to attend. Seriously, everyone was much cooler than I imagined.
Oh, and my third biggest regret was everyone blowing off Felicia’s stud tutorial after the tourney. To Felicia and Glenn, I fully accept the blame on that one for failing to rally the troops to get kick ass advice from a world class stud player. I definitely lost out on improving my stud game. I hope you can forgive me for that. I knew that everyone spent time and money and cashed in favors (spousal or work-related) to make the trip and with knowing all of that, I was hoping that everyone would have a great time and more specifically, have one great Vegas story. The more I reflected on my flight home, the more I realized that the blogger weekend was one of those events that could be the core of a future novel. Don’t get your hopes up too high. I have at least three other novels to write before I could consider writing up this weekend. Which is why these mini-reviews and live updates have helped, along with my scribbled notes, and these trip reports. Seriously, I spent hours this morning ready everyone’s versions of the weekend and seeing some random pictures of all of us out there.
Hazel Sports Game News Blog 
Leave a comment