I was at a party the other night and one of my favorite conversations happened. I get introduced by someone I know to someone I don’t know. “This is Tommy,” they say. “He is like, Joe Poker.” After I say a few words, I ask my new acquaintance, “So, do you play poker?” And they
I was at a poker party the other night with some friends I had not seen in several years. One of them is David, a pro I used to play with all the time. He was with his girlfriend, Liz, who I had not met. We three were chatting along, and I asked the tradition
I went to a party recently where I ran into John Mugnani, floorman extraordinaire at the California Grand Casino. The next day John sent me an email with a story about our mutual ancient friend, Tahoe. A guy walks up to Tahoe and says, “Listen to this terrible bad beat story that just happened to
I have played a great deal of poker vicariously, through my clients. They send me hands they played, and we talk about them. All clients send me hands at the beginning, and some of them send me hands for years. I ask that the hands be written up in prose form, with analysis and feelings
The meaning of “reconcile” in play here is “to make consistent or congruous.” In other words… How can someone walk the path of harmlessness if it has poker tables on it? Let’s say there’s a guy who plays poker, and he starts meditating every morning and doing mindfulness stuff all day long and reading about
If playing poker and coaching poker and writing about poker don’t work out for me, I think I could get a job as a wildlife photographer. As my resume, I would submit the spectacular sequence of photographs you are about to see. To be an expert in this field, you must have incredible patience. You
Heedless. Is that a beautiful word or what? It takes something that’s hard to put into words, and puts it into one. Here are some synonyms I found online: careless, negligent, thoughtless, unthinking, inattentive, unmindful, and unobservant. Those last two especially made me want to start remembering to use this word. I recently saw the
I’ve been doing some piano recording here at home the last few months. Most of it is short bits of music that I’m inserting between segments of a poker video series called The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment that you can read about (and download the music) here: EPTPE I’m posting now about one of those
Many of my conversations with my buddy Alex begin similarly: Hi. Whatsup. How you doing. It doesn’t matter who starts the initial hellos. All that matters is who ends them. If I start talking next, the conversation can start anywhere and go anywhere. If Alex starts talking next, it goes like this: HIM: … sigh
