World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event 2009 Results

	The much-anticipated play at the final table of the World Series of Poker finished yesterday with 21-year-old Joe Cada becoming the youngest player ever to win the WSOP bracelet. Cada walked away with . . . more

Financial firm failed? Looking for work? Play poker!

Thanks to The Big Picture.

I Can't Believe We Made It!

A somewhat belated post-New Year's "Happy New Year!" post to my fellow blogospherians. Some highlights from spending the final night of '08 and early days of '09 in the Empire and Garden states:

• Driving down during the Great Blizzard of '08 in Dunndee's Trans Am, AKA the Car with No Traction, Wiper Fluid, Functioning Wiper Blades, Rear Windshield Heating Element, or Headlights. At one point I thought we were going to be stuck in a rest area parking lot on 84 until 2009.
  
• Great New Year's Eve party "in the village," as they say, replete with bottomless Strong Islands, lots of A-side peeps, and vaulting bartenders
• 24 hours on Dunndee's couch on Jan 1st. Quite literally.
• Seeing the outside of an old law school building at Rutgers Law, Newark, AKA "City Law University," the law school Mike McD attends in Rounders, a film I watched approximately 146 times in college. Damon, Norton, Malkovich, and Turturro at their absolute peaks.
  
• Getting serenaded a cappella by five cheerful gentlemen in the wee hours of 2009 on the PATH train from World Trade Center back to Penn Station, Newark, NJ. A brief but comical Hall & Oates stint - "Hey, what you wanna listen to? White people music? What do white people listen to? Hall and Oates!" - was followed up by a little Sam Cooke at my request. A few bars of "A Change Is Gonna Come" were all too appropriate at that point.
• Calamari pizza. Don't knock it 'til you try it.
• Sauerbraten, AKA the "best thing on the menu" over at Cafe Steinhof in Crooklyn, NY. Nothing but steins, schnitzels, and spaetzle over there.
  

How about we award the nomination to the winner of a heads-up no-limit freezeout between Obama and Hillary?

An interesting article on Obama's poker skills in The New Yorker.

Hat tip to ToKissTheCook.

R.I.P. Chip

Poker star and fellow Dartmouth alumnus Chip Reese has passed away. He was only 56.

Shuffle Up and Deal

Poker Wisdom of a Champion, by Doyle Brunson: This book, an anthology of poker stories, was published in a new edition some twenty years after its first publication under the far better name, According to Doyle. Brunson's tales are short (a few pages each) and sweet, being variously humorous and bland. He groups them into five thematically-similar sections. Most are interesting and amusing tales of the old-school poker players, cowboy-like roamers who drifted from town to town on "the circuit" in Texas, playing in any back-room games they could find. Games were illegal, and could often get hijacked - a far cry from the insulated world of the $2-$4 table at Foxwoods. Some of Doyle's stories are trite, however, feeling more like filler than anything else. But it's a quick read and worth checking out if you have an interest in the game or in Doyle himself, one of the true legends of no-limit Texas Hold'em poker.