Party Poker Blog

"Anarchy is a cool concept 'til the sewers need fixing."
Jello Biafra

Again, have no fear, there is an uber poker post from Sunday if you wanna read poker content. Just scroll on down.

Wow, this is gonna be an awesome tournament. Cmon folks, hurry and sign up to get a piece of this wonderful overlay. For only $20 bucks, I'm guessing first place will be around $650 dollars. Plus, look at all these bonus bounties!! We really have an outstanding community here - thanks to everyone for helping out.

So here's the NEW list of players signed up for the Monty Memorial Poker Blogger Tournament for poker bloggers and their readers. ANYONE can play, so feel free to join the fray. Even if you just read a poker blog or two once in awhile, please feel free to play. Bloggers versus the readers versus the bloggers is gonna make for a great time.

ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT TO REGISTER!

Here's the skinny: $20 entry fee. If you could sign up with Pacific Poker through my link and then email me your screen name, you are in for a fun time. Or if you have any questions before giving this a whirl, please feel free to email and ask away.

You should play for the table chat alone. That is worth $20, in and of itself.

This Sunday night, the 22nd.
9pm EST.

Deadline to sign up is this Thursday at Noon. If you don't email me by then, it's too late.

As it stands, listed below are an excellent mix of bloggers and readers, about 55 thus far. Best of all, the bounties are starting to pile up. If you knock out a player with a prize next to his name, you win said booty. Everything from cash to booze to poker books. Pretty damn cool. If anyone wants to add a bounty, just leave it in the comments or email me.

Damn, if we end up with 60 players that's $1200 in prize money. Sweet!

Pacific is hinting that they WILL be able to increase the starting stack sizes to 1500 but I'm not holding my breath. I'm trying to tell them it's to their advantage to make 50 poker bloggers HAPPY rather than irritated. Sigh. So hell, I'm trying folks, what else can I say?

Anyway...I present to you the list of players for the Monty Memorial Tourney. Bloggers are listed first with links to their respective sites and then the esteemed readers.

Thanks to reader Pdxnewb for offering a portable CD player.

Please double check your screen name:


AntMaude
Badblood
boygza Bottle of Spanish wine, picked by BG, the connoisseur
chrishal DVD's of "Championship Poker and the Plaza" and "American Poker Championship"
fatguy44 A CD of The Gourds, Shinebox
crabasa
dogbert Signed Phil Helmuth book "Play Poker Like the Pros"
gosain
doubleas
CantHang Bottle of SoCo
hdouble pending
he1ixx
jcostale
Jofus
Iggster Guinness something...
Kodies
Maguro
mashashi
MonsterZ
otisdart $50 cash bounty
sloejack
TCommish
tpfelt
Undrchvr
Up4Poker $50 cash bounty if same player takes out Otis
VARoad - Custom Poker CD
EireChad
jerge88
Lucas67
xupugh
MonteCh

albethke
BlindJP
Canesfan
dannmizz
f2aler
G8rEngr
h8vegans
hotlead
Kahrhoff
KnoxTN
Landow
MMMan1
Mstephan
mtammen
NemoD
ThGamer
vanzylb
lostalex
voodooey
dankhank
pdxnewb Panasonic Portable CD player
TeeDubb
KNITMOM
lconfrey
TXinNC
Grasp

I'm still looking for my bounty. Perhaps some Guinness paraphernalia? I haven't had any time to look around yet.

Hell, in the spirit of the poker blogging community getting together for a long overdue poker tournament, I'm just gonna link up the new blogs and get to the tables, if I'm still awake. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Jeremy of the venerable poker blog, Love and Casino War, is back.

Thanks to everyone for playing and anyone on the fence really should jump in and play. As the fine folks at Pokerati said today:

---

In fact, my purpose when I began about two minutes ago was to simply pimp out Iggy's next Poker Blogger Tourney. I've played in one before, and they are much fun. The poker is good, of course, and the pre-, post-, and during-game banter is always priceless, as you might expect when dealing with a bunch of dorks who have nothing better to do than write about poker all day.

Perfectly put. Damn, it's gonna be fun. I only hope I last longer than a few orbits.

Here's a NoLimit newbie tourney report of playing a tournament with his Dad.
The Poker Report: Lucky/Chances

Long overdue pimpage to:
Cubanlinks
Not always about poker but a very prolific poster and supporter of the poker blogs. Worthy daily read.

Damn, no mas, I'm wore out. I'm sorry, but perhaps next time I can crank out a real post.

Thanks a ton for reading and to all who are playing. Deadline is less than 48 hours away so get your account up and funded.

Well hell, I'll leave you with a fine poker essay from Stephen Elliot about his home game. Sign up for his email listserv to receive these yourself, he's a fine writer with an interesting background. If I wait till he posts it to his site, it could be months or even years. But go read through his old posts if you enjoy the literary talents when applied to poker.

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The Poker Report
8-13-04
"Yawning Through The Precipice Since 2001"

In the early evening in San Francisco the streets are splashed with colors: neon reds and flat violet paint jobs on the cold cement stairways. The sky is half dark and bruised; the clouds catch on the hills like cotton.

It's easy to love this city with its spectacular views and its bright pallet of pastel row houses twisting through the headlands and veering into the cliffs beyond Ocean Beach. But below Pacific Heights and the office buildings scratching the sky above Market Street and the shuttered windows with their dark secrets past the gates in Seacliff, is an underworld vandalized by the fantasies of restless travelers long since stuck in this town, given up on ever going home, ravaged by freedom and lust, their promiscuous desires gyrating against the unspoken promise of city hall, protected only by the prophylactic of things learned in the past and long since forgotten. And it's among these places, the shooting galleries and halfway houses and basement bondage clubs that Andy Miller lives in a home full of mice along the dirty entryways of South Van Ness, just down the road from Seventeenth Street Chicken and Gas. That's where we meet to play our games.

Andy's still got my table, with its plastic rim and wooden base, but the table is deteriorating since I left town, bundling all my stuff into the back of Andy's truck, then running off to follow the presidential campaign trail. The table is breaking apart, splitting near its legs, the hinges bending in awkward directions. The table, getting old, like the rest of us.

And because Andy still has my poker table, Steve's House o' Poker still lightly stenciled across the green felt, and because he also has my shoe box filled with thick clay chips, and because he has a kitchen, and permissive roommates, this is where we meet for our game, the game we used to play weekly, then monthly, and more recently six times a year.

Ben and I show up first with a six of tall boys. Then Abby and Eric, the Marvelous Martins, then Marika who is new and doesn't know how to play poker nor will she by the time she's done. Then Eli, all angles and elbows poking from his young body. Then Jensen who recently climbed Mount Rainier and Poindexter who brings a bottle of good whiskey and a bag of potato chips because he has more money than the rest of us. It's a good crowd and a good crowd makes for a good game, which is one of the few things ever proven true.

We start with Peach Grove, three of a kind or better for high, seven up on the low, and three suited connectors for a share of the pot. Eli wins big, taking the high and the grove and stetching his arms forward to engulf the pot. I tell Eli I had folded the winning hand.

"What do you want," he snarls, chin tucked to the nape of his neck, nose facing the table, eyes staring across his forehead, "a medal?"

This is a new Eli, and I shouldn't be surprised. Since I've been gone Ben and Wendy have bought a house and Jon and Alice have had a baby. Jon now emails naked pictures of his wife and child to a small group of friends, which is something he never used to do. Donahue and Foxy are getting married as are Julie and Jeremiah and both couples are leaving the city. And Eli is a man now, a successful and powerful editor, and not the Eli I left behind who was just a kid out of college, an up and comer, trying to make his way in a society he was just beginning to understand. This was not the shy kid with the curly black hair and skinny arms who always had something nice to say to people, even if they didn't deserve it. This was a competitive Eli, a year older, his smile bright and violent, his gums red like blood.

"What?" he asks again, and I look away.

Then we play Omaha and Texas and Scrotum and Six Card High Low. There are nine of us total and we haven't all been in the same place for a long time and it seems like we still like each other and we all agree without saying anything that Eli is a man now and we would treat him as such. Later, in the weeds with two to play Eli takes the high and the low with spades and kings across the middle as Poindexter mixes water with his whiskey, stretching his drink. Miller's slow cat scales Eli's leg arriving on Eli's lap, his tired, evil nose and ears poking just above the cup holder.

"What do you do to that cat?" Marika asks. The cat is listless, as if drugged, and Eric Martin lifts the cat and shakes him, then puts the cat back down. Andy claims it isn't his cat. The cat, he says, belongs to his roommate, and he is therefore not responsible for its condition.

But it is a bad night for Andrew who loses against trips, straights, full houses, and everything in between. He rubs his eyes with his fists and demands to see the cards during a game of Six Card when everybody has folded except the winners.

"It's my house," he crys, and everybody laughs and shares Poindexter's potato chips or opens a beer or says something funny. We're having a good time.

Eli leaves first to meet his girlfriend but refuses to tell us where or what her name is. And after Eli leaves Eric and I split a terrific pot with Poindexter bluffing on a pair of fours straight through to the bitter end.

"How did you know?" he asks, coming over the top on my fifty-cent blue chip before turning his doubleton four on its face.

"I didn't," I say, though in a way I did. "All you can do is take snapshots. There is no bigger picture." And when he scratches his head I continue, "People act like they have a view of the world, a basic understanding of things. But it doesn't exist. History is nothing more than a set of pixels brushed together to create a picture of a man and his wife having a picnic. Nobody knows anything. Anyway, you were going up, starting low and building toward a seven, that how I figured I had you beat."

After that Ben decides to go and Jensen also leaves, ten dollars down. Ben has clawed his way back from the brink and is leaving in the money for the first time in almost a year. Abby is the big winner, still pretty, her cheeks still creased into dimples after all this time. Abby smiles when she wins. When Abby wins she always has fund. And in the last hand of the night, with twenty dollars in the center and only two beers left in the fridge, Marika folds four nines into the current and Poindexter sweeps the final bills from the table. The cat saunters knowingly into the damp back room and Andy Miller turns to the stove, touching the gas knob, then thinking better of it. We all hug. And as Andy and Marika prepare to go to the bars on Valencia and squeeze the last drops of opportunity from a city that had not yet gone to bed, the rest of us kiss cheeks and hug like men, before setting out to face what is surely not yet upon us.

Stephen Elliott
Editor
The Poker Report

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homepage: www.stephenelliott.com----