2010, The Ugly Side of Love
It was a long, strange year, and at the moment I don't even know how to exhume the story arc properly. Instead, a few memories:
January - Amir Vahedi, one of the more charismatic and gregarious tournament pros on the circuit, passed away at the beginning of this year. We were friendly, he always had a warm smile and a nice thing to say, and I genuinely miss him.
I began the year with my fourth trip to the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. It was a great time, most of my close poker friends were there, and my father even decided to come down and hang out. It was cool, except I was reminded why I never like to involve family in poker: My father was sweating my bust hand, in which I went broke with QQ to AA on day two. Afterward, my dad thought it was appropriate to berate my play, informing me that "queens are often beaten by kings and aces."
Later in the month, I went to Deauville, France for a European Poker Tour event. I had a great time at the venue (I reminisce over that breakfast buffet, and the sauna was excellent), and I almost made a run in the tournament, finishing 26th and getting knocked out with less than five hands to play on day three. It was a million chip pot, in which my A8 had the opportunity to triple-through two poker champions--Peter Eastgate and Mike McDonald--both holding kings. "The heroic ace of justice" did not appear.
The ironic postscript is that we had already made dinner plans (Peter, Mike and I), and we kept the plans as if the heartbreaking bust hand had never even occurred. At least Mike and Peter paid for the massive steak we consumed at the bistro in town that was open late.
February - Kind of a blur, but I do remember my girlfriend coming back from her own work trip at the end of the month and breaking up with me on the eve of the LA Poker Classic main event. I busted that one with AK vs. AQ early on day one.
March - What do you call a poker player without a girlfriend? Homeless. Luckily, my good friend Owen was without a residence after the LAPC, too, and together we rented a furnished sublet in a beautiful A-frame house on top of a winding drive in Topanga Canyon. For a variety of reasons, it was one of the greatest months of my life.
Of the 30 days we stayed there, 27 of them were probably spent in front of the computer, grinding 10+ hour days of online poker, begrudgingly taking turns driving down the canyon to pick up egg sandwiches for breakfast, ordering greasy pizza most nights, and affixing ourselves to the computer for the days. I had great results that month, and both Owen and I streamlined our April schedule by winning satellites for the NAPT Mohegan Sun event and EPTs San Remo and Monte Carlo.
It was a perfect union of set and setting. Despite how work-intensive our time there was, and despite our abysmal nutritional intake, I simply felt good waking up in that house. A lifelong city sucker, this was my first time ever living in a proper house, not an apartment. Walking onto the deck barefoot with morning coffee, making a fire in the wood-burning stove in the evening, no television, listening to new music on WFMU--it was magical. More than the music itself, it was the way that music sounded--rolling up the hills into some beautiful void and reverberating back--that stands out in my memory. I hope to get back to a place like that.
April - I threw a bunch of stuff into a storage locker in Santa Monica, and Owen and I flew to NYC and drove up to Mohegan Sun for the first of three major tournaments that would dominate the month's activities. A week later, I flew to Rome and spent a day there alone before taking the train along the coast to San Remo, where we would play a series of tournaments before heading to Monte Carlo for the EPT Grand Final. If I remember right, sometime during that time period a volcano erupted and screwed up travel plans for a bunch of players.
Some highlights and lowlights: Kick-starting a motorbike in the parking lot of the hotel in San Remo and, seconds later, totaling it by colliding into a garage door and then nervously revving into the immovable object. More memorable was the peripheral image of Owen, standing 10 feet away from me, laughing so hard he had to put in serious effort to pause briefly to ask if I was OK before resuming uncontrollable laughter. The bike rental place charged me €1,000 for the damage.
But the pool at the hotel was amazing--some saline/chlorine combination, and the first proper diving board I remember seeing in six years staying at fancy hotels. The pool at the Monte Carlo Bay and Resort, one week later, didn't have a diving board, but it did feature attractive topless Hungarian women on beach chairs and poker players getting sloshed on $16 drinks after busting from the tournament.
Poker results for the month were non-existent, though. I probably played 10 major tournaments between Mohegan Sun and Monte Carlo, and the closest I came to even min-cashing was a bubble in the 5K 6-max event, the last event I played in Monte Carlo. With less than six players to lose before the money (I think there were 16 left and 12 paid), I lost a coinflip to the excellent young player David Peters from Ohio, who went on to take second place.
The EPT was a good experience as usual, for the opportunity to meet poker players from all over the world, the chance to spring off good diving boards and lounge alongside topless Hungarian women, but it was a disappointment from a money-making perspective.
May - After Monte Carlo, I took the train with a couple other poker players to Paris. I had an 18-day sublet arranged, and my friends were tagging along without any real plan or return ticket to the States. At some point, a pretty, skinny French actress sat near us and helped us sort out some confusion relating to our being in the wrong seats. As the train pulled into the station in Paris, I got her number, and we said we'd do lunch.
My plan was to play the WPT Paris event at the Aviation Club a week later, play as much online poker as possible and then go to Barcelona for another WPT event before taking the long trip back to Los Angeles. It turned out playing online poker tournaments on a GMT schedule is as insane as you might think (I don't know how my European counterparts do it, really), and except for one good score in a turbo rebuy tournament (playing headsup vs. Isaac Baron for a $20K difference at 6AM local time), it was a relatively unproductive month for poker.
The French actress responded to my texts, she even went as far as making a lunch date with me, but it was all part of the classic Elaborate Blowoff, a worldwide phenomena, which culminated with a last-minute cancellation of the lunch date and a message along the lines of, "Sorry, I'm gonna be busy with work [forever]."
But I loved Paris, and it didn't trigger my newfound aversion to big-city life at all. I definitely enjoyed some tourist-y things--leisurely walking around Père Lachaise, checking out the Lucien Freud exhibit at the Pompidou Centre, walking up the steps of Montmarte, shopping--but the highlight was generic Parisian living: riding around a rented Velib bicycle, buying fresh bread and funky cheese every day, sitting at a bistro sipping espresso. I was also helped out tremendously by friends who had friends in Paris, and they all made my experience much richer.
In Barcelona, I rented a bike from the hotel, rode to the casino and back to play the tournament, rode up to Park Guell and circled Sagrada Familia a couple times. Ate at the same tapas place probably eight times. On my penultimate day in town, the bike was stolen from right in front of the hotel while I was taking a nap. Time to fill out a police report, time to get back to the USA. I enjoyed Barcelona, but I was homesick by that point. Homesick without a home, but I do love America, and it was time to get back, a few short days before WSOP time.
June/July/August - Whiffing live poker tournaments was taking its toll on me, and going 1-20 or something at the 2010 WSOP, my third shitty WSOP in a row, did not help things psychologically. Nor did my grandmother's death in Israel. It was not unexpected, and a Jewish funeral is a low-key affair (followed by a week of grieving), but I was faced with a choice that I didn't handle properly--take the trip across the world to be there for my mother, my cousins. Living for the living. But that would mean putting a massive hole in my WSOP potential, my hope for achieving some live poker results for 2010. The bottom line is I had my head up my ass when I made the choice to stay in Vegas, and it's pretty unforgivable.
It also did not help that early in the Series I found myself hung up on my ex. It was like I woke up one morning and felt a burning, all-encompassing need to repair things. But it was too late, even if I didn't realize it yet. She didn't want me back, and after the series ended my best option was to just hit the road, due east. Initially I conceived of a solo car ride all the way to Miami, where live poker had just gone uncapped. I scaled back my plan to a somewhat less ambitious, but more rewarding, road trip to visit friends in various locales in the Southwest.
First, Albuquerque, NM, where I played my first hand of casino poker when I was 22, where my my oldest childhood friend Matt has lived for over a decade, more than eight of them with his son Jacob. I've known Matt since we were about that age.
Then Tulsa, OK, where I stayed at the beautiful house of my good friend Jordan Morgan. On my first morning there, he broke his elbow while we went on a bike ride. The next day while I was driving Jordan around on some errands, we almost got into a fight in the middle of a busy street with some yokels who almost rear-ended me (and then pulled up in front of us, stopped the tractor-hauling vehicle they were driving, stepped out of the car and confronted us, presumably hoping for a scuffle). We spent most of the next couple days curating the Tulsa Film Festival, culled from Netflix WI choices. The festival highlight was Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
I then drove down to Austin, TX, stopping at Willie Nelson's bio-diesel-fueled truck stop for a burger. In Austin, I stayed at the house of my beloved former employer, Paul, who once owned the messenger company where I worked when I was 18. He lives with his wife and two daughters. The most enriching part of the journey was seeing how my friends, and various other people (I later stayed at the house of a near-stranger, who was out of town but told me where to find the spare key, in Bisbee, AZ), live in their native environments. There was a diverse range.
In Austin I also hung out with my poker friend Russ, met his kids, his friend and his friend's kid. Spent a day on the lake with the friends, the kids, a night doing a mellow bar crawl in downtown Austin, and made a couple trips to the original Whole Foods store, which is awesome--like, they decided to make future Whole Foods stores pretty awesome, just not as awesome as the one in Austin. I spent close to a week there, and I had a great time in a great city.
I finished the trip with a pass through Marfa, TX, hugging the border towards my stop in Bisbee, and finally a night in Phoenix with my poker friend Ryan. I arrived late in the morning, and in the afternoon we met up with legendary poker player Tom Schneider at Pizzeria Bianco, a destination pizza spot to be sure (you have to show up like an hour before it opens to have a reasonable shot at a seat), but it's no DiFara's.
The next day, I made the final leg of my trip, back to my city without a home.
September/October - This was when I fell deep into the abyss of everything: dealing with unrequited love, uneasy in my current career and more than a little nervous about the prospect of finding a new career. It seems like I spent those months wanting to crawl out of my own skin and into a different life. Lacking a way to do it, I was nothing short of scared.
November/December - Well here we are. The past couple months are as well documented as I want them to be for the moment. Like my friend Peter Gubin once told me, "You're either writing or you're living."
I guess I forgot to mention I saw George Clinton and his P-Funk All Star posse perform at the Red Rock Casino in early June. George is still out there, doing it. Really doing it! And he once said something like, "Everybody's gonna make it this time."
I have a good feeling about 2011, and I hope you all do, too.
posted by Shane Schleger at 9:27 AM
8 comments
is one of this year's highlights. I'm hoping to write up a more proper Year in Review one of these days, but in the meantime this randomly Brooklyn-based music video is a good appetizer.
