I’ve had a great year so far when you measure it using the typical poker barometers:  my total profit and ROI are excellent.  Yet there is one troubling statistic:  my total hours played is very low.  Crazy low.  Espcially since my WSOP final table, I have played very little poker for someone who calls himself a professional card player.

This is the kind of statistic that should make normal working folk jealous–I’m financially secure and my life has essentially been one long vacation for about four months–but it is actually a little bit disturbing to me.  I’ve had several false starts in the last few months:  moments where I’ve told myself that it was time to kick things into gear and then failed to drum up sufficient motivation to play a long session.  When I have managed to sit down and play, I have found myself playing a disappointing, vanilla version of tournament no limit hold ’em.  This is a game where players fade in and out of the proverbial “zone,” and I have not been there in awhile.  The “zone” isn’t a place visited very often by people who are only playing because they feel obligated to.

There are probably a few reasons for this inertia.  One is that i surpassed all reasonable yearly goals only five months into 2007, which has made resting on my laurels a rather attractive option.  Another is that I’m shockingly conservative for a professional gambler.  Winning $250,000 earlier in the year has not changed my risk-taking proclivity one iota.  If anything, I have grown less likely to put a big chunk of my bankroll on the line.  The final reason for the inertia is a series of minor personal mishaps (e.g., computer dying, car defacement, other) that I have had to devote an annoying amount of time to.

Which brings me to today.  I am now at Foxwoods for the World Poker Finals, and I am once again announcing my intention to turn things on and get back into the zone.  I mean it this time!

And by Bellagio, I don’t mean the Steve Wynn version, I mean the original.  And by Budapest I mean Budapest.

Janeen and I just got back yesterday from a great little vacation.  A short recap:

Bellagio and the entire Lake Como region of Italy is probably the most serene place I’ve ever been.  It occurred to me after a couple of days there that I had not seen a person in an agitated state the entire time.  No one screaming, no one running, no one doing anything that might raise their heart rate.  I think the reason is that everyone on Lake Como–tourists and locals alike–is subconciously cowed by the awesome visual splendor of the place.

You get swallowed by your surroundings on Lake Como:  the lake itself is a massive, deep, still, shiny body of water.  It is ringed entirely by the Italian Alps, whose incredible proximity to the water’s edge makes a person on the lake feel especially tiny.  When you’re in Bellagio or any of the other lakeside villages, you are nestled into a very small crevice between two impossibly large creations of nature.  The effect is so striking that it alters one’s state of consciousness. 

Bellagio is the kind of place that can make a wacky person sane, and the kind of place that can arouse existential thoughts in the brain of even the dullust moron you know.

Lake Como’s villages, many of which are only reachable via ferry or other boat, only add to the overall effect.  They date back to medieval times (or later) and retain the look and layout with which they were designed.  These places are truly untouched by modern tourism.  The “streets” are actually cobblestone stairways built into the side of the Alps, making them unaccessable to automobiles.  The businesses, from the largest hotels to the amazing restaurants to the retail stores to the newsstands, are all privately owned.  You will not find a McDonalds or a Hilton anywhere near the lake.

Janeen and I spent 3 days in Bellagio doing the only things there are to do there:  relaxing, hiking around and eating.  And that was just fine by us.  Highlights included a ferry ride up the length of the lake, four or five excellent meals, and the breathaking view from our hotel room.  It is safe to say that this part of our vacation was romantic.  🙂 

Selected for the simple reason that neither of us had ever been there, Janeen and I went to Budapest for the second leg of our trip.  Once there, we decided that the time for relaxation was over and we threw it into hardcore tourist gear, as we attempted to cram every site in Janeen’s Frommers book into three days.

I am half expecting a mad Hungarian (Al Hrbosky?) to read this and correct me, but the main historical fact that I took away from Budapest is that Hungary is the Los Angeles Clippers of Europe.  From Roman times until the present, it seems that Hungary has been on the losing end of at least one war per generation, with no wins whatsoever sprinkled in.  They’re batting .000 in the A.D. period, and that’s a pretty bad slump.  The result is that Budapest has been sacked more times than Vinny Testaverde.

What this means for the 2007 traveler is that Budapest has no particular historical cultural identity, which is actually kind of cool because the city has been left to develop its own identity in recent times.  This means that although the city features architectural feats of old and even ancient vintage, it is a decidedly modern place. 

Janeen and I saw all the major sites and partook in all the expected activities.  This included the obligatory visit to one of Budapest’s famous public bath houses, which was strange for me because I’m typically rather private about my bathing.  This was nevertheless an enlightening experience, and I’m happy to report that Europeans and Americans continue to have very different ideas about what kind of bathing suits are appropriate for obese men to wear.

The best part about Budapest was mixing it up with the locals at night.  The city has several highly regarded restaurants, and Janeen and I ate dinner at two of them.  They were both relative cheap and delicious.  Even better was going out for drinks at local bars and clubs.  The bar scene in Budapest leans toward the bohemian; the best bar we visited was an old apartment complex in the old Jewish quarter that was sloppily revamped and turned into a rollicking scene filled with Hungarian and various expat hipsters.  Hungarians like to get down:  Janeen and I went club hopping in, of all bizarre places, a large multi-level mall.  Yes, in Budapest one of the local shopping malls turns into a club complex at night.  Once there, we wandered into a packed salsa party (a testament to how modern Budapest is and how global music has become), an authentic hip hop party (replete with metal detector at the entrance), an upscale-ish house music party (hilarious female model/do-nothing DJ on the decks) and your basic drunken pop music meat market (Sutton Place, eat your heart out!).

While I will surely have very fond general memories of Budapest, the singular memory that might last the longest is the fact that everyone there smokes cigarettes.  I’m not talking about 50% or even 75% of the people.  I’m talking about everyone.  It was insane.  I’m not even going to pretend that I’m not being prissy about this.  I have never been much of a smoker myself, but at the time that the New York City smoking ban was enacted, I was strongly opposed, believing that people should be able to do as they please in public.  Several years later, I am now firmly in the “smoking is a disgusting stinky gross habit and you should get that smelly shit out of my face” camp.  So you can probably imagine my discomfort as plumes of toxic garbage wafted across my nose in between bites of my gourmet dinners.  And at the bars, the general smokiness of Budapest was extended to its logical extreme.  Many of the bars are underground places without much ventilation, making the air thick with a visible cloud of fumes.  To Janeen and I these bars were literally unbearable.  Within five minutes in these places, our eyes were burning, my beer tasted vaguely ashy, and we had to flee.  Yet these places were rammed full of people completely oblivious and obviously fully adapted to those conditions.  Yuck!

Overall, Janeen and I had a great vacation.  The entire thing worked out perfectly.  Lake Como allowed us to empty our minds of all that sinister day-to-day clutter that we unkowingly accumulate.  Then Budapest let us see how other people live.  The whole thing sure beat the shit out of sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, which bores me to tears.  I’ll post some fun pictures once I get my hands on ’em.

Here’s a summary of what has been going on with me for the past week.

On Wednesday, I played in a $300 tournament at the Taj.  It drew about 150 players and paid 18 spots.  With 21 players left, I had the chip lead.  On the bubble, I still had the chip lead.  And with 14 players left, I was gone.  I decided to go on a bubble rampage and win the tournament right there.  Instead I self destructed.

The next day I busted from the Taj’s $500 event very quickly when I made a stand against a maniac and got outflopped.  The tourney had drawn only 95 players, and it was obvious that the $1000 the next day would bring even fewer, so I split and drove home on Thursday afternoon.  There would be better action for Sugar D online.  Up the Garden State Parkway I went.

Back in NYC, I was in a foul mood as I circled the streets of the Upper East Side looking for a parking spot.  I wanted an alternate-side spot that would allow me to leave my car for the entire weekend, but I was having no luck finding one.  Then finally, after over a half an hour of trolling, I saw it:  right on the corner across the way there was a spot.  I pulled across the street.  Upon closer inspection, it was actually two back-to-back parking spaces!  Nice.  And someone was pulling into the first one.  I prepared to pull behind this person and take the second spot.  But then the person stopped their car directly in the center of the two spaces, leaving roughly six feet in front of them and roughly six feet behind them.  Not enough room on either side for me to parallel park.

I pulled up to the side of the vehicle, lowered my window and got the attention of the woman behind the wheel.

“Excuse me, would you mind pulling forward so that I can park behind you?”

This polite inquiry did not sit well with the middle-aged black woman who had just finished turning two parking spaces into one.

“There isn’t enough room for both of us!  Find another spot, this one is mine!”  She said in a Jamaican accent.

“Ma’am, there absolutely is enough space for both of us.  You are taking up two parking spots.  Please move forward.”

“I will do no such ting!  Be on your way!” 

I was not in the mood for this woman’s bullshit, so I proceeded to put my car into reverse, swerved behind her, and then slowly pulled forward until my front bumper was nestled up against her back bumper.   She did not like this one bit.  She flew from her car, slammed the door and stalked toward my open window.

“What da hell do you tink you’re doing!?”

“I’m parking my car,” I replied as I opened my door and got out and instructed her to follow me as I walked to the back of my car, which was sticking maybe two feet into the crosswalk behind me. 

“My car is two feet into the crosswalk and you have left six feet of space in front of you,” I continued.  “Is this still one spot?”  She was now totally infuriated.

“What da hell is your problem?  Dis is one spot!  Are you on crack?!  You are!  You look like a fuckin’ crackhead!”

She was screaming and making wild hand gestures in my face, but I was the crackhead?  I remained calm.

“Ma’am, if you think this is one spot, you have not driven your car in Manhattan before.  Now please pull your car forward two feet.”

“I been working at dis hospital forty years!” she screamed as she pointed eastward, “and dis is one spot!  If I move foward, I never get out of here!”

“You’re not being very neighborly.  Please, just move foward.” I sighed and I rolled my eyes.  Now she stalked back to her car, put it in drive and moved it foward about a foot and a half.  Then she quickly put it in back in park, leaped out and scrambled behind it so that she was standing between our cars.  I was now beyond frustrated.  I got into my car and pulled forward about six inches.

“You’re hitting me!” she bellowed.  My car was not in contact with her.  Then she unleashed an incredible string of expletives that was truly shocking, even to me.

“Excuse me?” I said as I got out of my car and approached her.  “Care to repeat that?”

“You ‘erd me, motherfucker!”  Jesus.  There was now absolutely no way that I was conceding in this ridiculous dispute.

I proceeded to show her that I was still parked illegally by about a foot, while the empty space in front of her was about four feet long.  So we repeated the process two more times, with her standing between our cars and belligerantly swearing at me each time.  In the end, I finally was parked legally, and she looked like she wanted to punch me. 

I sarcastically said “have a good night, ma’am” as I gathered my belongings from the back seat, then surreptitiously wrote her license plate number on a scrap of paper.  She was lurking there with a murderous look on her face, and I had a feeling that a violent crime could be visited upon me any second.  Also, some form of criminal mischief seemed vaguely possible once I left the scene, which I managed to do unharmed. 

I walked the few blocks to my apartment.  My blood was boiling.  The trip to AC had been a washout because I had played undisciplined, stupid poker.  Then a long drive home was punctuated by a ridiculous dispute over a parking spot with a psychotic Jamaican orderly. 

Now I was finally back home, and I decided to spend the rest of the day playing poker online.  But first I checked my email.  I had a few messages, but as I opened the third one, I realized that something was wrong with my computer.  It was frozen.  No cursor pointy thing, no ctrl+alt+delete, no nothing.  Just frozen.  I turned it off using the power button, waiting the requisite ten seconds and turned it back on.  Then a few beeps, then a black screen with an error message that may as well have been written in a foreign language.  I repeated the process and got the same result.  Ummm, this was not good.

And indeed it was not.  Somehow my Microsoft Windows had been corrupted.  I spent most of my Columbus Day weekend talking to Hewlett Packard’s inept technical support staff, along with other computer-knowledgable people on the phone, trying various methods to restore my computer to its prior state.  It turned into an all-encompassing, life comsuming time drain.  In the end, nothing worked and I had some recovery discs fedexed to me.  Over $400 and four days later, I managed to save most of my files, but my computer still does not function properly.  It needs to be reformatted from scratch, and I need to transfer all the stuff I managed to save onto CD’s, then reload it onto the computer once it’s been reformatted.  I am writing this blog entry from my archaic laptop. 

Poker?  My job that I’m supposed to be refocusing on?  I haven’t played a single hand in almost a week.

Yesterday I needed to move my car to a new parking spot, in compliance with alternate-side parking rules.  I walked a few blocks to the car, which reminded me of my unpleasant confrontation on Thursday.  Despite my shitty mood, I chuckled to myself as I pictured my bug-eyed rabid parking nemesis.  But when I reached the car, my laugther ceased.  There was something white on my hood.  I walked and took a closer look.  Some kind of string?  Bird poop?  No…

Carved into my hood with key, in clearly legible, large lettering was a lovely parting gift:  “FUCK U.”

Life tilt.

Hello from what might be the most depressing place on earth on a Tuesday afternoon:  the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City.  I have taken a break from watching wheelchair-bound, toothless geriatrics stare at slot machines to jump online and make an announcement!

I hereby officially announce that I am going to be more focused on poker for the rest of this calendar year.

For the past month or so the only things I have felt like doing are:

-watching football;

– sending (arguably) witty emails to my fantasy football leaguemates; and

-observing the lifeless corpse otherwise known as the New York Mets rot before my eyes.

Now nothing is left of the Mets besides their coffin.  For the past two weeks they were like one of those time lapse photography things where you can see something that was once alive decompose before your eyes (and it was equally nauseating), but now they are just a coffin.  Good riddance!

Football only happens on Sundays (no college ball for me, thanks).  And email is getting boring.

So it is time to do something I haven’t done in quite a while–play some serious freakin’ poker.  Outside of the romantic European getaway that Janeen and I have planned in two weeks, I am going to focus on one thing:  getting serious about kicking people’s asses at the poker table.

Starting…..

….

now.

First up:  Trump Taj Mahal USPC tourneys.  Not the main event, some other piddley stuff.  Off I go!