With a good night’s sleep behind me, I’m a little less zoned out and can probably put together some coherent thoughts that you probably won’t be interested in anyway. This encompasses the tournie up to the point I was kicked to the curb, by the way — I didn’t stick around to see who won. Here we go:

- DanM ran a great tournament. It only started about 20 minutes late. With 55 entrants, trying to get the cards in the air on time is hard. With a large number of them being journalists, it becomes impossible. However, that means that if you get there on time, you’re twiddling your thumbs for a long time, and you get extra keyed-up. Naught to be done about it, though.

- The Lodge (WARNING: not safe for married guys to have in their bookmarks), a gentleman’s club, was an excellent host. Not for the reasons you’re thinking, perv. They roped off the VIP room for us. They provided two excellent waitresses, and one excellent bartender (I never sat there and thought, boy am I thirsty.) The appetizer spread was first-class: coconut chicken, shrimp on ice, little half-sandwiches with stuff on them (I think these are called canapes), deviled eggs, enough fruit to feed the Dallas Zoo for a week, and my favorite, the beef shish-ka-bobs (I probably ate 100 of those yummy things.) Iced tea and coffee were gratis, as long as you bought a few regular cocktails at the cut-rate price of $2. Most importantly, they managed to keep the strippers dancers entertainers out all day (with one exception, explained later.) The solitary problem that sticks out in my mind was the burnt-out flourescent lights in one corner that forced two tables to play in semi-dark conditions. I got to spend a couple of hours to the left of the manager of the joint, and he had some pretty funny, non-racy stories that he shared with us about the trials and travails of what every single guy thinks has to be the best job in the world.

- I stuck with the Coors Light, simply because you couldn’t catch a buzz off those if you drank a case after fasting for a week, but it’s wet, cold, and tastes faintly like beer. By my tab, it looks like I drank between 8 and 10. That’s a little more than one beer per hour, thus showing my massive restraint and single-minded dedication to poker. Not one single Shiner Bock passed my lips, and that hurts, since I’ll never find $2 Shiners again, I’m sure. In retrospect, I should have stayed for one or two by way of rewarding myself — yeesh, $2 Shiners, dummy! That would have, though, most likely turned into 10 or 20 Shiners, and I’d already promised The Wife I would high-tail it home as soon as I got knocked out.

- Others weren’t so temperate, which I think explains a lot about my ability to last to the round of 16, aka the Final Two Tables (OK, so I’m looking for some faint glory here.)

- Let’s get the solitary stripper out of the way, shall we? One of the participants was a total dude name of Eon Marshall. The scuttlebutt was that this dude had won $40,000,000 in a Powerball lottery. DanM says that he has an online poker room, too. I don’t know any of this to be factual. What I can tell you is that he was the only guy there wearing a white suit, black shirt and a tie. He also wore about 10lbs. of gaudy gold jewelry, including the Super Bowl-class ring DanM mentions. But the hilarious part was his stripper girlfriend, whose name I didn’t get. She was about a foot taller than him, and her clear platform shoes made her about a foot and a half taller than him. She spent the entire tournament perched on the arm of his chair, cooing in his ear, rubbing his shoulders (and probably other things), and (dig this one, babies), taking her boobs out of her underwear everytime he went all-in. He’d say, “All-In!” (always with a great flourish), and then turn to her and say, “…and All-Out!” She’d giggle, and flop ‘em out. That was funny the first time, I’m sure. After that, for me, it got to be fairly annoying, which was likely the whole point of the ritual. I was fortunate and only had to play about three orbits (about 30 minutes) with the guy. I bet he went all-in six times in that span of time. All-in appeared to be his move of choice, anyway, and he had built up a nice fortress of chips with it. Another quirky aspect about the guy was his apparent inability not to think out loud. You know how when you get bet at, your mind runs through all the possibilities of what that bet might mean: bet size, stack size of the bettor, position, previous play, pre-flop v. post-flop, what time is it in the round, how many other players are in the pot, are dogs better than cats, is there life after death? Those kinds of things. Well, ol’ Eon seemed to have an undisconnectable engagement ‘twixt his brain and his mouth. All of that, and all of the digressions therefrom, had to be voiced out loud on Every. Single. Hand. Again, I don’t know if this was schtick, if it was a strategy, if it was his normal mode of play, if he was incapable of doing the computational & situational strategerizing internally, or what. But, from my seat, it was grating as hell — it slowed down the game tremendously. So did the flourish-filled countdown of his stacks on his regular all-ins…doing the dealer moves that they have to do to show they’re not palming chips but which are completely unnecessary when you’re counting your own checks. Tiresome, it were. If I had not been short-stacked, I might have been able to relax and let it slide, but I needed hands to play, and this dude was keeping me from getting them. GRRRR! Dan says he bubbled out, so I’ll take that as karmic payback. It’s not as if I intensely disliked the man, I just wanted some cards, and I didn’t want to have to wait for them, and he was dragging things out. Oh, yeah — the stripper? She was your basic generic, wavy-haired, eye-candy, stripper-from-metal-videos, drenched in perfume…you could smell her from 15 feet away…anyone know why they do that? All it does is make me think of the sailors of olde, who used copious amounts of Worcestershire sauce to cover the smell and taste of of slowly-rotting meat on their voyages.

- Once more, I found myself physically hurting. Sitting for seven hours is hard. I made a concious effort to get out of my chair far more often and it helped, but it still got to me. I guess I’m going to have to try out this “exercise” thing all the kids are talking about.

- Mentally, I felt like I stayed on top of my game. I made one really horrendous call — an all-in while holding wired sixes that gobsmacked me. I’d raised it up from the button, and the BB snapped back at me with an AQ or something pretty strong. I should have laid it down, but I panicked. It was near the end of the rebuy, and I was looking for a cheap win. Instead, I’m the one re-buying. I shall state here and now that I laid down about 20 little pocket pairs in the face of a bet during the entire tournament. Other than that, I got one pair of Js and one pair of Ks and I could do nothing with either one of them – nada — just the blinds on a 3xBB bet. Big sigh. ‘Twould’ve been nice to get some rocking chair hands, but they didn’t happen. My three AKs all flopped eensy boards, and I was out of the hand after the flop on all of them. I went out of the PI on a QJ-sooted from the big blind. I got raised from the small blind, so I pushed and prayed hoping it was a steal attempt. I got four to the flush, but his ATs paired, and I was done for the night.* My stack would have withstood one more orbit, I think, so I probably should have waited for that one last good hand to make my stand, but QJs is not the worst hand to play at that point…or is it? Dunno.

- I lasted longer than this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy. By law, I don’t count Dan, since he was tournament director, and it’s pretty impossible that you can play good poker and run a tournament of this size. Others may disagree. The other four are heros of The Wife (and damn good poker players, to boot), so, you know, minor bride props for me. I sometimes think that if they weren’t pokerers, I would not be allowed to play cards at a strip club.

- The usual collection of very good poker players that are friends of Dan were there in force, and took up fully 50% of the final two tables. I don’t yet know who won, but my bet would be on Fearsome Todd or Austin Pete, and I would not bet against Shane (who already has a seat to the WSOP from another tournament win.) Newly-mustachioed Adam was playing quite strong, too. I also got to meet Fearsome Todd’s dad, who made the first half of the day really enjoyable. A coffee-houser par excellence. Mr. Dad is obviously a Big Wheel, and was having a grand time, rebuying three or four times. He also kindly bought the table humongous stinky cigars at one point. He’s the kind of guy I want to be when I grow up – golfing, pokering, stogeying rich guy.

I wish now, in retrospect, that I had stayed till the end, but I was frazzled and fairly limp, and not a little disappointed, after I went out. I’m still amazed at just how much playing poker for this long can take out of me. I think it’s the tournament pressure and being short-stacked for so long that zonked me. It’s objectively a little bit silly that I would be so intense over a $100 investment, but the payout was quite significant to a working man like me (especially here at the gift-buying time of year). And I don’t mind stating that the fleeting honor would have been a nice ego stroke.

The ultimate bottom line, though, is the realization of just how far I have to go to be a good card player. I like to kid myself and say that I know the cards, but there’s still a terrifyingly long path to go before I can justify that statement. There’s no way around the fact that I’m still a lifetime loser at poker (but the gap is shrinking, honey!) So, it’s back to the online grind, back to the books, back to the Poker Tracker, back to hand analysis, etc. for the forseeable future.

Until, you know, I decide that I’d rather take up eBaying, or the golf, some other diversion…

IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR, YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED UPDATE: Dan posts the winner and some other TWIB-ish notes. Of minor interest is the note that the winner of the event is the nice young man who knocked me out. So, I can say, with my remaining shred of pride, that it took the best to beat me (NB: there’s only one molecule of truth in that statement.)

* That’s only funny to me and my lovely bride. After her sixteenth verbal barb at me about “going to gamble illegally with a bunch of strippers” yesterday morning, I told her that a) it’s not gambling, b) there would no lap dances during play, and c) if she heard the garage door opening while it was still light outside to please lay off the sarcasm. Since it was dark when I lost, I count this as a personal victory. It’s the little things, you know.