Friday, March 18, 2005

Please Pass the Marmalade, Jeeves

Because my NCAA bracket is toast. Christ, can I have just ONE year where I'm not shredding my tourney sheet by lunchtime on Friday? OK, I'm not totally done, I haven't lost an Elite Eight team yet, as I told someone yesterday my first round has been like the first five minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Got an email from a reader who, in an extremely bizarre coincidence, works for the company I got laid off from last year. Strange. Anyway, he told me of some tasty poker action here in the 'Burgh that I was not aware of. Alas, I've decided to take a step back, do some reading and study, and rebuild my game from the ground up. I have a lot of writing I'm in the middle of and I still need to, you know, find a real job and crap like that. But if and when (and unfortunately IF seems more the operative word) I get a job I'd like to be playing a better brand of poker than I've been displaying lately.

I'll still be playing in the Blogger online events, of course. And if it's a slow Friday night (as tonight promises to be) I might try the odd SNG. It reminds me of a skit I heard on the college radio show at Penn State. They have an anti-drug public service announcment from former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten: "Don't doooo drugs. Drugs are baaaaad. Drugs killed me friend Sid! So don't doooo drugs...well, unless you're really BOOOOOORED or something!!! What's the harm in a little fun, maybe some WANKAH comes up to you and you break a bottle over 'is head!!!!!" That's me and poker for the moment. Just for a little fun.

Speaking of sketches, did anyone see any of the Fox "Sketch Show" Sunday night? Appalling. Here's the skit (if one could call it that) that kicked off the show: You see a guy (girl?) cycling down a road. There's a sign that says "DANGER". The person rides past and the sign falls and hits him on the head.

There is no way, NO WAY, I would allow a joke like that to be broadcast on national TV. How about this one--woman is sitting at a desk clattering away at a typewriter. She reaches the end of the line and violently hits the carriage return. "Get with the 21st century," a co-worker sneers. Next scene you see her clattering away at a keyboard looking at a monitor. She hits the return key, and sweeps the monitor off the desk.

BWAHAHAHAHA! Maybe I've been too hard on Tilt after all. Nah, probably not. I didn't mention that, in the final episode, the FBI lets the insane cop Nickel have 5 minutes alone in a bathroom with the Matador. I don't know that, even in this day and age, the Feds let lunatics duke it out with people in their custody. I mean, if they (and by this I mean the FBI and our moronic heroes) really want to nail Everest, is giving him an iron-clad and perfectly legitimate brutality case the best way to accomplish this? They arrested him practically on-camera after the tournament ended--how exactly would the Feds explain him having a broken jaw and cracked ribs and a concussion? Then again, we see Nickel returning home to Iowa with a split lip and bruises above his eye, while the Matador looked perfectly normal. Nothing was said about what happened during those 15 minutes. They just moved past it.

This really pisses me off, because it's not that hard to do these things right. How long would it take to come up with a plausible plotline that would be equally dramatic? Or, in this case, dramatic at all? If a writer can't even bother to come up with a clever plot, if indeed he comes up with a plot that not only requires the willing suspension of disbelief but also the deactivation of all logic circuits, why bother watching? It shows contempt for the audience, which perhaps isn't a surprise as Tilt showed contempt for just about subject it dealt with. Poker, poker players, law enforcement, the cost of revenge, the nature of friendship. The show was nothing more than an attempt to cash in on the latest craze, and we should treat it and its creators with the same contempt they showed us. As I think I've just done.

OK, now I want to hit someone. Someone smaller than me. This most recent WPT event was pretty doggone good. Leave your tight-weak game at home, at this final table you'd better be ready to gambool. Rock-em sock-em action. An observation--is there any poker player (or human being) alive who looks more different with sunglasses on than David Williams? Wearing his shades he looks like a professional badass, like one coooool muthafucka. Without his shades he looks like your paperboy. You want to ask if he wants a Popsicle. Remarkable.

The whole Negreanu-Williams "Flop Master/Flop Apprentice" thing was hilarious. Less so was Negreanu slow-rolling Williams on the last hand, but it wasn't too egregious. Danny got pocket aces in two of the last 3 hands they showed (or was it the last two?) and Williams got unlucky to hit a pair of kings on the flop the last hand. Not much to be done about that, especially as hyper-aggressive as the game was.

That sound you heard Wednesday night was Josh Arieh throwing up as he watched himself bluff his way out of the tournament against Negreanu's straight. He played a take-no-prisoners game, and as he did in the WSOP made some nice laydowns, but you could see in the interview with Shana afterwards that he was agonizing over that last hand. Understandably so.

They showed several (but certainly not sufficent) shots of Angela Arieh in the audience, and is she a lovely woman. I don't think Josh would be too distracted by Shana in that red dress, thank you very much Mr. WPT-Promoman. Sitting next to Mrs. Arieh was Carlos Mortensen's wife Cecilia (an excellent player in her own right). Paul Phillips I believe described her as being "cute as a button", which either means that Paul doesn't understand the meaning of that expression or, more likely, he has experience with a much higher-quality of button than myself. Because she's dreamy.

But of course no discussion of swoon-inducing female poker players could be complete on these pages without mention of Isabelle Mercier, and this time I actually have reason to bring her up other than my puppydogish crush on her. She's cashed in the EPT tournment Otis is covering in Monte Carlo and is hanging on with 17 players left. Check out Otis' reports and send all your positive waves her way.

I close with a picture of the Lady girding herself for Battle:

posted by Gene @ 1:08 PM   |