stevesbets

I have never told anyone the specifics of the story I’m about to write, I don’t know why I am putting it now in a public domain, but here it goes.

Three years ago yesterday I woke up in my dorm room shrugged off sleep and went to play the Saturday online poker tournaments on partypoker and pokerstars. My girlfriend was at dance practice for the day so I intended to play poker most of the day straight through to dinner time. My mom interrupted me with a phone call asking what I was doing. The conversation was fairly standard, but there was an edge in her voice and I sensed there was something just a little bit off, she asked questions she doesn’t normally ask and eventually wished me a good day and hung up. Awhile later she called back and acted VERY strangely before hanging up and I began to get nervous. I called my dad’s office to try and gather what was going on and became nervous when it went to voicemail only to be momentarily relieved minutes later when I remembered that it was Saturday. I called my dad’s cell phone and it rang a few times before being answered, but no voice came on to the other end. After about 10 seconds I faintly heard my mom’s voice in the background and the phone clicked off.

A few minutes later, I was still in two partypoker 1k single table tournaments when my world collapsed. and I got through to my mom again, in a fairly normal tone she said, “Steven, is Jon or Bree or anyone else around?” When I said no and told her she was making me nervous she suddenly broke into tears and said, “Your dad died this morning of a heart…”

I have no memory of the rest of her words or the conversation, I just started screaming. As the walls collapsed in on me I felt like there was a chance I was in a dream or some sort of alternate unreal reality and tried to gather myself to figure out what was happening. A few minutes later is my first memory and I realized that as I was screaming at the top of my lungs I was still playing the partypoker 1k sit and goes going all in every hand. To this day I have no idea why I was still playing or why I did what came next, but someone in the chat was making fun of my play (I think I was going all in every hand) and I declared to the table, “My father just died”. People at the table made some sort of remarks only one of which I remember, “If that’s true why are you still playing”. Its amazing what happens when you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing and can’t comprehend how everything you know has suddenly changed. When the other player said this and it came to me that quitting was an option, I dropped the mouse and my GA heard my screaming and came to see what was going on. Somehow over the next couple hours I ended up in my sister’s room at Penn, then my house in the suburbs.

Flash forward three years. By way of pure chance, I I found myself in a religious institution on Feb 26 yesterday for probably the first time since my father’s funeral. Luke and I were visiting St Paul’s Cathedral and resting after walking up and down all the steps when a priest came to the pulpit and recited a prayer of some sort. Afterwards he said something like, “I’ll be around all day if anyone wants to talk to me about anything”. My aversion to organized religion is fairly well known, but for a very brief moment I even considered going to talk to him just to see what he might say about my story. In that brief moment I understood why many people resort to faith without science nor proof, because perhaps something so terrible happened that there is no other way they can understand it or make it dissipate in their heads. Being unable to change who I am though, and being unsure I would want to anyway, Luke and I finished our visit to St Paul’s and left without another religious word.

Through circumstance I haven’t been with my family for the last two “anniversary’s” of February 26 but I can’t say I fully regret that. Some days aren’t worth remembering.

I have now been in London approximately 24 hours , and i have seen many of the “important” touristy sites. Last afternoon we went by the tower of london and London Bridge until the pouring started and we headed back to the hotel. For dinner we went to Lester Square which was an area I was very impressed with. Lit up like Vegas and bustling like Manhattan, it was a vibrant place to hang out even on a Sunday night.

This morning we went by Buckingham Palace to witness the changing of the guard. We agreed that the white house needs a dog and pony show of that magnitude. Even though it was a random Monday morning, the crowd was insane to watch some soldiers march around. The USA could make a fortune to finance their government spending.

Next was Westminster Abbey which was awe inspiring, when I depart life I want to go with a sculpture of me on top of my tomb like the people laid to rest in Westminster. I was disappointed that they didn’t allow photos inside of the church. I don’t have a really strong understanding of anything holy.

After the Abbey Luke and I were walking along the Thames looking over at the eye of London (which looks like a giant Ferris Wheel).  I noted that the wall was very low on the bridge we were traversing and we joked about how much we would need to be paid to jump into the river. Luke mentioned that there would be a good chance of survival as opposed to leaping off the golden gate bridge. He went on to tell me some interesting tales of the suicide culture of the golden gate bridge. Over 1000 people have jumped from it. As the number approached 1000, a local radio station set up shop on the bridge to track the count to 1000 suicides, announcing what the number was up to over the airwaves. They apparently even offered a reward of like 10 cases of beer to the family of the 1000th jumper. I was pretty shocked that such indifference could be shown to all of these deaths. About 3 or 4 of the jumpers survived due to hitting the water in just the right way. When interviewed after the fact, to a man they said that the instant they jumped they immediately regretted the decision. This is a fairly notable phenomenon. These people were so depressed that they chose to end their life AND actually followed through with it, but as soon as the decision was irreversible they changed their mind. This as is close as we can get to talking with the dead. Let that be a lesson to any of you contemplating suicide out there.

A few other notable observations about London.  Everything is obviously insanely expensive right down to daily internet access at the hotel which is 15 pounds (30 dollars roughly). Online poker is advertised all over the place including on subways and on billboards. The USA really needs to open its doors to online poker advertising, lets put a big full tilt logo in place of the cup o noodles in time square so we could watch online poker blow up to never before seen heights. One thing I forgot to mention about EPT Copenhagen was that there was an insanely large media presence there. I would say there was roughly 4 times the media there than at a standard WPT stop, the Euros just love poker. Back to London, it reminds me of New York City and I really like that, tons to do and eat, but then the added perk of legalized casino gambling and sportsbetting (though I haven’t placed a bet yet). The abundant William Hill sports betting parlors are in stark contrast to USA’s absurd stand on everything gambling related. We have yet to figure out if the rake here is as exorbitant as the rake in the Danish poker games.  Overall I really like this city, I could definitely live here and I can’t say that about most places.

I’ve been in Denmark for a few days so far and there are a few things I figure are worthy of remark. Firstly, both Copenhagen and London are obscenely expensive. They are both above new york city on the list of most expensive cities worldwide, combine that with the dollar being totally tanked and prices are more outrageous than most people can imagine. A few examples(i know those who read my blog are mathematically gifted so i’ll let you do the conversions, 1 pound is about 2 dollars, and 1 dollar is about 5 Kroners): in the London airport I got a burger, fries and garlic bread for the low price of 25 pounds. My friend and I went to lunch in Copenhagen yesterday at a small italian place where we split a small pizza and each got a small appetizer for the very reasonable price of 368 Kroners. Dominos pizza delivers to our hotel room for the price of 125 Kroners per medium pizza. Last but not least, a 5 minute cab ride will clock in at 100 Kroners.

On the subject of cabs, nearly every cab that we’ve seen so far is a mercedes benz, not like an old trashy one either, brand new, detailed benz’s. When I asked the cab driver last night how they all have mercedes’ he smiled and said, “we like mercedes”

On the gambling front, I busted towards the end of day 1 of the EPT event. They started us with 10,000 chips as opposed to the current WPT trend of starting with 20 or 30k chips so the structure moved the tournament along pretty fast. There were two day 1s with 230 people each, when I busted there was about 95 people left in my day1. So i made it kind of far but it was all for naught as a pretty sick turn card crushed my EPT dreams.

Casino Copenhagen in our hotel is tauted as the biggest and greatest hotel in all of Northern Europe. It is very very different from any casino i can imagine in the USA. Men are required to wear jackets, there is and 85 Kroner entry fee for the privilege of gambling, there are no free drinks, they are open only from 2pm to 4am. At 3pm yesterday there were a total of 4 tables open in the whole casino, 2 blackjack and 2 roulette. In the blackjack games they have just about every rule possible to hurt the player, and a tiny max bet of 2000 Kroners. Additionally, it is expected for players to tip 10% of their original bet anytime they get blackjack and they tell you so on the signs by the blackjack games. The poker games they spread are no less ridiculous. Since it is tournament time they are spreading games like 25 50 nl/plo (all games are in Kroners), 50 100 nlh and 50 100 plo. The rake on these games is 5% per pot with a max of a whopping 150 Kroners per pot!! Needless to say, if there were an aggressive, wild 9 handed plo game at the 25 50 level, the house would probably have most of the money after 12 hours of play.

The city of Copenhagen sort of looks like a fairy tale with colorful interesting buildings, twisty towers and old churches. It is dreary and cold every day at this time of year but apparently the summer sports a sun that is up until 11pm every day and parties around the clock. Luke and I had a blackjack dealer yesterday who looked exactly like Miranda from Sex and the City and we inquired about the prices of apartments in the swanky area of town near the Queens house (we witnessed the changing of the guard). She said that a 1000 sq foot apartment may run between 20 and 30k Kroners. More expensive than Manhattan! They call diet coke coca cola light, and they use coke zero as an equal substitute for it. Every 7 11 is well stocked with all sorts of pastries, many of which are unrecognizable to my American eye.

I converted some Dollars into Kroners at the train station yesterday and the clerk warned me to beware of pick pockets as she dispensed the money. I felt no need to beware since I feel far safer here than in most cities in the US. As my friend Luke put it, “In America you may be killed for your air jordans, that just doesn’t happen here”

Today we’re going across the bridge to Sweden to check out Malmo,  seeing the twisted tower designed by Calatrava interests us. Maybe I can dream that one day I’ll have the 30 million required to buy one of the cubes in the new building he’s designing in Manhattan. That’s all for now, I’ll give more updates later.

I’m sitting at a bar in the Newark NJ airport waiting for my plane to depart for londons heathrow airport.This woman just tried to walk with a drink out of the bar and the bartender told her that she had to stay inside with the glass, she gave the bartender a nasty eye roll. Why the meanness for just doing her job?

I’m getting to Copenhagen in a roundabout way, flying virgin atlantic to London at which point I have 5 hours to get my bags, change terminals to british airways, and check in for my flight from London to Copenhagen. On the way back I’ll spend a few days in London, hopefully with cash in my pocket if the tournament goes well.  My friend Luke (Lukekim.blogspot.com) is flying from Vegas to join me for this trip so props to him for coming along. If anyone is going to be in Copenhagen or London drop me a line, also if you have any good ideas for things to do in either place let me know.

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails lately and I’m sorry for being unable to respond to the questions, I’ve been really busy. One person asked said that there were too many terrible players for him to beat the low stakes sngs. As I havent played them for awhile I don’t really know how tough they are, but my guess is too many bad players cant really be a bad thing. This is one of the many dumb/weird things that especially live poker players do, they talk like people are terrible then they say they don’t want to play with them. For example, I was playing 2 5 nl with some friends at the borgata a few weeks ago, when i play that low, i sometimes play pretty loose and terrible. My friend with me plays far worse than me. More than one of the “regulars” made some absurd offhand comment about how the players at this table were too loose and terrible for them, and they needed a table change. Several others left. I honestly dont understand how people so illogical can live in the world and get by. I mean, I sometimes have trouble ordering pizza, and yet people with so little thought are capable of living rich full lives. Note that I’m not making fun of casual players that choose not to devote much time to understanding poker, the players I speak of are borgata REGULARS that utter those sentiments.

I just read a book called Moneyball which profoundly interested me. I have a big blog coming up with my thoughts on it when I get the time, but for now, anyone that can get their hands no this book should read it, even if you don’t like baseball.  Anyway, my laptop is dying so I’m gonna start one of my books. Everybody start reading Moneyball now!