stevesbets

Today I played in the o8 Wcoop event all day only to get 68th out of abotu 850 players for basically no money. I have to say, I don’t think I’ll ever play a limit tournament again. In the beginning of the tournament, hands are mostly meaningless as you are playing limits that are way too small for the chip stacks, then suddenly limits get too big and pretty much everyone is playing 1k 2k with a 15k chip stack, it just doesn’t work when one limit hand can end the average stacks tournament with over 200 people left. As a result of my long failure in this tournament, I missed a night out with my friends but went to meet them for a slice of pizza to end the night and offered them a ride home.

I picked them up in the west village and we crammed 5 people in my car, 3 in the back did not really fit too well. The last thing I wanted was to get pulled over because well, it’s pretty much never a good choice of evening activity. As we drove into a wall of police cars, I got a little nervous when I realized that the cops were watching each and every car drive by and picking at “random” who to pull over. I had no doubt that a somewhat flashy convertible with 5 twenty-somethings in the car would be on their list to inspect.

Of course I had not drank anything, but I did feel a little bit loopy from 9 straight hours of online poker. The cop motioned for me to stop, it didn’t help that my friend Rebecca could not stop cackling like a rabid hyena in the back seat. We’re still not quite sure why she found the situation so funny. The cop asked me if I had drank anything and stuck his face very very close to mine. I found this somewhat intrusive and I was wondering if he wanted me to actually breathe on him so he could smell. In the end I thought a deep breath may have been considered rude so I just breathed normally. He then requested my license and told me to pull over. At this point we noticed at least 2 other people being hauled away from the stop point in handcuffs, I guess the police were accomplishing their objective. After a brief wait the officer returned my license and asked me to step out of the car.

At this point he went through a whole litany of questions about where I was coming from, where I was going, and why the girl in my car was laughing so much. He once again asked if I had drank anything and I reiterated my innocence. He then said my eyes looked very red, to which I did not really know how to respond. I opted for saying, “well I’ve stared at my computer for the last 9 hours”,  I probably should have also pointed out that I had swam earlier with goggles which I think was the cause of the irritation. He nodded and took out a breathalyzer. He asked if I had taken the test before and then went out of his way to excessively vouch for the sterility of the tube I had to blow into so that I would not fear germs. This had the opposite of the intended effect on me and I became quite worried about someone with contagious something or other who happened to blow into the tube before me. After passing he said, “well congrats, you told the truth, you’re sober” and let me go.

This whole encounter left me with two questions. The part of me that believes that “brevity is the soul of wit” wonders why he needed to go through the whole song and dance routine to determine my drunkenness if he could just test me and let me go on my way. The whole process seems rather redundant.

The law student in me wonders how on earth such stops are legal. They are clearly profiling with who they choose to pull over, additionally they have no probable cause or definite violation to be infringing on my liberty there. I am not necessarily against such stops, they clearly  found some drunk drivers tonight and in doing so made my commute safer, but how is it possible that it is legal to deprive people of their liberty for no legitimate reason. After all, had I not listened to the cop and had just driven on rather than pulling over for the test, I would no doubt have been pursued and probably arrested.

I am almost a full two weeks into law school and I have come to one definite conclusion, my life will be very different for the next few years than it has been for the last few. This is not because it is already excruciatingly hard or even because I’ll be spending time thinking about obscure legal concepts (as I would say this has been a hobby of mine for years regardless of school). Rather it is because I simply do not have the amount of time I used to have. I now see myself as essentially having two jobs even though many people would say I have none. I am both a law student and professional poker player. Combine that with trying to get into decent shape and having a semblance of a social life and there just isn’t the same amount of time to make up games with friends about who can throw crumpled paper balls close to a designated area on my coffee table. For the past few years, anytime service at a restaurant was terrible, or somebody with me was being terribly slow at accomplishing some task, my near robotic response was, “not that I really have anywhere to be anyway.” This is both happily and sadly no longer the case. When deciding what tournaments to play, I no longer need only consider bankroll, buy in and field strength, I need to see if I’ll happen to have a few day window in my life at school over the next 3 years. These concerns probably sound laughable to most of you who have had jobs this whole time and can’t really imagine that I feel so busy from a few weeks at Fordham Law School. I appreciate the silliness of my words but I urge you to remember that everything is relative. I am used to having time as my greatest asset. Time to be on call for friends, gamble at will and travel whenever and wherever I need or want. This is all coming to an end and I finally need to prioritize and make some decisions about what things are not worth doing. I’m sad to say there is a stack of TV shows I have not yet to see that I was going to get to soon, those may have to be put on the back burner…