A couple of years ago, there was a big scandal with a couple of New Jersey cops and former NHL player Rick Tocchet (who must have known these guys from playing for the Philadelphia Flyers) running a book operation. At the time, Tocchet’s boss was a guy named Wayne Gretzky…maybe you’ve heard of him. Sports icon. Perhaps the greatest player in any team sport, ever. The Great One. Wayne was, and still is, coaching the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes now, and Tocchet was the assistant coach.

Anyway, when the gambling ring got busted, only one celebrity name came out as to having placed action: Janet Jones, former model and actress, and wife of…Wayne Gretzky. The Great One’s reputation took a pretty solid hit, even though nobody accused him of anything, just because it was revealed what a degenerate gambler his wife is. She made TONS of bets, including really silly stuff like Super Bowl coin flip props (anyone who puts action on a coin flip, paying a vig, should immediately head to rehab…Do Not Pass Go).

The bottom line is there would be NOTHING smarter of Janet Jones Gretzky to do than to lay super-low for awhile, especially when it comes to gambling. I obviously don’t knock putting a little side action down on anything, but when you’re connected how she’s connected to a sport with a tenuous hold on the American sports market, you can’t just do whatever the hell you want.

So, what do I see when I turn on the High Stakes Golf action on ESPN? Along side Doyle, Dewey Tomko, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu…partnering with Vince Van Patten…Janet Jones Gretzky. She repays everyone’s forgiveness by anteing up $125k in one of the bigger gambling props ever put on TV.

Wayne Gretzky is a small-town Canadian kid who happened to play a game better than anyone before, and likely anyone since. I don’t care how hot she was, and how much of a MILF she may be now…nobody deserves that kind of disloyalty. Yuck.

I’ve been travelling around a lot. I’ve been in LA and Vegas a lot in the past month, playing a lot of poker. It turns out that I’m a bad blogger…. the more interesting my experiences, the more I think, “Am I really going to put that in a blog?” So the whole thing just doesn’t work out. But I’ll keep at it.

I played this pot on Saturday….
Full Tilt Poker Game #3991315183: Table Pantheon (6 max) - $200/$400 - Pot Limit Omaha Hi - 5:29:00 ET - 2007/10/28
Seat 1: Luck123 ($8,000)
Seat 3: Gus Hansen ($62,587)
Seat 4: David Benyamine ($135,351.50)
Seat 5: Brandon Adams ($48,437)
Seat 6: pokerinvestcouk ($32,996)
Gus Hansen has 5 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen posts the small blind of $200
David Benyamine posts the big blind of $400
The button is in seat #6
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Brandon Adams raises to $1,400
pokerinvestcouk has 15 seconds left to act
pokerinvestcouk calls $1,400
Gus Hansen calls $1,200
David Benyamine calls $1,000
*** FLOP *** [2s 5c 4c]
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen bets $5,600
David Benyamine calls $5,600
Brandon Adams has 15 seconds left to act
Brandon Adams raises to $28,000
pokerinvestcouk folds
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen calls $22,400
David Benyamine raises to $88,800
Brandon Adams calls $19,037, and is all in
Gus Hansen: ups
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Luck123: i dont know him, who do you think he is ?
Gus Hansen calls $33,187, and is all in
David Benyamine shows [Kd 4s Kc 4d]
Brandon Adams shows [5h 7s 3s 6s]
Gus Hansen shows [6h Tc 3h 7d]
Uncalled bet of $27,613 returned to David Benyamine
*** TURN *** [2s 5c 4c] [5d]
*** RIVER *** [2s 5c 4c 5d] [8s]
David Benyamine shows a full house, Fours full of Fives
Gus Hansen shows a straight, Eight high
David Benyamine wins the side pot ($28,300) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Brandon Adams shows a straight, Eight high
David Benyamine wins the main pot ($146,709) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Gus Hansen is sitting out
Brandon Adams is sitting out
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $175,011 Main pot $146,711. Side pot $28,300. | Rake $2
Board: [2s 5c 4c 5d 8s]
Seat 1: Luck123 is sitting out
Seat 3: Gus Hansen (small blind) showed [6h Tc 3h 7d] and lost with a straight, Eight high
Seat 4: David Benyamine (big blind) showed [Kd 4s Kc 4d] and won ($175,009) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Seat 5: Brandon Adams showed [5h 7s 3s 6s] and lost with a straight, Eight high
Seat 6: pokerinvestcouk (button) folded on the Flop

In other news, Viffer (Dave Peat) played for 77 hours straight (in the same seat, no significant breaks) at Commerce recently. By the way, for those who don’t know, he’s one hell of a live poker player when he’s on. I think he even managed to book a win on that marathon session. One of the overlooked arguments for booking a win and going to sleep after, say, 16 hours, is that if you keep going, you will often find yourself in the situation of, “Shit, i’ve been playing for thirty hours, but this game is too good to quit. No way I can leave.” And next thing you know you’re 77 hours deep.

I think Gus has been winning a decent bit on FT lately. One thing that (sometimes) seems to work out for him is, if his hand has any value at all, he’s going to see it through. I mean he’s not folding away much of his equity.

BA

Tonight my wife went out with a friend for drinks, she suggested that to pass the time my girls and I could go shopping for my youngest daughters birthday party supplies.  When I told my girls this their eyes lit up.  They know I am a sucker.  If it was a fight they would have stopped it.  Here were some of the lines:

“What is a party without balloons?”, certainly that is hard to argue.

“We need gift bags”, reasonable.

“We need things for our gift bags”, they have me here.

“Bratz bubbles, Tiaras and charm bracelets”, OK, so now I am starting to feel it.

“We have to get pirate party favors for the boys”, you have to be kidding me.

“Stickers”, I have to admit, I still like stickers.

In the end the only thing I think I said no to was, well, nothing that I can recall.  I really don’t think my kids are spoiled but tonight would not have been a good time to judge me on that one.

Get paid to play at UltimateBet by getting max comps, read below.

A very long time ago in a far away land I used to do some consulting work for UltimateBet.  Those were the heyday’s of online poker, all of the things everyone has come to expect with online poker didn’t exist in those days.  There are 2 things though that make a difference to players today, resizable tables (so you can play multiple tables and see them all) and saving hand histories to disk (so you can import them into a tracking system that will help you analyze your play).  If you want to be good at online poker these are important.  For various reasons UB was late to the party on some of these but not any longer.  I have long contended that UB’s software is the best out there, I believe totally but certainly on speed.  UB is the fastest and cleanest interface there is which is partly why they didn’t want additional things to slow down their client.

One thing most people don’t think of when it comes to resizable tables is going bigger.  I usually only play 1 or 2 games so I tend to bring the tables to full screen.  If I am playing bigger stakes it allows me to focus, not to mention that my monitor is not a computer monitor, it is a television and it is not as close to me as a computer monitor would be.  At full screen the UB tables are super clear and the action stayed fast.

I know that Brandon was writing an article on Poker Prospector from Poker Academy.  Both of us have been using it lately, it is the evolution of Poker Tracker.  The imports work like a charm and the data you can access is unbelievable.  Adding the UB Hand History file was a snap and UB even gives you instructions on how to do it.

I am likely going to be writing an article soon on comps from UB but if you don’t have an UltimateBet account this may be a good time to get one.  Signing up through this link gets you 30% of your rake back (similar to casino comps). 

If you have checked out the site for a while you will have noticed a lot of changes.  Unfortunately some of those changes had our blogs down for a few days so with everyone’s help I am hoping to get back into the blogging groove in a big way.  We still have some dust with the new construction but overall things are very close to what they are going to be long term. 

Last week was awful in so many ways, first of all I was sick, which made everything seem tons worse than normal.  Secondly I found myself handling a ton of non productive things.  I had a meeting in Florida with Brandon (Adams) and some of his business partners.  I go to a lot of meetings but this was one impressive group of people who are looking to do some big business in the Mixed Martial Arts world and additionally in Poker.  I have to admit, what little I saw was impressive and as more details come out I will keep you guys posted.

Overall though my life has gone through a significant simplification process, sometimes when I bite of more than I can chew it is just time to purge and that process is over and I have a lot of clarity because of it.  Which of course makes me want to play a ton of poker, so you can expect to see me at the Limit Tables on most sites this week; hopefully my clear head will help my game.  I am going back to limit because that is where my sweet spot is, I need a decent run and in the past my best runs come in limit holdem.  Did you know there are more losing players playing limit holdem than in no limit holdem.  I am basing it on the data I have run but it seems pretty apparent that when fish realize they can’t play anything like a jackass they run to limit poker where they lose their money slower.

Personally I left Florida and on the same day I caught a flight to Chicago to go see Wicked with my wife.  It is our 12^th wedding anniversary today and I just wanted her to have my full attention so I left my computer in my suitcase and I left my cell phone off.  I am not a huge fan of Chicago; it just always feels so tense when I am there.  It is really not any different from all of the other mega cities in that way, I am not sure if it is the constant traffic or the merging of so many cultures but in Chicago it isn’t a good mix, at least that was my opinion.  On Friday we got in late and I was wiped out from flying all day so we just went to Geno’s East for some deep dish and got to sleep pretty early (though I did stay up later than I should have watching Blow with Johnny Depp, man, that is still a good movie).  The next morning was a whirlwind because my wife forgot the tickets at home.  Between the concierge at the Sheraton and the ticket office at the Oriental Theater we did get something worked out and both of them helped us tremendously.  Before the show we ate at Morton’s, my wife picked an Italian place initially but I pushed for Morton’s.  Morton’s is not a homerun but it is a solid triple and after a week of being sick and dealing with a lot of little things I didn’t need a homerun, I needed a guarantee and Morton’s delivered.

The play was phenomenal and I have spent most of the evening listening to the soundtrack with my daughters.  After seeing the play I may fly them to either New York or Chicago to see it, it is just too good for them to miss. 

I feel like I could sleep for a week and I might just do it.  I don’t have a lot planned for this week so I am going to take it pretty easy and play a lot of poker.  Just for some fun I will let you guys know.  Tonight I played a mix of 15-30 and 30-60 limit, 2-3 tables at a time, I think I ended down about $600, which is not a huge loss.  I am going to try and not get buried while finding my groove and once I am there I will play as much as possible.  I am hoping for a nice 20-30k run to end the year.  Recently I ran up close to that amount but gave most of it back playing live and then ran bad for about a week online.  But that was playing No Limit.  Middle Limit-Limit Holdem is my bread and butter and I expect I will do well with the clarity I have at the moment.

Wish me luck.

The day after I busted out of EPT Baden, I started off playing 25/50 PLO and NL on Stars and ended up losing about $25,000 to start the day. I went out to a spa to get a massage. If you know me, you know I love me some massages! Lol. Baden is well known as a “Spa Town” so they have very good massages for very competitive rates. Massages usually cost anywhere from $100-150/hour back home, but here it cost me 45 Euros which was only about $65!

Later that night, Ansky, Hevad “Rainkhan” Khan, Anita, and I went out to “El Greco”, a nice Greek restaurant right around the corner from Casino Baden. We did the usual, which was talking about a lot of poker stuff and joking around. After dinner, we decided to go check out the live cash games. I decided to start off playing 20/40 No-Limit Hold ‘em while I was waiting for a seat in a juicier 20/40 Pot-Limit Omaha game. I started off the session stuck in NL, but when a seat opened over in the PLO game, I was able to make a comeback and book a win. The next afternoon, I went down to the casino again and was on the waiting list for hours for the 20/40 PLO and 20/40 NL games. Waiting such a long time for a seat didn’t make me feel quite as good about playing, and I probably should have gone home and taken a nap or just played online. When I don’t feel like playing, even if I get my money in with the nuts, it just doesn’t seem like I do very well, and I‘m not sure why. I’ve been focusing a lot lately in the past month or so on fixing this as much as possible, because I used to put in 12 hour average long sessions day after day after day, every day of the month almost, unless I had something important to do. Thomas Wahlroos was on my left, and the guy I busted out of the EPT with my AK to his JT was sitting across from me and to the right. Thomas Wahlroos was doing a little bit of straddling as well as some other people at the table, making the game play a little extra aggressive, and larger. I had about $8k in front of me; Thomas had the same, and the guy I busted out of the tournament that we’ll call “Euro John Doe” had about $15-20k when the following hand happened:

Two people limped in early position, and I decided to limp in middle position with As6s9c9d. A decent pair with a nut flush and weird straight possibility is a good hand to limp with after a couple of limps. Thomas limped in behind me; another guy limped behind him, Euro John Doe completed in the SB, and the Big Blind checked. Flop was complete gin for me…it almost doesn’t get any better than this flop. The flop was 5s 7s 8c, giving me the nut straight, with a redraw to the nut flush draw. I sensed at least one of the other six people in this pot besides me had to have hit this sort of flop texture. It checks to the guy on my right, who bets 400Euro, I casually throw in a 500Euro bill, as I’m not scared of slow playing this as long as the board doesn’t pair which will be fairly easy to get away from if it does. I want to try and let a worse flush draw peel and let us both hit. I have two nines in my hand, so I have blockers to the bigger straights. I also believe that by me casually smooth calling a flop bet, it will encourage some action from Thomas or the other guy behind him, or even better if one of the guys that already checked, sense weakness and check-raise. In my opinion, I played this hand absolutely perfect and thought it out extremely well and clear. Thomas seemed like he was going to raise, but ended up just calling 400Euro as well. Euro John Doe in the small blind stutters for a few seconds and decides to raise to 2500Euro. At this point, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to fold for another 4000Euro, so I’m glad that I’m probably going to end up raking in a huge pot while extracting max value from everybody. Everybody folds to me and I obviously re-pot it and put all my money in. Thomas is a little visually upset but folds after a few seconds, Euro John Doe takes five seconds and calls. At this point, I’m basically just worried about the board pairing, as I don’t think Euro John Doe has my same straight which is the current nuts, since he took an extra 5 seconds to call, as well that I have two of the four 9’s in the deck, making it less likely he has one of the remaining two. The turn bricks off some low red card like the 3d, and the river comes out the 9h. Euro John Doe says something to the effect “Oh, look, the nuts“, and throws over a red JT88 for top set and a gutshot which spiked on the river. Thomas shares with the table that he had the case-fourth 9 in the deck, as well as middle set of 77. With the hand that Thomas told the table he folded, the percentages of this guy winning the pot from me obviously decreased a substantial amount giving Euro John Doe One 7, One 8, One 9, and Three 5’s left in the deck to catch. Of course he has a redraw to pair the turn card on the river also. Generally, getting a set without even a flush draw all-in on a straight board in an unraised pot with seven players to the flop usually isn’t a good play. With all that said, that’s just PLO for you, flop the nuts, have a nut re-draw, and you can STILL easily get beat, it’s a sick, sick, sick game.

The last full day that we were in Baden, we decided to go to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp near Linz and Gusen, which we had to change trains three times to get there. Although it was a 2 hour trip each way, I felt it was very important to see one of the Concentration Camps that is such a big part of history and especially World War II. I don’t know when I’m going to be in Europe again after this long trip is over, but I felt like I should see one of Nazi camps where many people were murdered and tortured that played such a large role in history. Although it was a large concentration camp, not many people were visiting that day. Standing in the gas chamber and next to the very same ovens which tortured and murdered so many innocent people 65 years ago was definitely an experience. The gas chamber resembled a locker room shower with tile floor and walls. The ovens were long and narrow, and you can see how they were just large enough to slide a person into them while lying down. These rooms were underground and dark, and with only Anita there with me, it was awfully creepy to be there. The U.S. Army ended up liberating the Mauthausen concentration camp a little bit before World War II ended.

I just finished writing the last two blogs as well as this one all in the past two hours. Today, Anita and I are on a train heading to Venice, Italy. We’re going to Venice, Pisa, Florence, and Rome to hang out and do some touristy stuff while vacationing. Everybody that I have talked to who has been to Italy loves it and says I’ll have a wonderful time, and I have no reason not to believe that. So far it’s been a pretty uneventful and long train ride. Let me note that the scenery today has been extraordinarily beautiful passing through the high mountains of Austria with all the trees and plants changing colors since we’re in Fall season now. I can’t wait to get my Italian food grub on!

In my college days, I worked for a couple of years at the deli in the basement of one of the dorms. We served sandwiches and pizzas, and there was a common area with some tables and chairs, a jukebox, a couple of arcade games, and two 7′ pool tables, known to most good players as “bar boxes”. It was a place for us to hang out, and for me to make minimum wage playing pool with friends and strangers during slow times. One of my friends during that time was a guy named Pete, an electrical engineering major two years ahead of me. Pete came from money, and during the times he wasn’t outwardly flaunting it (flying the girl-of-the-semester to a resort in Cancun for spring break when the rest of us were piling 8 in a van down to Daytona, or in my case, working two jobs), he still wasn’t doing much to hide it. He had a mid-line Meucci cue in a hard leather case when the rest of us were schlepping our $30 Dufferins or Vikings in a soft pouch. Pete was charming, fun, and an entertaining guy to hang out with. He also liked
to gamble.

One night, a few people were hanging out with me in deli after closing time at 10 PM. Pete suggested we play a couple of racks of 9-ball at $5 a game. That was fine with me, as I knew I was probably a ball better than he was, and I certainly knew how the tables played better than anyone. After I won 5 of the first 6, he bumped it to $10/game to try to recoup his $20. I won the next 3, and he bumped it to $25/game. At 19, I don’t think I’d ever played for $25/game before…but I won the next three at those stakes, to be up a total of $125. I didn’t know that the condition called “tilt” had a name, but I saw it on his face and posture. His girlfriend Annie saw it too, and asked Pete to slow down a little.

No dice. “$50,” he said, and I won two more. This was quite the rush I was on…he and I both knew that I wasn’t THIS much better than he was, but there’s nights when you’re in dead stroke and the pocket looks like the mouth of a cave. Pete kept doubling up, trying to catch up. After $100/game, I was up $400. After one at $300, it was $700. $500/game, $900/game, $1500/game…it was nuts. Pete was frothing, Annie offered to do ANYTHING if he’d pay me off and go home with her, and I went to take a leak wondering when he was going to let me in on the joke and dig out a wad of Monopoly money or something, and how badly getting stiffed would fuck up our friendship.

After a few more games (he won one game out of four at $1500 per), I unscrewed my cue. It was 1 AM, I had a class in 7 hours, and since I knew this was completely surreal, I wanted to end it. I said, “Pete, you’re my friend, and I don’t like where this is going. You can pay me $1000 right now and I’ll buy the drinks the next time we go out.” Big mistake. HUGE. I had turned my engine off the moment the sentence left my mouth. Pete knew I was done, and more importantly, that I wouldn’t walk out the door. “Paul, what do I owe you, five grand? C’mon, let’s play a set for four.” He won the set by a couple of games, won a few more games at $200 per, and paid me off for the rest. It was 3 AM. I turned off the lights and locked the door behind us, leaving the keys in a drop box for the lunch crew the next morning.

We walked back to a couple of blocks back to our apartment building (he lived two floors below me) in silence.

Apart from the gambling lesson, I took one other thing from that night with me. Our friendship was never the same, but I used the $300 I won to buy my Meucci HOF-1 cue, 19.5 oz, 13mm pro-taper shaft. It’s a thing of beauty that I still have nearly 20 years later.

This article was important to me because it virtually describes what I have done to shave off 30 pounds. I will likely talk more about that in upcoming articles. For now, this is a lot of reading.

I am friends with Nick at Cardschat.com and I am going to tell you that his poker section flat out blows me away. If you are new to poker this is a can�t miss. You are losing money by not knowing this information.

Cardschat.com

Lifehack.org is a site I visit at least once a week. They are a portal for a lot of life issues and I would suspect you will see a lot more from their site. This article speaks to what motivates people. While this section isn�t at all about poker there are some interesting parallels.

Lets see it has been rough and non profitable on the tournament circuit over the last couple of months.  I have been concentrating on tournaments and not what I like best witch is big cash games. I think I need to mix them up a little more.

The Bicycle Club - out first day (lost with AK and beat by AK)

Biloxi-out first day-(AK beat my pocket Queens all in pre flop)Board 65AKJ

Borgata-out first day in the last 30 minutes (9s6s beat my AA all in on flop he had 8 outs) Board 78J75

Turks and Cacaos-out third day 18th place (beat by three outer on the river) Board 448J4

Aruba-out first day-(quad deuces beat my top two AQ) Board 2AQ29

If I was to write a book about tournament poker it would be named live or die by AK.I think in most tournaments you have to beat AK and win with AK on a regular basis or you have no shot at winning the tournament.

Now I am off to Las Vegas for the poker bowl. This event is a new concept for poker. This is a televised team sport airing seven episodes on Fox Sports in early January. My team is me, Fred Goldberg, Eric Calejais, Paul Wolfe, Greg Muller, and Kyle Wilson.

Three Americans and Three Canadians. I and Fred Goldberg bought the franchise. We are officially the Atlanta Ace’s. The web site is www.pokerbowl.com if anyone is looking for more details.

I will be in Vegas for at least seven days. I heard there are going to be some big cash games at the Venetian and Bellagio.  I am so excited I am getting burnt out on these tournament bad beats I know I am going to hit one of these 10k events soon but some times I think these tournaments are more like dice than chess.

I love Vegas!!!!!! VIP tables at the clubs, VIP dining at the best restaurants, limos. The poker life is defiantly great life in Vegas. I will blog full update of trip, parties, win and loses, from my vacation after I leave Vegas.

Antonio Salorio

When I made this site the point was to be different from sites that aren’t fun.  Well cheating scandals aren’t fun and in the good majority of cases they also aren’t true.  Whether the one with Absolute is true or not I think has mostly been decided.  Perception is reality in this world and they have a real problem.  But that has been covered.  So I thought I would give an opinion on a few side matters.

I am hearing a lot of people say “if they regulated online poker this wouldn’t happen”.  This is foolish at worst and at best a pipedream.  This won’t be the thing that causes regulation; this is just fuel for our enemies.  Let’s remember that online gambling has few friends.  The friends we do have right now have to defend themselves against the “click your mouse and lose your house people”.  It is sort of like having a wish and then living a life like that wish came true.  Or maybe a better example would be buying a lottery ticket and immediately going out and buying a Ferrari. 

People won’t leave poker because of this.  They might leave Absolute Poker because of this (though that doesn’t appear to be true, I signed on 2 nights ago and they had 5 5-10 NL games going) but they aren’t done with online poker.  All things like this do is make losers lose less and leave.  Is that bad? It certainly is but it isn’t the end of the world.  It does mean that the games will get harder (as if they hadn’t already) and more pros will need to get real jobs.  When you hear that someone is leaving online poker because of this I would put it at about .0001% is about this scandal.  It just makes the decision easier if someone is losing or not winning as much as they used to win.

This isn’t even the only time this particular thing happened.  Planet Poker and Paradise Poker both were hit by scandals, Planet Poker never recovered and Paradise Poker barely hung on.  Security was the issue in both of those cases and ultimately I think that will be the culprit here as well.

There is good news and I would argue great news.  These cheaters were caught and many cheaters online are being caught.  As disheartening as this may seem it is actually a good thing, when was the last time you heard of someone being caught in a casino cheating at poker.  Certainly it has happened but it is rare.  Does that mean that no one is cheating playing live poker? Hardly.  Online poker is nothing more than a lot of data, the more data the better and accurate information.  So while it may appear that all of these scandals are bad in reality it is just proving one thing.  Online cheaters can be caught and dealt with.  So if there is a bright side to all of this that might be it. 

There are a lot of people good at Texas Holdem but you could argue that Brian Townsend is the best of the best.He has beaten online poker for many years and is an instructor for Cardrunners.com. Here is a link to his blog. Also browse around and look for blogs from CTS, Stinger and Green Plastic. If you are looking for straight forward poker, these blogs are not for you. If you are a little advanced, these blogs might just be the trick to bring your game to the next level.

Brian Townsend, Cardrunners.com

When I was just warming up to the crowd at Speeds’ pool hall (I don’t think I’d met Prof. James Acquaintance yet), I spent a good bit of sitting at the bar, letting my eye drift around the room to see what was going on and developing a huge crush on a waitress named Lisa. There will definitely be more on her in another blog, sometime. One night, over in the far corner, I saw a guy buried in the Sports section of the Dallas Times Herald, glancing from time to time at a biker-looking guy playing 9-ball with a midget. Well, at first I thought he was a midget. He reminded me a lot of my friends and I learning how to play pool in my basement as grade schoolers, a 57″ cue being 4 inches too long to comfortably handle, unable to make a proper stance without standing on the balls of your feet.

Eventually, the biker departed for the electronic dart boards. The midget got a dollar bill from the guy reading the paper and came across the room to feed the jukebox. As he came closer, the midget morphed into a short 14-year-old (I didn’t know he was 14 at the time, he looked younger). Finding just the right music proved to be a time-consuming chore: the jukebox not only had both country and western, but Skynyrd too…so many choices! While the kid was flipping back and forth, I motioned Tom the bartender over and asked who the guy in the corner was.

“Oh, that’s Big J. He takes some book and other action. Can’t play anything but 9-ball, and is too smart to try otherwise.”

“Lemme guess…the kid’s Little J?”

Tom laughed a big belly laugh (he didn’t have another kind), and replied “You got it!”

I can’t claim to be any great paragon of virtue when it comes to gambling or being where I probably wasn’t supposed to. I used to go with my great uncle to the track when I was a kid…he worked the windows and cage at Arlington Park and Mayfair, and used to let me go back there with him from time to time. I remember explaining to all my friends in junior high what the “6 1/2 - 6″ and “+140″ meant after each baseball game in the newspaper. And I didn’t have a problem taking lawnmowing money from high school guys in their basements on Friday nights.

But I was momentarily repulsed by the idea of letting a 14-year-old hang out in a pool hall. I mean, there wasn’t anything dangerous or nefarious about the place. I don’t remember ever seeing a drug deal or a fight. But c’mon! It’s a pool hall! Drinking, smoking, gambling!

As the evening wore on, I thought of all the kids I knew that didn’t have any father-son time at all in their teenage years. For Little J, it was “Take Your Son To Work Day”, all year long. Could be worse.

We just finished up day 2 of shooting for episode 6 of I BET YOU. We are ALMOST half way done with season 2. Seven more episodes and we are FINITO. For this episode we went camping and bet on whom is a better camper via various bets ranging from mountain climbing to fishing to making a fire and so on. We bet on anything and everything that had to do with the outdoors.

A few of our crazier bets

 Rock climbing…one was BLINDFOLDED rock climbing. I kid you not we went up a SERIOUS cliff with zero visibility. We were roped in incase we fell but nonetheless we did shoot up without VISION! You will have to tune in to see who won.

Axe throwing…this was really fun. I always wanted to chug an axe at something and this was my way of fulfilling that desire.

Fishing…now this sounds really boring but I assure you it was just the opposite. Whoever lost had to EAT a live worm. It would be safe to say that Phil and I were MOTIVATED to catch the first fish.  It won’t take much to figure out who lost this one…and yes the loser ponied up and ATE a live worm.

I literally just got back to my room. Just finished up what may have been the MOST enjoyable shower of my life. It’s amazing we don’t appreciate technology as much as we should. Being in the woods for a couple of days I forgot how satisfying it was to turn on a sink and have water pour out…how about room service?! What a SERIOUS luxury. Oh and in your room t here is ZERO chance of getting poison oak or poison ivy (which I am REALLY hoping I didn’t get). We were rummaging through so much wilderness i’m a little nervous.

All in all I LOVE the outdoors. I love sleeping in the middle of the wilderness…looking at the stars…being at one with earth. One thing I forgot to mention-this was not the kind of camping where you drive up pick your spot and CAMP…this was park your car on the road hike about 2 miles until you FIND a place to crash. Lucky for us one of the crew guys (Spencer) was a regular in these woods and new just the perfect spot. No running water…no showers…no store to buy wood or food…just US and EARTH. It was unreal.

We have a 2 day break before filming resumes for episode 8. That gives me 2 nights to find out what Knoxville nightlife is all about!!! Watch out Tennessee here I come!

Antonio