![]() ![]() And for that healthy dose of perspective, I have to thank the 30,000 strangers who gathered around a racetrack this weekend in Watkins Glen, my boyfriend, who encouraged me to join them, and four guys named Trey, Mike, Page, and Fish who put on one helluva show. No amount of words I speak or write will do anything to change the dramas that constantly repeat themselves in the poker world. My time is far more profitably spent these days grinding out rent money in the $1-2 and $2-5 NLHE at Venetian. The same goes for the Main Event, which roars to a start tomorrow. At this point in my journey as a writer, I have a far better perspective standing further back from this particular painting. Although its a little strange NOT to be live-blogging the whole thing from start-to-finish, I can't say I miss it. We returned just in time to witness the final table of the $50,000 Players' Championship, where Phil Hellmuth is making his third run this summer at his record 12th WSOP bracelet. I had to get 2,500 miles away from the Rio to do just that. Make it a few yards and you'll begin to see the scene for what it really is. Stand too close to an impressionist painting and it is, in the inimitable words of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, "A big ol' mess." Move back a few feet and shapes start to form. I'll make the 380-mile journey south come Thanksgiving to placate my parents' wishes to spend the holiday with both their daughters, and again for an unspecified amount of time around Christmas that has yet to be decided. The 800 or so square feet I've called home for the last seven years will remain largely unchanged, albeit inhabited by a trusted caretaker. ![]() I suppose it's the fact that I'm still hanging on to this apartment until the end of the year, the fact that it's still filled with furniture and appliances and art on the walls that separates me from the reality of moving. ![]() Most of my clothes are already inside a dresser in San Francisco and the winter coats and heavy sweaters I'll no doubt be donning in the upcoming weeks and months have been cleaned and pressed. Cabinets and drawers full of junk I forgot I owned have been sorted, catalogued, and (mostly) discarded. Three bankers boxes of books and DVDs are still sitting in the trunk of my car, waiting to be sold to a secondhand shop in Hollywood. 14 bags of corporately-produced clothing that I wore to slave for a corporation half a decade ago went to Goodwill. On a practical level, I've certainly taken the necessary steps to prepare, spending the better part of my downtime since the end of the WSOP divesting myself of a sizable percentage of my physical possessions. It hasn't fully sunk in that I'm moving out of Los Angeles one week from today. The PPA will forever be haunted by the specters of their former board members Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson, and the hundreds of thousands in dirty dirty Full Tilt player-owner money they took in donations over the years. I'd be gunning for a 2012 WSOP Main Event seat from my living room in San Francisco on come spring, instead of wondering if I'll ever be able to play another hand of online poker. since they were in violation of the UIGEA? Ding ding ding! Doesn't that 15-month blackout period sound positively dreamy right about now? We'd already be nine months into it. Why else would they come out against the Reid bill last December? Um, because it would put them out of business in the U.S. A limp-dicked lobbying operation almost wholly funded by Full Tilt and PokerStars, the PPA claimed to represent the interests of players, but in actuality, they only represented the interest of their two biggest donors. Can anyone get the industry out of this mess in Washington? Well, it's certainly not the PPA. ![]()
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