Happy Birthday Sis!

Ok, the statue doesn't really have much to do with the birthday but it's a great statue and beats any card I'd come up with. BTW, I am sorry that I dropped the hammer on your head. How was I to know that you were climbing into our tree house to tell us to come have some fresh baked cookies?

I'm sure getting hit on the head by a hammer didn't hurt your employability all that much. Employers these days expect their employees to be knot heads.

Then again, brain damage would explain those kids of yours. ":^)

This is my little brother, Chris.

Chris has always been good at poker. He used to beat adults back when he was a teenager, adults who played poker on a regular basis. Since then I think it has been a hobby. One that depends on rounding up enough friends to put together a game.

That is, until the internet. Now he can always find someone online, ready for a match. So Chris played. He played and got better. Eventually he entered a tournament at a casino in Arizona and won.

His most recent win qualified (and paid for) an entry in the World Poker Tour finals at Foxwoods Resort in Connecticut. I drove down this weekend to see and cheer him on.

I don't know anything about poker.

A little background on the tournament. It costs $10,000 to enter. 675 poker players either come up with the money themselves or are financed by a casino contest like my brother. That's a $6,750,000 dollar prize pool. The winner gets around one and a half million dollars. The fifty nine runner-ups get some portion of the rest, minus whatever the casino and tournament organizers get.

On the first day, Saturday, the first half of this group started playing at noon, each with ten thousand dollars in chips. Every 75 minutes they took a break and the blind was raised. Half way through the day there was a dinner break. They played until there were 8 blinds. They played until 1am. There were 96 players left. The number one player had $125,000 in chips, the last survivor had $3,000.

Chris played on Sunday. It's embarrassing for him to recount, but at the last WPT (and his first) in Las Vegas he only lasted 35 minutes. Some yahoo played an unplayable hand and pulled out a miracle.

I'm sure Chris wasn't thinking about this at all.

Most likely he was thinking about his back, which he had pulled a couple hours before the tournament started. He survived the first 75 minutes, coming up about even. He survived the second as well, pulling out ahead of the table. I headed back home so I could work the next day while Chris played poker.

I called him Monday morning and was happy to hear that he made it. In fact he was in 30th place out of the 187 players remaining. Starting noon Monday those 187 poker players started playing again. When they are done there will be sixty left.

As I type this up Monday night I don't know if he's still in the game or not. If he makes it he'll be in the play-down on Tuesday. Tuesday they play until there are only six players left. The final table will be on Wednesday. If he doesn't make it at least he's had the opportunity to spend two days butting heads with some of the top poker players around the world.

About the crustaceans.

With 300 poker players in the same room you'd think it would be chaos. It's not. There's no smoking, not much talking, and very few people moving about. The most notable feature of 300 poker players playing poker is the sound of chips. Chips stacked, unstacked, bet with, and fiddled over. It is the sound of crabs. Hundred and thousands of crabs clacking their claws at each other.

Good luck Chris!

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