Aight... here's first blog!

Greetings Pokerroad! I have to say that I'm pretty stoked about blogging here. For those of you who don't know me, I have been blogging on pokerpages.com since the summer of 2006 and am generally known for not holding much back and being pretty honest about the life of a 20something professional poker player living in Las Vegas. Every once in a while I will take 2nd in some tournament and write about it, sometimes I write about adventures in personal life, and sometimes I might bitch about running bad. If you would care to catch up with my blog you can find it at devopoker.net and I think it will be archived here eventually.

Anyways, off to blog land, eh? For most of the year I have been planning on taking the month of May off for the most part just to R&R before the series. That changed into spending more than half of the month "working", where Gavin Smith, Lacey Jones, and myself cruised up to Canada to host the first ever WPT Canada series at the River Rock Casino. It was more of a working vacation really since I was slated to play four tourneys, but two were small and I was a $1k bounty in a third. In the two small ones I started drinking within an hour of the cards getting into the air, and somehow luckboxed my way into winning the first $500 NLHE event piss drunk wasted. Life is good when you run good eh? They also got me saying 'eh' up there which has become the point of much needling around the house these days.

So, while on that "vacation", I got the jonesin to do a random road trip to the Caribbean. I wanted to put three islands into a hat, draw one, buy a plane ticket, go there with a backpack, get off the plane and say, "Now what?" Unfortunately, I'm not too good at knowing which day it is much less when holiday weekends are falling, and I assumed that Memorial weekend was this coming weekend and I had an extra week of life in there. So, since there are two annual trips that I always find myself on in the last two weekends of May, I chose to do those instead. I got back from Canada on a Friday, left for the lake for a houseboat trip on Saturday, got back Tuesday, chilled for a few days and neglected responsibilities, and then left for the river house on Friday.

The river house is always a debaucherous disaster in some delightful way. It is the home of sense killers, "Jose" the beer bong, Jenny boat, and many other traditions that have carried through my core group of friends since high school. This trip was no different, nothing was hurt except for heads in the morning, and I met some great people in the neighbors next door. Poker Videos

One story. Monday night we leave the house via the "Piece of Ship" around sunset and booze cruise up river to the Avi Hotel and Casino just south of Laughlin, pretty much on the southern tip of Nevada. The cast is myself, my brother Jared, Jackie, my roomie's brother Shaun, his friend Dooner (who are participating in "moustache May" and showed up at the river with snorkeling gear, a harpoon gun, spears, and spearfishing licences. LOL), my friend Doug who is an old friend on vacation from LA, and "Girl on the Couch" Amber. When we pulled up to the dock I noticed some blonde chick wandering down the dock to the boat, and I'm wondering who in the world this is, and it's my friend Lindsey who is probably the most spontaneous traveler I know. I met her when I moved to Minnesota in the fall of 2005 and we have been friends since. She works for a travel agency owned by Northwest Airlines and one of her perks is free travel. Friday she left Minneapolis, flew to Anchorage, drove to Denali to meet a friend of hers up there, it was raining so said screw this, drove back to Anchorage, flew back to Minneapolis, decided she wanted to go whitewater rafting and called me since she knew that I used to be a guide. I gave her some recommendations, also told her what we were up to in case she wanted to come down here. Long story shortened, she got to Vegas, left cell phone in MN, drove to the river house, and the neighbors directed her to the Avi where she found us. Nice!

We end up heading to a nice dinner, realized that the fireworks store was closing soon (on these booze cruises we float back down river after everybody has had enough and turn the boat into a fireworks launching platform), and played spin the bottle to decide who was going to get the fireworks. It landed on me which is really a good beat for everybody except my wallet and laziness because I don't really mess around at the fireworks store. As we were standing in line we ended up behind an off duty fireman still in his fire pants, and I ask, "So how much does this make you cringe?" He turns and looks at Lindsey and I and our overflowing basket of fireworks with multiple 38" skyrockets sticking out of this standard grocery hand basket, and says, "Nah, I'm jealous actually." LOL. "Every fireman was a pyro as a kid. Have fun out there!"

I love the Avi.

We drop the toys off at the boat, return to the casino, I accidentally drunk dial somebody that I haven't talked to in forever and that was cool, and we have a fireworks show for the next hour. We make it back to the house, and the throttle breaks. This is bad when the river is flowing past your house, your boat somehow still floats after $200 worth of black powder was just exploded from it in various manners, and the only tools you have are golf clubs, beer cans, a charcoal starter, lighters, a spatula, and lifejackets. MacGyver aka Jared mounts the 35 horse Johnson outboard like a bull to control the throttle manually and uses a beer can bent into a prying device to do so while Doug steers. Somehow make it back to the dock.

It was a good night :-).

So, I'm pretty fired up for the series now. I've played two online sessions and two tournaments seriously in the past month, so it's been a great much needed break. I've been killing it this year and would like to end my string of 2nds this year with a nice shiny gold bracelet, but regardless I am going to make sure that I am in prime condition to play well through the grueling schedule. I have scheduled myself for 24 events so am going to have to make sure that I take care of my mind and body throughout the next couple of months.

Thank you for welcoming me online poker road!

Peace and good luck,

Devo