My last post talked about the Montana days, Poker Used to be so Much Fun, and brought back a rush of the lunacy and some of the antics that I first watched poker players do, and then learned to do myself. Continue reading The days of the rack attack
Category Archives: Montana Days – and Nights
The Growth of Pot-s
Today I played in the Sunday Storm at PokerStars – guaranteed prize pool of $1Million and 200k for 1st place. Yowzer! See…I originally thought to title this ‘The Growth of Poker’ but then that would mean I’d have to go into the Cinderella Story of Chris Moneymaker and the hole card cam and the World Poker Tour and 40 other things that have been hashed and bashed until I can’t stand to think of them anymore. And more appropriately, what this is about is the fact that the prize pools and the pots are super gi-normous now and they just keep growing.
I didn’t get lost…
but I did get tired. I actually didn’t post yesterday because Clearspine did and whoever posts last, their post hits PokerWorks’ main page. I wanted readers to read him and hopefully leave a comment on his query on how to blow off use his FPPs. So do give him a holler – all of you online poker players out there. Continue reading I didn’t get lost…
Montana – some Desert Don
I pulled out my two photo albums and leafed through them, stunned to find that I had a picture of Cap Walters, Desert Don, and a few others hiding in the pages that have been packed for such a long time. And I mentioned in a post about Red Gilman that he always wore a stetson…I lied…I found a picture of him wearing a baseball cap. I guess the mind is one of the first things to go, but where the hell does it go? I remember Red in a stetson – but then I also found him in a black one. Continue reading Montana – some Desert Don
The cast of characters in Montana
Realizing that many of these people are still alive and kicking and those that have passed on can’t come back to bite me in the ass, I will still relate the Montana Poker Tales to the best of my memory. If anyone out there, living or dead, or living dead, or dead while they are living disagrees, simple leave me a comment. This is, after all, my story and I can tell it however I want but hearing your side of it would be great for my poker memory archive. 🙂 Continue reading The cast of characters in Montana
Thinking back
Even after a few days of trying to think about the order of how things happened, where I started to recognize the fact that there was a game in the back room, it still eludes me. I’m sure there was a game in the back room, along with the two pan games that ran every day, but I really wasn’t aware of it. Continue reading Thinking back
One step back
I feel the need to add a small glimpse of my history to the ongoing Oxford story. In order to appreciate my own insanity and addiction with poker, it might be easier to explain (without going into too much detail) that my earlier life was fraught with family death, family illness, (more than one family member in both circumstances), and the eternal struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent – in other words B-r-o-k-e, a lot of moves to different states, and general quicksand traps along the way. I won’t even begin to say that I handled anything well, in truth, I really didn’t know how to handle anything and that was another issue that surfaced for me years later. I never had options although I did have choices and I made some bad ones. But those were more related to husbands and relationships and since I never had two thin dimes to rub together, I didn’t make bad financial choices…until I became a poker junkie. Continue reading One step back
Get ready for the ride
I can’t remember putting my thumb out but somehow I was a hitchhiker in a world I knew nothing about and I managed to catch a ride with a busload of poker crazed lemmings heading for the coast. There’s something to be said for staying home, quietly raising children, cooking and cleaning, paying your bills, and slipping quietly through life in a comatose state with no mind ripping memories. That something is “FUCK IT!!” Continue reading Get ready for the ride
The haze of history
At times my ability to recall events and even words spoken, is amazing. At other times I find it difficult to put things into any order and decipher when certain things happened. The time spent behind the Oxford bar seems to roll into one dark pool of disgust and loathing. At first I was barely aware of the poker games that were going on in the establishment. Continue reading The haze of history
Despair
Today I went into Pahrump with my son. He went to a couple of the casinos looking for work. I sat down at a 5c keno machine for about an hour while I waited for him to fill out an application and take it back. It was strange. I used to play keno machines every day. Way back when the Mirage first opened, I went every night after work and played – the frequency became less and less. Now it’s been about 4 times in 3 years – and I have no desire. That’s the whole answer to the perplexity of gambling MOI thinks…desire. The sickness of addiction is what pushes the desire and makes it so paramount that you have to do it. Literally, some people HAVE to do it. I’m not sure what drove me at the time, but it left a long time ago. Continue reading Despair