Greetings.

If you go to the Spearmint Rhino on your down time, you might as well not bother wasting your time on any other stripper. Just ask for Cherokee...aka, Theresa, who at 40 years old perhaps the hottest woman I have ever seen. And has a personality and a brain. I spent more money than I have EVER spent in my lifetime of strip clubbing. I'm not bragging about that...but at the same time, I am not ashamed either.

Coming out of there at 1am I got THAT ITCH to go to Rio and snap off a $1030 single table satellite. Of course when you walk in you have to get creamed by either (a) bad beat stories or (b)"how are you running Monkey? You in the Main? You got chips? You happen to have a pain killer?" My buddy Steve ANger....from Canada...got in late Thursday...bought in to the Main Event on Saturday at 12:09pm...and looks down at Table 10, Seat 5...which is the ESPN FEATURE TABLE! NICE! What wasn't nice was that had he arrived 8 minutes earlier he would have scored an $8,000 deal with Full Tilt to wear their gear. What a buzz kill!

Well, he did pick up AA against QQ about 20 minutes before the end of the night to finally accumulate some chips and come back for Day 2. Well, I got into my sit n go. Good table. David Fox on my right. Richard Lee on my left. Dimitri, the crazy Russian from all my deep Beau Rivage cashes and now my good buddy and Red Snapper Drinking buddy also there and my "save partner" in the deal. I will go into that a little deeper later. I played this damn thing super tight...knowing that there were 3 guys at the table who play very aggressively. I picked up KK and re raised Mr Aggressive. He folds 33. I show him KK. Deep sigh. A little later he raises again. I look at AKspades and re raise him again. He shows 77. I show him AK suited. He nods. Now with above average stack and the blinds 200/400...I raise UTG with KK.....this time he shoves. Dammit. Well, I am not folding KK and cant put him on AA or I think he would have min raised me to 2400. I call. He shows 99. Hmmmm...well, okay I AM ahead at least.

Forget that. He flops a set of nines....night over for the Monkey. Before I leave for the night I go ahead and get registered for the Main Event. They have closed Sunday to registration...another move by Harrahs to try and balance out the fields. With 4 starting flights the majority of players usually want to play either Day 1a or Day 1d....well, me being the sly dog I am, I had to figure out a way to weasel into a Sunday start time...so I find one of my tournament director buddies (whose name I will withhold so as not to let Jack Effel and/or Jimmy Summerfield reprimand him) and get him to manually free up a seat for me. Ship it. Monkey is set for Sunday. Brasilia Room, Table 68, Seat 5.

So my next 'big play' is to come and play what will certainly be a HUGE $1060 Mega Satellite today (Saturday) at 1pm. So we all get up, get ready....ride in together and do our pregame hype session...only to walk up to the registration cage and be told "Im sorry sir, the 1pm Mega is sold out. There were only 240 seats sold." HUH!!!!???? You have got to be kidding me. Another golden play by the genius' who run the ship over here. They have ALL this new space, over 400 tables...and yet they cant manage to squeeze more than 24 tables for this deal. So instead of playing to try and take down another $10,000 of walking around money, or in my case...catching up on my already depleted bankroll. Well now I will sit here and watch all these nervous rookies see how long they stretch out 20,000 chips!!!! And oh yeah, catch up on this and share a few of my interesting perpectives on some things.

RULES

There are some new rules that I find interesting. That's Monkey Slang for RIDICULOUS! As much as I like the Venetian...lets start with one that they instituted over there. They call it the Jamie Gold rule, which I think is both ironic and funny since they have some kind of a promotional deal with him, in which he plays a certain number of hours there a week in cash game and then shows up for some of their tourneys. Last week in the $540 that I final tabled he was at my table early. he didn't do anything remarkable that any of you would care to hear about. So the rule states that if you are in the hand against another player and start talking to him about anything relating to his hand you can incur a penalty. Now, I am used to the rule where if there is three-way action or more that you cant do that...and YES, that makes sense. But when you are Heads Up...it is my opinion and quite a few others who I have discussed this with...that talking to your opponent about his hand goes back to the original ROOTS of poker. That guy can say whatever he wants! Lie, tell the truth, tell you what he wants you to hear to make you call.....what the hell? This isnt a game between CYBORGS! Its a game matching wits and skill played by human beings. When I have to sit and listen to a dealer sneer at me "sir, you can not say anything about the hand" I want to reach over and knock him out of his chair. That is a HUGE part of my game...and they are stripping it from me. Not that it mattered, I kept doing it anyway. This other guy, from Germany...was hilarious. When they told HIM he couldn't do it....instead he looked at the dealer and started saying everything to the dealer that he would have wanted to say to the other player. It was pretty funny.

This next rule is a real doozy. Some of us like to get to tournaments late. Or rather...some of us, who didn't ever make very good employees before we started playing poker for a living....just dont ever SEEM to be ABLE to make it ANYwhere on time! I fall into that category. If you arrive late to most tournaments and buy in when you arrive you either go in as an alternate...in which case you get to the table when there is a seat open. Some places give you a full stack. Some places take an amount that equals whoever many blinds you have missed and pull it from your stack when you sit down...adding it to the pot incrementally every hand. Well, this year at the Rio...if you buy into an event at say 12:15...and it started at 12....and you draw seat 2...you are most likely going to be angry. The button started in the 10 seat most likely, which would have put you in the big blind. You show up...probably out of breath from hustling over there. The button now is in the 3 seat. That is when the dealer tells you "sir you can't come in until you are in the big blind, at which time you will get your stack." WHAT!??? Yeah...that is their new rule. So you sit there for about 8 hands...praying to god that you dont have Uncle Fester as your dealer, who likes to wash the deck in between EVERY hand...then takes another minute or so getting the cards out. This is one of the most painstakingly slow things to sit through. You are better off going out to the Food Tent and getting yourself a $460 Personal Pan Pizza from Pizza Hut. Oh and while you are there, buy a $5 Red Bull because that is the ONLY place you can get one in the whole place.

The excessive banter/celebration rule. Lets just call this rule what it is. Some people have tried to tell me its the ANTI MONKEY RULE. That's crap. Its all based on that moron Hevad Khan. Him and the guys like him who freak out when they win a big hand. Those of you who know me well, know that I do not EVER act like that. The only time I get excited and show emotion when I win is when (a) I am in a sit n go (b) I am hammered and (c) I have sucked out on someone who I cannot stand and probably have a bounty on. I talk a lot at the table. But I talk in a way in which I am having fun, keeping the table loose...making relationships with the other players. I dont chat it up when others are in a big hand. And when I win a big pot...I am usually SO relieved that I didn't get sucked out on that I just sit in my chair and breath in and out and count my lucky stars. Here is my theory. I played sports my whole life...so I know that when one side takes down a huge victory, there is another side who has had their dreams crushed. I am cognizant of that and try to keep it in mind when I whack someone. It is just a bad, bad show of sportsmanship to dance around and yell when you have eliminated someone. Honestly, I would much rather get my chips from a huge stack who can take the hit and still be healthy, than to get them all from another player I like and end his tournament.

BACKERS

Lets talk about backers. But first lets talk about people who dont have backers and like to borrow money from other players. I WILL NOT EVER borrow money from another player for use at the poker table. If I am running bad, so bad that I have to find money...that's when its time to go home. I dont LIKE oweing people money. I dont like people KNOWING that I HAD to borrow money. Its bad for your image. And if you have ANY pride at all, you value your image. I have run into more players out here wanting to borrow money. I have heard stories from friends about how much so and so owes them. Its disgusting. I know of players who have had a lot of GOOD cashes, and yet are still borrowing money from people. I have borrowed money from my housemate Rick Rudloff twice on this trip. But when I do it I have money that he knows about either at the house, or in my safety deposit box at the Venetian. And even then I hate doing it. But my credit with Rick is solid. This guy who borrowed money from me at the Ceasers classic last year...I guess I wont mention his name...has taken me clowning him about it for the entire month of June before finally walking up to me two nights ago and handing me the money. I was shocked. I even shook his hand. I told him I would officially quit clowning him. Now if I could just get Russ Floyd to pay me the $2000 HE OWES ME....my world would return to normal. Here is a guy who WON a $550 event in New Orleans last fall...and stiffs me. I see him get 2nd in the Sunday Warm Up on Stars two months ago for $56K...and STIFFS me. Then he gets deep in a WSOP event here...and again, STIFFS ME. TK Miles tells me he was watching on Full Tilt as he ran up to 250K in a pot limit omaha cash game....and again, he STIFFED ME. If any of you every loan RUSS FLOYD money....dont call it a loan, call it a donation! Because that money is gone!!!!

How I got my backer is kind of an interesting story. Four years ago when I was still working for Southern Wine and Spirits as a liquore saleman, I played in the Southern Classic in Biloxi. I had this guy, Ben King...sitting next to me. A long haired, Harley riding good ol boy from South Carolina...he came off as one of those guys you would never probably bring home to meet the family, but would certainly go have a beer with. Turns out him and his wife had hit the Wheel of Fortune jackpot the previous year for $2 million! He took my card. ABout two weeks later he calls and asks if I would like to play poker full time. Um, well...duh! He proposed a deal where he would pay my monthly bills (avg. $2500) and then pay all my tournament buy ins and travel expenses in exchange for 50% of the winnings. A GREAT deal! I agreed to it. Well, he didn't exactly follow up on his end of the bargain. I got stuck in Indiana at the Ceasers event waiting on money to come that never did. I had to take my $1000 and grind away in sit n gos to just play a couple of tourneys on my own dime. Him and I continued this relationship for over a year and a half. Sometimes the money would show up, sometimes it wouldnt. There were always reasons. Maybe they were true, maybe they werent. But the bottom line is that it was NOT ever a stable backer/player relationship. Hes a great guy. And my theory is that if ANYONE is even KIND OF willing to put faith and finances in you and your game, you should never BITCH about it. And I didnt. It just made it very tough. I made him one nice score in New Orleans in May of 2007, when I took 3rd for $20,000. He has put more into me than I have won for him...for sure. I would like to cash deep in the Main Event and just send him $20,000 to show my appreciation. ANother guy that came into the picture was Chris Roney...a guy from pensacola. he owns a locksmith company there and used to date a girl I played with once in awhile. As it would turn out....he is ten times the person she is. I became very good friends with him. It was awkward at times because the girl was somewhat attractive and my own girlfriend was jealous of her at times. It was totally unnecessary, as I had no interest in her that way. But Chris was a hell of a guy. Over a six month period he staked me for about $10,000 worth of tourneys and I never managed to score for him either. So he is another guy I would like to ship $20,000 to for believing in me. Every bad beat I took he was always incredibly supportive of me. That's very important to a poker player.