Hiatus (Updated)

The Bad Beat Jackpot in the Harrah's casinos in Atlantic City is currently over $718k. I've been playing 12-15 hours a day trying to be there when it hits and thus collect a Room Share (which could be worth $700-3500). Because of this I've been too tired and/or busy to post regularly. As soon as it hits I'll be back on schedule.

So, it finally hit on Monday Aug. 13th. The total Jackpot was 787k, the room share was $958. I love playing poker, but the long days days grinding were starting to wear me down, especially since I wasn't taking time to do much writing. There are three things I need in my life to be truly happy; time to read and write, poker, and the love of a good woman. And two out of three aint bad, but lately I had been down to one. It's good to have more of a balance. I wasn't having the best day pokerwise, I had lost $200 earlier that day playing 1/2 at the Borgata in a session where I basically never won a hand. This after losing the night before in a bad session where I let my blood sugar get too low by not eating and then tried to rectify the situation by drinking iced tea after iced tea, instead of quitting and going to eat. I didn't play well and after losing a small amount decided to quit after about 6 hours. So Monday wasn't looking so hot, when I got to the Showboat around 3pm. I was losing about half my $200 starting stack after getting two outed by a moron who wouldn't fold an underpair, when the BBJ announcement was made. I didn't actually hear the announcement because I was having a really interesting discussion with a very pretty French woman who was sitting next to me (after all if there's anything I'm good at it's having interesting discussions with pretty women). We were discussing Haitian Kreyol poetry, (because what else would two poker players be discussing while waiting for the BBJ to hit?) reading it online actually, a subject which came up because the dealer was Haitian and Lou-Lou (the French woman) made the remark that Haitian Creole was a beautiful spoken language and it was a shame that it had no literature. I of course corrected her and she made that haughty face that beautiful women tend to make when they think they're dealing with a fool. But she was smarter than the average bear and when I suggested that she google 'pwezi kreyol' she did. She also was smart enough to figure out that 'pwezi' was a phonetic spelling of the French word 'poesie' (poetry). When she pulled up an actual poem in Kreyol, I was the one who got the shock when I read the first line of the poem. The first part of the line was "Si'm ta mande'w . . . " And even though I can't read Kreyol I immediately recognized the grammatical structure of the sentence; 'Si'm' means "If I' and "mande'w" means "ask you." But what really got me  was the use of "ta", because the same phoneme is used in Kriolu (Portuguese Creole) in exactly the same way. But even more importantly, the way the pronouns are added to the words before them is also a feature of Kriolu. It shouldn't be that big of a stretch to think that these two languages share some grammatical similarities, but seeing it that way was startling, especially given that I haven't read anything that has pointed this out previously. It was a pretty cool discovery and something I plan on researching more. But then the BBJ hit at Caesars and voila! life is back to normal, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

And until next we meet, may all your potatoes be sweet (and dusted with cinnamon.)