The week ahead

I have a few (well, four, to be exact) posts in mind to write tonight and tomorrow. Then there is likely to be a relative lack of posting for the following nine or ten days. My dear friend Cardgrrl is coming to town for a little over a week, starting Monday, for a confluence of events, including the allvegaspoker.com tournaments (details here), and some get-togethers for members of Poker Academy. The schedule is already filling up with tournaments, dinners, meetings with friends, shows, and sight-seeing day trips. And, of course, any unstructured time that I can spend alone chatting, relaxing, and/or playig poker with Cardgrrl, I'll take. Also, an out-of-town reader that will be here next week has generously offered to enter me into the Venetian nightly 7:00 pm tournament Monday, so I'll be playing that.* The predictable result of all this is that I'll be building up a bunch of experiences to write about, with no time to do the writing until after Cardgrrl leaves March 30.

So once again I must ask your forbearance. I know it's a strange concept, but the order of priorities is (1) life, (2) play poker, (3) write about poker. I do realize that so far this year there have been more than the usual number of blocks of time in which (1) has had to be tended to above (2) and (3), but that's just how it is sometimes.


*It happens with some regularity that a reader will write to say he or she will be in town and would like to meet me. I'm usually reluctant to make any particular plans along those lines, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm terribly awkward and uncomfortable in social situations, especially meeting strangers. This tendency is exaggerated when playing poker, because I'm inclined to just sit quietly and try to pay attention to the action, which usually doesn't lend itself to being chatty. As a result of this, sometimes people meeting me think that I'm giving them the cold shoulder and/or not liking them, which isn't necessarily so. Second, I'm not fond of planning my poker in advance; I like to go when and where the spirit moves me, so to speak. I often Tweet where I am, so it's not like I'm hiding, but I almost never know very far ahead of time. But the offer to stake me in a tournament--well, I'm not one to turn down free money. If this reader knew of my general reluctance to plan meet-ups with readers, he certainly devised a high-probability way of lowering my shields and making it happen!