Seriously?

So I'm reading the November 8 issue of Poker Player newspaper, and come to a column by somebody called John "The Scientist" Hayes. This is part 6 of a series documenting his "$500 poker challenge." I have just skimmed through others, so I have only a dim idea of what he is setting out to accomplish. But for some reason I read this installment in its entirety.

It left me shaking my head, wondering if this is serious.

The guy comes to Vegas with a $500 bankroll. His first night, he plays $4-8 limit at Boulder Station, makes $180. The second night he goes to Golden Nugget, has two double martinis, and loses all his money, except for $60, playing $2-$4 limit. He loses the last $60 the next morning, though he doesn't say exactly how.

The penultimate paragraph, though, is the kicker: "To make a long story short, after three weeks in a homeless shelter, I finally get the wherewithal to return to Los Angeles. Obviously, I am back to square one, raising a new $500 bankroll to continue the Poker Challenge."

Does Poker Player newspaper seriously employ as a columnist somebody who didn't just take $500 from his discretionary income to see what he could make of it at poker (kind of a low-rent, live version of Chris Ferguson's famous online bankroll-building experiment), but who took the last $500 to his name for that purpose--and then blew it all in one shot playing while playing drunk at the lowest-stakes game Vegas has to offer, and had to go live in a homeless shelter?

Or is this some sort of gag, with me being the only one too dense to see where the joke is?

I think of the talented, experienced poker writers I know who have lost their jobs in the industry, and this is who PPN has putting together columns for them?

Seriously?


Addendum

Here's a link to the first five parts of his series: http://pokerplayernewspaper.com/category/authors/john-hayes

I'm rereading them now to get some perspective. Get this: At the end of each of the first five parts, the blurb about him says, "hosts Ask the Scientist, a live call-in poker instruction show on http://www.hpstv.tv/ at the Hollywood Poker School in Hollywood Park Casino." That just raises the WTF quotient another level: A guy who is so stupid and talentless that he will lose his entire bankroll playing $2-4 limit while drunk is holding himself out as a poker instructor? The mind reels. What a surprise--that bit of information has been excised from part 6 of his series.

The back story also gets simultaneously funnier and sadder. The series of columns was supposed to last for a year and a half. He managed to churn out the first five columns without playing a single hand of poker, just jawing about the parameters, what books and consultants he would use, and scouting out locations. Then he blows the whole thing in one night. It's going to be mighty hard to put out another year's worth of columns now.

The challenge is over. He says that he is going to "continue" it, but that's a lie. It's done. In his own words, the terms of the challenge were: "Start with $500 and build a poker bankroll over a period of one year into a substantial bankroll." It doesn't say, "Start with $500 as many times as necessary."

On those days when I fall into a funk and hear that ugly voice in my head accusatorily saying "loser," I'm going to think of this guy and cheer up.

Or, again, perhaps the whole thing is one big joke and I'm missing it. I kind of hope so, because I'd really rather learn that I had been leveled than that this is what passes for poker journalism.