AVP tournament: I make top five

I'm just home from a marathon poker tournament. Allvegaspoker.com sponsored this one at Harrah's. It started at 7:00 p.m., and didn't wind up until 3:00 a.m. I was fortunate enough to be one of the five left standing at the end (out of 65 original entrants), when we negotiated an even-money five-way chop of the remaining prize money for $1000 each. At the request of one of the organizers, I jotted some notes on how the final table played out. You can read that account here. I won't repeat myself here. But I'll tell you that I'm very happy with the outcome. I played my best, got lucky in a couple of key spots, and was never on the ugly end of any costly bad beats. What more can I either ask or expect?

I have long had what I feel to be a symbiotic relationship with AVP. When I first started playing poker in town, nearly all my thoughts that got reduced to words went up in the AVP forums. After a few months, the responses had been positive enough that I felt emboldened to start this blog, and the vast majority of my early readers were AVP'ers who followed me over.

Since then, I post a lot less on AVP, because virtually everything I have to say about poker goes here. But I continue to peruse the discussions there (though not as frequently or thoroughly as I did before my own writing got to consuming so much time). I am happy that people find their way in both directions: From this blog to AVP, and from there to here. I hope that that bidirectional flow of like-minded people continues for a long time to come.

I was reminded of all of this tonight because of the surprising number of people who recognized me and approached me with kind words of appreciation for this blog. I don't think I've ever heard so many gracious and obviously sincere compliments about it in one day before. I am both delighted and humbled by that response. Thank you all for taking the trouble to seek me out and tell me that you enjoy reading what I have to say. You have once again energized me to keep it going.

But not tonight. It's just after 5:00 a.m., and I am dying to get some sleep.