Ten years ago today

Happy birthday, first blog post!

Post deleted

On August 13, 2014 I put up a post with updates to a post I did on May 9, 2009, about difficulties I had with an advertiser. As part of settling that old dispute, I agreed to remove the newer post, leaving instead just this marker of having done so. The 2009 post now has a dated addendum with further details.

About the comments--oops!

It just occurred to me today that it has been a long, long time since anybody submitted a comment for any of my blog posts. I thought about it for a minute, and realized the likely problem: I changed my email address when I moved to North Carolina, but I never updated the email address to which Blogger sends my notifications. When the old address died sometime in July, I stopped getting notifications that comments were awaiting moderation.

I just checked, and found nearly 50 comments that had not been posted because of this. Oops! I'm sorry. It was not intentional. All except the handful of obvious spam ones have now been approved and posted. Furthermore, I have updated the email notification address and tested it, so this should not happen again in the future.

My apologies.

Leaving

Everything has been shipped or packed into my car, except the two items (suitcase and computer case) that I'll be living out of until I get settled in my Asheville apartment. I expect to turn in my keys and hit the road in about two hours, arriving at my new home sometime Monday--which, by happy coincidence, will be the fourth anniversary of the day I first met Cardgrrl, in the poker room at Harrah's. (I think if you go back and reread the post I wrote about that first meeting, you'll see that I liked her right off the bat.) My goal is to have a home office setup sufficient to allow me to resume work by Friday, a week from today.

Cardgrrl's house, meanwhile, is showing real progress. The foundation is nearly finished, despite lousy weather for construction through most of January. Three or four more months, and it will be ready for her. Then we'll both be settled in our new places, and poised to see what we can make of our lives in North Carolina. (We're not quite ready to actually share the same zip code--that would be too scary--but we will move to the next level of relationship, which is adjacent zip codes.) You can, as always, follow both her house progress and her photographic adventures in her blog, "Something Beautiful."

I am equal parts sad, nervous, and excited about this transition. This past 6 1/2 years has been fun and challenging, and I've learned a lot about myself and the world. I've grown in important, interesting, and unexpected ways. It's time to see if Asheville can reshape me as profoundly as Las Vegas has.

I am immensely grateful that so many people have found my meandering thoughts worth reading. Your enthusiastic reception has made the hours of writing and rewriting a rewarding pursuit. I cannot sufficiently thank you for your support.

I'm sure I'll pipe up here once in a while with a thought, rant, story, or joke. Plus, I expect that occasional trips back to the Land of Many Poker Rooms are inevitable, and you'll read all about them right here.

But for now, take good care of yourselves, play good poker, and don't be grumpy. That's my job.

Photo credit: Terry Hassan

So long, and thanks for all the fish*

From time to time, somebody asks me whether I plan to stay in Las Vegas for the rest of my life. My answer has always been, no, I don't plan to stay, but I also don't plan to leave. There is no plan. I would tell anybody who asked me that question that I will leave if and when something happens to makes me think that I should live somewhere else. Otherwise, I'll stay.

Well, something finally happened to convince me that it was time to live somewhere else: I fell in love.

This won't exactly come as news to my readers, unless you're brain-dead. (In which case, congratulations on just being able to read. Quite an accomplishment.) I met Cardgrrl in February of 2009. By July of that year I knew it was something serious. During a visit I made to her in Washington, D.C., in August of 2010, I finally became convinced (1) that she was never going to move to Las Vegas (as I had not-so-secretly hoped), and (2) that I wanted to be a lot nearer to her than 2400 miles, and (3) that meant that I would have to move east.

That plan, however, entailed some serious logistical difficulties. The cost of living in Washington is much higher than it is in Vegas, and I would have to meet those increased costs without 50 poker rooms in my back yard.

By happy coincidence, around the same time some consulting work related to my formal education and my pre-poker career sort of fell into my lap, and I nurtured the source so that I would start getting more and more such projects. (I mentioned this work twice in the blog, here and here, just to drop a couple of hints that change was in the air, and to see if anybody was paying attention. As far as I could tell, nobody noticed that those hints signified that a major change was underway.)

Even if you missed those clues, surely long-time readers must have noticed that my frequency of posting dropped fairly dramatically year by year from the high-water marks in 2008 and 2009 to the present. Some of that was due to the simple fact that after a few thousand posts on one subject, it gets progressively harder to find new things to say, new topics to write about. But the drop-off was due at least as much to the fact that as time went on, I was spending more time on the growing side business and less on poker. Poker has gone from being my sole source of income when I first arrived in Vegas in the summer of 2006 to being only a small part of it in 2012.

Cardgrrl also met me halfway. Early last year she decided that she wanted to try living somewhere besides D.C., established some criteria for herself by which to judge potential target cities, and started exploring the possibilities. (Vegas was never a contender.) By about June, she had settled on Asheville, North Carolina. After several exploratory trips there over the next few months, she finally made the move into an Asheville apartment at the beginning of November, and is now having a house built in the city.

No, Asheville isn't halfway between here and D.C., but it does have a much lower cost of living--comparable to that of Las Vegas. It's also a place that I would rather live than D.C. I consider our nation's capital a nice place to visit, but not to live, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with. Her move made it easier for me to pull the trigger on my own.

A few hours ago I returned from a week in Asheville--my first time there. It's a beautiful city, set in the midst of some of the prettiest land in the country, even in the dead of winter. Take a look at a map, and you'll see that it's surrounded by the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Cohutta National Forest, the Sumter National Forest, the Cherokee National Forest, plus a comparable number of state parks and forests. Heck, the famous Blue Ridge Parkway/National Heritage Area runs right through the city; turn onto it, and 30 seconds later you feel like you're in the middle of a vast, wooded wilderness.

Biking should be, um, interesting in Asheville. As far as I can tell both from maps and from driving around in it for several days, there is not a single straight or flat street anywhere. Every street is winding and sloped.

Most of this visit was spent apartment-hunting. On Tuesday I found the best prospect--an upstairs unit in a well-maintained old mansion converted into a four-plex of two-bedroom apartments (one bedroom to sleep in, one to be used as an office) in the rich part of town, so I can pretend to be wealthy. It's about four miles due north of where Cardgrrl's house will be. On Wednesday I signed a lease; the place is mine starting February 1.

This is sooner than I had anticipated. As of a week ago, I was thinking it would be more like March or April when I would make the move. But things change, and I decided I needed to just do it. I'm not yet sure exactly when I'll go. I can't get everything planned and arranged to leave here by the first of the month. It will probably end up being more like February 10th to 15th time frame. Heck, I don't even know how I'll move--hire a moving company, drive a U-Haul myself, or maybe try to UPS anything that won't fit in my car. We'll see. (The new car, by the way, was an integral part of this evolving big plan, though I didn't tell you that at the time. The old car could not possibly have been trusted on a cross-country trip, nor could it carry much stuff.)

Anyway, the Las Vegas chapter of my life (actually the second Las Vegas chapter of my life, as I was here for a couple of years back in 1980-1982) is now coming rapidly to a close. With it, this blog will also mostly fade away. I won't shut it down completely. I'm sure that once in a while I'll have a story to tell, an opinion to share, a news item to comment on, a rant to get off my chest.

But poker is hard to come by in North Carolina. The only poker room that is less than a full day's drive is Harrah's Cherokee. Cardgrrl and I went there last night to scope out the place. It's about a 70-minute drive each way when there is clear weather and no traffic. The poker room for now has no live dealers, just a bunch of Poker Pro electronic tables, though they are in the process of training dealers, and have a WSOP circuit event scheduled to be there in April.

How about online? Well, we'll see. I've never been as successful at the online game as the live game, nor enjoyed it as much, though my Josie-inspired brief orgy of online tournaments in August raises the possibility that I could do better at it if I really tried.

The upshot is that I think it's inevitable that poker will be reduced to being a small, occasional part of my life and attention, and that as a result blog posts here will be few and far between. I will probably also greatly cut back on the amount of poker-related blog and Twitter reading that I do. I can't continue to saturate my reading with poker when I can't go out and play it. That would drive me crazy, I think.

I am sad to be leaving a city I've come to like very much, and to consider my home. I'm sad to be leaving behind the friends I've made in my 6 1/2 years here, and to no longer be in a place where friends and readers from across the country and around the world come to visit on a regular basis. I'm nervous about trekking across the country to a place that I really know very little about, and to be making my home in a state where I never had any reason to think I'd live, where I've only set foot once before last week--and that was just in the Charlotte airport during a layover--and where I only know two people besides Cardgrrl (Shamus and his wife live a couple hours away). I'm bummed that I won't have a ridiculous richness of choice of poker rooms running 24/7, regularly stocked with fish in a way that is the envy of the trout and salmon industries, with which I can scratch the poker itch whenever it hits me. I'm slightly nauseated at the prospect of having to face cold winters and humid, mosquito-filled summers again, after thinking that I had left them behind forever. I'm distressed that I won't be able to pop up to see my parents and my sister in Salt Lake City for weekend visits every few months, as has become my practice.

But rising above all of that is that I am excited to be able to be near the one I love, and to find out what our relationship can be when we can see each other on a regular basis. That is more important to me than what state my address is in, more important than the weather, more important than being near the Vegas friends I've made, more important than poker--more important than anything else. (As Jesus taught, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he move to North Carolina to be near his girlfriend." Or something like that.) That realization makes me confident that this move is the right thing to do. It's time for one chapter of my life to end, and for another to begin.

What story will that chapter tell? Hell if I know. But it's time to turn the page and find out.





*It seems hard to believe that anyone intelligent enough to be a reader of this blog would not know the pop-culture origin of this title. But just in case there's a lame-o out there, see here.


Addendum, January 12, 2013 

For Cardgrrl's perspective on this, see here.

My most-viewed post?

Something just prompted me to look at my total page-view stats via Google Analytics, which I had never done before. (Just over 1.1 million. Thanks for asking.) I used to look at my traffic reports every week or more, but now it's very rare. I just don't care much.

Anyway, in the process of setting the date range to the entire life of the blog, I noticed a traffic spike that I had never noticed before, occurring on September 14, 2011. It was nearly twice as big as the spike I got when I got backroomed by the security goons at the Cannery in 2009. I was deeply puzzled as to what I might have written that got that much attention. It appears to have been this post about the ethics controversy at the Epic Poker League. I can't tell exactly where the traffic came from, because the main referral source is listed as a link-shortening service, so I'm guessing that somebody with a big Twitter following posted a shortened link to the piece.

Strange what gets attention and what doesn't. Some posts are deeply personal and important to me and get slaved over for hours and hours. Others are just whipped off from the top of my head and involve things on my mind that day, but which I consider of no lasting consequence. The degree of correlation between how important I deem something/how much work I put into writing it and how much attention it gets appears to be pretty close to zero.

Go figure.



Update

Mystery solved. I remembered that my friend Shamus got his biggest blog traffic spike ever when Daniel Negreanu posted a link to something he wrote. Given Negreanu's outspoken disdain for the EPL, it occurred to me that he was a likely source. A little digging, and, sure enough, he tweeted a link to my EPL post using the shortening service I had found on the exact date in question. It was then retweeted by others, including Kathy Liebert, Wicked Chops Poker, and others.

Comments

Some months ago I turned on the word-verification feature for comments. I.e., you had to prove you were a real person in order to post, though anonymous comments were still allowed. It immediately cut way down on the amount of spam I had to deal with.

A few days ago I quietly turned that requirement off to see if perhaps the problem had stopped or slowed down. Nope. Within 24 hours, it was back to about ten times a day getting an email notification of an obviously spamming comment submitted, which I would then have to flag as such. It's a serious irritant. So with regrets and apologies to my readers, word verification is being turned back on. Blame the horrible, selfish, anti-social people who think that the whole internet should be theirs for splattering their ads. If you are one of them, please go die in a fire.

Also, for reasons that are completely obscure, sometimes I don't get an email telling me that a comment is awaiting my approval. I try to remember once a week or so to go to the Blogger dashboard and check for pending comments that didn't generate an email notice to me, but sometimes I forget and comments languish in limbo without my knowledge. It's not a conspiracy, just a techo-glitch. Please forgive and don't take it personally.

The results are in

Four months ago I told you that I was among the choices available for a reader survey by Ante Up magazine. I subsequently forgot all about it.

Yesterday afternoon I was at Caesars Palace waiting for a seat be available and started flipping through the October issue. When what to my wondering eyes should appear...


 

So there you have it.

Oops--another milestone slipped by

Sometime recently I did my 4000th post, and didn't even notice it. This is #4015.

It's hard to sound excited about it now, since it went by like a thief in the night. But I thought I'd mention it, for the sake of completeness.

I used to think every 100th post was worth noting; now 1000 go by and it doesn't even register. Life changes.

I missed the blog's big birthday

And I missed it by a long way. It was 30 days ago, and it was just today that I realized that I've been doing this bloggery thing for five years now.

Here's the very first post, from October 30, 2006: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-you-threw-away.html

I don't have anything profound to say about the passage of that interval of time. To use my girlfriend's favorite (hah!) expression, it is what it is. But I thought I'd point it out anyway.

Thanks for sticking around.

Outta here

I'm leaving Wednesday morning for a week in D.C. visiting the wunnerful, wunnerful Cardgrrl. With much to do before flying off, I anticipate no more posts of any substance until sometime after I return. On the other hand, if we end up doing something of touristy interest I may manage to put up a story and/or pictures about it.

Word verification for comments

Word verification for comments is now enabled. I hate doing this. I have resisted it for almost five years. I could handle it when the spam comments only averaged about ten a day, but this week some ass-clown has been bombarding me with about a hundred a day, and I just can't stand it anymore. It appears that a bot is going through my archives and trying to submit a comment (there's a rotating list of maybe 20 generic comments) on every single one of them, and it's driving me crazy. I'm really sorry to add to the difficulty of posting a comment for the rest of you, but I don't know of any other way to stop it.

Blog name

Every once in a while I run across a poker-related phrase that I think would make an absolutely perfect title for a blog. I noticed one such today:

"Unbalanced Range."

It's so good that if I were starting this blog from scratch today, I'd probably forget the whole grumpy theme and go with that. It simultaneously suggests my generally tight play (i.e., I don't have a truly balanced range--I'm usually not bluffing); the fact that the blog might feature a wide assortment of topics, depending on my whims and interests at any given moment; and that I am likely to be perceived (rightly or wrong) as a little unbalanced.

Ah, if only I had thought of this five years ago....

Content thief at it again

In late February I posted a short note about a web site, "rodmanpoker" that was reposting, without permission or even notification, content from this and other poker blogs. I emailed the site owner. He apologized, said he was just experimenting with code, and took down the purloined posts.

Well, earlier today my friend Shamus let me know that the guy is at it again. Sure enough, I see one of Shamus's recent Peru travel reports posted there. There is also a copy of a couple of posts from the Carbon Poker blog, this one from PartTimePoker, this one from Pokerati, etc.

I was willing to accept his apology and explanation when it had just happened once. Now, however, this is clearly a pattern. His previous explanation that he was just messing around with autoposting was plainly a lie; he seems to have decided to make it the source of everything he posts.

The contact information I have lists the site owner as "Dustin Cal," with email address of d_c_8@hotmail.com. Fellow bloggers, you might let him know what you think of his ethics.

Good news

This blog has been officially deemed an "essential" service, and will continue publishing even in the event of a federal government shutdown.

Time out

Tuesday morning I'm heading to Florida for a week with Cardgrrl. Thanks to all for the nice list of suggestions of things to do and see. I have a ton of stuff to do before leaving, so I don't expect to be posting until I get there and find something to share. Or maybe not until I get home--who knows? We'll just have to see.

Submit your photos

Today I put together the next bunch of "Guess the casino" posts so that they will keep popping up while I'm away in Florida. It made me realize that I'm starting to run short of usable pictures (not surprising, after about 800 such posts now).

If you have photos of either the interior or exterior of Vegas-area casinos--limited to those that have or have had poker rooms within the last few years--that you think would make good material for this feature, please feel free to email them to me (address is in the "profile" in the left-hand margin).

I still have plenty of shots of the handful of most obviously visually interesting and photogenic places--Aria, Venetian, Caesars Palace, Bellagio. It's others that I'm lacking.

Small legal points: Please only send photos that you have taken yourself, not ones that you found somewhere else on the intertubez. Also, sending them implies giving your permission to use them, though it will only be for this silly little feature, and only once--I'm not compiling a book or anything. Please also include a notation about how you would like to be attributed, e.g., full name, nickname, anonymous, or whatever. I need your real name on the email (because I'll be suspicious that anonymous submissions are not using their own work), but will publish or withhold whatever you prefer in terms of identification.

Obviously, I can't promise to use everything you might send; I might not think a picture works, or it duplicates something I've already done, etc. But I'd really like to try to use what I reasonably can. Finally, please identify the casino for me--don't make ME guess!

Thanks!

Thief

Fellow bloggers, you might want to look at rodmanpoker.com and see if they are stealing your posts the same way they are stealing mine. Predictably, there is no contact information, so nobody to complain to.

Thanks to HighOnPoker for alerting me to this.

Update

I wrote to the site owner and asked him what he was doing. He replied: "Sorry Ill remove it.. I was just messing around with auto blogs.. I don't even have any ads on the sites.. sorry about that." And, in fact, it does appear that the site has now removed the material.

Troubles

I have spent most of the last three days wrestling with a truly infernal computer problem, or set of problems. Found a bad RAM module, removal of which stopped most of the random crashes, but somehow in the process of testing and replacing the hardware, the system software got out of whack, and now won't let me do much of anything (like connect to the Internet). Today I finally threw in the towel and took it to a repair shop. I have pressed the old computer back into temporary service, but it's somehow gotten even crankier and quirkier than it was when I last used it in October. So I'm doing as little online as possible for the next day or two. This all happens to coincide with when my supply of pre-posted "Guess the Casino" posts ran out, so that, too, will be on temporary hiatus.

I'll let you know when I'm back in business.

How do people get here?

Recently I've seen myself listed by other poker bloggers (specifically Bill Rini and Wicked Chops) as among their top referrers. It occurred to me that I've never done more than glance at the Google Analytics report about who has been referring hits to me. I herewith correct that deficiency. For 2010, the top ten referrers were:

1. http://craakker.blogspot.com/
2. http://www.allvegaspoker.com/
3. http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/
4. http://taopoker.blogspot.com/
5. http://magicalmysterypokertour.blogspot.com/
6. http://ftrain.blogspot.com/
7. http://www.thinkingpoker.net/Blog/
8. http://bwop.blogspot.com/
9. http://www.twoplustwo.com/
10. http://bastinptc.blogspot.com/

While I was at it, I also took an updated look at what Google queries lead people to something I've written. To be sure, the great majority of Google searches that find me are clearly looking for me, with some combination of "poker," "grump," "rakewell," and "blog." But setting those aside, for as long as I've been peeking in at this sort of thing from time to time, the top inquiry has been about Tom Dwan's sexual orientation. I wrote about it the first time I saw Dwan play on television. Then a while later, I discovered that Google searches about Dwan were by far the most common thing leading people to my blog. For 2010, such questions remain in the lead by a huge margin, with at least 1200 souls having looked through my pages in an attempt to satisfy their curiosity on this vitally important matter.

Interestingly, for the first time, I can actually provide something of an answer. Since I last mentioned the subject, I have heard Dwan speak openly about his girlfriend when playing in various televised events and on his Twitter feed. Assuming that he is telling the truth, and that this refers to a romantic rather than platonic relationship, the answer appears to be that he is straight. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

Oddly, the next most common Google search that leads people my way is now "Brad Booth broke." That plus a few variants on the same idea brought over 650 searchers to the blog. The only thing I've written about Booth is a post pointing readers to an interesting All In magazine article about his travails: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2010/05/brad-booth.html It's not like either Booth or Dwan actually feature heavily in my thoughts or writing.

There are also some strange keyword searches that show up in the rankings:

• poker grump jeep (209)

Huh? I've used the word "Jeep" exactly once in four years. It was in a non-poker-related post, just showing a few photos of a crazily decorated car that I noticed while walking downtown, here. And yet more than 200 people specifically sought out that post? I don't get it.

• shannon elizabeth (152)
• shannon elizabeth feet (61)

Um, OK. I have no idea what these people are doing here. I just tried a Google search for Shannon Elizabeth, and I'm nowhere in the first five pages of results. If you have a foot fetish for her, I'm surely not the go-to guy about that.

• grange95 blog (131)

Baffling once again. When I replicate this search, I find my first mention toward the bottom of the second page of results. If people are looking for the infamous Craakker, how do so many of them get diverted my way, rather than where they presumably want to go?

• cory zeidman drunk (46)

One of my personal favorites, this--though just as mysterious a result as the others. I did write once about having Zeidman at the table with me briefly, but he was not drunk. He consumed only water while he was playing.

As I have found in the past when doing such high-tech navel-gazing, what specific things people are looking for when they find me has zero correlation with either what I write most about or with what I think are my best pieces of work. Oh well. I'm glad I have at least a little something to offer to people with such widely varying interests.