My god Chester is cute

Jumping through hoops is not easy for couch potatoes

I like my sports activities as sedentary as possible — they usually involve leaning back and resting the remote on my belly, Chester snoozing on the couch next to me, giving off little dream twitches and growls (I’ll leave his gas emissions out of this). I move generally for the sole purpose of cursing out my team of the day (I’m a Mets, Rangers, Jets and very distant Knicks fan, so that’s a lot of cursing). When I first got my Nintendo Wii, I have to admit I was a little pissed off that it requires so much actual physical effort. My motionlessness is further proof that Chester is indeed my human son, no matter what anyone else says to the contrary.

Maybe that’s why online poker is the most appealing sport of all. A lot goes on in that tiny screen, and I barely have to move. I have been on an aformentioned roll, and something’s clicked in — maybe it’s the influx of players from Party Poker to Pokerstars as a result of Bill fucking Frist, but I’ve been feeling like most of my opponents have been playing with their cards face up, and I can get them to do what I want, when I want. I think I am learning much more how to read and play the other players, and the results are starting to show for me.

Now, with all that, I will be forced to make some serious effort (ugh, effort) to withdraw and/or deposit money into my poker account. NETeller, the sort of middleman between poker players and the poker sites as far as exchanging funds go, has stopped serving US customers. This is a result of the new gaming law snuck in at the end of the final Republican-controlled Congressional session at the last minute to the port security bill by Bill Frist, for his presidential run that is already abandonded. (Can anyone say cat-killing lunatic?) Oh yeah, also, two former NETeller execs got arrested on what seems to be pretty odd charges, more related to sports betting than poker, for actions apparently before the new laws were passed (and the aws haven’t been enacted yet anyway).

The point is, now I will actually have to make an effort when withdrawing money (like, get a check in the mail and get off my ass and deposit it in a bank) and if depositing, use a more expensive and possibly less safe company, or mail a money order to the Isle of Man or Antigua or wherever the fuck the poker sites are hiding. This makes it all a little more work, but of course I am perfectly willing to do it, as are a few million others who like to sit on their (probably fatter than mine) asses too.

Meanwhile, if I happen to like betting on horses from the privacy of my home, that is perfectly easy to do, and not under attack. Why? The horse betting lobby is older, has more money, and thus, influence, than the very lame poker lobbyists. How that jibes with alleged moral threat of online poker is beyond me. Horse racing is just as morally corrupt as poker (to me, not at all), and no one shoots me full of lasix or performance enhancing drugs before I sit down to play poker, and there’s little danger of any animals becoming injured (Chester does sometimes fall off the couch) and subsequently shot to death, so to me, poker has a bit of a moral edge on horse racing.

But of course, we do have “pro-lifers” who like the death penalty (not to mention the random death of civilians in Iraq) in America, so hypocracy (or shooting a few horses) is not very problematic is it?

Poker radio interviews are entertaining

I love listening to poker players get interviewed.   Kevin Saul (belowabove on PS) on the Circuit the other day was very entertaining, as he recounted how he blew all his money in a bad month in Las Vegas a couple of summer ago, quit poker to take a low-paying job.  That lasted 4 days, until he found a backer and won $27K in a tournament, and quit his job.   I just thought it was fascinating how really young people who are good at the game spend their lives.   Very large sums of cash seem pretty meaningless to them, which is one way great, since miney is so overvalued in our society, yet it’s also weird how much money people make playing a game, while others work for years doing things they believe in and make jackshit.

That being said,  I’m on a roll lately and have cashed 4 of the last 5 tourneys I’ve played, including two FTs of 180 person sit’n’gos.  Yay!