Happy Anniversary!

Today is the anniversary of this very blog.  It was two years ago today I posted not one but two posts, and followed that with two more the next day.  I didn't want to launch the blog until I proved to myself I could I had more than one post in me.  I guess I proved that.  This will be my 328th blog post, and the blog is, amazingly enough, approaching a quarter of a million page views.

After two years, I almost can't believe how much I enjoy doing the blog.  It's been a great experience.  I really enjoy writing up the posts—especially those really long posts that my readers clamor for.  Sadly, this will not be one of those extra long posts.  Oh well.  But I have to say, nothing beats getting favorable reaction to one of my posts.

It is fair to say that the blog has led to my current working relationships with both All Vegas Poker and Ante Up Magazine.

Doing the blog has directly and indirectly led to meeting some great people who have become good friends--both in cyberspace and in the flesh.

And there have been some surprising benefits to doing the blog beyond anything I could imagine.  Recently someone told me that being written about in the blog led to something really, really positive for her in a totally unpredictable way.  Sorry, but I promised not to reveal the details of it.

And, although I'm hesitant to discuss it, I will mention that I recently heard from a member of Jace's family to thank me for my comments about him.  The family apparently really liked what I wrote about Jace and had sent the blog post around to all his friends and family.  They said I captured the Jace they knew.  That made me feel real good (under the circumstances, of course).

And the blog and the magazine gig have given me a lot more notoriety than I ever could have imagined.  I discussed that in this post here.  And just last nite, I was playing poker at good ol' BSC when a guy said to me, totally out of the blue, "Say Rob, how many magazines do you write for?  I know you have a blog and write for Ante Up, but anything else?"

I recognized this guy as someone I'd played poker with before, but I don't recall ever discussing the blog or the magazine with him.  I asked how he knew my name, and he said that he recognized me from my picture in Ante Up.  He was reading my column once and realized he had played poker with the guy who had written it the nite before.  Neat.

The blog has changed in ways I couldn't have imagined when I started it.  That's mostly due to the fact that I was strictly a 2/4 limit player when I started it.  Switching to No Limit changed the focus of the blog into more of an actual poker blog than I initially expected.  Not that I don't still post my share of silly stuff--you know, the hooker stories, the "woman saids", the boobs mentionings, the genital mentionings.

Speaking of which, to commemorate the second anniversary, I thought I'd share this little ditty that dates back to the days when I was still a 2/4 player and that I've never posted until now. It is more typical of the way the blog started out than it is today.....

It seems that at the 2/4 table several years ago, there was a psychologist playing, and one player in particular found this fascinating and started pumping him for information. The guy doing the questioning was a nice guy from the Bay Area, there with his wife, also very nice.  Let’s call them Pete & Gladys. Note:  you see a lot more couples playing together at the 2/4 game than you do at 1/2 NL.

Once Pete found out a shrink (actually a marriage counselor) was there, he started asking him all sorts of psychological questions.  I tried hard to tune it out because this is not really the kind of conversation I want to hear at a poker game.  At one point though, the idea of a "metro-sexual" came up, and the shrink claimed he wasn't familiar with the term.  Pete and Gladys tried to educate him, and he said he understood it, he just hadn't heard the term. Now I had already sorta overheard the shrink say something like he really like big asses (on women), and that this preference dates back to the caveman era when women were always taken from behind (I wish I heard this better to report exactly how he had actually expressed this but I believe I have the gist of it).  Too bad this was before I had met Prudence.  No doubt she would have accused the shrink of being “obsessed with asses.”

So when the metro-sexual was described, he said something like, "Well, as far as I'm concerned, if you look at a penis for more than five seconds, you're gay."  

I suppose in thinking about this now, a couple of years later, I have to wonder if the guy was really a shrink.  That doesn’t sound like something a shrink would say, does it?  But then, there had been copious amounts of alcohol consumed.  And I don’t mean to imply the guy was disparaging gays at all, he was not.  It seemed like he was merely trying to make a witty observation.

Pete then announced to the entire table that, “I look at my own penis longer than that, and I’m not gay.”  One of the guys asked why he would look at it so long and there was so much laughter I didn't hear anything else. I think the logical thing would have been to ask Gladys if Pete’s peter was worth looking at for so long, but if someone did that, I missed it.  Anyway, at that precise moment, some little gray haired old lady next to me got up from the table. 

The dealer, who had just come to the table, asked the rest of the table to “bring it down several notches, we'd already lost a player.” The old lady came back 10 minutes later, played a few hands but then moved to another table.  I asked Gladys if she thought the woman had moved to other game because of her husband’s comment and she said most definitely yes.

She also kind of laughed and shrugged and indicated that she after all these years, she was used to her husband saying bizarre statements like that in public.