The Poker Project (playing and writing about poker in the U.S.)

I reckon someone should write a novel about what's contained in Dubnjoy000's 2nd spoiler ...

This is hanging on my wall

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makes sense. I think I agree with G's take that at some point the cliffhanger angle reaches an expiration date.

Yeah. I've experienced a wide range of encounters, as I wrote about above, and most of them have been harmless/amusing. But it can also be tricky to navigate, as you/GG/Dubn are mentioning.

Nola seems squarely in the "small city" category: small enough that bump-ins occur with some frequency, but not so small that you're constantly encoutering regs. One of the other things you're touching on—getting to know cardplayers well off the felt—is especially interesting to me. How friendship operates in the poker world, in other words, and how knowing the intimate details of a fellow reg's life complicates how you deal with them/exploit them on the felt.

It's interesting to think about how cardplayers create cliques and self-segregate. Yes, birds of a feather flock together, so winners will "naturally and inadvertently" mesh well, but friendships can obviously develop for plenty of other reasons—type of games and higher/lower steaks being chief factors, I think.

And then there's the bullshit cameraderie that's different from what you're describing: regs "befriending" donators in order to poach them for private games, etc.

Anyway, forgive my rambling. Some food for future thought 😀

FYP

January Recap

Looking back, local historians will no doubt highlight the Great Sneauxpocalypse of 2025. "Magical" is an overused word, especially in Nola, but it really was a magical few days.

Sledding on the Levee

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Road Trip Frenemies

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Poker Cats and Dogs

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Another January, another Heater

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As promised, here's a link to the

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-joel-doney/id1674014548?i=1000685369946

Apple Podcasts

#25: Joel Doney

With Operation (re)Deny marknfw successfully completed, the question is whether or not to run it back. To which I say

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That said, I might impose a mini-challenge or two this year, on the poker and/or the writing front. For now, though, I have two familiar February goals:

[ ] run 200 miles
[ ] survive Mardi Gras

Hope everyone's year is off to a good start!

Mr. Bumblebee

It’s Sunday afternoon, the last day of the Nola Circuit Event, and I’m already armed with a second cup of coffee. The WSOP’s black-and-white poker chip logo is on every chairback, above the flatscreens on the faux-French Quarter balconies, beneath the check-in podium’s glossy black tabletop. The room is near-packed, sixteen tables are going, and Supervisor Fozzy’s being ambushed on three sides by would-be players and table-changers, his eyes darting between computer monitors as he manages the waitlists. After a fifteen-minute wait I’m sent to a $1/$3 on Table 7, across from Buddha; when a seat opens on his direct right, I take it. “How was the party?” he asks. He’s chip-shuffling with one hand hand and playing Candy Crush with the other.

“Good,” I say. “Total shitshow.”

Last night, for my friend's 28th beeday, there was a party bus in the Quarter and fireworks in City Park and karaoke at Kajun’s. I made it to karaoke after wrapping up a long session here. “How’d your night end up?” I ask. “I looked for you as I was leaving, but didn’t see you.”

“It went really well. Unexpected spaz at a pretty tight table put me up $700 for the night.” Buddha checks his card, folds, gives me a look. “Any party that you can show up at 1 a.m. for should be a little bit of a **** show.”

I’d arrived right as my friends were spilling out of the bus onto St. Claude, yelling and laughing and sipping go-cups of beer and wine. The birthday girl pulled two of her besties onto the sidewalk and they huddled together, heads close, powdering their noses before scampering with their glittery purses into Kajun's.

“So just my typical weekend around Becca then?”

“I hope that’s a joke,” I say.

Buddha grins and says, “She knows lots of people who do blow. Obviously not me. Like the drug dealer who lives next to Maggie.”

“Of course,” I say. “I played with him the other night.”

We’d played together a half-dozen times or so, but we’d met outside the cardroom, during one of the parades. Outside Becca’s sister’s Chewbacchus party, a big burly guy was standing on the sidewalk wearing big black glasses and a bushy beard, dressed exactly like the tapdancing little girl in Blind Melon’s music video No Rain: yellow-black headpiece and arm warmers and tutu, black tights, black shoes with yellow bow ties. He even had fake pigtails, although his dark chest hair and manboobs were real.

The first time we’d played together, Mr. Bumblebee was sitting on a few grand, whaling around and cracking jokes with the same merriment he’d had on the street. He was dressed in a blue short-sleeved shirt and a gray bowler cap that covered his big bald head. I sat on his left in the 1 Seat with a grand, and at an opportune moment I slinked over to the cage, slid the cashier five hundos, and plopped a purple chip onto my stack. Seeing this, Mr. Bumblebee made a joky comment that the pros were here, **** was about to really get real, etc etc, and I couldn't come up with a witty reply. Although I wasn't a pro, he wasn't wrong about my intentions. I'd decided that the gee in front of me was insufficient for extracting max value: I wanted more. To be precise, I wanted every chip in front of the table's resident whale. Mr. Bumblebee, recognizing this, was letting me know that he knew what I was trying to do.

I didn't stack Mr. Bumblebee that day, and he didn't stack me. Over the years we played together a handful of other times, he was at most a semi-reg, and we’d never had a real conversation. I figured I was the only one who remembered our fleeting street encounter.

On his phone, Buddha wordlessly shows me one of Mr. Bumblebee’s Facebook pics, with the caption, Killa? lol

I recognize the cardplayer in the photo. He’s a run-of-the-mill white guy wearing a tan hoodie, a UTC trucker cap, and a look of abject misery on his face that says, Do you see how much I’m suffering? He’s peering at the middle of the table, presumably deep in thought, surrounded by other stoic chipshuffling misregs.

The misreg looks like Dirk Nowitski.

The misreg is me.

“So random,” I say, glancing at Buddha. “I had no idea he knows who I am.”

“I don’t think he does. Just a coincidence I’m pretty sure.”

I take out my phone and within a minute find Mr. Bumblebee’s account—in his profile pic he's wearing the bee costume—scroll down to my pic, and read the comments. The consensus is that I’m not, in fact, a killa. Ew. No. Lol, someone replies. Someone else posts a pic of a redneck zombie. I take a moment to appreciate the unsolicited, unfiltered, unflatting image of myself that I've stumbled on, for the rest of the world to see. I’d like to be able to tell you that I’m always good for the game, that I treat others with respect and kindness, even when I’m losing, that I bring a breath of fresh air to whatever table I sit at. How nice that would be if it were true.

I scroll through some more photos and find some chip porn. There’s one of a fat stack at Harrahdise with the caption, At the office grinding it out. There’s one at the Beau of Mr. Bumblebee holding four cards high above the table so that a bewildered service dog in the next seat can take a look. There’s one of a fat stack of hundos, four 1K yellows, and a VIP room key, with the caption, crushing the Beau. Part of me wants to put him on blast, to post on his Facebook wall, hey brah, Harrahdise killa here, you know where a guy can score some blow?

“I’ll have to friend him,” I say, putting my phone away.

“Maybe don’t friend him,” Buddha says.

“C’mon,” I say. “Where will I get my coke?”

Nice!

GmyunrulybeardisSamBeaminspiredG

Damn misregs!

Go to karaoke songs?

Ghasonlykaraoke'doutofthecountryasmysingingisthatbadG

What a magnificent page and a half itt.

It's like he should write a book or something.

Are these book excerpts?

GcluelessingeneralnoobG

In other news, after yesterday's Super Bowl (which I didn't watch) and today's news (which are omnipresent), I can finally say that I do believe I would have a fair chance of recognizing Taylor Swift in a picture... And I did have the pleasure of talking to quite a few (Latino and Quebecois) friends about how the subject came up with a poster ITT (a couple of years ago...?) that he did not believe me that I would not recognize her ; we all had a good lol 🙄

Sorry for the derail Ben!

I'm not too deep in the karaoke streets. I've been known to bust out some classic country or the occasional TayTay tune. You? (I'm sure your singing is in the so-bad-it's-good category)

is it too late to Make Two Plus Two Great Again?

I look forward to delegating the task to a fleet of Chat GPT-5s

more like drafts of stuff I may or may not use

congrats on getting up to speed on lolMerican culture!

now if you could please decode Kendrick's Super Bowl halftime show, I'll be forever in your debt, tyty

I think it's fair to say there are no derails itt Dubn 😀

I've karaoked exactly twice.

Correctly read the room in Dominican Republic as very Canadian, so me and wife sang Summer of '69 (so we had everyone drown out our terrible voices).

And apologies to Paul Simon, but I absolutely butchered Feelin' Groovy in Mexico once.

Gslowdown,youmovetofastG

Once, in NOLA. Tried and failed to get video proof.

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Bthirdtimesacharm?B

Gonna need some help deciphering who and what that is!

Paging Doctor TeeJayOh...I've assembled what I need to achieve Claire Keegan completism

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Yes, expecting your review(s) shortly. I wonder if you're planning on reading all those in quick succession? I just finished a brilliant novel by an Oz author (The Wall by Jen Craig) and intentionally paused before reading her two other novels. Will be kicking myself if I don't get around to reading those other two novels of hers, since, as you know, "things happen" that stop one from reading (e.g. I go busto and can't afford to buy brand new books/lose enthusiasm for reading new stuff in general/get stuck trying to finish all of Dickens/someone gives me a book I have to read/fall-out of my reading routines and so on).

Thanks for the Jen Craig rec. I think I'll read Keegan's books slowly and mix in others alongside them. No reason to rush.

Unless, of course, I go busto!

February (and some of March) Recap

Happy Ash Wednesday, yall. Yesterday was even more epic than usual for me because, for the first time, Fat Tuesday fell on my birthday. And on top of that, it was my tenth Mardi Gras!

A decade gamboling in Nola, and I haven't yet gone busto. How good do I run?

To celebrate the occasion, I assembled oodles of beeday throws and distributed them to the frolicking masses of revelers in the Quarter. It was actually a super-windy day, leading to a few parade cancellations and reductions, but my favorite parade, St. Anne's, went off without a hitch. The vibe was great.

In the Quarter

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By the River

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Monster Alert!

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content fluffball

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uncontent fluffball

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How Racist is this Front Yard? #ruralMissippi

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Super Bowl Blackjack Degens > Harrahdise Cardplayers

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I've played exactly one session of lolive poker since the Heater, at the request of a friend who wanted to dress up like clowns and splash around. (How could I refuse?) I bought in for the min and started ramming and jamming and naturally it was impossible to lose. March, though, should result in a few sessions, with March Madness and a poker trip on the horizon. Hope everyone's month is off to a good start!

Reminds me of Mark Linkous, vocally, tempo-wise too. Like the Mavis Staples connection and the fact that he reads DeLillo.

How do you know he reads Delillo?

Shortly after discovering Booker, I caught the last show of his tour at Siberia (in Nola, not, alas, Russia), and enjoyed it. He reminds me a bit of Ben Harper.

He quotes from White Noise in the song Witness. Also references James Baldwin and Sartre: https://www.stereogum.com/1954967/can-we...

Seems to be a Nola local now albeit a self-confessed outsider. I was never a large Ben Harper fan but he certainly had many in Oz.

Cool interview, thanks for sending. I had heard he's a Nola local right before the Siberia concert. I'm following him on Instagram now so we're pretty much bffs.

At the IP

On Saturday morning I pick up Steve and pull onto Beach Boulevard and head to the Waffle House that’s across the street from the Hard Rock Biloxi. We take a booth, Steve orders an All-Star Special—scrambled eggs, wheat toast, burnt bacon—I order the same minus the burnt bacon, and we launch into our usual gabfest. A postmortem on his bustout hand in Day 1A of yesterday’s WSOP Circuit Main, when he defended the big blind against an UTG raise and flopped top pair. How Monkey went apeshit last night in a cash game at the Beau (he bet big on the river, a buddy of mine bumped it up with a flush, Monkey tank-called and rage-mucked and stuffed his chips into his pocket and drunkenly hopped the banister, blustering away two gees poorer). Various gossip involving Harwell and the Prince and Wild Bill (can you call yourself a pro if you only enter the fray thrice yearly?) and the next stop on the merry-go-round, October’s WSOP Circuit Event in Hollywood, Florida.

“Poker players are a strange breed,” Steve says.

I drop Steve back at his AirBnB and we wish each other luck. He’s heading to the Beau to fire a bullet in the Gulf Coast Poker Championship's $1,340 Main, I’m heading to the IP to fire the $365 Turbo. I park on Level 5a, take the elevators to the first floor, and walk past a security guard who doesn’t bother carding me to the bustling playing floor, which is filled with every sort of gambler tapping away on every sort of bright blinking machine. “Don’t lose all your money, honey,” a woman says to her husband in a sing-song voice as they amble through the smoky slots.

I take the escalator to the second floor and head into the Cove, a quieter space decorated in soothing browns and yellows. Pendant lights resembling bamboo stalks cluster on the ceiling, emerald flowers spruce up the faded industrial carpet. As soon as I step inside Studio B and look around—dark green walls stamped with black-and-white WSOP logos, thirtyish cardtables crammed with cardplayers on brown padded chairs, donkament clocks ticking away—I’m thinking about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Same setup as last September, same schedule (a big reentry to kick off the first weekend followed by a PLO event, a ladies event, a monster stack, a six-max, a few turbos, the Main), lots of the same faces. One year earlier I met Choff on the rail of the final table, he was sweating Cough and I was sweating Steve as they battled for the $126K first prize. When action got three-handed Steve and Lytle and Savage suddenly needed very badly to take a piss, they went to the bathroom as the WSOP staff stood helplessly waiting—the WSOP wouldn’t facilitate deal-making, but neither could they prevent it—and a few minutes later the three survivors heroically strolled back to their seats, a successful deal intact. Soon enough Steve was holding two fat bricks and celebrating another five-figure score, and then the two of us were zooming down Caillavet Street in his sleek silver Corvette, Steve gunned the engine and we went from twenty to sixty in an eyeblink, I was yelling and Steve was laughing, for a few moments we turned the one-mile stretch between the IP and the Beau into our personal amusement park.

Now, one year later, Day 1B of the Main’s going full steam, fifteen or so tables are running. Savage, the defending champ, is here, along with Captain P.O.B. and Judge Leo and the Professor and Joe the Pro and Dubble Dee and Cody and Tim and Jeter and Cough and Choff and, in the corner, wearing her best kick-ass face, Miss Katie.

Today I don’t have to worry about a long grind—I’m out of the turbo by the fourth level. It’s only six, and so I head outside and get on the cash game list in the six-table main cardroom. I'm sent to the 8 Seat at a table in the middle of the room and instantly recognize Seat 6, old Mr. Ron with his thinning white hair, munching a waffle cone with a napkin guarding his red-and-blue flannel. Everyone’s sitting with a few hundred except for Ron, who’s got at least four hundos beneath five stacks of reds. I buy in for three bills.

Dolly, a fiftyish woman on my right, is wearing a sparkly black shirt, snazzy white glasses, and lavender Bose headphones around her neck. The drive, she tells me and Ron and the 9 Seat, Mr. Willy, is about an hour.

“Sounds like Mobile,” Willy says. Big and burly, dressed in a Tommy Hilfiger polo and blue jeans with the fly open, he reminds me of Bald Bull from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

“That’s exactly where it is. It does stink, though. I live in D’Iberville, that’s where my house is, but I’m living with my parents for now. I’m going through a nasty divorce.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Willy says.

I raise Ace-Eight of clubs, Willy calls, two more calls, the Jack-Jack-Three flop checks through. I check again on the Ace of hearts turn, Willie bets $20, only I call. The river’s the Nine of hearts, bringing in a backdoor flush, I checks and he quickly shows Jack-Seven. “The heart scared me,” he says. “Can’t bet no more.”

One of the machines in the middle of the Cove, Willy says, has been tempting him for the last hour, but he’s done with slots. They don’t make any sense to him. “If you’re wanting to play slots to make sense of it,” Dolly says agreeably, “you don’t need to play.”

“I watch people sit there and put hundreds and hundreds of dollars in the machine,” Willy says.

“I watched a woman tonight at the Hard Rock, she was doing fifty dollars a spin. She probably went through a thousand dollars in fifteen minutes.”

Willie shakes his head. “I’d ‘a passed out, graveyard-dead.”

Dolly schools us on the slots, the different denominations, the betting patterns. Ron’s moved on from the waffle cone to a pastry the size of a frisbee, politely nibbling and listening. “The reason I know all that is because I used to be an exclusive high-limit slot player,” Dolly says. “I wouldn’t go in with less than three to five K.”

Before I came upstairs I wandered around, eyeballing the machines and popping into one of the rooms filled with dragons and buffalo slots. It was the old cardroom. I could picture the tables and chairs and the cashier booth. I must have played there ten times or twenty times, back in the aughts when I was driving from Houston to New York and back on summer breaks from school. Hours and hours, and I can't remember a single hand. I can't remember whether I won or lost or even when I was there. But I can still see the room in my mind's eye.

“I’ve got a low straight,” Dolly says, frowning at a board riddled with flushes and boats. Her Eight-Nine off is good. As the dealer pushes her the pot she says, “That hand just got worse and worse!”

“Yeah, but it won,” Willie says.

Our side of the table has an easy camaraderie, and the game feels friendly, welcoming. Lots of regs from what I can tell, sassy dealers, nobody too upset with losing, nobody gloating after their wins. Ron starts telling jokes. He also tells us about the time when he was playing with a filthy rich woman who mucked a jackpot hand to spite some *******. As he’s telling it I realize that I’ve heard the story before, it’s part of poker lore, and I wonder how many other stories Ron has recycled and repackaged for his own purposes. I wonder how many times I’ve done the same.

“I can’t keep up with the machines,” Dolly says after she wins another pot. “I was playing one just while I was waiting, it was a little chicken machine. It was horrible—I mean, horrible. It takes hundreds like it’s candy.” She cackles. “Stupid-ass chicken, I’ll barbeque your ass.”

“They got ‘em all in here,” Willie says.

“The particular lifestyle I was in, the only thing that was there was money. So I got pretty heavy into the slots. But now that it’s my money again”—Dolly scans her stack—“I’ll stay where I’m more comfortable.” She laughs bitterly. “Like, now that it’s not my piece-of-**** husband’s money? ‘Cause he was like, ‘You blew all of my money!’” She turns to Willy and me and says, her eyes wide, “I damn. Sure. Did! And I did it as fast as humanly possible! You wanna pretend like I don’t exist and our kids don’t exist? I’ll burn through your money!”

We're dying. “I’m weak in the knees!” Willie says.

Around eight I take a break, hit the bathroom. Before I can go inside Studio B, Katie speedwalks straight to me. Tears are streaming down her face. She’s talking so rapidly that I can barely follow a word she’s saying, a look of profound anguish and confusion is on her face, and eventually I get the gist: she flopped a set, lost to trips that turned into a higher boat, and busted the Main. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she tells me. “I didn’t!”

On my way back to my seat I spot Katie’s traveling partner, Miss Joan, sitting serenely in a cowboy hat and librarian glasses, cool-as-a-cucumber-confident. “Katie’s out,” I tell her.

She shakes her head and says softly, “Katie-girl.”

I tell Joan about the book I’m writing and ask if she’d be willing to do an interview. “Wait till I win a tournament,” she says.

“I don’t care who wins tournaments,” I reply.

She smiles coolly and doesn't reply. Not wanting to press my luck, I wish her well and retake my seat and text Buddha, who I’m chopping a room with at the Beau. Still playing, he replies. LSU game is on. Going to call Becca in an hour or so.

“Raise to $12,” our dealer announces.

I fold my small blind and glance at Dolly, who’s flicked in a rare raise. “I play enough slot machines. I do enough blind betting. I like to look at my cards here.” She wins with Ace-Queen and reminds the table that she’s still not ahead.

“I haven’t been ahead since before the Grand was open,” Willie says. Dolly and Ron’s eyes brighten, and they smile and nod. Now that was a cardroom, they say. Free donuts, free popcorn. Great action. Friendly, tight-knit regs. Everything you could want.

“They could have offered a class on how to run a cardroom,” the dealer says.

“I was at the old Grand one night, walked in about 7:30 and there’s a line from there to there”—Willy gestures from one end of the Cove to the other—“waiting to play.”

“Poker?” I ask.

“Yeah. They had Omaha going, they had no-limit, they had $4-$8, they had Stud, all these different poker games were going on. I sat down waiting and waiting and waiting, and one of the dealers came in that I knew, I said, ‘Trish, I dreamed about you last night, so I came down here to play.’” She looked at me like, you dreamed about me? And I said not like that, nothing sexual. I dreamed you were gonna deal a bad beat jackpot.”

Dolly laughs.

“And she says, I’ve never dealt one. Midnight, and she dealt it.”

“Really,” Dolly says.

“She dealt it. I got $25K. And I had the worst hand you could play. I had Seven-Deuce, three Deuces were out there, and my Quads lost. This lady had Three-Five of hearts and made a straight flush on the river. Trish screamed and said, ‘you dreamed it!’” Willie smiles and says, “I lost the hand, but it was worth it.”

“I’ll get your phone number, you get mine,” Dolly tells Willy, “and when you get another dream, you call me.”

March Recap

March-April-May are perhaps the best months to be in Nola. Haven't been pokering much but did play a bit the first weekend of March Madness and snuck in a short trip to the Beau, where I binked a royal and won a $500 promo, ez game.

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With no TV shows grabbing my attention at the moment till Andor drops, I've gone down the Sean Baker rabbithole starting with Anora (which seems like a very good film that probably wouldn't win Best Picture most years, but I'm glad it did). So far I've seen Takeout, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, with my favorite probably being The Florida Project.

Also just finished the most outrageous book I've read in a while, Tony Tulathimutte's linked short story collection

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/rejection-by-tony-tulathimutte-is-a-story-collection-about-people-who-just-cant-hang

The New Yorker

A Story Collection About People Who Just Can’t Hang

I've also been loving the NBA recently. Was telling a friend how lucky I feel to be able to see Luka and Lebbron on the same team. The only time I was more excited by an acquisition—and, to be fair, teenage Bob was way more excited—was when Rodman joined the Bulls.

As much as I respect Yokich, I'd love to see SGA win MVP and a title. Should be a very interesting Western conference playoffs, though in the end I fear the Celts will mop everyone up and win another title.

One last parade

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Visiting old friends

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Bedroom Coup

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Thriving fluffball

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Have a great month yall!