We know about Jamie Gold’s poker residency at the Tropicana in Las Vegas — where he can be found playing 1/2 and apparently trying to fill the poker world’s Professor void by offering lessons that cost about as much as a college education. (The Jamie Gold Poker Room official launch party, btw, is Feb 17!)

But what about the rest of ‘em?

You can currently find Jerry Yang, the 2007 WSOP’s biggest winner and #20 on the all-time poker tournament money list, bussing tables while commanding an otherwise lackadaisical staff (according to Yelp) at Pocket 8s Sushi & Grill in central California. Um, pass the yum-yum sauce?

Via Pokerati’s resident Vegas grinder-thug @AndrewNeeme:

Poker Fish: You wouldn’t believe how many of Jerry Yang’s relatives are always hitting him up for free sushi.

Jeesh, everything’s so serious these days … or stupid. Either way, it’s been too long since we forgot to tell you about the latest from The Micros. It really was a funny episode a month ago. But like always, lol because it’s true!

And we have a bonus late episode — the Micros’ pitch for people to vote for them in the 2011 Bluff Readers Choice Awards, where Rose, Chase, and Tommy somehow got lumped in with all the podcast/video/live radio newsy shows (in the category The Poker Beat always dominated) and cleaned up.

Enjoy, if you haven’t already.

I had plans for my first post of 2012 to write about my new year’s resolution, which was to find more purpose in what I’m doing for a living … quite the challenge when your work day consists of picking out tourists to relieve of their vacation cash so you can pay your bills for another month.

Crushed, beaten, annihilated, squelched, wrecked … you feel helpless and empty and start questioning what you’re doing with your life and why you’re wasting so much money.

A new year is supposed to be a time when everyone is feeling the most hopeful and positive and have the brightest outlook on what the next 12 months may hold. I try to put a positive spin on everything and especially the things I write on twitter and in this blog with an audience in mind. I’m sure there are some people who take joy in other people’s down times because it makes them feel better about their own situation. But I just think it’s a better EV play to try and inspire people rather than give them something to wallow in.

I wish I could follow my own advice, but today I don’t see how.

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La Sengphet took down another one on the WSOP-circuit — winning a $345 NLH at the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, Calif. for her fourth WSOP-C victory (third in a ring-bearing event) and a $25k payday. Her other half, David Clark, made a final table the day before, and won his second ring just a couple stops earlier at WSOP-Tahoe. Their story is becoming sickeningly charming … perhaps even inspirational … showing that true love and poker success can go hand-in-hand for a couple of old-fashioned rounders making their way across an ever-unpredictable poker landscape.

(That, or … Go Team Pokerati!)

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It’s been a few weeks since my last post but the grinding hasn’t stopped. Well, actually I didn’t play much at all over the Thanksgiving weekend as I spent the holiday in Palm Springs with some family. Here are some photos!

I went into a bit of a breakeven stretch over the following four sessions. I have only myself to blame for this because I failed to use any sort of anti-jinx methodology. For example, say you send a tweet talking about how hard you’re crushing a game or how amazing you’ve been running at the tables. I usually don’t like to write such tweets because over 50 percent of the time they carry the jinx-virus, which will abruptly halt any and all rungood and stop it dead in its tracks. That being said, it is possible to tweet such thoughts to the twittersphere, but it would be foolish to do so without using anti-jinx protection. You’re simply putting yourself and your bankroll at risk without strapping on a hashtag along the lines of #plsdontjinxitkthx at the end of your happy tweets.

I don’t know why we call the poker gods, Gods, but we do. They seem more like a bunch of high school dropout, weird uncle, goofball idiots to me. When they abandon you, it is the filthiest, loneliest feeling you can imagine. But when they reflect their light on you for any kind of extended stretch, you feel, well, enlightened. Chosen. So in tune with everything you can hear the hum of the earth.

I somehow managed to sneak a $117 victory past the jinx-bouncers playing $1/$3NL at the Rio on the 1st of the month. But the next day when I ventured into the Palace of Caesar, his games of $1 and $3 were not so kind. I left @CLVPoker $400 lighter in the pocket, and followed that with a small $85 loss on the 3rd. My spirits were quickly risen on the very next day, which was a Thursday. Thursday evenings, as you should know by now, means Pokerati game night. The PLO/NL mixed game has treated me really well since its incarnation @PalmsPokerRm (#nojinxnojinxnojinx) and this particular Thursday brought happiness in the form of a $520 win, erasing losses from the previous two sessions. Unfortunately the breakeven stretch continued another day; on Friday I played a long, 10-hour session at the Rio dropping about $700 in frustrating fashion. Actually there was a pretty interesting hand from said session…

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If you just saw it on the street, you might not know it had anything to do with poker. But indeed, according to 2+2 NVG, this fine Nevada license plate is attached to nearly $100k worth of Beamer, a 650i, that Ben Lamb recently purchased:

Would be much cooler if the “1″ represented a bracelet, and he got a new car for every one he won. But oh well, sometimes third place and $4 million will have to do.

ALT HED: Germans Win Again

Oh, and almost forgot to post … here’s Pauly and I on scene doing some Tao of Pokerati during the moment from the final 3 with him that we’ll all remember:

Tao of Pokerati: First Hand Fireworks FTW? by Pokerati

Every “professional” poker player has some sort of a story as to how they found themselves with that job title. A lot of kids on the scene nowadays spent the majority of their free time in college grinding online and getting really good… so good that they didn’t see much point in getting a job working for somebody else, and naturally continued to grind after they left school. You hear about other people who had jobs they lost, and then turned to poker, a field that is always accepting new applicants without any need to update your resume or buy a tie for interviews. And there are those who had jobs, some good, but always unfulfilling compared to the allure of being your own boss and the thrill of using your wits to earn a cash payment every day on your own terms.

Life as a professional poker player has been a massive learning experience, of which the strategy and theory is only a small part of the process. You have to learn how to LIVE as a poker player …

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pics: WSOP.com

This heads-up battle stands to be one of the great ones. But it’s more than just a few million bucks difference and a bracelet on the line. The whole future of poker style could hang in the balance of a single river card. Will Martin Staszko, the workman-styled Czech-raiser, beat Pius Heinz and end the hoodie trend among online poker Deutschebags?

Nov. Nine – Heads-up Outfits (Ep 9) by taopokerati

It’s been heads-up for almost three hours between Martin Staszko and Pius Heinz. Dan and Pauly discuss their outfits and lack of patches. They also decide to pick sides. Pauly is backing Heinz, while Dan is sticking with Staszko.

Oh, and Dan is perplexed when he realizes that he is dressed identically to Pauly.

Sometime during this year I decided I wanted to add more tournaments to my poker diet.  I’ve been a cash game grinder for my entire poker-playing career and don’t really have anything to speak of in regards to big tourney scores.  My “official” tourney resume is pretty weak.  That being said, I think every high-volume tournament pro wishes they crushed at cash games, and I think that every cash game grinder wants that feeling that only a tournament victory can bring: the combination of the big pay day combined with being the last man or woman standing at the end of the day (or day 2, 3, 4, what have you).  It very well could be my ego projecting my perceived thoughts onto the rest of the poker-playing community, but why would you not want to be well rounded in your profession and have multiple skill sets?

I’ve torched a lot of money being irresponsible … Vegas definitely has a way of seeping into any crack in your guard wall and blowing it wide open.

If you think that low stakes live poker games tend to be pretty soft, you should check out some of the tournament series that are running this month and next around Vegas.  You’ll see things that will make your head shake and leave you feeling good about the future of poker and its draw to the casual players.  However, these are tournaments we’re talking about, which means you’re a bit handcuffed in regards to how much manipulation of tourists you’ll be able to partake in compared to the cash games.  The structures for a lot of the events are pretty good, but variance is still a bitch.  I won’t go into detail about some of the ridiculous beats I’ve taken over the past week to send me on a walk of shame toward valet.  I’m gonna keep plugging away though with a healthy mix of the series, and cash games when there isn’t an event to my liking.

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Full Tilt laid off some 200 people on the Pocket Kings staff in Dublin last week — leaving pretty much just the head honchos, who apparently believe that ole Chris Ferguson bit about “a chip and a chair” too much and somehow still think they can salvage the company something.

Sucks for the Dubliners, but for the rest of us, that means 200 or more employees with insight into FTP operations over in Ireland, no real reason to necessarily protect certain information anymore, and access to 2+2.

Sure enough, at least two former employees from two different departments are posting away and answering questions. Check it out … worth the skim.

Nothing earth-shattering (yet … gotta figure anyone with the uber-goody dirt probably would go to the DOJ requesting immunity before turning informant) but the virtual deposition one former employee goes through provides plenty of color to paint a decent picture of what life was like in the middle of a corporate collapse … not to mention how the nouvea-poker-riche behave without the cash (and TV shows) that previously formed the foundation of their power.

For example, I learned:

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Hey, at least the Lions are winning.

We had high hopes coming into the 2011 football season but to see them run out to a beautiful 4-0 start is outstanding. And the Tigers are up too! As I write this they currently hold a 2-1 series advantage over the Yankees after stealing home field advantage in NYC. One more win and they advance to the next playoff round. Life is good these days for my hometown teams.

Little did I know that the hole would only grow bigger and deeper as the day went on, culminating with me somehow losing with KQ vs 55 after c-betting a K-6-4 flop. I booked a 4-figure loss and called it a day.

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I just got back from my first live poker session in I don’t know how long… almost two months I think. I took an extended hiatus from the game for a couple of reasons; a) my dad was in town for a while and we went sightseeing here in Vegas and in Los Angeles; and, more important, b) my finances just weren’t where they needed to be.

(The shorter version of that story is “I went broke.”)

I was making too many mistakes away from the felt and living a lifestyle that just wasn’t sustainable on my “salary”. I definitely wasn’t going super crazy or ballin’ out of control by any means. But similar to the way a small preflop error can compound on itself and become a large, costly session-killer, smaller mistakes away from the tables can quickly add up and drain a poker player’s bankroll. This shouldn’t be news to any poker player, but when you live in a city like Las Vegas and you like being social and experiencing what the city and life itself has to offer, you have to constantly check yourself.

I look down at 6s7s for my first live hand in two months. Forget that I’m in early position, I can’t help it… the suited connectedness was overpoweringly sexy.

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Click to enlarge: Melanie Iglesias has her panties in a wad over something related to her break-up with the WPT.

Undercleavage: This stylish lingerie not available at K-mart offers a new way to look at Lacey Jones’ right boob.

Pot-committed: Survivorist Jim Rice found a more legal way to earn a living than online poker by selling weed.

Tenacious P: Jack Black is still kinda sorta into poker.

Baller beware: No TV show ever came of an idea about bar-bill wars between Kobe Bryant and Antonio Esfandiari.

A little poker gossip because sometimes in serious times we like the petty …

Melanie Iglesias vs. WPT (and QuadJacks?)
The guys at Quadjacks have called it “Flushgate” — and reportedly have received quite a bit of wrath from non-poker types over “the abrupt resignation of three Royal Flush girls” — 2010 Maxim Hometown Hottie winner and now MTV personality Melanie Iglesias, Michelle Banzer, and brand spankin’ new RF girl Mica Javier, who had only been on the job for a few weeks. The purging all went down last month right around the time of press announcements for the World Poker Tour’s new Season X … ooh, juicy! You could almost be certain somebody was gonna cry, if not more formally cry foul.

Catpacking in AC
We can only imagine how cut-throat that world can be — where looks absolutely are tied in with your success. Call us old-school here at Pokerati, Melanie is great and all, but she’s still no Lacey Jones, who recently did a lingerie photoshoot with power-model Katerina Van Derham. Meanwhile, here’s a new video featuring Lacey and Maria Ho helping Christina Lindley pick out a dress for her birthday party at the Borgata in Atlantic City this weekend … and New Jersey celeb-hunter Michael Berman interviews this threesome, being dubbed “the Cat Pack” here for the kickoff of WPT Borgata, where there may or may not be openings for three new Royal Flush Girls.

Auction Player?
Speaking of old school, Phil Hellmuth appeared last week on the A&E show Storage Wars — advising a group about strategy in their game of swag auctions, which apparently involves a combination of luck and skill. Not too familiar with that show … when do we get to hear someone say to Phil, “Going, going, gone!?”

Dealer’s Choice: From Poker to Pot
A relatively unknown poker player named Jim Rice is representing poker (whether he likes it or not) and pot on Survivor 23: South Pacific. Supposedly a pal (and business partner?) of Paul Wasicka’s, the 35-year-old from Chicago is now a medical marijuana dispenser in Colorado (woot!). His most recent cashes include a 3rd and a 23rd on the Heartland Poker Tour, this year and in 2008, respectively. And now with online poker more illegal than selling weed (in some US jurisdictions) … makes you wonder if certain poker pros would rather be Jim Rice or Jean-Robert Bellande.

Jack Black Rising or Falling Poker Celebrity?
There’s always new Hollywood celebrities getting in on poker — and hosting a charity tourney is often their first foray into niche hero-status and/or business opportunity around their personal poker addictions. Could Jack Black be the latest? The last-place finisher in the WPT’s 2009 Hollywood home game is hosting a charity tourney next month at the Commerce Casino in California, but otherwise still has much to prove before he becomes the next James Woods, whom you may recall back in 2004-05 kicked off his effort to become the Adam West of Poker.

Vegas Living: Closing Down Blush
The luxe but laid-back “boutique” nightclub Blush, at the Wynn, is closing after a four-year run. Ahhh … I remember this “ultra lounge” as the site of multiple VIP poker parties and the place where upon moving to Vegas I met a guy who explained to me the process of importing women to the US for a life of hooker-dom before having to excuse himself to go sell coke. But perhaps more famously, Blush is the place where Antonio Esfandiari “lost” a game of who’s got bigger ballers to Kobe Bryant — with the NBA star supposedly racking up a $21,000 champagne bill that had celebrity and sports media mocking some poker player being called “the magician” … even though he somehow got Kobe to pay for the last 15 bottles of Cristal.

Meanwhile, @KobeBryant’s Twitter account got suspended last week, and @MagicAntonio’s, who had a surprisingly similar number of followers, did not.

I almost didn’t realize that what heretofore had been the biggest online tournament series in the world — the World Championships of Online Poker — is underway throughout the non-American ether. Even with an American government-mandated “boycott” reminiscent of Moscow 1980, is WCOOP still the biggest? (My guess: probably so.) But without certain American players, do we still care?

That’s hard to say, but regardless, you can still look stylish in your nonchalance with this 2010 edition WCOOP T-shirt commemorating the events from back in the Poker Cold War days:

Generic WCOOP Shirt by Pokerati

Big thanks to Dr. Pokerati for chasing down what is possibly the holy grail of poker-themed license plates we love around these parts. Apparently she had to chase this one down something fierce heading westbound on Sahara before the yellow lights conspired in our favor at Hualapai. (“I figured if I didn’t get it now this one would just disappear into folklore,” she explains.)

Would love to know who has “POKER” … and whether he’s had it forever or acquired it for a premium post-Moneymaker or even post-Jamie Gold.

The big one that didn’t get away.

TRICAT (not a poker player) says the driver of this notably American semi-luxury SUV was an “average 50something white guy” talking on his phone … but he got away before she was could get a clear shot of whoever it was who’s tagged himself with poker everywhere he goes. Drat! But oh well …

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