A Visit to the Bay 101 and the WPT

Last week I drove to San Jose to check out the Bay 101 Casino. The final table of the World Poker Tour was to begin Friday afternoon, so I made sure to drop in to check it out. After leaving the Bay 1o1 I drove across town to the Garden City Casino and watched a final table there from a daily tournament.

The Bay 101 is a nice enough place, and certainly one of the larger card rooms you will see in California. The WPT Shooting Stars tournament was wrapping up that evening with the taping of the the final table for the GSN Network. Kathy Liebert was the only name I recognized on the final table list of players, so I decided it was not worth hanging around to see the taping. I'm glad I didn't stay. It turned out to be one of the longest final table matches in WPT history...I would have been there all night. Instead I walked around for a bit and then left. Kathy finished second, by the way, but still took home a nice $550,000.

The Garden City Casino is located in a retail shopping area of north San Jose. The building itself looks like it was built in the 1980s. Inside the decor was right out of 1985, heavily paneled with wood, comfortable soft lighting placed throughout. I was thinking it looked like a steak house that had been converted into a gaming establishment. A tournament was finishing up when I arrived, with three players left at the final table. I watched the match for a few minutes, then it quickly ended when the low stack went all in, the other two players called, and the low stack sucked out a win. Since this put all three players relatively even in chips, they decided to chop the prize. They each received about $3,000. I later read that professional Gabriel Thaler cut his chops there before moving on to Los Angeles, then Las Vegas.

On my way back to Monterey I stopped off at Mortimer's Card Room in Marina. I was disappointed. The room was very small, only four to six tables. Two tables were running spread games and the rest of the room was cluttered and messy. The room is actually a backroom attached to Mortimer's Bar. The neighborhood is old downtown Marina, a little scary, and probably not the safest place to be at midnight on a Saturday.

Fighting a Cold

I've been fighting a cold and flu-like symptoms for the last couple of days. I hate being sick. The weather has been great and I can't see missing it by staying in bed all day. I've not been sick, really sick, in years. This is probably the worst cold I've had since I left Texas back in the summer of 2007. I bought some NyQuil, however, so tonight at least I'll get some rest.

A person really can't afford to get sick. The cost of health care is so ridiculous it hardly seems worth debating. I had a tooth ache on Memorial Day weekend last year while I was in Las Vegas. I visited a local emergency room on Saturday, realizing that the pain was too severe for me to last until Tuesday when a dentist office would reopen after the three-day holiday. I had lost one night's sleep and tried some over-the-counter pain medication, but it was obvious I needed a dentist. No offices were open of course, so I ran into a hospital for some pain pills so I could at least sleep for a couple of days.

After a round of required handshakes from nurses and the attending doctors, I was subjected to some tests...evidently required before any pills are given out. Hear the cash register "ca-ching." The attending doctor visited with me for all of 5 mintues ("ca-ching", "ca-ching") and finally wrote me out a prescription for some pain medication. The final bill? Well...I paid them immediately $375 before walking out the door. Then about two months later I received a bill for the lab tests: $1695. Ca-ching.

I made it to the dentist on Tuesday and had the tooth pulled for $275. Adding it all up, it appears my tooth ache on Memorial Day weekend last year cost me a total of $2,345.

It's In the Cards

One thing I've sorely missed the last few months is a good card game. I've asked around and no one has invited me to a local game, so I guess I'm not speaking to the right people. California and various local laws concerning card rooms and poker are difficult to figure out, but I'm learning.

The closest public card rooms are in Marina, just up the coast from Monterey. Mortimer's Card Room and the Marina Club are across the street from each other, though I can't personally prove it since I've never been there. According to PokerWiki, the rooms were there six months ago. Mortimer's is the largest of the two rooms and seems to cater to a higher stakes game.

If I want a larger room at a casino I'll have to drive to San Jose. The Garden City Casino and Bay 101 Casino have large poker rooms spreading numerous games and have enough tables to keep things moving along. It may be worth the extra drive to play in a larger room.

I suppose I'll have to visit all four locations and report on my experiences. There is no way to know where the best games are. Keeping in mind I'm near the ocean, I'm looking for juicy fish.

I'm sitting at the Starbucks in the Del Monte Center watching a steady stream of latte drinkers basking in the glow of all the goodies in the display counter. This particular Starbucks is among the busiest I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of Starbucks locations around the Southwest (see the sidebar at left). Whenever I have visited this location it's always been busy.

It's easy to get a glimpse of the people of Monterey County at the Del Monte Center, particularly here at the Starbucks. In line I see military personnel (probably from the post-graduate naval academy), young children hanging on young moms out for a day of shopping, elderly women with books in hand (mystery novels seem to be popular with them), Asians, Mexicans, mostly Caucasions, and very few Blacks. Three young men in blue jeans are busy typing away at laptop computers at various tables around the room (me, too, but I'm no longer young). Tourists are in town today. You can spot them right away by the new cameras hanging around their necks. By my calculation, today's most popular customer at Starbucks is a young woman, perhaps between 20 and 40 years old. At the risk of sounding sexists, my guess is most men are at work. Thus the only men I see are elderly, working on Suduko or Crossword puzzles, and a few young ones working online.

Outisde the window I see the many tables and chairs available for patio-dwellers. This area of the Del Monte Center has restaurants and fast food places, though you will not see a McDonald's or Burger King. Chipolte's and Chinese Express are directly across from the Starbucks, and a Subway Sandwich and pizza joint are nearby. Most of the lunching crowd sits outside. Monterey has one of the best year-round climates in the country.

The locals refer to this place as a mall, and I suppose it is. It's really an outdoor mall, since entrances to the retail stores and eateries are all outside. Since many indoor malls around the country are closing due to the economic crisis, maybe outdoor malls will survive. I would think an outdoor mall saves a fortune in utility costs, air conditioning and heating provided by Nature.

While I know California needs the rain, I was nonetheless a happy clam to see the sun break through the clouds this morning as I drove to Monterey. January was entirely dry, so it's a good February has been a very wet month. But enough is enough already.

After visiting the Monterey Public Library, I had lunch at the Del Monte Center. I noticed three military soldier-types, still in fatigues, enjoying a meal outdoors. I often see sailors and other military personnel in town. The major military presence here comes from the Defense Language Institute, Naval PostGraduate School, and Coast Guard.

The beach at Carmel was growing more crowded by the minute as locals discovered the sun was out. An elderly couple walking three dogs, one man walking a grid pattern from the ocean edge to the cliffs with a metal detector, swiping the detector left and right like a drunk Samarai with a broken sword. Two women brought their sack lunches and sat beneath a Cypress to eat sandwiches and watch a few surfers take advantage of the nice waves. I walked along the path along the beach and listened to Gordon Lightfoot on my iPod.

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I'm nursing a sore thumb. How I strained it I can't tell. Unfortunately the ligament strain is at the base of my right thumb. Since I'm righthanded, it's been a problem. I never realized how a sore thumb can make your day a little bit uneasy. Try taking notice of how often you use your thumb. When I think about the guy who had a big toe transplanted on this hand to take place of a severed thumb, I now understand it. I'll trade a big toe for a thumb if it ever comes to that. My feet stink, anyway. One less appendage might not be so bad.

I drove to Carmel Sunday afternoon and attended the “Author to Author” lecture series hosted by the Carmel Public Library Foundation. The CPLF schedules these events throughout the year. This presentation involved three published authors and the topic was “Fiction: Writing the Novel and Getting It Published.”

The three authors presenting the program were Alex A .Vardamis, Cornelia Read, and Robert Irvine. They were seated near a huge fireplace in the Barnet Segal Reading Room, located just to the right of the entrance to the Harrison Memorial Library. Tom Parks moderated the discussion and asked questions. Somehow, about 75 people squeezed into the large room, with some of them sitting in chairs beyond the rail along an upper floor balcony. I was surprised to see that many come out on such a rainy day.

I didn't learn much. Unfortunately, Mr. Parks failed to take full advantage of the hour. It takes a special talent to interview a panel such as this. It's not as simple as just writing down a few questions. I realize Mr. Parks had a remarkable career as a writer and dialogue coach in Hollywood. Nonetheless, the panel's presentation was a little flat. Perhaps having one author, not three, would have been better. That way, we might have been able to dig deeper into the life of a professional published writer and gained some insight into how they deal with publishers, agents, and editors in a changing industry.

Mr. Parks touched on the Kindle 2 controversy from Amazon, but it was clear he didn't fully understand the issues involved. Mr. Vardamis probably summed up the whole discussion by saying that “the Kindle is probably the wave of the future...it's how things will be done since printing costs are so high.”

The one thing that really stuck out in my mind after hearing the discussion? Writing is an individual and lonely pursuit. Every writer is unique, and each has their own opinions on the process and practice of being a writer. Writing is as unique to the individual as fingerprints. When a writer puts words to paper he is fingerprinting an idea, saying a thing that no one else will say in exactly the same way.

Finding one's voice as a writer, then, should be easy. All we must do is write what we will. How we choose to write it is our business, and others be damned.