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Anyway, I was watching Final Table With Fossilman, which is the last episode of the Main Event with some DVD-style commentary from champion Greg Raymer, for the third or fourth time Wednesday, and I heard something that shocked me. In telling a story about his early poker career, Raymer said something like, "When I was going to school in Minnesota ..."

Sure enough, I did a little Yahooing (I think people say they "Googled" something even when they used another search engine, and that doesn't seem fair), and found the following on Raymer's Wikipedia page:

We've all heard that old cliche about how you learn something new every time you see/hear/read something, but how is it even remotely possible that I watched Raymer on TV dozens of times for an entire year, read dozens of articles about him, and saw dozens of interviews with him, and yet never heard that he went to school at the University of Minnesota until just now? Amazing. And then you know what happened? I quickly realized that I didn't really care all that much.

Normally I lay fairly low in the early going in tournaments, but this one was only giving a prize for first place, so I figured I would be aggressive from the very beginning and take risks in an effort to either build up a huge chip stack or get knocked out immediately. Well, my aggression was working, and I had built a pretty big stack by the time the field was narrowed to around 200 players. Then all hell broke loose.

Twice in the span of 20 hands I was dealt pocket queens. Both times, there was a single raise in front of me, and both times I re-raised to a significant amount of chips. Facing a re-raise, my opponent pushed all-in both times and I, not being nearly good enough as a player to lay down queens pre-flop unless someone almost literally bashes me over the head and tells me they have aces, called. The first time my opponent turned over pocket aces. The second time my opponent turned over pocket kings.

I went from being in the top dozen spots to having barely enough to cover the blinds for a round, all in the span of about 15 minutes. And that's how my dreams of playing in this year's WSOP ended. The funny thing is that before I went on a prolonged poker losing streak, I actually had thoughts of taking my winnings and simply buying into one of the lesser events. But after the losing streak (or during it, since it's not over by a long shot), I was stuck using my frequent player points to get into a 400-person crapshoot for a seat.

I guess I'll have to wait another year to fulfill my lifelong dream of meeting Norman Chad.

Also, let me join the many devoted Simmons fans in saying to Bill that we are very happy about the birth of your daughter, but happier that you can now get back to pumping out 50,000 words a week for us to read on the toilet.

My favorite line from the movie came from Bruce Willis' "Hartigan":

Mickey Rourke was pretty incredible in a very unique role, although just slightly less incredible than the scene where we first meet Carla Gugino's "Lucille." If you've seen the movie, you surely know what I mean. And lest anyone think I'm a Johnny come lately, because I was on the Gugino bandwagon from way back.