Thanksgiving
I’m currently home in the US for various Thanksgiving get-togethers. My first stop was to fly to NYC last Friday. On Saturday I met up with Dani Stern (Ansky/supernova9) and Jay Rosenkrantz (krantz/pr1nnyraid) along with my friend Eric Strauss from thepokerfilm. This was my first time meeting krantz although I felt like I knew him a bit already from watching 2M2MM. And long-time blog readers will know that I used to be pretty good friends with Dani before we kind of fell out of touch. I still consider him a good friend though and I’m really glad he’s making waves in the poker world.
We went to Sushi Samba in the west village and it was great. I always love good sushi and, while it was overpriced for the quality imo, it was still a very good meal. We chatted about industry stuff, current events, etc, etc. Nothing really new and exciting came out of the conversation but we did talk about some cool new things that krantz is planning on doing with DeucesCracked and possible partnerships with sites like PocketFives and maybe PokerTerms as well. I’m all for it so I’m going to be doing my best to get a good working relationship going with DC and krantz.
Instead of credit card roulette, I suggested that we play shaniac’s favorite method for splitting a bill. Shane likes to have everyone write down a guess of the bill total before anyone can look at it. While there’s a huge possibility for an angle shoot with this sort of game if you spring it on people the way I did (ie, just as the bill is being put down), it’s a ton of fun if everyone is honest about it. I barely looked at the menu because Dani did all of the ordering so I’m pretty sure everyone knew I wasn’t scamming them (although I don’t think they would think that about me regardless, hopefully). My friend Eric bought out for 25% of the bill and the three of us wrote down our guesses in our phone. I was so far off it was ridiculous. There were some strategic reasons for my lower guess but, as I thought about them more, they were actually probably wrong. Also, I never really looked at the menu so I never saw the prices — and I did a horrible job of guessing how much stuff we ordered. Plus I didn’t have any idea how much the saki was because that sort of thing is so variant. So I ended up guessing 207 and both krantz and Dani were around 300. The bill was something like 430 I think. Oops. Their guesses were obviously not good but mine was absurdly bad. Given that I’ve played this game very well in the past I don’t know what I was thinking but clearly I was a huge fish at it last Saturday. Great time though — I’m glad we did that instead of a straight flip.
Saturday night was a pre Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of friends. My only close friends at the dinner were the three guys sitting below:
I cut off most of the other people at the table because they probably don’t want to be on a random blog. Those three guys (other than me obv) are my closest friends from high school and mostly everyone else that was there is a friend or relative of the guy in the light sweater — his name is Ben. BTW, those two fingers in front of my face are obv the girl sitting next to me. I don’t have painted fingernails. Also, I am wearing a large native american headdress. Long story how that happened so I won’t get into it.
The dinner and party afterward were both a ton of fun. Ben and Megan (they got married almost 2.5 years ago…) throw a great party… seeing all of the effort they put into it was really astounding. Even with all of the food and drinks that people brought they still had a ton of stuff to do. And they were both great hosts. They have a cool backdoor area with a firepit (how many people have that in the NYC area?) so we were making s’mores and drinking around the fire for awhile. I think we ended up staying until after 2 am but I can’t remember the exact time we left. They do it every year and I’m already looking forward to next year.
On Sunday I didn’t do anything of great significance during the day. At night I headed up to stevesbets’ apartment and we got dinner then watched the football game. I invited Dani to come up to hang out and he was like “I’m always up for an adventure” and he took a cab up from his place. They have a somewhat colorful chat history from a bunch of heads up SNGs that they’ve played on PokerStars. Obviously the chat mainly consists of Steve tilting on Dani but whatever. Steve tends to, by default, dislike (or at least tilt on) any poker player who he hasn’t met. But then he usually ends up thinking that the ones that he actually talks to are pretty cool. Same deal with Dani. Anyway we just watched the Eagles for a bit and then I took off to go back to Eric’s apartment to sleep.
On Monday I headed home to Philly and now I’ve just been here for a little over a day and I’m spending time with family. I go back to Cayman on Saturday but I have a pretty busy schedule in between now and then. Should be fun!
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