BBT3, and Addiction

So the BBT3 Tournament of Champions got a little smaller again this week, when OMGItsPokerFool used his luckbox powers to sneak away with another Mookie title, I believe his 465th. I was also very happy to see this morning that joining the coveted ToC as well thanks to this week's Riverchasers title is longtime blonkament player and also well-known luckbox Astin, one of the best guys in our whole group. Sure he gets dealt pocket Aces 10-12 times an hour, but I've always said, you still have to know how to play 'em, and Astin certainly gets paid with his constant nuts. So I think we are down to 49 or maybe even 48 players maximum in the Tournament of Champions, comprised of those who won each of the BBT3 tournaments like I did earlier in a Skills Series Stud8 tournament, meaning that almost 1 in 11 runners in the upcoming ToC scheduled for Saturday night, June 7, will walk away with either 2k or 12k in prize money to be spent at the 2008 World Series of Poker. Just. Awesome.

Wow. I just read Donkette's incredible ten-part saga of her story of addiction over on her blog. That is some seriously compelling storyage there, like one of those books that you simply cannot put down. When I first saw that Donkette's story was in 10 parts, my first reaction was like "ugh I'm not reading that". Well, I did decide to just start the first post just to see what it was about, and booooooom 15 minutes later I was done with it all. Seriously compelling stuff, wtg Lori on writing such a great story and on turning things around so well in your life.

It is amazing the more we find out about each other how many of us poker bloggers come from families where addiction of some kind abounded. And I wonder how many of the others of your families are from similiar situations as well, among those who have not ever spoken or written about it before. There is obviously some correlation, some of it obvious and maybe some not so obvious. I mean, our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters, our uncles or best friends, whoever, they drank. Or smoked. Or did coke. Or gambled. You name it, and our families and friends growing up did it. And now here we are, 20 or 30 or 40 years later or whatever, playing online poker every night, competing for a chance to make it to the World Series of Poker, writing about poker, thinking about a form of gambling day in, day out. My own family is no different in the general sense, even if the specific form of addiction and some of the specific symptoms might be a little different.

As a father of two young children myself, I wonder sometimes. By playing so much poker, writing about it every day, helping create the BBT, and all this stuff, am I creating that very same environment for my own children? Are they going to grapple with some form of addiction or substance abuse when they grow up, and sit around thinking (and writing, maybe) about how their own father's habits led them down the road to addiction? Is there anything I can or should do to prevent that from happening?

I am really looking forward to next week here on the blog, where I plan to get back to some good old-fashioned hand analysis. Screen shots and all. I have so many great, fun hands saved up to post about here, I could never in a million years get to them all at this point. I had originally planned to get up some of these hands this week, but work was all over me in a huge way all through the week, keeping me from posting what I really wanted to, from devoting the time to the blog that I really wanted to, and generally even forcing me to post later in the days than I would like. Next week, the Hammer Family heads back to the Poconos on Monday-Tuesday for a brief vacation at the same indoor water park that we took the kids to last fall and they loved so much, so I am not sure whether I will post on those days or not, although sitting here now I can say that I plan to. But either way, come the middle of next week, I will be here with some honest-to-goodness hands to analyze and provide your opinions and thoughts on. Looking forward to that.

Not sure if I make the donkament tonight. Probably not. But I suppose one never knows....