The Show is UP: Fluff LeCoque's Jubilee!

For some reason, this was a particularly laborious editing experience. It may have been because I had to remove the outtakes of Miles being lewd and crude and making hilarious voices, which is great for our final outtakes show but perhaps not so great for me working through the audio. Either way, here's what we did. Enjoy. Click on the date below to play or right-click to save the show. Or you subscribe -- for free -- in iTunes or Zune and you'll always get it first. -sf

July 15: Fluff LeCoque's Jubilee!

EXTRA: Jubilee!'s most successful alum, Tina Walsh

Thirty years is a blink of the eye in most places, but it’s an eternity for the every-changing Las Vegas. This summer, the venerable, historic Jubilee! celebrates the start of its fourth decade at Bally’s, so we chatted with the 88-year-old firecracker who has ruled the land of massive headdresses and sequined skivvies with an iron fist for all this time. Fluff LeCoque talks to Steve about bruised thighs, chubby guys, fake boobs and so much more this hour. Also, we’ll hear an excerpt from our conversation with Jubilee’s most successful alumna, Tina Walsh, who was a principle singer for the show in the 1980s and is presently appearing as Madame Giry in Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular. The entire conversation with Walsh will be posted as an extra edition into the feed and on the website.

In Banter: Miles makes HIS big announcement, Steve has a WSOP adventure, several Vegas closures afoot, the Plaza has some odd new things coming, more MGM misfortune and a Titanically bad restaurant idea.

Open & Banter: Start to 41ish
Fluff LaCoque Part I: 41-103ish
Trivia/Poll/Letters: 104ish-1:13
Fluff LaCoque Part II: 1:14-1:33ish
TSTToTW: 1:34ish-end

Links to stuff discussed

Get tickets for Jubilee! and the backstage tour
Tina Walsh’s Phantom bio
Steve’s essay for The Daily about his WSOP adventure
A piece on the “bubble” bursting at the 2011 WSOP
A feature about Michael Stevens, the quadriplegic who lasted to Day 3 of the WSOP
Steve’s piece on The Daily about Paul Pierce’s WSOP playing
A piece on Phil Hellmuth’s Day 2 drama
News on Rosemary’s and Carluccio’s closing
That weird Titanic dinner at Bernard’s
The questionable news outlet known as Las Vegas Entertainment News
Howard Stutz’s latest on the Perini-MGM scrum over The Harmon
The Plaza’s plan for a sexy salon and the Swingers Club
Legionnaire’s Disease drama at Aria
Project Linq is coming, supposedly
Steve and Jamie’s piece for the L.A. Times on the topless shows in Vegas

The Strip is LIVE tonight at 8pm PT w/ @AnnieDuke

[UPDATE: We'll start the Annie Duke interview at 8:15p]

On the eve of the start of the 42nd World Series of Poker Main Event, we hear from the only pro in the game who has any kind of serious name recognition in mainstream popular culture. That's Celebrity Apprentice runner-up Annie Duke, who is sitting out the WSOP this year to focus instead on her role as commissioner of the Epic Poker League. My Las Vegas Weekly column this week lays out my argument for why this league could be exactly what the game needs to interest people beyond the poker world. Annie explains how it works and then talks a bit about Joan Rivers, Donald Trump and her 1 v 100 stint.

The episode also is expected to include an interview with U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas, who is sponsoring a bill to repeal the virtual ban on playing poker online. That conversation won't be recorded until tomorrow, though.

As usual, we'll play the interview starting at about 8 p.m. and you can hear that and chat with other listeners -- pluss watch Black, Jack and Aces gnaw ferociously at treats! -- on this UStream site. When Miles gets home from work, we'll do the regular parts of the show.

C'mon down! But if not, I'll try getting the podcast out probably Thursday night, so you can subscribe to The Strip (it's free!) in iTunes or Zune to get the latest show and various specials.

4 a.m. at the WSOP Final Table

If these women look exhausted, forgive them. It's now 16 hours since the Final Table resumed play at the Rio for the World Series of Poker. The aim is to whittle down the nine players who survived the field of 6,494 in July down to two and then have those two go heads-up starting at 10 p.m. on Monday.

It's been colorful, amusing and grueling. I know many of you don't care about poker, but the mechanics of the game are never why I find this so intriguing. It's the personalities and the life-changing sums of money involved. The four guys left right now include a 46-year-old lumberjack from a Maryland backwater who was never on a plane before July and has now won at least $2.5 million. The guy lives in a double-wide, won entry by winning a tournament in a West Virginia casino that cost him $130 to enter. That's nuts.

Also nuts? This lady, the self-coronated Poker Queen:

Also ALSO nuts, the fact that the $27 million they're giving to the players this weekend is in mounds on a table with a couple of security guards who look like Barney Fifes:

Yes, that's real and not newspaper (they even make that anymore, anyhow?) filler as the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Howard Stutz thought until I walked him over to take a closer look. Perched atop that mound is this, the only bracelet most men would want to own or wear:

They're being very loose with access for journalists like me who have stage passes...

...to sit on a risers a few feet from the action and behind some cheering sections. The unmanned Mac there is mine:

The guy to my ghost's left in this image is Eric Ramsey with PokerNews.Com, the guy who is writing these hand-by-hand accounts of the action and that's fortunate because even this close, it's hard to tell what's happening. I've gotten some cool shots like this one when Phil Ivey, the acclaimed poker pro who busted out in 7th place, was pondering a move:

...and when Doyle Brunson, the elder statesman of the game, issued the "shuffle-up-and-deal" declaration to begin play so many hours ago.

Here's one of the dealers in earlier times at the table...


...and an up-close look at the face of the special chips they create each year for this event:

Yes, we were young and fresh once, full of energy. Back when we started, there was a huge line in the hallway of spectators who waited hours to get into the Penn & Teller Theater to watch. It's free, but the demand was huge:

During breaks, famous poker pros like Howard Lederer, whom I profiled with his sister Annie Duke in the Boston Globe in 2007, signed autographs.


Some of the eccentrics got to take pictures with the Holly Madison of poker, online pro and [link maybe NSFW] WSOP hostess Lacey Jones:


As you can see, Ms. Jones works hard to please:


To preview the WSOP Final Table, I wrote a profile of Ivey, referred to as the Tiger Woods of Poker because he's an elegantly handsome, biracial break-through player whose astoundingly winning consistency has folks believing they are in the presence of greatness. Unfortunately, Ivey seems to despise the press and only speaks to reporters when he's in some way being compensated or is obligated to do so. Thus, the press was not sorry that he played lousy and riskless and busted out in seventh. To return the favor, Ivey was the only one who snubbed even ESPN when he departed, much to the WSOP's chagrin. He surfaced playing on a poker website within an hour, the very definition of gambling addiction.

Here's the only shot I got of Ivey up close:

Other pros were more accessible. I chatted up Phil Hellmuth and 2008 finalist Dennis Phillips and got these shots of Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu...

Doyle was signing his new book, "The Godfather of Poker," which I picked up to read and possibly review. Not sure what Negreanu was doing with his hand there.

As the night wore on, I did wander the Rio looking for a place to buy some candy and soda to perk me up. I caught a little bit of this silly show in the casino...


...and found myself pelted by beads from the Masquerade in the Sky:

Not sure what to do with them. Put them on TheStripPodcast.Com trivia question prize list, perhaps? Or hang them on the car rearview as everyone seems to in Vegas?

The reason I need to hang in here is because one of the remaining players -- currently in first with a large lead, in fact -- is Antoine Saout, a 25-year-old college dropout from St Martin Des Champs, France, and one of my clients is Agence Presse-France, the French wire service. Clearly the deeper Saout goes, the bigger a story it is over in France. I love how his cheering section has these special scarves they knitted...

...which seems tres francais, non?

But now, after 265 hands and no sign that these four are going to settle it anytime soon, we're all feeling like we could use a little nap.

Those legs happen to belong to poker star Mike Matasow, who decided to lay down on the floor and rest. That sounds nice, but some of us have to work here.

The Show is UP: Daniel Negreanu

Here we go ... the newest show. Listen to the first two minutes to hear how to win a pair of MJ tickets and afterparty passes! To download, right-click on the date below (or the AAC link) and save it to your computer. Or you can subscribe (it's free!) via this iTunes link or via this Zune link.

Aug. 20: Daniel The Kid

This is an abbreviated episode because we couldn’t get into the studio this week because of our work schedules. Thus, an interview-only episode featuring Daniel Negreanu, nicknamed Kid Poker. But the kid, presently No. 3 on the list of all-time earnings in poker tournament play at $11.6 million, has a bit of a wicked side, too. His Tweets during this year’s World Series of Poker were rife with snark about other players, Asian drivers and weird encounters with fans on the rail, and in this week’s conversation, Negreanu has some harsh words for fellow star Annie Duke’s representation of the game on the recent season of Celebrity Apprentice. Plus, is it true that most poker players are atheists? Negreanu answers that, too.

Links to stuff discussed:

Negreanu’s blog site
Steve’s column about poker and Twitter
Daniel Negreanu’s Twitter feed
The McClatchy wire feature on Nick Maimone, Catholic poker player
The YouTube clip of Joan Rivers attacking

The Strip is LIVE Tonight (Yes, Tonight!)

Drew Carey canceled all his press interviews today, so instead this week's guest is poker star Daniel Negreanu, currently third on the all-time list of all-time tournament earnings at $11.6 million. He's known for his mild-mannered style, but Negreanu had some not-so-mild words for Annie Duke and how she represented poker on "The Celebrity Apprentice." Good stuff. Also, he's really smart and Canadian and we had a really deep conversation about health care reform. And he Tweets a lot, and not all of it is PC.

Join us at 7-8 p.m. PT for live chat, video and audio at LVRocks.Com. Also, Miles is back! Or wait till tomorrow and it'll be a podcast! Woo hoo!

Is Poker Over?

I don't really think so, but I have been surprised in the past couple of days to find my editors at The New York Times and Newsweek completely uninterested in next week's start of the World Series of Poker's Main Event. All good fads must come to an end, sure, but I suspect that the ESPN's WSOP broadcasts get better ratings than some of the sports covered regularly by the Times -- tennis and NHL hockey come to mind. Plus, this year has so many great themes going on, what with the return of poker black sheep Jamie Gold (the NYT did let me break the story of his confessing to breaking rules last year) and the superhot question of just how the Congressional ban on Americans using their credit cards to play poker online will lower the WSOP Main Event population. Only USA Today really seems to "get" it -- they've run a special section at the onset of WSOP Season two years in a row.

We still care, of course, and I've got a really big piece on the Venus-and-Serena of poker, Annie Duke and Howard Lederer, coming out in this Saturday's Boston Globe. (They grew up in Concord, N.H., part of the Globe's New England reach.)

We've now posted both the Duke and Lederer interviews, both of them with a lot of interesting discussion of their odd childhood, their careers and the state of poker these days. Hear Annie here or right-click here to download it and listen to it whenever you want. And hear Howard here or right-click here to download it.

What do you think? Is disinterest from the mainstream media a sign that poker, at least as a national craze, has run its course?

"The Strip" is LIVE at 7 pm PT With Annie Duke!

Join us live at LVROCKS.COM to hear "The Strip" be recorded and chat with us! Plus, with the World Series of Poker's Main Event in the offing, we get into the spirit of the season with a revealing interview with the world's most successful female poker player, Annie Duke. Hear what she has to say about Jamie Gold, Ben Affleck, her strange upbringing and those nasty Internet rumors about her.

Come on down. Or catch the podcast on Thursday. Your choice!

Three Books You Should Read

This is going to sound really odd, but I just finished three books that should never be read back to back to back and came away surprised by all three in different, pleasant ways.

1. "Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker." The world's most successful female poker star writes a memoir accessible not just to poker fans but to anyone intrigued by how a pioneering woman navigates through a very tough male-dominated profession. What's more, Annie Duke isn't afraid to discuss her personal travails, namely an in-depth chronicle of her life of panic attacks. Catch my interview with her and her famous brother, Howard Lederer, on "The Strip" this upcoming week.

2. "Drop Dead Beautiful." Bestselling author Jackie Collins' next potboiler is being launched this weekend in Vegas, where it's largely set as a tale involving an effort to halt the opening of the heroine's new megaresort. It was campy, silly, utterly addictive and so full of sex that there's a blowjob on, I think, the fifth page -- and Ms. Collins reveals on this week's episode of "The Strip" that her publisher wanted that scene to open the book but she demurred. What restraint! My aunt tells me we don't call this "trash" anymore; it's now known as "beach reading." Mmhmm. Hear the Jackie Collins interview here or right-click to save it to your computer to hear at your leisure.

3. "The Year of Magical Thinking." So then I moved on, naturally, to Joan Didion's National Book Award Winner. I had hesitated to read what seemed likely to be an unrelentingly depressing memoir of the year in which her husband died and her daughter lay deathly ill, but it turned out to be a lovely, sensitive and remarkably thoughtful meditation on the experience of grief and the strange things it does to normal, sane people. Didion forced me to ponder who the great relationships of my life are whose death would launch me into that kind of mourning; in other words, a book on death and loss succeeded in prompting me to take stock and feel grateful for life, mine and those around me. That said, the book did drag a bit near the end, even at 226 pages, and became a little redundant. Well worth it, but mercifully succinct.

So now I'm low on books. Any suggestions?

Live from the WSOP VIP Lounge!

As I type, I am waiting for prime rib.

I'm working on a profile for the Boston Globe of Annie Duke and Howard Lederer, the Venus and Serena of poker who were raised in Concord, N.H. That's part of the Globe's New England readership. This sibling success story has fascinated me for years and I'm finally getting to write it, so earlier I supervised a photo shoot (above right) at the ESPN Final Table and then I was brought into the World Series of Poker V.I.P. Lounge for a leisurely, fascinating interview with Howard Lederer. (I had interviewed Annie about two weeks ago by phone.) Both of these interviews will likely be available on the podcast feed in coming weeks as the World Series of Poker heats up.

Anyhow, the VIP Lounge is an interesting place. Each poker player who has entry privileges paid $1,000 in a donation to the Nevada Cancer Institute. It's not a large room -- maybe 40 feet by 20 feet, but it has a pool table and a putting green, free Wi-Fi (obviously) and a buffet furnished by Del Frisco's Steakhouse near the Strip. The hostess just told me as I foraged for a snack that prime rib would be out in mere minutes.

Howard Lederer, (holding court on a couch at left) tells me that the VIP Lounge is like a de facto casino in its own right. Phil Ivey, he claims, was betting $10,000 a putt last night. I was putting earlier with Phil "The Unabomber" Laak, boyfriend of Jennifer Tilly, who surprisingly remembered me from the interview I did with both of them last year for Vegas Magazine at the CPK at the Mirage.

Fortunately, Laak didn't insist we bet. It's hard to believe sometimes that I am the son of a man who, in lean years of my childhood, made his living betting thousands on his golf game. He'd be so disappointed.

Prime rib's here! Yum!

Annie Duke Backs Me Up!

Annie Duke is the most successful female poker player ever and, it turns out, a fascinating interview. I spoke to her for more than an hour yesterday a variety of venues including Vegas Magazine, the Boston Globe and "The Strip" podcast. The chat will go up on the show near the end of June.

But given the grief I got for the post in which I wondered why people watch live poker (they're known as "railbirds"), I wanted to blog this.

FRIESS: I have to ask. I understand why people poker on TV because you can see the hole cards and all of that. But the railbirds, the people who watch live poker…

DUKE: That confuses me. It baffles me. I can’t do it. Erik Seidel a couple of years ago won a bracelet at the World Series and I was in the audience to support him. And it was excruciating. You can’t see any of the hole cards! What makes poker really fascinating is that you know what your hole cards are and you’re trying to figure out what the other people’s hole cards are. So you have some of the information. It’s decision-making under relatively extreme circumstances of uncertainty. When you’re watching, you have zero information. You can’t figure out anything out.

For the record, I've now asked this question of Chris Moneymaker, Joe Hachem, Jamie Gold and Duke. And they all professed similar curiosity. (Hear "The Strip" episodes with each of those WSOP champs by clicking on their names or right-click to save the file to your computer.)

Anyone out there who does this want to explain it to me? Really. What are you watching?!?