Cinevegas + WSOP = All In

As folks following my Tweets and Facebook statuses know, I've been running around like mad the past few days, working on a new piece for the Times that has sucked up a huge amount of time away from the computer and I've also been trying to keep tabs on Cinevegas because the lineup is the most interesting in all the years I've covered it.

I was a little concerned, though, after "Saint John of Las Vegas" yesterday. The opening night premiere, starring Steve Buscemi and Sarah Silverman, was a weird little flick that just didn't engage me and that distracted me by the several smaller details about its titular city that it got wrong.

But I knew there were a number of really good pictures in the lineup because I'd already seen all the gay-related ones for this Advocate.Com piece. In particular, "It Came From Kuchar" is wonderful and I'm looking forward to Friday's premiere and the Q-and-A session with the Kuchars on Sunday at 9 p.m.

Still, I was unprepared for how much I enjoyed "All In: The Poker Movie" tonight. Premiering as it did during the early stages of the 2009 World Series of Poker across the street from the Palms at the Rio, it drew some poker stars who are also in the film including WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack and two-time bracelet winner Howard Lederer...



Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth were supposed to be there, too, but they were doing so well in one of the WSOP tourneys they couldn't. Occupational hazard. Amarillo Slim was there, however.

As for the film itself, let me first say that I'm someone who became interested in poker in the first place because it's a perennial story that someone is asks me to cover each year. We also get huge download numbers whenever we have poker stars on "The Strip." (We've had Chris Moneymaker, Jamie Gold, Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Phil Hellmuth, Jennifer Tilly, Joe Hachem, Jerry Yang and Greg Raymer over the years, all of which can be found at TheStripPodcast.Com.)

But "All In" tonight really taught me something else: The poker boom is about as American as anything ever was. The variation on the game itself -- Texas Hold 'Em -- is an American invention. Risk-taking is the foundation of our capitalist society. And the ingredients that turned it into what it is today include new technology (hole-card cams, Web poker) and anyone-can-succeed chutzpah (Moneymaker) that have deep roots in our national traditions.

It wasn't just that it was a sweeping, artful film. It was that, although some of the blurry camera angles and odd tics of speakers could be grating. But from dignified Doris Kearns Goodwin to cool-cat Matt Damon, from Southern-fried Slim to lovably goofy Phil Laak, from scholarly Dr Dave Schwartz to curmudgeonly Frank DeFord, documentarian Douglas Tirola really cast a very wide net of diverse voices to explain where this phenomenon came from and who it impacts. I also appreciate that not everyone is likeable -- World Poker Tour's Steve Lipscomb comes across as a total, arrogant prick -- and that not everything is positive, as when Tirola delves (briefly) into recent online poker cheating scandals.

That said, there are gaps: No discussion of problem gambling or sexism in the game, no serious effort to allow anyone who objects to online gambling or gambling in general to offer a cogent argument for their side. And Ira Glass? Really? Blech.

But even without all that -- it's not a Ken Burns PBS special after all -- it's really a compelling movie that needed to be done and done with this sort of maturity. If you're near the Palms on Friday at 12:30 p.m., check it out. Too bad it's not on over the weekend. Also too bad I cannot find a YouTube trailer of this film or even a website to point you to.

Meanwhile, Cinevegas has really taken over the Palms. The Lounge, where we did the Vegas Podcast-a-Palooza (and are waiting for the OK to do again in October) last year has been transformed into a headquarters for media and film folks. There's video games...


...and a pool table...


...and music...

...and fun couches.


Finally and appropriately, I was stuck behind this on the way home...

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!