CARDRUNNERS

Many of you have read in the CR Forums that Friday, February 6th, will be my last day as COO of CardRunners. I pretty much covered the reasons my departure there. It also occurs to me that some people don't have access to the forums, so I'll append my post at the bottom of this.

I want to use this space to basically say a small number of things:

• I have had a great time at CardRunners. I learned a whole lot, worked with some wonderful people, and generally enjoyed myself.
• As was true at PokerStars, and the EPT, it was you folks - the poker players (and those nutty enough to read about poker but not play it)  who kept me engaged and energized. Thank you for your support, your emails, your PMs, your complaints, your suggestions, all of it.
• I honestly have no idea of what comes next for me. We'll see in a year what's going on. I do know that I anticipate being a much better dobro player and trout fisherman this time next year. Well, more experienced at both, anyway.

Hi folks -
As you can see from the above announcement, Jim Varnon is stepping in to be COO of CardRunners/StoxPoker.

Which I suppose begs the question of what I'm doing

I have decided to go see what the world has in store for me next... Taylor and I agree that it's the best thing for both the company and me. Be assured that there are no "problems". I have the highest regard for Taylor and all the people at CardRunners. And I extend that same respect to the StoxPoker people, particularly Jim Varnon, with whom I've gotten to work closely. Jim is going to be a dynamite COO. Basically the issue is that we've got too many managers for the work that needs to be done, and that's too many mouths to feed. Everybody else is tied to CardRunners by a substantial equity position, so I'm the natural candidate to step aside.

CardRunners is a healthy business that continues to thrive. There are new programs such as Truly Free Poker Training and the Hold'em Manager purchase program. And exciting new instructors such as Internet Pokers and thatpfunk. But a company always has to watch its bottom line, especially in economic times such as these.

I am going with the good wishes of my colleagues at CardRunners/StoxPoker, and they know they have mine.

When I first took this job, I expected it to have a lower time demand than my PokerStars and EPT jobs. For better or worse, it didn't turn out that way. I don't expect to be taking a regular j*b in (or out of) the poker industry in the foreseeable future. I have a couple of poker-related projects I'm looking at, but nothing even approaching full time. I'm going to hike around the Blue Ridge mountains, go trout fishing, play music, travel, and, yes, play some poker.

And I will continue to be a presence in the various forums, but it'll be in the strategy forums rather than the administrative ones.

Thank you all for your warm reception and correspondence throughout the past year - I've been honored to be part of this. And I look forward to what comes next for me. I'm sure you all will be excited by what comes next at CardRunners.

Best regards,
Lee Jones

So Lisa and I just got back from Asheville Pizza and Brewing Company - a hippie pizza place nearby that has a movie theater integrated into it. People eat pizza, drink beer, and watch movies. But today it was pizza, beer, and inauguration.

Yeah, I know I said we were going to go to D.C. But frankly we got scared away by the crowds, the insanity, the cold. I'm kinda sorry I wasn't there, but watching it in a theater full of happy people was still great.

I think the most important message to take away is that we truly do have a peaceful handover of power between two groups that share very little in their vision for America. Elsewhere, elections mean opposing leaders being jailed (if not shot) , people afraid to go to the polls, obvious rigging by the leadership, etc. Here, as soon as the people have spoken (and we'll set aside 2000 for the moment), that's it.

The most stirring moment for me, and by far the most delicious coincidence, was the quartet featuring Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, along with pianist Gabriella Montero, and John McGill. McGill, by the way, is the principal clarinetest of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. If you just randomly wanted to find the best clarinest in the world, simply saying "Gimme the principal at the Met" wouldn't be a terrible way to go about it.

   

Okay, I admit it - Benefield's blog pushed me into doing this.

Here's the deal, folks: I'm usually pretty cynical. And I realize that Washington is going to crush some percentage of Barack Obama's idealism and spirit like a bug. I don't think there's a president yet who hasn't had that done to him.

But his team is asking for our (the nation's) input, and has made it drop-dead easy to sign up for the Citizen's Briefing Book. In short, you create a userid, then you can post comments and vote on issues that matter to you.

There are a couple of "Repeal UIGEA" threads in there, and they're getting heavy traffic with big - overwhelming - votes for repealing it.

So, I just timed myself - it took me seven minutes to go to the website (thanks Raptor!), create a userid, search for "UIGEA" and then vote for the repeal.

Will this do any good? Look, it's a freeroll - it won't do any harm. We know that Obama is a poker player, we know the Treasury is looking for new sources of revenue. And in fact, I suspect that Full Tilt, PokerStars, and all the other major players would be on the first plane back to the U.S. if it became fully legal here.

"You mean - even if they had to be regulated and pay taxes?"

Hell, yes. To have access to the American financial system (i.e. your credit card works as easily at Full Tilt as it does at Amazon.com). To have full unfettered access to the advertising media. To have the protection of the American legal system against fraud. Etc.

No-brainer.

So please - take the seven minutes, sign up for a Citizens Briefing Book account, and go vote to the repeal the UIGEA. If you want to read and post comments about other topics of importance to American citizens, you get extra credit. But be careful - you may find yourself becoming involved in the civic process, caring about issues that matter to you, and even becoming an informed citizen and voter.

Scary stuff, that.

Regards, Lee

So, needless to say, yesterday was not my best day. It's still hard looking around the house - just "silly" things like, "How cool that Eric built that wine bottle lattice into the end of the kitchen counter". But I'm thinking that maybe somewhere in the house I'll put up a picture of Eric and the epitaph that was originally written for Christopher Wren:

    LECTOR, SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE

Anyway, it was good for me to get out of the house last night and go to the jam that one of the local fiddle players hosts at his office. His name is Adam, and while he makes his money from real estate, he's (IMHO) a professional quality fiddle player.

So we're picking away and Adam has stepped out for a few minutes. There's a bar directly under his office and some of the musicians will go into the bar and pick down there for a while; I'm pretty sure that's where he was. So now Adam comes in and he's got a man with him. "Hi everybody - this is Dave. Dave, this is everybody."

"Hi Dave!"

Dave is a bit older than I am, and he looks like life hasn't always been gentle to him. He moves a little slow, he's got a stoop that you see sometimes - you know, that seems to be as much in the soul as it is in the body.

Now, Adam, he's the epitome of a polite gentleman (and crazy smart, too). He turns to Dave and says "Dave, you wanna sing one?"

Dave smiles a little, and in a subdued voice, says yeah, he'd like to sing one - names a bluegrass standard (though I don't remember what it was). "Can y'all play that one?" he asks the assembled multitude. "Absolutely - what key?" is the reply.

"Well, I'm not sure about the key - kinda like this..." and he commences to singing. It's not a super powerful strong voice, it's nothing you'd rush out and buy the CD. But he sings it with feeling, and the phrasing is real good. Real quickly, we find the key that he's singing in and everybody jumps right in. And old Dave sings it good - pauses to let people take their breaks (solos) as a good bluegrass singer would. I'm sitting right next to him and he's got a smile on his face and his foot's tapping.

We finish, and everybody agrees that was fine singing. A couple of more tunes get played and Dave just sits and listens. "You wanna sing another Dave?" "Well, yeah. How about 'Two dollar bill?'" Again, he's not much on keys, but he starts and one of the mandolin players plunks on it for a second and says "G". So we do "Two Dollar Bill" in G, and two or three people sing harmony with Dave on the choruses.

So we had a fine time and Dave clearly enjoyed himself. After that song, I wasn't really paying attention, but Dave just sorta slipped out the door at some point and out into the wet Asheville night. Maybe he'd been at the bar downstairs - I don't know.

Here's what I do know: playing with those folks last night helped make a pretty bad day tolerable. And Adam did a beautiful thing by inviting Dave up to sing a couple tunes. Of course, it's possible Dave's a multi-millionaire living on 30 acres on the side of some mountain outside of Asheville, and he comes into town just to slum with the bluegrass musicians. But that, as we poker players say, is not how the smart money bets. More likely, that was the high point of Dave's day, or maybe his week.

So thank you, Adam, for giving me a place to go and pick and feel better yesterday, and for letting me be part of that gift to Dave.

Regards, Lee

The fireworks are cranking up in downtown Asheville, so I guess it's time to bid adieu to 2008.

This time last year, I was enroute to the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure - my fifth straight. It feels a little weird not to be going, but wholly appropriate. I got my licks in there and had a great time, but it was time to move on to something else.

Those of you that are going to be there, have a wonderful time. Make sure to get out and play in the ocean some, but if you want to go swimming with sharks, please do it with Stuart Cove, if you get my drift here.

I guess the most astonishing thing about 2008 for me was Barack Obama. Had you seen me at the Atlantis last year, and said "Who's Barack Obama", I would have probably guessed a utilitiy infielder for the Red Sox or something. By August I was signing up to work for the guy's election. I just read that something like 76% of Americans think he's a "good leader", which is of course hard to do when he hasn't taken office yet. But he's putting out reassuring vibes, and right now, we need that in a big way. I also find it encouraging that clearly a bunch of people who didn't vote for him think that he is/will-be a strong leader. Again, we need that. For instance, when the whole Blegojevich thing broke loose, a bunch of Republican party types tried to tie him to Obama. And guess what - some senior Republican guys in the Senate and elsewhere said, "Back off - (1) Obama isn't involved in this, and (2) we've got bigger fish to fry right now." Even John McCain said it. I guess when the chips are really down (and people, this country is pretty short-stacked right now) it brings out the statesman in some people and they start thinking about the good of the country rather than their own political agenda. Praise god.

On the professional front, I had a blast doing the second half of the European Poker Tour season, [1] We have one of those little digital picture frames and I look at it sometimes and see the pictures from all over Europe (and Kenya and the Galapagos too) and think "Wow, who hit me with the lucky stick?" It was easy to leave Liverpool, wonderful to return to the U.S., but man, I miss the people of the EPT. I guess it's always that with careers. You forget the w*rk pretty much immediately, but the folks who you've touched, and who touched you, stay with you. Moral of that story: pay attention to your coworkers as much as the j*b you're in. You will be able to recall them long after you've totally lost exactly what it was you did there.

And then coming back to the U.S. and ending up at CardRunners has been a dream come true. Taylor, Andrew, Brian, and all the guys have been incredibly generous and gracious with me. They tolerate my fuddy-duddy nature with good humor, and treat me as an equal. That's quite a compliment coming from a small group of guys the ages of my sons who have created not only a wildly successful commercial enterprise, but really an entire industry. One of the great things about the poker business is that I spend a lot of time communicating and being with dynamic, intelligent young people. It really does help keep me young. I'm lucky to be in the poker business, and deeply proud to part of the CardRunners/StoxPoker team.

Personally, well, it's cliché, but I'm certainly the luckiest guy there is. I've got an extraordinary wife, two amazing sons, and family and friends who mean the world to me. I'm having the time of my life living in Asheville. I've got a dobro teacher named Tyler Kirkpatrick who's an amazing player and a wonderful young man. He's rapidly turning into a friend (and hopefully fishing buddy) too. Anyway, between the lessons, practice, and the jams, the Scheerhorn guitar (aka "dobro") is getting a good workout and I'm actually getting better on the instrument. But of course, as Taylor points out in his blog, the point is not to prepare yourself for what comes next, it's to be in the moment, because when this minute is over, you never get it back. So I've stopped saying that I "practiced" dobro. No, I played dobro. If that made me a better player, excellent. But I spent that hour of my life playing a musical instrument, and if it were to be my last hour on the planet, there are few things I'd rather be doing.

By the way - I'm getting an astonishing lesson in "living" from my wife, Lisa. She's recently gone back to nursing a couple of days a week at the Cardiac ICU at Memorial Hospital in Asheville. Already 2-3 patients have died on her watch. That happens when you're a nurse, and especially when you're on in a CICU, but when she tells the stories, it reminds me how precious it is simply to be breathing (something else Taylor pointed out in his year-end blog). One guy who passed away just last week was in his 30's (or maybe 40's) - had at least one pre-teen kid.

I got to spend a bunch of time standing in trout streams this past year since we moved to North Carolina. That's a been an enormous blessing too.

Taylor closed his blog with an admonition to enjoy 2009. I second that. Be in the moment, listen to more music, tell your framily and friends that they make your life worth living (they generally do), and have coffee with a friend you haven't seen in three weeks or 30 years. [2] As Lisa's stories from the "office" remind me quite poignantly, there's no guarantee that I'll be here for the 1/1/10 blog entry, or even the 2/1/09 one. 

Peace,
Lee

[1] Speaking of the European Poker Tour, my former colleague at PokerStars, Tamar Yaniv, is waking up somewhere in Tel Aviv about now, married. Assuming she bothered to go to bed rather than dancing until dawn. Congratulations Tamar; I wish you Ahavah Olam.

[2] Over Thanksgiving, I had a delightful sandwich and beer dinner with a woman I'd known in high school and her husband. I hadn't seen her in something like 20 years. She and her husband have been married 28 years (!), raised two kids, got one of them through a life-threatening illness, and she teaches first grade. I mean, she's getting 6-year-olds turned on to reading. That's heroic stuff, right there.

I don't know what caused it, but something magic happened at the Jack of the Wood Thursday night. I mean, there's a bluegrass jam there almost every Thursday night. Most nights it's pretty good. Some nights, it's kinda mediocre.

Day before yesterday, magic happened. All the first team musicians were there and in a mood to play. And as if that weren't enough, a bunch of people I didn't know (but were obviously known to the other musicians) showed up. And every one 'em was a first-rate picker.

For about three hours, I listened to, watched, and picked with some of the best bluegrass musicians on the local scene. And that, my friends, is saying something. At one point, I counted 12 of us on the stage. I count myself a pretty fine musician, but I'll tell you what: I was the 11th or 12th best player up there.

Two examples:

I worked up the nerve to sing Love of the Mountain, which is one of my favorite bluegrass songs. I stepped toward the center near the mic, the song kicked off and I was in the center of an acoustic wave that I'd have ridden to Hawaii given the chance. I could hear guitar and mandolin fills, fiddle pads, counterpoints to solos. Stig the bass player was locked in like a low frequency metronome. It was all I could do to remember to sing. When I sang the chorus the first time, I was surprised (and a little disappointed) that nobody stepped in to sing harmony. As somebody was taking a solo, I turned to a guitar player next to me. He'd nailed a few songs earlier. "Why didn't you sing harmony?" "I cain't sing that high." "When the chorus comes back around, you sing the lead - I'll grab tenor." [1] Well, when the chorus hit, he sang the living bejesus out of the lead part, I sang tenor, and one of the banjo players who I didn't know stepped up and added a perfect baritone [2]. We had us a fine three-part chorus and sitting on top of that acoustic wave, I'd pretty much died and gone to heaven.

The very next tune was Hangman's Reel, which is a great fiddle tune with parts A, B, C, and D (most fiddle tunes are just A, B). What I particularly recall from that is Adam and Tim, two of the hottest fiddle players in Western North Carolina (imo) doing a raging duet. Either of them can play a harmony part to essentially any fiddle tune you can name. I don't know who was playing melody and who had the harmony, but man, when those two stepped into the center, and cranked it up, heads turned. The banjo player to my right, Jim, just grinned ear to ear. "That," he said, "is what I'm talking about."

You know, I've often told people that Mick Jagger is still touring not because he needs the money but because he's addicted to the applause. It's a potent drug indeed. But as I study on it, I suspect Mick's got multiple habits he's feeding. The other addiction doesn't need 30,000 fans screaming. It just needs Charlie Watts playing the back-beat and Keith Richards on the Telecaster. It's the irreproduceable high of being in the center of a musical storm.

It's only bluegrass music, but I like it.

Regards, Lee

[1] In the bluegrass world, the harmony parts are known as "tenor" (the harmony above the lead), and "baritone" (the harmony below the lead).

[2] The baritone part of three-part bluegrass singing is toughest to hear, and generally the toughest to sing.
 

When I lived in San Jose, I instituted a pot-limit poker game that ran, in one form or another, for well over a decade. In fact, I'm proud to say that the "Kelp Kard Klub" still meets occasionally in a different venue (here's a shout-out to Chatham Way) in Mountain View. The stakes were always small - we were all clear that we didn't want anybody getting hurt. But they were big enough to sting a little - albeit mostly in the extremely sensitive area of the male poker ego.

I'm delighted to be living in the Blue Ridge Mountains now, but I miss those poker gatherings, and I think it's time to have one. Since I've got a built-in poker community here I figured this was the obvious way to find players.

I'm thinking Friday, December 19th at my house in Asheville. Here's the plan...

• We'll order in pizzas and eat and get to know each other, then we break out the cards. I've got a nice poker table in the basement.
• We'll play either $.25-$.50 or $.50-$1 pot-limit Dealer's Choice. The button chooses the game and we deal it around the table. When it gets back to that person, the button skips him and the player to his left selects a new game.
• There will be a rake - something like 5% up to $1. All the rake goes to the Junior Appalachian Musicians (JAM) program.
• Bring your iPod - you can plug it into our stereo. Control over the tunes on the stereo will be rented out at $5 per hour. That goes to JAM too. If you wanna play death metal or rap, it'll be $10/hour.
• Smoking is outside.

This evening, my cousins Roald and Ellie Kirby invited me over to their 80-year-old farm house in Troutdale, Virginia for a "little music party", as Ellie put it.

Now, Troutdale is about as good a name as you could have for the place where they live, because Fox Creek, a dynamite trout stream, runs pretty much through their front yard. But that's a story for a different blog entry.

The aspect of their home that's relevant here is that it's about five minutes from Virginia Route 58 - the Crooked Road, which is a twisty turny road leading through the birthplace of American country music. But it's more than the birthplace of American country music - it's the cradle of bluegrass/old-time music. That is, it's a form that has its own life and culture, apart from the Nashville product of which it is (for better or worse) the origin.

So they're kinda parked there in a hotbed of music-making.

Anyway, I show up at the house at 5:30, and the cars and trucks are already parked all over the yard, behind the barn, up against the side of the road, etc. Smoke's coming out of the chimney from the woodstove, the sun is setting behind Mt. Rogers and Whitetop Mountain behind me - there's nowhere else in the world I want to be at this moment.

People are standing around talking and the kitchen table and counters are covered with dishes of homemade food. It's a beautiful sight. I first say hi to Roald, Ellie, and their extraordinary daughter, Rosy, who's home from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC for the weekend with a few friends. Then I grab a plate and fill up on homemade lasagna, quiche, sweet potatos, home-baked breads, etc.

Pretty soon as people are finishing off second helpings, I hear a guy say "Let's pick one - I gotta leave early." And there's that beautiful sound of instruments being tuned up and strummed. Sort of the way an opera fanatic must feel when he hears an orchestra tuning up - good things are fixing to happen.

Next thing I know, the den has two banjo players (one of 'em is Roald), two fiddlers (one of 'em is Ellie), two guitars, and a mandolin player. It's amazing how "regional" this music is. That is, in this county, they know tons of tunes that I've never heard of, and I'm around this music a lot. Even the way they refer to a tune is different. They say "Let's play that Leather Britches." Everywhere else in the world, we'd say "Let's play Leather Britches". But in this region, it's "that Leather Britches" or whatever.

Pretty soon the den is rocking with acoustic string music and a couple of leftover grazers in the kitchen are doing a little flatfoot dancing. It's not a push-back-the-furniture full-on dance party, but they're getting into it a bit.

So I think, ah hell, why not, and I go out to the car and get my dobro. Thing is, a dobro isn't really an old-time instrument, and it's not particularly well suited for fiddle tunes, but any port in a storm, and all that.

About 3-4 songs in, I say "Y'all know Hangman's Reel?" [1] Well, they do, and we rock hard on that fiddle tune. My cousin Ellie is the picture of concentration when she plays fiddle - eyes closed, body leaned over, all ear. I would have driven up from Asheville (three hours) just to play Hangman's Reel with these folks.

As we're playing, it strikes me that we're continuing a tradition that dates back hundreds (thousands?) of years. People gather at somebody's house to eat and make music. Back in the 16th century, wealthy families had sets of viols so that family and guests could make music together. I'm sure it was going on for centuries before that.

And in more recent times, the family picking on the porch or in the kitchen is a deeply loved American tradition. The song that pretty much defines bluegrass music, Uncle Pen, is about Bill Monroe's uncle, who was a fiddler.

At one point, a couple of college girls came down from Rosy's room and played guitar on a few tunes with us. They'd never done that, but I have a suspicion that they'll be back for more later. As Jimmy Buffett says, "And maybe one day she'll take a fancy to picking; 'cause when that bug bites you, you live with the sting."

Toward the end of the evening, they called a woman named "Helen" into the room to play a fiddle tune "Helen knows that tune real well," said Ellie. Helen played with an ease and grace that you just don't see very often - this woman is a born fiddle player. Suddenly, I put two and two together.

"Is that Helen White?" I asked the guitar player next to me.

"Sure is - you a fan?" 

"Big fan." 

Helen White is Wayne Henderson's "lady friend", and Wayne is a regional legend and national treasure. He has played for Queen Elizabeth and at Carnegie Hall and had a book written about him. I'd always wanted to meet Helen and talk to her about a program called "JAM" that she runs.

So I got to meet Helen, and say hi to Wayne, who was sitting in the living room talking (wait for it) guitar making. He was also talking about shotguns and dispatching a grouse with a claw hammer, but (1) this blog has rambled enough already, and (2) I could never ever do justice to the way Wayne describes the grouse/claw-hammer incident.

But I guess the whole point of this ramble was to say how good it felt to just go to a family's house, eat too much, and play music. I felt tied into a tradition that helps define the entire region's culture.

If you ever have the opportunity to attend (or host) such a gathering, do. It's heart-warming and does wonders for the community.

[1] In looking for a version of Hangman's Reel on YouTube, I found a claim that Albert Hash wrote the version that's commonly played in the Blue Ridge Mountains these days. If that's so, then it's even cooler that I requested that tune. Albert Hash was a legendary fiddler from nearby Whitetop Mountain, and taught Ellie Kirby to play fiddle. In fact, he gave her the fiddle that she plays, in exchange for a woodcut that she made of him, playing fiddle.