From: LouKrieger@aol.com
Subject: BARGE Trip Report

The weather at BARGE is always the same: 105 degrees with clear skies 
outside; seventy-two and smokey in the casinos!  Bad weather in both places 
any way you look at it.

As most of you know, my BARGE trip report invariably makes its way into Card 
Player as a column once I clean it up for the general public, but this year I 
wanted to do something different and not repeat myself by regaling Card 
Player's readers for yet another time with tales great fun, frivolity, and 
much-needed sophomoric humor.  As Peter Secor is so fond of saying, "You can 
still have fun when you play poker," and BARGE is clearly the place for that.

So I wrote my BARGE Card Player piece the first night I arrived -- before I 
was tired, sleep-deprived, and too filled with BARGEan madness that I could 
not make the serious points I wanted to convey to Card Player's readers about 
the incredible community of RGPers that show up at BARGE each year, and 
continue to do amazing things during the other 11 months when we stay in 
contact mostly online.

Since I always run about two months ahead of deadline, I've added the text of 
my Card Player piece to these impressions.  You can read it now.  The rest of 
the world -- those who still haven;t learned what an incredible fraternity 
RGP really is -- will have to wait a few months to see it in print.

My memories are still a blur.  My impressions still run together and I 
haven't caught up on my sleep enough to sort out my memories, so this hazy 
listing of my recollection will have to suffice.

A number of favorite memories come to mind.  

TEAM HORSE:
As usual, I love the team CHORSE.  With the innovations made by Peter Secor, 
we got in a lot more play and still had time between rounds to socialize.  
CHORSE is a terrific time to visit with people, and the arrangement of one 
round in and two rounds out seemed to serve both needs: poker and rekindling 
friendships.

The Coney Island Whitefish have placed in the money each year, but failed 
once again to capture the trophy. But we did earn an astounding six dollars 
per person for our efforts, and got to wear our cool new hats.  In case 
you're curious about them, I saw a site that does custom clothing; the lids 
were inexpensive enough (around $100 to outfit the team, plus a few extra 
hats for any new members we may add in future years) so I sprung and treated 
the team to hats.  It seemed simpler and quicker to do that, than to see if 
everyone was willing to chip in for the team bucket hats.

CHOWAHA:
Nothing beat this year's Chowaha game.  They spread the game in prime time 
and in a prime location for tourists and Vegas regulars to see, and dozens of 
people hovered around the table to ask about the game.  It was incredibly 
nice of Chris to take time out from his tournament schedule to remember his 
roots and join us at Chowaha.  It was equally nice to see his clear enjoyment 
of the madcap antics that are always part and parcel of a Chowaha game.  

I played for three hours and lost $40 -- and probably all of it went for 
incoming and outgoing tokes, and the few small pots I won where I wound up 
toking the entire pot to the dealer.  Where else could I have so much fun for 
the small cost of $13.39 an hour?  Nowhere.  No way.  No how.  Nothing equals 
Chowaha; it is -- pure and simple -- the spirit of BARGE personified.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS:
Chris Ferguson was an incredibly inspired choice for the speaker at this 
years banquet.  Not only is he honest, modest, witty, and warm, his talk was 
terrific.  It was not, as is generally the case with so many speakers, full 
of platitudes and generalities.  Instead, he filled with specific advice 
anyone can use to improve his or her no-limit game.  His presence made this 
the best banquet I've been to in my three years at BARGE.

TOURNAMENTS
I loved them all, in spite of my miserable showing.  I enjoyed the History of 
Poker event, since it was comprised of games almost never played anymore.  
When you think about it, it's tough to imagine finding a tougher field than 
this one in any $50 buy-in tournament anywhere in the world.

BINION'S
In spite of the smoke, Binion's gets us.  The Orleans never understood us, 
and it was a clash of cultures from the get-go.  But Binion's staff loves us, 
they roll with the punches, join in the fun and games and seem to have the 
kind of good time that the Orleans never did.  Although I hate the smell of 
smoke, you can't take the smoke out of Las Vegas.  The best one can do I 
suppose is to immediately dump all your trip clothes into the washing machine 
upon entering your own front door, then get in a hot shower with plenty of 
soap and shampoo for about 30 minutes.  

I dunno know about anyone else, but I'd still prefer good old smokey Binion's 
to an Orleans with air that's been filtered, scrubbed, polished, and cleaned.

THE CALCUTTA
Since I don't buy horses, the Calcutta seems to leave me cold.  Nevertheless, 
others seem to really get into it, and I would not recommend scrapping it for 
any other event in that same time slot.  I liked the innovations to this 
year's bidding.  Grouping players made the entire process go off more 
quickly, and allowed everyone to get over to the Team CHORSE competition at a 
reasonable hour.

MISCELLANEOUS
Thanks, guys, for all the cool bust-out gifts I received.  Thanks, Ploink, 
for the wonderful CD full of gambling and poker songs. I can't wait for 
Ploink Records to release the second disc.  I've been playing it as I drive 
around LA.  I have, but the way, discovered a CD with a poker-related cover 
although there are no poker songs on it.  It's entitled, "Nobody Knows: The 
Best of Paul Brady."  The disc itself depicts cards all over it, and the 
cover is a shot of Brady sitting in a poker game somewhere.  It's a terrific 
album, covering 20 years of an incredibly talented singer songwriter who -- 
like Paul Simon did and so many others didn't -- made the transition from 
folk to rock to something beyond that.  It's worth a listen, and definitely 
worth a look.

CARD PLAYER ARTICLE  
What follows is the text of my BARGE article that will appear in a future 
issue of Card Player.  Hope you enjoy it.

 ON STRATEGY: ROLL OVER, NOSTRADAMUS
 By: Lou Krieger

Roll over, Nostradamus.  Roll over and make room for me.  You're not the only 
seer who's successfully called a shot.  I made some predictions too.  
Although I made my predictions last year, not hundreds of years ago as you 
did, mine were much more specific.  After all, one can read almost anything 
into your prognostications.  They're that vague.  While I'm not ready to look 
500 years into a future I can neither conceive nor even understand, at least 
I served up some specificity with my words. 

Almost a year ago to the day -- while writing about BARGE, the annual August 
gathering of Internet poker aficionados who congregate and share ideas on the 
Internet Newsgroup, Rec.Gamnling.Poker -- I wrote these words: "RGPers are 
the future of poker…Most of us study intensely, and share information and 
insights among ourselves.  While the majority of RGPers are not household 
names, at least not yet, some are -- and others are on their way."

I never realized how prescient I was.  Nor did I have the slightest clue as 
to how quickly my prediction would come to fruition.  Right now, less than 
one year later, RGPers rule the poker world.  The $10,000 buy-in, no-limit 
hold'em tournament at the World Series of Poker -- the one that determines 
the world champion for the year -- was won by longtime RGPer Chris "Jesus" 
Ferguson.  If that's not enough, two months after Ferguson defeated the 
largest field in World Series history to garner a $1.5 million payoff, the 
2000 Tournament of Champions was captured by a modest, unassuming RGPer from 
the San Francisco Bay Area named Spencer Sun.  

Sun, who goes by the name "Zorak" on RGP, defeated a stellar field from the 
United States, Europe, and other corners of the world to win a tournament in 
which he had to demonstrate determinative mastery of a number of poker games, 
not merely one that's his particular specialty.

So what's going on here?  Why is RGP fast becoming the salon of choice for 
the exchange of ideas among poker players the world over?  After all, there 
are poker players everywhere. -- literally millions of them in the United 
States and more now that poker seems to have expanded globally.  Here's 
straight skinny about RGP. Most of the players you run into are not students 
of the game, at least not in the sense of wanting to advance the state of the 
art.  Scratch any poker player and of course you'll find a guy who is always 
open to a fresh idea or looking for a tip to improve his game.  But the ones 
who are developing advanced strategic ideas, well, that's another story.  
There aren't many of them, and cyberspace is as convenient a place as any to 
meet.

If this were an earlier age, some city would have emerged as center stage for 
poker's renaissance.  In the 50s, San Francisco served as home to a literary 
movement called the Beat Generation.  Thirty years before that it was Paris' 
left bank where writers like Hemmingway, and painters like Klee, Kandinsky, 
and Chagal did their thing.

But that was before the Internet.  With cyberspace only a click away on 
increasingly inexpensive computers, there's no need to move halfway across 
the country, or across the ocean, to commune with like-minded visionaries.  
Now you can do it from the comfort of your own home.

That's what RGP is: a virtual community of poker's pundits and thinkers, 
players, teachers, listeners, learners, and visionaries.  It's been around a 
while now and RGP's readership continues to grow -- though no one knows for 
sure how may people actually peruse the information posted there on a regular 
basis.  After all, for each "poster," there are probably scads of "lurkers," 
who read RGP regularly but don't post anything of their own.

Not everything posted to RGP is of value when it comes to learning about 
poker.  Logistical information abounds, posted in response to queries about 
where to find the best game in Tuolumne County, California or Tucumcari, New 
Mexico.  Some postings are humorous.  Some of it is nothing but trash talk 
from Southern Californians, extolling primacy over their Northern California 
brethren -- and NoCals saying the same thing about their SoCal cousins.  And 
some of the postings are just junk: rants from players whose opinions are 
substantially stronger than their minds.

But there are gems too.  From conceptual blockbusters like Morton's Theorem, 
to Spencer Sun's description of the tactics he employed to win the 2000 
Tournament of Champions, these are writings worth at least a read, if not 
detailed study.

And for every idea espoused on RGP there is criticism, debate, suggestions, 
ideas reformulated, tried, tested, and debugged by the best and most 
articulate poker players one can ever hope to find.  Concepts learned and 
forged in this kind of crucible will inevitably be strong enough to endure.  

And if RGP all by its lonesome is not enough, there are related poker sites 
available to intrepid 'net searchers too.  Discussions can be found on a 
forum maintained by Two Plus Two publishing; Mike Caro maintains a web site 
at Planet Poker; ConJelCo, an on-line distributor of poker and other 
gaming-related books as well as a publishing company, offers a wealth of 
information on their web site, and my own web site provides links to most of 
the better poker-related web sites.

RGP is the oldest, biggest, and probably the best place for anyone to keep 
his or her fingers firmly on the pulse of the poker community.  Ideas move 
about fast and furiously in cyberspace.  And one needs to keep reading the 
Newsgroup assiduously to avoid missing out on things of importance.

After all, Spencer Sun and Chris Ferguson plug into RGP regularly.  And if 
it's good enough for the current world champion and for the winner of the 
Tournament of Champions, it ought to be good enough for you.  After all, they 
were nurtured on the Newsgroup, and many of the ideas and concepts they've 
incorporated into their games were first discussed and dissected on RGP.  

I don't know whether next year's winners will be RGPers or not, but I am 
willing to make another prediction: More and more of the top players in the 
future will have cut their poker teeth on RGP.  And although he'd undoubtedly 
be much more vague, Nostradamus would probably say the same thing too.

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