DOYLISM OF THE DAY: ‘Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.’

With no high limit games in town it seems all my time and energy is going into the Real Deal at the Venetian.  Our show is getting better and better.  Five o’clock is a little early for a show on the Las Vegas Strip and the producers are trying to get a later starting time.  The audience is bigger each week and they seem to enjoy the show.

After researching when my father died in 1957, I am the same age today as he was when he passed.  It certainly doesn’t seem like it was fifty years ago and it makes me consider my own mortality.  The reality is that we should appreciate and enjoy every day we live.  I think I take after my mom’s side of the family. They (all 10 of them) lived into their 90s with three of them breaking the 100 year mark.  At least that’s where the family tells me I got this bald head.  Perhaps the people who say I am getting old and senile are right.  I can’t believe I responded to what people posted on a public forum.  I should have learned my lesson a few years ago on Rec Gambling when some nut accused me of cheating and running all the high limit games in Las Vegas.  According to him, no one could play unless they had my or Chip Reese’s permission.  He said all the games were fixed.  I tried to defend myself but lots of the folks that posted there seemed to believe it.  You can’t win in a situation like that so I won’t make that mistake again!

After Dewey Tomko and Harry Ornstein were inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame it made me wonder which of the young guys will wind up in there.  There are some obvious choices right now but time has a funny way of changing things.  At best we have a pretty good idea who the first African American will be.  I think Dewey was a worthy choice because in the 80’s and early 90’s he was a force to be reckoned with in both the cash games and poker tournaments.  Henry, if for no other reason, deserved it for the invention of the hole card cameras.  He wrote a great book, I Want To Live, about his survival of a Nazi Concentration Camp.

CADDY:  Sir, why do you carry two pair of pants when you play golf?

DANIEL:  In case I have a hole in one.

-DB

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “It’s choice, not chance, that determines our destiny.”

The most I had ever paid for a hamburger was $10, which I thought was foolish.  Yesterday, I went to Red Rock Casino to go to a movie with my pal Jack Binion.  We stopped in a gourmet hamburger place in the Red Rock and got a $14.75 burger.  It was a big restaurant but almost completely empty.  The way the economy is right now, this is going to be tough for them to survive.  The first thing people cut out is going out for lunch and dinner.  I personally would rather have a whopper from Burger King, anyway.

The election is finally over and I’m glad.  Martin Luther King said that someday, men would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.  Looks like that day has come; with Obama being our first African-American president.  I voted for McCain because of some personal beliefs, but now that America has spoken, Obama is my president and I’ll support him in any way that I can.  I can only hope he will be able to turn our country around.  President Obama is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard.

I get asked a lot where I get the Doylisms I use to start my blog.  A few of them are from me, but most of them are from things that I have read.  They come from all walks of life and from different folks.  I read a lot when I have time and I’ve taken the thoughts of a lot of authors, all the way from Will Rogers to Winston Churchill.  There is a lot of wisdom in books if we take the time to find it.

I didn’t go to Foxwoods for their WPT tournament.  Besides the fact I’m trying to stop traveling so much, my plate is so full now I don’t have any time.  I have to do a book signing at the Rio that I committed to and also have to appear in their “pro pit”.  The Hall of Fame induction is Sunday and I have to make the introduction speech for my pal Dewey Tomko.  I also have to do two shows for the Real Deal because most of their pros are out of town.  I’m also addressing some issues with Microgaming, DoylesRoom’s software provider.  Everything will work out, but it takes time and effort.

Daniel:  What do I do wrong?

Caddie: Sir, you spend so much time in bunkers, you get mail addressed to Hitler!

-DB

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.”

What has happened to me?  I’ve done four “Real Deal” shows, two “Poker After Dark”, a TV cash game and every time I look up, someone wants me to do a charity tournament or be on some radio broadcast.  I’m really getting discouraged with all this stuff.  I really enjoy the cash games for TV, but the sit and gos on PAD aren’t my cup of tea.  The structure is too slow and it seems I never hold a hand in them.  I’m going to do my best to start promoting the cash game at the Bellagio.  It seems the economy is reaching down to the poker games along with everything else.

I went the entire spring and summer and never hit a golf ball.  There were some good action golf matches I would have loved to been a part of, but along with all my other commitments, my leg is getting worse and I’m determined to get over to the Jobe Clinic and try to get it fixed.  Trouble is, that is no guarantee for success.

I just read where Michelle Obama is redistributing the wealth by having a $447 lunch at the Hilton Hotel in New York.  She had lobster, caviar and champagne.  I guess she was really hungry!

I went to a site called luckbox.com and watched Vegas history.  It had a video of the late Puggy Pearson talking about the “old days”.  I had a lump in my throat as I watched and remembered when I first came to Vegas.  Puggy was the man in those days and all the games revolved around him.  He was a totally fearless all around player and should be remembered as one of the pioneers of poker as we know it today.  He was a ruthless player who would do anything to win but he never pretended to be anything else.  I miss the guy, I would have loved seeing him and Phil Ivey go at it.

We only have a few days left to get out and vote.  If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain about the economy or anything else.  I’m Doyle Brunson and I approve this message

Caddie: Sir, how are you playing?
Daniel: I’m hitting the woods great, but I’m having a terrible time getting out of them.

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “Criticizing someone else’s garden doesn’t keep the weeds out of your own.”

This 700 billion dollar bailout doesn’t seem to be changing anything.  The stock market keeps going down and banks keep going under.  The culprits are being rewarded at the taxpayer’s expense.  Lehman Brothers went under after awarding 50 billion dollars in options and bonus money to their top executives last year. Why can’t the government step in and reclaim that money?  The banks that tried to be prudent and make good loans are being punished along with the banks that knew they were making terrible loans.  I taught Money and Banking at a University in Texas when I was a graduate student.  I remember in our textbook a quote, “Bankers are someone who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the minute it starts to rain.” Now, nobody has money to loan to the business people that need it.  I don’t know what the government is going to do now.

CNN says that Senator Obama is already measuring the drapes in the White House.  It does look like he is a shoo-in for the presidency even though there is lots of talk about his association with terrorists, him being a Muslim and some folks saying he is the Anti-Christ.  While all these things are taken to the extreme, we shouldn’t ignore that Obama didn’t use good judgment about his professor, his friends and his spiritual advisors.  As far as him being the Anti-Christ, forget that because he doesn’t fit the prophecies.  The Anti-Christ is coming out of the old Roman Empire which includes Iran, Iraq, Germany, Turkey and other countries in the Middle East.  I still haven’t made up my mind who to vote for but I’m tempted to vote for McCain.  After listening to my poker pals about me supporting George W. Bush in a big way and how bad he has been; if Obama turns out to be a lousy president, I can tell them, “I told you so!”  Whatever happens, I hope our country can recover and gain some respect back for all of us.

I went to the Venetian and went through a rehearsal for the “Real Deal”, a show that starts October 21st.  It went very well with Scotty Nguyen and myself playing poker with six members of the audience.  All the rest of the audience can play along with handheld devices that can call or fold.  Prizes are given all through the show to the top scorers.  Merv Adelson is the producer of the show and has a very professional team out of Los Angeles. The pros that will be in these bi-weekly shows are Scotty, Jennifer Harman, Eli Elezra, Todd Brunson, Gavin Smith, Phil Laak, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu and myself.  Kenna James and Lacey Jones introduce each show and pick the folks out of the audience to play.  We are going to have a lot of fun with this.

I saw where Daniel was bragging about some of the young poker players’ accomplishments.  A lot has been made about the number of entries in the old days and some of the older guys’ records can’t mean as much. Well, a final table is a final table and in the “old days” the field was thinner but tougher.  So when you judge from that, John Moss was at 22 WSOP final tables, won eight with two seconds.  How about this one, Billy Baxter has been at 11 WSOP final tables, won 7 times with one second.  I’ve been at 21 final WSOP tables, won 10 and have two seconds and three thirds.  Some of us dinosaurs could close the deal also.

Caddie: Sir, why do you play so much golf?

Daniel: There is absolutely nothing else to do in Las Vegas.

-DB