Hot to Trot

On Tuesday us Poker Academy fellows are off to Las Vegas. Most of us will be there for 5 days (5th to the 10th) for our WSOP trade-show booth. Myself and a skeleton crew will stay an additional 5 days to help host the WSOPR (World Series of Poker Robots). We are gushing with anticipation over this trip. It’s going to be very exciting.

On Friday we had the official 2.0 release and launched sales on our website. So far the feedback from customers has been super-great. You can’t imagine how good that feels. After working on something so hard for 6 months, you lose focus and start to have trouble objectively evaluating your work. Pre-release we were sitting on pins and needles. It sounds like we have a hit! And we can’t wait to show it off in L.V.

I have no idea how hard it’s gonna be keeping my diet in check on this trip. I’m gone for 10 days so it’s not like I can pack my lunches in advance. I’m going to have to ad-lib it and eat out for every meal. I plan to hunt for salad bars and eat light, whilst bringing a good solid arsenal of supplements to pick up the nutritional slack. I do have a freezer bag full of mega muffins, but I know first-hand how sticky border guards can be about bringing strange-looking muffins into the US.

The last time I crossed the border they confiscated all of my beef jerky (I was going on a week long backpacking trip in Montana). Because of the mad-cow scare, no beef products were allowed to cross the border from Canada into the US. The server irony is that the beef jerky was ALL packaged in the USA and imported into Canada. I was not allowed to walk across the border with US beef jerky. I pointed this fun-fact out the the guards. They were humorless. Here’s where it got even better. With our beef jerky gone, we needed a good protein source for our week long hike, so we stopped at a store in Montana and purchased some new jerky and sausages. Our hike went from Glacier National Park in Montana, back across the border into Canada. When we reached the end of our hike in Canada, we had to catch a shuttle bus back into Montana to get back to our car. Well, you guessed it. We had some left-over beef jerky in our packs again. Again, we had to surrender the beef jerky which we had purchased just dasy before IN MONTANA. Oh lordy, that was rich. Bureaucracy.