Isaac Haxton

Isaac Haxton has appeared in a number of major final tables over his short career. He finished second in the 2007 PCA for $861k, and sixth in the 2008 EPT London High Rollers Event for $188k. Haxton also has a couple of WSOP final tables under his belt. Greg Raymer, as you well know, won the 2004 World Series of Poker. Raymer is an extremely capable poker player, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him win this event.

Vitaly Lunkin won a bracelet last year ($1,500 NLHE event for $629k), and will certainly be no pushover at the final table. Dani Stern and Lex Veldhuis don't have a great deal of "live" tournament experience, but both are extremely talented players who made their names playing online poker. Alec Torelli has a couple of major final table experiences to draw from, including a second place finish in the $10k Heads-Up event last year at the World Series of Poker.

Noah Schwartz appeared at the final table of the 2008 Borgata Winter Open, where he eventually finished in 4th place for $331k. Schwartz has nearly $800k in total lifetime tournament cashes. The remaining nine players will all be battling it out for the $1.89 million dollar first place prize, as well as the coveted WSOP bracelet.

Pushing Daisies

Pushing Daisies, the screwball comedy that comes in candy-fruit colors, returned for the first of its final three episodes. All was right with its world: there were two murders to be solved, but also a new complexity between the show's essential romantic triangle of pie-maker Ned, his love Charlotte "Chuck" Charles, and Olive, the Pie Hole restaurant waitress. Plus extensive study of the double-negative as a clue to the true meaning of love.

Personally, any time a major subplot involves Kristin Chenoweth's Olive, the happier I am with Daisies, and last night's was Chenowonderful. We saw a glimpse of Olive's childhood (unloved, neglected) and met two men who were once accused of kidnapping her. They were played, to my delight, by George Segal and Richard Benjamin (two stalwarts of 1970s cinema and television -- look them up on YouTube in Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show videos, and in films such as Blume in Love and Goodbye, Columbus). Both men played these two shady characters (not really kidnappers but petty thieves) as slapstick bumblers.

Meanwhile, back at the Pie Hole, Olive was being courted by David Arquette's Randy Mann. Olive, of course, spent much of her time mooning over eternally-unattainable Ned, parsing his every remark for signs of affection. (That's where her study of the double-negative in grammar came in.) When Ned kissed Olive, we got a brief, lovely musical number, with Olive/Chenoweth trilling the Lionel Richie hit "Hello," a song I thought I never wanted to hear again until that moment.

Whistler SL500

Whistler SL500: I met DE-1732 back in Toronto. I’d been wanting to start a band for a while, but I’m kind of a no-frills guy. Not much of a rock star, you know? So I was at our church beaver roast one Friday when I saw this really cool-looking radar detector with this wicked smile. When he told me he was VG-2 undetectable, just like me, I knew this was the guy.

Whistler DE-1732: That’s actually what our first song together was about. “Immunity”, it was called. “Uniformed inspector / Seeking your detector / His idea of fun is / Seeing you punished / But you’re immuuuuuune!” Whistler SL500: We oughtta do that one again. Whistler DE-1732: Yeah, it was pretty rough. For one thing, we’re illegal in some states, so that was kind of a hassle. And we missed a bunch of gigs ‘cause we couldn’t use our GPS.

Whistler SL500: The tour bus only had two DC jacks. We call it a bus. It’s really more of a minivan. Anyway, me and DE-1732 had to use those jacks. So no GPS, no gigs, no payment. Nobody wants to pay you in this business. Whistler SL500: Now we got this deal going with this discount deal-a-day web site. I think it could totally turn things around.