Wicked Chops Poker

It’s hard to even know where to start when discussing the year in poker. So let’s rely on an old Wicked Chops Poker crutch to get the discussions going: a bad analogy.

Nothing was more fun when we were younger than getting bombed at a party at the house of some friend whose parents may possibly have been out of town. No cares, no worries.

Inevitably though, some uptight neighbor would call the cops, the party would get busted up, and we would have to move to a new spot, where the party would go on, but maybe with a few less people and a little less fun.

And that’s kind of what happened with poker this year.

We don’t want to buzzkill this article out of the gate, but if we believed in saying things like “We’re just trying to keep it real,” then we’d say, “We’re just trying to keep it real.”

However, there is a silver lining of sorts. Because occasionally, after that party moved, we’d still end up scoring a hot chick.

So as Wicked Chops Poker looks back at 2006, our hope is that poker can still somehow end up scoring a hot chick. It can happen. We’re living proof.

When we’re running our multi-million dollar empire and a really tough business decision that involves good news and bad news is put before us, and we’re asked, “Do you want the good news or bad news first?” we almost always reply that, “We want the bad news first, Jack,” because it’s usually an old employee of ours named Jack who would present us with these scenarios.

We fired Jack. It was starting to piss us off.

So that brings us to the bad news of 2006. If you’re a fan of 1980’s WWF wrestling, you probably remember an announcer named Gorilla Monsoon. And during these wrestling broadcasts, whenever a good guy turned into a heel and started beating the snot out of his buddy or wrestling partner, which happened pretty often, Monsoon would declare in scripted dismay of the “Pearl Harbor job” that had just occurred.

With this extended prologue finally finished, it leads us to the Pearl Harbor job that Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), with a tag team assist from Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) and some others, pulled off on the American public by sneaking antigaming legislation into a Port Security bill, because you know that there’s no better way to protect our country from the importation of materials to make weapons of mass destruction than by banning online gambling – unless, of course, it’s gambling on horseracing or state lotteries, since those forms of gambling are OK – because they have powerful, well established lobbies.

We’re not going to rehash all aspects of this hypocritical legislation in this article, because a) you’ve been reading about it for two months now, and b) this article is really getting bloated and long. But we’ll note that some sites for various reasons and motivations have decided to stay in the game and go against the legislative grain. So for the vast, vast majority of online poker players, not much has changed… for now.

However, it’s up to you to make sure your voice is heard and stricter regulations don’t come to fruition, and it’s up to the online poker sites still doing business stateside to get their lobbying butts in gear, to ensure we’re not the only “free” society in the world that prohibits online poker.

And while you can’t see it, we’re stepping off our soapbox right… now.

Pre-September 30, when Frist & Co. pushed their Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act through Congress, the year in poker was the freaking nuts.

The game’s popularity was still growing like gangbusters. WSOP prelim events produced record field after record field, and the Main Event had a ridiculous field of nearly 9,000 players that included the 2005 Wicked Chops Poker Girl of the Year, Joanna Krupa.

Now, if only someone can teach 2006 Wicked Chops Poker Girl of the Year, Keeley Hazell, to play cards. That would be awesome.

Also good for the game, it was announced that everyone’s favorite poker hostess, Shana Hiatt, is getting back on the air, lending her considerable charm to NBC’s Late Night Poker, premiering in January 2007. Whether or not NBC eventually claims responsibility for the rise of poker’s popularity, à la WPT, remains to be seen.

And finally, in what truly has to be the feel-good story of the year, except replace “feel-good story” with “How in the world could a former phone sex operator and a guy named Anurag Dikshit become billionaires?” PartyPoker, despite pulling out of the U.S. market, can take some relief in knowing that some of its founders, including the unfortunately-named Mr Dikshit, cashed out nearly 9% of parent company PartyGaming’s stock, making them all billionaires. Let’s face it, if your name is Anurag Dikshit, and you’ve gone by Anurag Dikshit your whole life, a billion dollars seems pretty fair.

In July, casinos in Atlantic City were closed because of a budget stalemate between New Jersey’s Democratic governor and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature. At this time, a man named B.J. Novak was down $1,200 at the Trump Plaza and stepped out for a bite to eat; he was not let back in because of the shutdown. B.J. was pretty bummed because he couldn’t return to win his money back. A day later though, B.J. was allowed back into the casino when the stalemate was resolved, leaving him free to lose even more money, because that’s what you do in casinos.

Greg Hogan Jr., class president at Lehigh University and an official member of the Wicked Chops Stupid Poker Criminals Hall of Fame, was sentenced this year after robbing a bank to pay off his gambling debts. Hogan robbed the bank on a Friday in between going to see the Chronicles of Narnia and attending orchestra practice. This is a truly distressing case, as we are genuinely concerned that Lehigh University must be the most uncool campus in the world since a student’s typical Friday night activity involves seeing a mystical, fanciful adventure at the theaters followed by orchestra practice. Scary times, folks. Scary times.

Back in February, James Woods let it be known during an interview with The Week that he wanted to be “the greatest poker player in the world.” Woods said that he was sick of making “feminist, douche-bag movies” and wanted to win the WSOP so he could “retire and spend a weekend in bed with four Rockettes.” Aside from making us wonder who the hell under the age of 80 still has fantasies about the Rockettes, even stranger is why James Woods the poker player would have any better chance of landing even a single Rockette than would James Woods the actor. If the 4,000 motion pictures James Woods has been in haven’t helped him bag a Rockette yet, then we’re pretty sure a WSOP win wouldn’t either.

One thing we’re noted for is our uncanny wicked prediction chops. Be it poker tournaments, American Idol contests, or celebrity break-ups, we’re like really good-looking, rich, American versions of Nostradumus.

With that in mind, here are some things we see shaking down in 2007:

By the end of the year, Jamie Gold will be more famous as a television producer of shows like Hottest Mom in America and Date My Uncle, than for being a professional poker player, and he’ll be perfectly happy with that.

Crispin “Don’t Call Me Bruce” Leyser will be seen “palling around” with Tom Cruise in Hollywood and will convert to Scientology — if he isn’t a Scientologist already, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anna Benson will have the Wicked Chops Poker guys over for a night of dinner and poker when Kris is out of town pitching for the Chattanooga Lookouts, and she’ll let us try out her stripper pole as she tosses $100 bills at our nearly naked bodies.

Bodacious Brit babe Keeley Hazell will once again be the official Wicked Chops Poker Girl of the Year and will remain such until gravity finally gets the best of her 32Es, and if there is a doctor or scientist out there who wants to selflessly do good for mankind, he will dedicate his life to making sure this never happens.

With Titan Poker bailing on the US market, its spokesmodel, the amazingly hot, Polish-American supermodel Joanna Krupa will launch her own poker site called HotPolishChickPoker.com; or maybe it will be just called JoannaKrupaPoker.com. Either way, deal us in…

The movie Lucky You will finally hit screens a decade (about two years) after it was originally planned to be released to movie theaters.

Whether or not online poker gets a carve-out similar to horseracing and state lotteries, we predict some really bad marketing campaigns will still be prevalent. Poker advertising is rivaling rap videos for an utter lack of creativity and astounding redundancy.

And if there is an end to online poker, playing the state lotteries will be the next “big thing.” You’ll see groups of men having weekly gatherings at convenience stores and gas stations across the country, scratching instant win tickets with fervent passion, and debating the odds of winning big (which are approximately 14 million to 1).

Or maybe not.