Oatmeal, Poker, and the Iron Bowl

11-15-2006

It's 5:07 am here in the WHNT newsroom. I'm here to tell you. If I eat another packet of oatmeal, I'm going to scream.

At my advanced years, a doctor recently suggested oatmeal might be good for me health wise and more importantly from an appetite suppression perspective. Working overnight and early morning does strange things to my metabolism. Some days I forget to eat, and some days if Tallulah the chihuahua walks by to slow, I'm apt to start looking for sourdough bread for a quick snack. Also, working overnight and early morning, exercise is a key to staying sharp. But my exercise regiment of running and walking was severely hit when I finally downloaded a poker website. In the afternoon, I can run or play poker and for some reason, I play poker.

The poker explosion is very interesting from a television perspective. When ESPN came up with the "holecam"....the camera which allows you to see what everyone has, poker exploded.
My friends who aren't in the poker cult don't get it. But I think it's simple. The reason reality television is successful is that almost everyone loves to watch other people react to stress.
Watching poker you get to watch people think themselves into and out of trouble. Plus, you mix in real unique....ok downright crazy characters....you have a great mix.
And when they all start playing for huge sums of money, the stress and the players quirks are fun to watch.

Women playing poker. I can't wait for a woman to win the World Series of Poker. And it will happen soon. First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I plan in poker tournaments. Tournament poker is an elimination match where you have to be aggressive as the stakes go up. But you are playing with play money...and then the positions pay out. So it isn't like you are sitting in a smokey room playing for your mortgage money.
But back to women playing poker. I'm always amazed. If you have 80 people to start a tournament, and you have 10 women playing, the final table will be split 50-50 with men and women. Women are great poker players. Actress Meg Tilly has already won two major events and her performance is drawing more and more women to the game.
My take on why women starts with their life experience. Most women have heard so much "stuff" from men their whole life that it's just about impossible to bluff a woman at the table. They know when men are bluffing, and if a woman raises twice in a hand...they normally have a strong hand. Women are usually cooler and calmer at the poker table, and it shows in how strong they finish in tournaments here locally.

Iron Bowl is this Saturday.

In this state, people are always interested in who you pull for on fall Saturdays.
"Are you an Auburn or an Alabama fan?"
In the this part of the south, it's kind of like being asked "who are your people and what church do you go to?"

I'm an Alabama fan. Graduated without honors in the class of 81. That would be 1981 and not 1881 as some have suggested in the WHNT newsroom. Pulling for Alabama has been filled with drama since Coach Bryant left us for the great stadium in the sky. I just tell people I graduated from Alabama but I don't wreck my car when they lose. If I wrecked my car when they lost like some do, that would be a ton of cars lately.

What has always been interesting to me is how the Iron Bowl rivalry is perceived by the rest of the country. I used to work in Richmond, Virginia. Loved Richmond, and we covered
Virginia and Virginia Tech regularly. In 1995, Tech and UVA played a game very much
like the legendary Alabama-Auburn game. Virginia won a game where the lead changed five
times in the fourth quarter. I was leaving the stadium and a guy with a Virginia hat slides up and says "hey Screws, how did that compare with all those Alabama-Auburn game you covered. This game was a classic don't you think."

I looked at him and said "well, the biggest difference between an Alabama-Auburn game and a Virginia-Virginia Tech game is that at the Virginia-Virginia Tech game the winners don't shoot at the losers as they run to their cars."

The Virginia fan with his orange hat and blue V on the front cocked his head and looked at him.

"Really? Do they really shoot at each other after games down there?"

I looked back at him with my black Davey Allison cap with the 28 on my head and said...

"Yeah buddy...want to see my scar?"

More Later