Does anyone have a good plugin or app to keep comment spammers off your WordPress blog? I’m by no means an expert on the format and I get tons of spam comments each day. So I’d love your help if there’s a solution out there that I just don’t know about.

Back in Atlanta this week, working (ish) ’til Wednesday afternoon. Got no plans tonight if you’re in the ATL and wanna get together, let me know. I’ve pretty much settled into a routine of staying at the Marriott Century Center, because it’s convenient to the interstate and thus my office in Midtown. It’s decent, and as of last night I’d locked up Marriott Platinum status until 2011, so I get the concierge level rooms. The nice bath mat and robe in the room is pretty spiffy, but I haven’t taken advantage of the concierge lounge yet. May check that out tonight.

Thanks for all the nice Facebook comments on my poetry contest win a couple weeks ago. It was pretty wacky to me to win the thing, since I’d never entered a poetry contest before. So I was shocked when I got the notification, and pleased because the way the poem came about was really neat. So I read the piece at the last meeting of the Writer’s Club, and it was very well-received. I kinda only started going to this club because my senior HS English teacher is on the board, so that gave it a measure of respectability in my mind. I gave her a copy of my book at the last meeting, and she was touched a little by the gesture.

Nothing really to report, since I had my crushing run at Omaha in West Virginia I’ve since given back $100 to the poker economy of Cherokee, NC on the electronic tables there, and dropped a gross $240 in my home game last week. I kept ending up second best, with draws that didn’t get there, or hands that wouldn’t hold up. I did manage to crack BadBlood’s aces with my kings in a hand that had we been playing deeper I could have gotten away from, but didn’t rake a significant pot for four hours after that.

In the AA v KK hand I had position on Blood, who was very early to act. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t UTG, but it was close. He raised preflop, his buddy Mike called and I three-bet. Now my preflop three-bet range is fairly narrow, and I need to work on expanding that, but I when I took his $3.25 raise to $8, I’d pretty closely defined my range as being a big pair or AK. Action folded around to Blood, who re-popped me to $31. Mike got out of the way and I thought to myself “He’s got Aces, but I don’t have any chips, I wish we each had a pile of money so I could get away from this hand.” But I had less than $40 in front of me, so I shipped it in. Blood called the five or six extra dollars, and I made a set on the turn to come from behind. I did have a bit of a sweat, as the Ks on the turn was the third spade, but I faded the flush and doubled up. It didn’t happen again all night, so I became the spewmaster. It wasn’t pretty.

Hopefully I can provide a better showing for myself in Vegas in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you there, and so is Suzy. We get in relatively early on Thursday and leave Monday, so we’ll be around to party and we’re both planning on playing the tournament. I bet I wouldn’t win a last longer with my wife.

A new episode of the Gambling Tales Podcast is coming up first of next week, with the inimitable Dr. Pauly as our special guest. We’ve got two more episodes in the can after this one, then we need to pick up more material for later shows. If you’ve got a great gambling story, drop us a line at gtpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and publicized the podcast, the response has been great and we’re having a blast doing it. I think starting in the new year we’re gonna try to do some promotional things, maybe with Cake Poker (bonus code GTpodcast!) in a shameless attempt to monetize the podcast and get more listeners.

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