Jennifer Shahade is a Philadelphia based writer and gamesplayer. She is a two-time American Women's Chess Champion (2002, 2004). Her first book, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport intertwined her own story with that of great women chess champions past and present. She is also a semi-professional poker player, and placed 17th out of more than 1200 players in the 2007 Ladies World Series of Poker event.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New In Chess, the L.A. Times, and Chess Life Magazine, for which Jennifer is the web-editor. She has coached chess to talented youngsters all over the country and also performs simultaneous exhibitions in which she plays up to 50 people at once, in locations as various as Shanghai, China, Soweto, South Africa and a Girls' Scout Convention in Los Angeles.
My boyfriend and I went to Atlantic City for Christmas, because we couldn't think of anything more romantic than watching sad people lose $$. Really, we sat in our discounted hotel room watching movies and running jacuzzi after jacuzzi. During one of these hot water bonanzas, I saw Knocked Up, which deserves an Oscar for mediocrity. Do they have those yet?
I watched Juno a week later, and that was fantastic, probably even more fantastic because I watched it soon after Knocked Up. Kind of like eating homemade fudge after a Hershey bar.
I played two three hour sessions of 1/2 NL Hold Em poker in AC. It was incredibly boring. I'm used to playing hundreds of hands an hour online, while live I only get to play about 30. Still I enjoy live play because of the human interaction- since I work from home, I already spend a woefully high % of my life in front of my two computer screens. It's great to be condescened to with absurd tips like "you should have raised less, you scared everyone away," or "you should play more hands." It makes me confident that I'm attractive and playing well. I'm used to it by now: At every casino poker game, I encounter men trying to flirt with me while giving me ridiculously ludicrous poker advice--I guess I look sort of dumb and innocent? I need to figure out how to use that to my advantage.
In AC, I lost two dollars in my first session and five in my second. The games were not particularly low risk- with a bit of bad or good luck, it could have swung hundreds of dollars in either direction. My frustration after both sessions reminded me that the boredom of breaking even leads to compulsive gambling. Some people would rather lose than be bored, and those are sick gamblers, destined to lose a lot of money at the tables. I'm glad I'm not one of them- that being said, I definitely felt that same desperate instinct in AC (I'd rather lose than go home with the exact same bankroll as I came with), but luckily I didn't act on it. Willpower is a strange thing: I have it in gambling, but I'm totally lacking it in many other situations. For instance, my discipline crumbles in any situation that involves ice cream, sitting down to write, or ice cream.
Now I leave you with some Atlantic City photographs. They're actually from a disposable film camera, because I brought my lunky SLR but left my camera battery charging in the kitchen. Even this throwaway camera reminded me that film is different, though not necessarily better.
The teddy bear photographs speak to me about the child inside me dying slowly in an abandoned arcarde in Atlantic City.
