Sometimes the best parts of the WSOP are those random nights where nobody really expects to do anything but the great Random Number Generator that is the Universe, spins it's way to a jackpot.

I love those nights.

I'm not really big on crazy parties or clubs although I've had some pretty incredible nights at clubs during crazy parties. It seems though that as the summers fly by, I prefer the random nights.

Like catching up at the Hooker Bar at the Rio for drinks with my friend Al (also known as Alcanthang).


Thanks to @brdpoker for the photo!

Or heading downtown for steaks at Binion's and then low stakes mixed games where the locals are literally pushing each other out of the way to get onto our tables. Or a really fun, totally chilled out night spent at Insert Coins with some of my friends who had a night off from working the media rail at the World Series.

For those of you who haven't been there, Insert Coins is a bar near Freemont Street in Las Vegas. It's unique selling point is that it's stuffed full of any kind of arcade game that you can think of. Even better, for just $25 per person in drinks for the whole night, you can rent out a table with any two consoles of your choice and just game your brains out for hours.

My particular poison was Street Fighter on SNES. It's been a long damn time since I worked a controller but it's just like falling off a bike. And I've always been really good at falling off of bikes.

After manfully trying to drink $25 worth of cut-price Red Stripes in a couple of hours, I was almost convinced to enter the Michael Jackson dance contest that the bar was running. Thankfully as I was warming up, I saw some of the REAL competition and wisely sobered up enough to shrink back with the rest of the wallflowers.

Wow. Seriously. These people could DANCE. There was this tiny little Hawaiian dude there who could actually bounce on his head. Repeatedly. His breakdancing skills were ridiculously good but as they weren't technically 'MJ' enough, he didn't end up winning.

Once the new pseudo-king of pop was crowned, the dance floor filled up with those of us who had been dying to bust a move since the music had started. Chip Bitch even did the worm.

I fucking love spontaneous dance parties.

So I'm in Las Vegas.

It's been a curious trip so far. Sadly, I don't have any good poker results to report. I ended up playing 6 events with my Party Poker patch on and bricked them all DESPITE having a copy of the luckiest lucky poker charm around - BJ Nemeth's WSOP Pocket Guide. This guide is made in very small numbers every year by BJ 'poker photographer extraordinaire' Nemeth himself. They're not only reputed to be exceptionally lucky but they're a really handy little book full of good information for the WSOP - start times, break times etc. This was the first year that I was able to get my hands on one and as there had been reports of them showing up in the pockets of many a final table-ist all summer, I was hopeful for a little extra run good. They're the 2012 equivalent of wearing a Micro's tee-shirt.

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Like I said, I bricked all 6 events and have been preparing for work ever since. I can't really complain though. I have some incredible life run-good.

I'm still thinking about digging out my Micro's tee though.

I've been in Las Vegas for 3 weeks now and you'd think that I'd have some great stories of strippers, parties, clubs and random encounters to tell. I promise, I'm not just holding them back! I actually spent a solid week hiding in my hotel room trying not to die from the flu. Bleurgh. I'm a lot better now thankfully as the rest of my time in Vegas is going to be busy with the ESPN broadcast of the WSOP.

We started with the Million Dollar buy in event, the Big One for One Drop and wow... the Cirque du Soleil drummers really amped up the atmosphere at the final table. We were doing the show nearly live (on a 15 minute delay) on ESPN and I was really stoked to get a chance to work like that again. I love live TV. I love ESPN. There's just a buzz there that I don't get anywhere else.

So now, we're heading towards the Main Event. It's been a pretty full summer so I'm looking forward to relaxing a bit at the WPT National Series in Venice, Italy right afterwards (July 21-25). I frakking love Venice so I jump at any chance to go there and playing a smaller National Series buy in event in Italy sounds like the perfect antidote to busting a bunch of WSOP events.

There are some things that European hotels do very, very well. Opulence, grandeur, gold-leaf molding, breakfast buffets with 17 different kinds of cheese... So why the hell can't they design a shower with a door that goes all the way across? Seriously. Is glass paneling so expensive that all they can manage are those little half door things that do nothing to stop the floor from becoming entirely flooded every time you want to wash your hair? I don't get it.

I was in Cannes last week to play the WPT National Series and was lucky to be able to stay in a really beautiful hotel on La Croisette. Beautiful, except for all of the evil.

Have you ever been somewhere which just didn't 'feel' quite right? It's beautiful and seems clean and well appointed but something, something just creeps you the hell out, Amityville-style. That was this room.

My first morning in Cannes, I groggily woke up from a dream about trying to claw my way up through a mountain crevasse. This alone is a bit strange becuase I'm not really such a fan of sports that I'd dream about them. My dreams tend to be more bacon-centric.

As I slowly came to, I started to feel a little freaked out as I realised that I couldn't actually move. Not at all. I squirmed around, trying to figure out just what the hell was going on before it dawned on me that my lovely King sized bed was actually two singles that had been pushed together. Badly. I'd managed to fall between them and wedge myself in the crack between the mattresses, with the bottom sheet acting as a kind of sling or bizarrely snug hammock. Or possibly a straight-jacket. Excellent start.

I'm a deeply lazy person and as I wasn't entirely uncomfortable in my strange little cave, I decided to give up on struggling and just lay there for a while as my eyes began to focus, pondering the day of poker I had coming up.

As my gaze moved randomly around the room, I began to see strange patterns on the wall. Is that the wallpaper? No. Shadows? No. Sleep in my eyes? Errr, no. Oh dear god, what the hell is that?

Creepily sentient looking black patterns had oozed through the fabric that covered the walls. They were concentrated near the ceiling but seemed to drip down the entire length of the room, disappearing behind the TV set. Sure, it MAY have just been deadly black mold caused by the dampness of a seaside town. It may have been that. I'm pretty sure it was the most basic essence of evil though.

Damn it, I just wanted a nice little holiday before playing some poker. I had no desire to share my room with some sort of formless malevolent presence. I'm still a little pissed off about ending up in a room that had clearly been claimed by some dark powers for its own nefarious purposes (quite possibly film industry related, this was Cannes after all). Plus the damned shower only had a half door. I want a refund. And an exorcist.

I finally did it - I moved out of The Barn.

(Okay, technically I only half moved as everything went into storage and haven't actually gotten a new place, but let's not split hairs.)

So yes, I moved. Success!! Two exclamation points fully earned.

In order to celebrate the fact that I had managed to do this very normal thing that people do all the time (and they do it without banging on about it for months on end), I jumped onto a plane and headed for Europe. I've been considering moving back over to that side of the pond and I thought this would be a good chance to check it out again and see how it felt to be back in my old hometown of Brighton.

It felt brilliant.

I was only able to spend a couple of days in England as the real reason I was there was to join up with a group of friends who were all off on a sailing holiday around Greece to celebrate a big birthday. My former flat mate W is a fabulous person and it seemed only fitting that we spend an entire week celebrating the fact that she exists.

There were 9 of us on the 51foot sailing yacht that we'd rented from a very, very dodgy company out of Greece. They definitely stitched us up with the boat as pretty much everything that could go wrong with it, did. A few times when we anchored in a harbor, the harbor master would come out, see the old tub we were knocking around in and laughingly ask us if we'd like a little extra help because he was only too aware of just how poorly the damn thing ran.

There were 5 cabins on the boat so I was sharing with my friend K. She's pretty much the perfect person to share a tiny 4 foot x 6 foot x 3 foot space with. She's calm and funny and lovely and she doesn't snore. Every single other cabin had a very loud snorer in it, so I felt pretty smug that we'd managed to get the only non-snoring cabin. That is, until K informed me that I snored. Oops. I blame the fresh sea air.

We had a great time, sailing around the Ionian Islands for 7 days. It was also of a reunion of sorts as a few of us had been on a similar sailing holiday on the Amalfi coast. Considering that only 5 years had passed, the dynamic of the boat had definitely changed. Over half of the boat had children now, some multiples and there were two engagements in the works. Instead of staying up until 5am every morning, dancing and drinking on the dock, we were mostly tucked up in bed by midnight after (quite) a few sedate drinks on the deck.

To be honest, I liked the change. I'm notoriously bad at staying up late and after getting baked by the Greek sun and wind all day, I was practically passing out before I made it to the bunk! Plus, these early nights meant not having to deal with murderous looks from the neighboring boats while we were kicked out of yet another harbor for excessive noise. I still can't go back to certain ports in Italy. Good times though. Damn good times.

- Italy, 2007

We had a little bit of everything on the trip. Hot sunshine, crazy stormy seas, swimming in secluded bays and clinging for dear life onto the side of boat as we tried to navigate through a storm we'd inadvertently sailed straight into. I even suffered a terrible sailing related injury. Or I sliced open the skin between my finger while washing dishes. Whatever sounds more dramatic, that's what I did. As the first aid kit on the boat was about as rubbish as everything else, I opted to pour gin on the wound and bind my fingers together in hopes that it would heal. Thankfully, between the gin and the X-Men bandage, I haven't developed gangrene. Yet.

It was, without a doubt, one of my favourite holidays ever. Ever, ever. And it made me realize just how much I miss life with my Brighton friends. Although I'm always 'myself' and I sincerely loved (and miss) my friends in Santa Barbara, I'm a far more relaxed and laid-back version of Kara when I'm in Europe. This is definitely something I'll be bearing in mind as I try to figure out just where in the world I should live over the next few months.

Next up: Cannes. I'm off to France now to play the WPT National Series there before returning to the USA to get stuck into the WSOP.

Good luck to the CR guys out there already!

I'm so terrible at packing. My house-movers show up in 33 hours and there's still SO MUCH TO DO.

Things I did today as procrastination/distraction from packing:

1) Went through my cos box. I wore a Santa Claus outfit until it got too warm in the Barn to be in a beard and then practiced with my (still non-functioning) lightsabre for half an hour. VWOM VWOM.

2) Decided to give myself an 80s makeover, complete with green eyeshadow, blue sparkly eyeliner and bright pink lipstick. I looked like a bored toddler had been asked to replicate a photo from an 80s Teen Magazine. And yet, oddly, I liked it.

3) Sat on the floor and read 3 chapters of a book that had fallen behind my bedside table so long ago that I'd forgotten I was reading it. It was still boring but infinitely better than packing.

4) Tried on every single dress I owned, with every pair of shoes. Then tried them on again with various combinations of two different shoes. I think wearing two different shoes is going to become a 'thing' and I want to be ahead of the trend.

5) Drank rum out of a coconut. This happened at many points throughout the day and perhaps explains much of the rest of it.

6) Sat on my deck, staring morosely back into the Barn at the huge piles of crap still waiting to be packed.

7) Took photos of all the crap still waiting to be packed.

8) Dug through all of my packed and sealed boxes to find the potato masher because I clearly NEEDED mashed potatoes even though I haven't used the masher in months.

9) Ate half of a chocolate cake from Whole Foods when I couldn't make mashed potatoes.

10) The Internet. 'nuff said.

It feels like only last week that I moved into this Barn in Santa Barbara but apparently it's been a bit longer than that. Long enough in fact, for my lease to be up and my landlord to request that I vacate so he can move back in himself. Sigh. It's partly my own fault for only signing a 6-month lease. Damn my inability to commit.

I have only two more weeks here before I hit the road. I've decided to just put all of my things back in storage and live out of a suitcase again. Between work in Europe, the WSOP in Vegas and visiting friends and family to fill in the gaps, I don't really need to have my own place to live until at least August. Maybe even September. Part of me hopes that by then, my landlord will have gotten himself another awesome job in SE Asia and I can just move back into the Barn for a while. That's if I haven't moved back to Europe by that point. Who knows? I'm feeling a bit adrift at the moment.

I love my life and I love my ability to travel the world and see all of the people I care about but sometimes having a community of people - MY people - scattered all over the world is hard. The idea of moving to yet another country to start yet another life and create yet another great group of friends, only to pick up and leave again in 6 months to a year - that does not appeal to me. The truth is, no matter where in the world I am, I'm always homesick. My family is in Canada. My 'hometown' community is in England. The wonderful group of friends who have become a huge and necessary part of my heart are here in Santa Barbara. Adding another location to call 'home' seems foolhardy.

When I heard the news that I needed to move out of the Barn, I started thinking about all of the different places that I've lived. As I began counting them up, it was surreal, this dawning realization that I've been a traveler for nearly all of my life. I've always seen myself as a homebody; someone who loves nothing more than to spend evenings surrounded by friends and loved ones; talking, laughing and eating (always eating) rather than being out there having adventures. A lot of my friends see me as an adventurer and I've always laughed at what I thought was their misconception. As I counted up my number, the shift in perspective was sudden and dizzying.

I'm definitely a wanderer. So far, I've lived in at least 27 different homes. This isn't including all of the different hotels I've been in, sometimes for up to a month at a time. Going through the list brought back a lot of memories. Some painfully good and some painfully bad. One clear fact: my life has been really, really full. This isn't inherently positive or negative. It's just a fact that I'm trying to digest and decipher right now, as I put my few possessions into boxes and store them away in a dark place again for an undetermined length of time.

So here it is. My list:

Canada

1. The house where I was born.

2. The house in High River

3. A short stint in Ontario

4. A year or so living in a camper as we travelled around Canada

5. My childhood home, built by my father. This was the longest by far that I've ever lived anywhere.

6. The fancy house in Peace River. The first place that I remember living in that seemed 'normal' in terms of the rest of society. It even had an indoor toilet!

7. Post high school, living with my best friend's family for a few months as mine adventured up to the Northern-most reaches of Canada, looking for a new home in a new wilderness.

8. The house I rented with my parents when they returned.

9. Playing house and co-habiting in my first apartment during University. A beautiful, old, oak trimmed flat which was completely out of our price range but incredibly romantic while it lasted.

10. The cheaper place we moved into. It had a crazy man living in the basement and I remember that I could see his eyes as he watched me through a crack in the wall while I did laundry downstairs. When he started talking to me through the wall as well, telling me how he'd always wanted to 'hug a pretty girl,' we moved out of there as fast as we could afford to.

11. The basement suite below what seemed like a very nice young family. Sadly, the husband turned out to be another psycho and after a massive overblown fight when we discovered that they'd been letting people stay in our apartment whenever we were out of town visiting family, we moved yet again.

12. The condo near the University. One of my favorite places. I could walk to classes and it had a fireplace. We also didn't have to share walls with any crazies (that we knew of).

13. The basement flat in the North of the city. We were there long enough for me to plant a garden and actually be able to harvest some big ass pumpkins for Halloween one year. A great place but living underground sucks. Always.

England

I'd never even been out of Canada before but what the hell. Why NOT move to a foreign country with no job and no place to live? We always had more nerve than sense and life really was just one big delicious adventure.

14. The studio near Hyde Park. When the futon/sofa bed was fully extended, I could stretch out and touch both walls with my hands and feet. It was tiny. I'm still sure that our landlord was letting himself into the apartment while we were at work. Some days there were 10 forks and no spoons. Other days, 12 knives and one fork and then the next day there'd be 4 of everything. Weird. Plus there was the neighbour who really did think that Britney Spears was talking to him through her music. He yelled about bombs a lot too, always in the middle of the night. Welcome to London.

15. Islington. Not the nice bit and there were burnt out cars EVERYWHERE. This small town Canadian girl was terrified a lot of the time but it taught me a lot about being tough. It also taught me to never, ever make eye contact with strangers.

16. The place by the old cemetery. Non-descript. Not a happy place.

17. Being a homeowner for the first time. Hurrah! A studio flat in SE London. A great place to live but impossible to sell due to it's archaic leasehold and it nearly spun me into bankruptcy. It was also, quite possibly, haunted.

18. My first foray into having 'flatmates' as an adult. I answered an ad and moved in with an actor and a clown. Clearly my judgment has improved since then. They both irritated the living shit out of me, especially when the clown took up tap-dancing. And they never did their fucking dishes or paid the electric bill when it was their turn. Assholes.

19. Back to the studio flat in SE London after yet another sale fell through. Seriously, that place was definitely haunted and/or cursed. After using the last bit of space on my credit card to hire someone to track down the building's freeholder and suing him to force him to give me my legal right to amend the lease to make the place saleable, I was finally free. Massively and horrifyingly in debt, but free.

20. Brighton. My spiritual home and one of my favourite places in the whole world. The house on the hill. A very peaceful place.

21. Living on a futon in my friend's living room after a relationship went south. I was so happy there. I think that they were a little bit afraid that I'd never leave.

22. Hove, with my gorgeous friend with the funny name. I loved sharing a flat with her and we'll always be friends. I visit her whenever I can and still miss her terribly.

23. The art deco house in Kemptown. Utterly gorgeous but a little bit lonely.

The United States

24. Montecito - Living in an avocado ranch has its perks. Mostly the avocados.

25. A couple of months in a house in Vegas. It had a pool for the dog and she spent most of her time swimming back and forth to deal with the heat.

26. Hope Ranch - probably the most incredible view that I'd ever seen but not very homey.

27. Freedom House - my friend's amazing granny flat on the Riviera in Santa Barbara. Actually THIS place had the most amazing view I'd ever seen. My friend offered it to me, knowing that I had no idea where to go to and was considering moving back to England. I was so chuffed and touched that my friends wanted me to stay that I ended up renting....

28. The Barn. This is the first place in more than 10 years that's really felt like home. Totally mine, totally me and totally suited to my tastes. And the fact that it's in the backyard of two friends who I really love... that's just a bonus I can't even express clearly. Getting a 'hey neighbour' and a smile from these guys when I come home or being able to pop in to say hi on a whim, these things are what community means to me. I'm pretty gutted to have to leave it but it's made a very clear impression on me about what qualities are important to me in my life.

So, where's next?? I have, quite literally, no solid idea. Wherever it is, I hope that it's very close to people I love and that I don't need to move again after 6 months. I am seriously frakking tired of that.

Yowzer. Intense.

We're in the middle of filming the Party Poker Big Game in Vienna which, as a 48 hour cash game, is a fairly crazy filming schedule all on it's own. This year, to make the most of the festival of poker taking place in Vienna in April, Big Game was added onto the back of the Premier League filming - a 10 day marathon of pretty long days. All of that to say... oh my god, I'm so tired. Like, I had to get up at 2am for work this morning and then managed to get myself trapped in the hotel's revolving door, tired. Oof. It's also a (heavy) smoking casino so add that to the mix and at this point I'm struggling to scrape myself together every day.

It's been a hell of a lot of fun for the most part though. I was really looking forward to this trip and catching up with a bunch of my friends on the TV crew. The best way to get through the long (long) days is to have a bit of fun and after years of working together, this crew is great at making each other laugh. The players certainly helped too. Despite my tendancy to completely over-explain every joke I tell, most of them still laugh. I don't even care if they are pity laughs, I'll totally take that.

The high quality of play was fun to watch but WAY more importantly for morale, the players were mostly very easy to work with and up for a laugh. It's such a help when the players are easy to work with. These people are playing for big amounts of money (the buy in for Premier League was $125k) so we really don't expect them to be all-singing, all-dancing for the cameras but wow, when they show up on time and are polite and friendly with the TV crew, it makes our days so much better. When they're actually good fun to be around, total bonus.

I'm definitely struggling for words at the moment and my sentences are all coming out jumbled up so I'll leave this update there and post more when I'm actually coherant again. So that'll be 2013 then.



With Scott Seiver during the early heats of Premier League V.

Like pretty much everyone involved in the Poker industry, Las Vegas has a really special place in my heart; I'm in complete and total love with it while I'm excitedly planning my yearly WSOP pilgrimage, I want to break up with it at least twice each summer while I'm actually living there and then by the middle of July, the entire city shrinks down into the space of one single room - the Amazon Room.

I'm not really used to going to Vegas for anything except poker so being there this month with a group of girlfriends to celebrate a birthday (not mine) was a totally new experience for me. In fact, the entire concept of a "girls' weekend" was a new experience for me. It was NOT an easy one to plan as the other three women all have children (5 between them - yowzer. They are TOTAL Hot-Moms) and we wanted to keep the trip as a birthday surprise for our friend P. After much wrangling and planning, which admittedly was mostly done by the others as I'm terrible at that sort of thing, we arrived at P's house at 9am where she was busy packing for what her husband had told her was a family day-trip to Disneyland. We screamed 'VEGAS BABY' at her shocked face (because this is Vegas-weekend law) and whisked her off into the minivan before her jaw could hit the floor.

Yes, minivan. That is how we roll. We drove up through the Desert, skipping the major highways and stopping off to take photos in random places. At one point we were stuck behind a train that was inexplicably stopped for 30 minutes on the road.






8 hours later, 4 overly excited women checked into the Cosmopolitan and proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend dressed to the nines.

If you're planning a trip to Vegas - book the Cosmopolitan. That place fucking rocks. And the Japanese soaking tubs in the hotel rooms are great for tired feet, after a night spent dancing until 5am.

I wasn't able to catch up with too many friends in Vegas while I was there because the entire weekend was dedicated to birthday fun and lady-bonding but we were really lucky to get an invite to join Sean Getzwiller and his friends at their table at Haze on Friday night. I'm not sure that Sean knew what he was getting himself into when he invited us but a bunch of married mothers of small children cutting loose in a posh Vegas club.... it was definitely entertaining! I'm really glad that I had a chance to introduce my non-poker friends to this particular group of guys because for the rest of the weekend, they could not stop saying how really NICE and POLITE the guys were. And yes, this IS a compliment. A big one. Good peeps, thank you.

Now, I hate to shock anyone but I'm not exactly known as a 'party animal'. Yes, I know, steady yourself. My friends and colleagues take great pleasure in teasing me about my tendency to ALWAYS be the first one to leave a party and to talk lovingly and at length about the joys of staying home with a nice cup of hot chocolate and/or tea. So when I disappeared on Friday night around 3am, the other women assumed that I'd snuck off to bed and left them. Imagine their surprise when they looked down to the floor and saw me dancing with a friend of mine in the DJ booth :) I like to think I looked like a rock star in their eyes at that moment but I probably just looked like a lunatic. Either way though, I stayed out til 5am and THAT my friends, is a miracle.

The next night was St. Paddy's Day (still crazy but less so than the night before) and then Sunday we packed up our ridiculous amount of luggage, posed one last time beside a giant shoe and headed home. Obviously this was after I won our gas money on one spin of roulette. I am a roulette savant. Seriously.

No more Vegas stories as you guys know the drill: what goes in Vegas, stays in Vegas. A massive thank you to my old and very dear friend Richard for making the trip actually possible and to Sean for treating my friends to a night they will sincerely never forget. Oh and Joe Cheong, I think you stretched my heels, you bastard.

I want to go on a road trip. I've spent quite a few hours this month with the humming sound of tires kissing tarmac, buzzing in my brain. All this travelling has stirred up my long dormant obsession with packing a bag and hitting the open road.

The obsession started young. My brother and sister and I spent a ridiculous amount of our youth, rattling around in our family's camper while our parents crisscrossed Canada in search of the perfect trout stream. This was actually where my obsession with card games began as well. We must have played thousands upon thousands of hands of Crazy 8s to pass the hours and keep ourselves from annihilating one another. And when I say annhilate, I mean it; in the way that only young siblings locked in a tiny, rocking room with nothing else to do, are capable of. Most days, that camper was basically an Octagon on wheels. Cards kept us sane and relatively unbloodied.

Yes, I was a hillbilly. You're allowed to laugh.

Now as a grown up (and only one technically by age) with my own driver's seat, I've been itching to set off on an adventure. Driving up to San Jose for the Bay 101 really kicked the dust off of this idea. I was actually planning to do a little trip up to Oregon or something once I busted - you know, just keep driving - but I managed to get sick while I was there and there's nothing more miserable than having to drive ill. So sadly (very sadly) I pointed my car home and promised myself that a road trip was in my near future.

Last weekend, 3 of my girlfriends and I drove to Vegas to celebrate one of their birthdays. We chose the back route up through the Mojave Preserve so it took us a couple of extra hours but it was so worth it. It gave us more time to talk and catch up but also the scenery was incredible. Did you know there's a VOLCANO there? And crazy rock formations. And a ghost town. And an old Train. And giant statues of dinosaurs FOR NO REASON.

This is why I love road tripping. I can't help myself. Show me a giant-sized tacky statue of something and I fall in love with it. Take me to a truck stop diner with an amazing fried breakfast special and I will want to marry the cook, perm my hair, change my name to Sheila and wait tables forever. Or more likely for about 5 minutes and then I just really want to see what else is down the road.

So this summer if there's time during the WSOP madness, I'm going to hit the road and just see what I can see. I'm sure I'll be posting way too many photos of it on Twitter (@KaraOTR) so if blurry shots of trees taken from the inside of a moving car are your thing, you're in for a treat!

Life is all about learning. I've always been a big fan of education, formal and otherwise. Hell, I even started a teaching career once upon a time. Sure, I didn't actually STICK with it but let's just ignore that fact right now and leave it at: I like education.

Even so, I'm no longer convinced that everyone needs so-called 'higher' education to be successful in their lives (and thank goodness because it's getting ridiculously cost-prohibitive.) However, I do feel that learning should still be a priority.

When we stop growing, we congeal like that scummy film that forms on the top of hot chocolate when it cools down. I happen to love hot chocolate and this scum absolutely ruins it. Therefore, congealing = bad.

So I'm always kind of curious about how other people learn.

A very good friend of mine is the head of songwriting at a really kick ass music school in England. He let me tag along to watch one of his live sessions. They were working (work-shopping?) a couple of original songs that individual students had written. It was incredible to watch the creative process as they worked together to arrange the music for a full band.

There were session players there to back the students up (drums, guitar, bass, keyboard) and other students would volunteer to provide backing vocals. The songwriter/singer would hand them all some music and let them know what he/she wanted. And then.... they would just go for it. Just balls out, super loud, play some music, give it everything, go for it.

After playing it through a few times, the rest of the class would then get involved with suggestions for (and forgive me for my vagueness here but I'm NOT a musician) the tempo or style of each instrument, how many bars the chorus should be, where the other instruments should come in and out. Everything really.

It was the most truly collaborative thing I think I've ever seen. Instead of clinging on to his/her own vision for this song that they had painstakingly written, the songwriter opened it up to the ideas and input of a whole classroom full of peers. Some of the suggestions were hilarious (add a disco feeling to the track) but even the ones that didn't 'work' seemed to lead them in new and better directions.

I learned a lot from watching them. Two things mainly:

1) Let go of ownership. Sometimes we (okay, I) hang on to things so tightly and are so protective of our creative 'babies' that we miss out on collaboration with others. Things can almost always be better and loosening up our grip and letting others have input is a great way to find your work going down some really interesting routes.

2) Mistakes aren't bad. This is something that I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. If I'm not making mistakes out there, then I truly wonder if I'm even stretching myself at all. Staying in a safe place is tempting but branching out, reaching, trying something new and maybe laughably wrong (like disco, because let's be honest, disco is nearly always wrong) can lead to new ideas, even when they themselves fail.

Failure is such a negative word and sure if we 'stop' as soon as something doesn't go well because we feel personally embarrassed or responsible or hurt by the failure, then I suppose it IS a negative thing. But it's the stopping that's bad, not the failing. This is something that I need to remember. If we are trying things beyond our actual abilities then some of the attempts aren't going to go so well. But, if we continue to push the boundaries and test new ideas, a few of them are going to be so much more 'right' than we could have done previously.

I thought a lot about this during the WSOP live coverage last summer. I definitely felt the pressure of doing something new and yeah, a little beyond what I felt comfortable with. But ultimately, I had really great people to collaborate with and I trusted their input. I think because of that, I learned a hell of a lot more than I would have by being safe.

It's hard though. I like easy. I like simple. I like safe. But these are not attributes that will push me to learn and grow. I'm going to try to be more open to collaboration. This is definitely an area where I need some growth, both in my work on-camera AND in my poker. Fear of failure (or fear of appearing to fail) definitely constrain me and make it hard for me to push forwards. But you know what, talking about it (or blogging about it) takes the sting out of it.

And after all, learning is really what life is all about, in my humble opinion.