Apparently this Diet Pepsi as been on for a while but I just caught it as I was catching up on some old TV from last week. I thought it was pretty funny, but some online research led me to this:

PEPSI’S POKER AD DOOMS FAD

March 19, 2006 — It’s official: Poker has jumped the shark.
The once white-hot gambling fad sailed right past ubiquity into sellout-infested waters with a Diet Pepsi commercial currently in rotation featuring professional players Daniel Negreanu, Scott Nguyen and Phil Hellmuth losing to a sweating cola can.

“Poker was a real underground trend, but now it has become so commercialized that the game’s lost the gritty flavor that made it attractive,” said Ryan Berger, Euro RSCG’s creative director of buzz.

Not unlike the major record labels’ bum rush to sign alternative bands after Nirvana blew up, or department stores glomming onto the latest downtown fashion trends, once underground movements gain mass acceptance, it typically signifies the beginning of the end.

Well, lemmee see, on the one hand I kind of like this news, because I liked playing poker back when it was something no one else did and now it’s just seems like I’m part of the fad, too. For this reason I don’t like to talk about it in public (this blog notwithstanding) and sometimes I hide the fact that I play. But on the other hand, the MGM didn’t used to have the nicest poker room to play No Limit Holdem in Vegas and now it does. In fact, it didn’t have a room at all and that didn’t really matter because you couldn’t find No Limit anything anywhere anyway. Things have improved tremendously, especially when it comes to the availbility of games.

Another thing is that as Fro and I were discussing on the phone earlier this week, there are no more newbie fish out there – the guys who were getting their asses kicked two or three years ago have either quit playing or have improved. Getting your ass kicked does that to you, and, as Fro himself said, all of those guys have read at least one poker book by now. I can think of a lot of examples of these types of guys and in fact, two of them play regularly at my house: my buddy JR and his friend Mr Compton.

So I am torn. But the ad is still pretty funny, no matter what it supposedly portends.

Pictures from the trip to France are here. We were happy to get out before the protests and riots scheduled for this week. We didn’t see any of the smaller demonstrations last week, either, but there were cops on every street corner and we saw quite a few processions of vans full of police armed with automatic weapons. It was a little unsettling.

As far as the pictures go, we spent the whole week in Paris except for Thursday when we took a train outside of the city to Versailles and toured the palace there. Mostly Mrs Johnnymac and I slept in until 10:30 or so every morning (it truly was vacation) before going out for sightseeing and lunch. Then we usually went back to the hotel and watched the awesome French game shows on TV and napped before going out for a late dinner. The food and the wine were excellent – of the entire week we only had one bad meal and that was the place across the street from the hotel that we tried just because it was convenient.

On the way home it was unusually clear almost the entire way back to Houston once we crossed over Britain and Ireland, so I snapped a few pictures out of the window as we passed over some interesting things. One of the coolest things we passed over was the Mackinac Straits with the Mackinac bridge faintly in the distance. I found a picture of what it probably looked like from the ground as we passed overhead:

It was striking how much greener things got as we traveled further and further south. In France it was almost-not-quite-but-soon-to-be Spring while we were there. It was pretty much cold and wet all week but plants were just beginning to poke out of the bare ground in the flower beds and the trees were all budding and ready to open up very soon. Contrast that with some of the pictures from Quebec and Ontario where it is certainly still winter and with the weather in Houston where almost summertime in my front yard right now:

[Image removed by request of Mrs Johnnymac. Also, despire what you might think, that is not her in any of the Paris photos (link also removed). That is some random French woman who looks a lot like my wife, even right down to the Oklahoma accent. ]

As far as poker goes, the Aviation Club (once home to Isabelle Mercier) was not very far from our hotel and we walked past it a couple of times, but I never made it inside. It was pretty cool to see, though, and the guys at the front desk said that it was a fairly popular destination for many guests at the hotel.

Pretty cool, I say.

So the Final Four is set. Two weeks ago, a lot of the talk was that George Mason didn’t even belong in the tournament because Hofstra has beaten them three times and deserved to be there instead. Well.

I am sure this point will be made, but it’s kind of hard to believe that there is no team from any of the traditional basketball conferences: the ACC, Big 10, Big XXII, Big East, and Atlantic 10 all got left out. UCLA is the only familiar name. Well.

Nous avons retourné de Paris!

Well, I’m back. Mrs Johnnymac and I just got home after a week’s vacation in France. We had a great time and I have some good pictures from the trip that I want to share as soon as I get a chance.

As most of you know in October I lost a $12,000 pot with AA against K2. Last week I lost a $2,000 pot with AA against 44. Last night, I lost a $400 pot with AA against K3

About a month ago on High Stakes Poker, Barry Greenstein lost a $160,000 pot with AA against Sammy Farha’s KK.

On Monday’s episode of High Stakes Poker, Antonio Esfandiari lost the biggest pot of his life ($210,000) with AA against JJ and TT.

It’s got me thinking….

What in the hell is AA good for??

Best I can tell, it’s good for winning small pots or losing enormous ones.

I hate it.