Blog of Sal

T wo years ago today I ran my first (and only) ultra trail race at the Sulphur Springs 50km in Ancaster, Ontario. The first half of the race felt amazing. I'd done the training and I mean, I was flying. I even felt good until after the massive hill around the 29km mark... Then, at the 30km turn-around I realized I was in trouble. As I headed back down the hill a woman I'd been keying off for much of the race pulled away, gradually out of sight. (She'd eventually beat me by over 25 mins.) I wanted badly to go with her. Alas, the wheels came off. It's an interesting feeling to be engaged in an activity where your mind and body are at odds. My body was screaming at me to chill. My mind wanted a sprint. The compromise was that I didn't stop running and was able to stay in the top 30% of the field. If my body had its way, I'd have quit. If my mind had its way, I'd have been up at the front, challenging the eventual winner, my friend and then coach Andrew Yorke.  ...

A few years back I got bored and created a 10 minute edit of my favourite film, ROUNDERS. I didn't publish it for fear of copyright infringement and later just forgot about it. In any case, it is here (for now) for your viewing pleasure!  My editing process was to first create a logical 30 minute version, keeping as many of the important plot driving elements, best moments, and best lines as possible. Next I just kinda spliced away with feckless abandon until I had something that felt right and was exactly 10 minutes long. The full film is available  here on Amazon Prime .     D espite minor inconsistencies with technical poker aspects and maybe a few unnecessary eccentricities, the movie holds up very well as a depiction of what poker was like in the 1990s (the film was released in 1998). I would have some natural sense of this having cut my own poker chops in the Montreal underground in the early 2000s, a time when poker was receiving a sma...

post first published  in my poker posts on Quora O ne of my poker stories stands out. It was back in 2004, the year after everyman Chris Moneymaker pocketed $2.5 million winning the World Series of Poker Main Event, forever changing the culture of the game in the process. By winning a cheap online satellite tournament (these events are common and equate to a qualifying event), Moneymaker secured his seat in the $10,000 No Limit Hold’em 2003 WSOP Main Event for the bargain price of $25. This proved once and for all that anybody can win big at poker. Moneymaker in 2003 Over the course of the next year, poker rose from obscurity to hit the mainstream. Every casino opened a card room. And the rooms in the pre-existing meccas of poker, like Bellagio in Las Vegas, were full of people from all walks of life, including even Hollywood elites.  I’d been hired by the Casino de Montreal to deal Blackjack a few years before these events, an amazing opportunity for me at the time. Af...