That Saturday started out like most others had for the last couple of months. I woke up next to the British math professor. He made tea with milk. We watched the news. I ticked down the hours until I got to go home to tend to my pets. Occasionally I could talk him into sex if he hadn't gotten too wrapped up in the news or with his research.
I checked email on my ipod touch. The Professor had trusted me enough to enter in the wi-fi password for me, but not to tell me what it was. A by-product, I assumed, of my brother having tangled with the FBI over some hacking charges back in the day. It must be genetic, after all.
There was an email from Lance. Most people try to avoid running into their ex-husbands, but even though we never hung out, ours had been a slow and steady friendship by email over the years. He called me when his father passed away. I turned to him when mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was consistent, even if the two of us, on our own, were two of the biggest degenerates known to mankind.
I'd asked Lance how his online poker had been going. I'd turned him onto poker back in 2003 and we'd both played online ever since, although Lance had learned far quicker than me and had progressed on to making a WSOP final table. His response back shocked me.
As of the day before, online poker in the US, for all intents and purposes, was now dead. Black Friday. The government had shut down most of the major sites. Lance immediately applied to aerospace jobs abroad, intent on leaving the country on principal. I felt angry about the poker situation, but was no where near as upset as I'd imagined Lance was. I was reasonably happy at that point to move on and make some evening plans with the professor. I casually mentioned to Lance that the professor and I might be hitting Galaxy Hut later. I sent along my condolences for the death of poker, and went on about my day.
At Galaxy Hut, we joined several of the professor's friends. We were chatting about the usual topic (how "evil" economists are), when I looked up and saw someone who was a dead ringer for my ex-husband Lance. Couldn't be him, though. I hadn't seen him in nearly 8 years and only had a vague idea of what he still looked like. I went back to my conversation. Nearly 30 minutes later I looked up and noticed that the gentleman was looking in my direction. I still truthfully didn't think it was him, so I looked back down and carried on with my conversation. A few moments later I looked back up to see him smirking. I can forget a face, but I could never forget this man's smile. I excused myself from my table, after giving the professor a polite warning about the situation about to ensue, and approached Lance. We had a nice talk and, after the professor and I went our separate ways a few weeks later, Lance and I began spending more time together.
This is the story of how that "chance meeting" made me fall back in love with poker. It's also quite possibly the story of how that "chance meeting" made me fall back in love with Lance. We'll see how that goes.
Don't worry though -- this promises to be 99% about poker and only 1% degenerate love stories.
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