Barge 2014 Report 19 years in the making. One week percolating. Hit over the head with it on the way home. Hospitality. Making the stranger feel welcome. Who knows what affect it will have? On the giver. Or on the receiver? Welcome to BARGE. That is all I heard this week as we introduced our son Sam to all our BARGE friends. We being my wife Caryl and I. Because there are no strangers at BARGE, only friends you havent met yet. Because we turn strangers into friends with hospitality. What can I do for you? I found your Ipad. Can I track you down to return it? I dont want a reward, just pass it on. Youd like to go to Paris? Let me raise some money. Getting married? Heres a donation to help you get started. Can I buy you into the tournaments? Would you like to join us for breakfast? How about joining our syndicate? The power of hospitality is not something new. In the bible there is the story of Abraham leaving a meeting with his spirit One in order to offer hospitality to three strangers. And to find a wife for Abrahams son, his servant creates a test where the girl should not only offer him water, but his camels as well. Sometimes the results of hospitality are practically immediate. I bought you into the tournaments and you had a great week and made us both money. You joined our syndicate and won the NL tourney and made money for the whole group. Other times the result of hospitality takes longer to show itself. What will the person whose Ipad was returned do for someone else because of that gesture? What joy will be spread in Paris on the trip? Or maybe this: In 1995 I was living the life of a computer geek with a small software business. My partners were my roommate from college and my brother Dan. They were both married, and I wasnt. And I had no idea it could ever be different. Early in August that year we attended a trade show in Las Vegas. After having given up on craps and blackjack, my brother and I were trying poker. I sat in on a 2-4 limit game downtown, and there were a group of people about my age whose vocabulary consisted of a single word -- raise. Almost every pot was capped pre-flop. After an hour I asked who they were, and one of them told me about Rec.Gambling.Poker and IRC poker (a play money site where people tried to hone their poker skills). When we got back to Chicago, my brother and I got into IRC poker. We met everyone who played there via the internet, using the game and its chat feature to talk to people. A year later and it was time to go to BARGE to meet everyone. Welcome to BARGE That was all I heard from everyone I met. Ask Bingo, that was his first year also. When he got home, he told his wife to block out the first weekend in August for the rest of his life. But of special interest to me was Kim Schienberg. Outgoing and bubbly, she actually took the time to talk to me during the week. The words from the end of my first trip report still echo in my head -- and thanks to Kim for being Kim. Over the next few BARGES I found myself being the one to say the magic words. And it began to transform me. More and more I found that the hospitality I gave out made me want to do more of it, as if it were a drug. I started doing volunteer work. Then in late 1999 I decided it was time for some serious hospitality. A family. By some miracle, it wasnt six months later that I had married Caryl and her son Sam. I brought Caryl to BARGE in 2000. I told her she had to meet the most spectacular group of people on the planet. Welcome to BARGE. New friends. Even some women! Then we went to a small off-site tournament to get Caryl some tournament experience. Maybe not such a great idea, as the locals did not have much respect for Caryls feelings. But I told her things would be different in the BARGE NL tourney (there being no significant other event back then). Fortuitously, at her first table she was seated next to Barry Tannenbaum. I introduced them and asked Barry to take care of Caryl. That worked. Thanks to Barrys hospitality (and everyone elses, and maybe Caryl finishing 7th), for the last 13 years, other than taking a year off to have our daughter Sarah, it has been Caryl who has made all the arrangements to come to BARGE. And now in 2014 we were able to bring our 21 year-old son Sam. So there it is. Welcome to BARGE. It changed my life completely for the way way way better. Thanks to all my BARGE friends. And now the cycle is starting anew. Welcome to BARGE. Sam heard it all week. Hospitality. The desire to help others. It seems pretty close to the definition of love. Friday at 9pm, in the middle of the no limit portion of the TOC, David Low and I got into a flip over Dan Goldmans chips. We both had about 20 big blinds. One of us was going to the final table, and the other was going to karaoke. David wasnt into singing, and I really wanted to join Sam and Caryl upstairs. So David took third in the TOC and I got to sing as a virgin karaokiest with my son and my wife. At the end we did some group songs, which Sam and I participated (Caryl disappeared after our debut). The first karaoke group song was All You Need is Love by the Beatles. The end of the song is a tad repetitive, with the words being your basic All you need is love and All you need is love, love -- love is all you need. As we were singing, I changed substituted the word BARGE for Love, and we all starting singing All you need is BARGE, BARGE -- BARGE is all you need. Everyone knew it to be the Truth. Hospitality. Who knows what the affect be? How will Sam be changed by all the love shown him? How will Mickey Appleman respond just to the vibe in the room at the symposium? What affect will sending Peter to Paris have on us all? How do all the virgins over all the years feel? How can a small group of computer geeks playing poker 25 years ago have such an affect on the world? Hospitality. Imagine if they were selfish and didnt let anyone else join in. How different things would be now. Welcome to BARGE. Love to everyone, David Epilogue: This is to let you know how I got hit over the head with this on our return to Chicago. We saw Bruce Kramer in the Vegas airport. We chatted and he wished us a good trip back. That started it. I get emails from various Jewish sites, and the first one I read on the plane was about Abraham and Rebecca and their hospitality. Then when we landed, there was an ad sign at the baggage claim area, but it wasnt an ad. It was Andre Aggassi on a poster for ForBetterLife.org, and it said: Still Serving. Give Back. Pass it On. I just went to ForBetterLife.org. In the top-left corner, there is this: I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. -Rabindranath Tagore I wasnt going to tell this part of the story, but now I feel compelled: Walking out with our bags from the terminal at Midway, we ended up waiting 15 minutes for a ride that they told us would be there in 5 minutes. 8 minutes into the wait, an elderly gentleman with a cane came strolling slowly by and attempted to sit in a wheelchair that I happened to be standing next to. The chair wasnt nailed down, so I held it for him so he could get in. Then he tried to fish his oxygen machine from a distance of 5 feet with his cane. That wasnt going to work, so I brought it over to him. He got it all set up and then his ride came. Thirteen minutes in to our wait in the center aisle, I spotted a slim young woman trying to push a large lady in a wheel chair up a ramp and into a van parked at the outer aisle. She got the chair up the ramp, but couldnt get the chair through the narrow opening into the van. I was then able to literally run to do a mitzvah. After trying to force it in, we discovered a metal bar on the right side of the van that was preventing ingress. While the young woman was going into the van to try from that side, I was able to back the chair up a few inches and angle it slightly to the left and presto! In it went. The feeling of joy was electrifying. I looked back and my wife and son where getting into our ride.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 19:40:53 +0000
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