Zac Rockwell: California Poker Trip

Zac Rockwell is a Spokane, Washington based grinder who joined the poker vlogging jag back in December, and brought with him two unique selling points. The first is that he is one of those relics of a forgotten age: the live limit hold'em grinder.

His second USP is that one of his regular haunts is The Bicycle Hotel & Casino in California which both makes for an impressive commute but also means his blog can take advantage of the professional camera setup of the Live at the Bike stream which he plays on in his recent blog series, the live stream makes for a more interesting point of view to the usual hole-gopro that blogs are forced to use to avoid having the other players faces and, you know, cheating come into play.

Unfortunately Zac doesn’t give as much insight into his game as you might hope for, the Live at the Bike footage is just allowed to run in its entirety and while you get the commentators take on the hands, you can get that from the Live at the Bike stream.

YouTube gives the vlogger a chance to slow down and give his perspective, and perspective is what is lacking in that first installment. This improves as the trip gets rolling and he brings his own post facto commentary to some of the hands. When he does, the vlog can be super interesting.

Zac also illustrates some of the minutiae of the grinding life, in the second part of his big California road trip he introduces us to the concept of the grind bag, his survival pack for living for six to twelve hours in a card room. His includes a huge number of sanitary materials, providing a terrifying insight into both his germophobia and the quality of toilet paper in California’s Casinos.

Zac is clearly a fan of some of the other vloggers out there, some of his musical cues sound suspiciously familiar to the regular vlog-watcher and he does at one point make a hilariously childish spin on the Trooper’s usual intro.

Eventually the puns run out as his trip grinds him down. Getting increasingly stuck as the cards don’t go his way, Zac decides he needs a change of scene and from the seaside warmth of California he decides to head east bombing 281 miles down the highway to Vegas where out of all character for that neck of the woods, the dessert is covered in a light dusting of snow.

Once there he struggles with technical difficulties and the strain of filming himself non-stop while on a losing streak. The result of this is a somewhat screwy timeline and a coda about downswings that Zac shys away from super dark, which is a shame.

As he says himself, losing is part of the game and should be part of the story, and it is something other vlogs have handled really well. Still it made for an interesting trip.