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Bio


I no longer play poker for a living, but here I am in 1997 with my Uncle Dave on one of our regular hops at poker joints in Vegas.
- RF

I was born in Florida, growing up on the last paved street of a small town, spending my youth cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.

After earning a college degree in Philosophy and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I thought that I would be happy being a college professor, writing dense, literary novels which I would assign to my students. I found, however, that being a professor was mostly a matter of going to meetings, and instead went back to my first love, poker.

I spent the next five years gambling full-time and living in a high-crime area populated by starving artists, alcoholics and petty criminals. After a time, I got restless and used some of my winnings to start a punk rock magazine called "The Rocket." The success of "The Rocket" got me a job as a feature writer for a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I took the adventure-and-new-money beat. Over the next seven years I flew with the Blue Angels, drove Ferraris and went for desert survival training with gun nuts. Great job but I wanted to write novels. I quit my day job and started work.

I currently live in Washington state.