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Men Nguyen is a seven-card poker stud with 20 Visa cards at his disposal and a half-dozen lock-boxes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. He travels with a band of adoring cardsharp proteges, fellow Vietnamese refugees, who tithe a percentage of their winnings to him while reverently calling him “Master.” LA Weekly's Michael Kaplan follows Nguyen into his tight-knit Vietnamese community and the world of high-stakes poker.

In these days of Lebron James hysteria, it's easy to forget that high-schooler-hype isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Actually, it dates back to 1973, when Texas schoolboy David Clyde became the first baseball player to go directly from high school to the Major Leagues. Clyde flamed out in spectacular fashion, playing bits and pieces of eight seasons before blowing out his arm and leaving the game for good. Today he's alive and well and living in Tomball, Texas. And, as Dallas Observer sports columnist John Gonzalez reports, he'd like a little bit of his life back.

Eight young people talk with Pittsburgh City Paper over a couple cases of beer. "We turned on a tape recorder but kept our pie holes shut, asking one participant, Oscar Lehman, to act as moderator. (Well, we didn’t just sit there -- we kept their frosty mugs filled with pale ale and quaffed a few ourselves!)" Thing is, the interviewees were role-playing CP staffers, but the joke may not have been on readers. "The efforts of Pittsburgh’s self-appointed youth-retention and regional-marketing experts are so utterly inane, self-indulgent and classist, that it’s hard to make a joke about them," Editor Andy Newman writes.

Running a gas station is a tough business, but during price spikes like the one that recently sent fuel prices to record highs, it becomes all but impossible for independents to make money selling gas. SN&R's Jeff Kearns reports on how the oil giants are tightening their grip on the gas market, squeezing small retailers out of business, and charging everyone more at the pump.