My friend, and flatmate when I was in Australia, Steve from Toronto, arrives in town with his girlfriend Jayme on
Wednesday, for 5 days of Scottish style liver abuse and to see Edinburgh in it’s
festival enhanced glory. A couple of years ago I went out to Canada to visit
them, and we managed tour from Toronto to PEI and back in just under two weeks.
This visit will involve a lot less travel, and more time to just chill out and
catch up.
We will have to do the obligatory tourist things though. A visit to the
Castle is number one on the list, and I intend to suggest a day trip out
somewhere like Loch Lomond, although I’ll leave that decision in their hands,
it’s their holiday after all.
I’m just looking forward to the time off work. From tomorrow it’s relax, drink, and be merry.
I can’t wait.
Using Aperture I created and ordered a book of photo’s from my trip in the summer. It arrived this morning and I have to say the quality is really very good.
I do have two issues with it though. Firstly, the sticker on the cover is a little loose, and I had to make a point of pressing down it’s edges to stop it peeling off, it was mildly annoying.
The second issue actually has nothing to do with the quality and more to do with my spelling and proof reading skills. I’ve put a few pages of descriptions throughout the book, and on the very first page there was a big glaring spelling error…..doh!!!
Overall though, the book is excellent and I think I’ll be ordering one again through Apple in the future.
I played the Sunday Millions tournament tonight after qualifying through a satellite during the week, (as I mentioned before).
Unfortunately there’s no very happy story. I did play pretty well though and I’m not unhappy with any play I made so that’s a positive thing.
I did bust in 861st out of 5884, that’s 36 short of the bubble. I ended up all in pre-flop with QQ, and was called by one of the larger stacks who had 66. He caught a 6 on the flop, I never improved.
End of story.
It was a fun experience and although I got my money in with the best hand when I busted, I really wanted to cash. Still I outlasted over 5000 other people so I can be proud of that.
I’m going to have to satellite into another one of these since it was a lot of fun, plus I think I have a decent chance of cashing, and possibly going deep in one if my luck holds.
Anyway, I’m going to end this here since it’s almost 1am and I have work tomorrow.
I have set myself various Poker Goals over the short, mid, and long term. Some of which I’m close to completing, others…well not so close.
One of the short term goals I had was to satellite into the PokerStars Sunday $1,000,000 Guaranteed tournament. It’s one I had set a while back, but I’ve never really attempted to complete it until tonight. Where at the first attempt I’ve managed to win a seat in the tournament.
I played a $10 + $1 Double Shootout and managed to come from way behind to win my first table. The when the second table started i was card dead for what felt like an eternity. Eventually I started picking up some hands, and there were a few time where I managed to pull the winning card out on the river, (it always seemed to be against the same guy, who happened to win the other seat).
I’m pretty pleased with myself at the moment, simply because I sat down tonight with qualifying as my main priority and I managed to pull it off on the first attempt.
Here’s hoping I do well on Sunday.
I haven’t played a great deal of online poker over the last few months. Leading up to my trip at the end of May/beginning of Jun, I had really lost any fun I was having when I played.
The combination of terrible play, both by my opponents and me, ugly bad beats, and the almost complete decimation of my bankroll sucked all the fun from the game and I was on the verge of just cashing out what I had left and forgetting all about online poker. It was a bleak time.
Even when I arrived home from my trip it was weeks before I even considered opening up Stars and playing. Once I did though I found almost instantly that I was enjoying playing again. I hadn’t made any significant cashes, I was only playing 1 table SNG’s and doing okay, not great.
I think I just needed a break from the virtual felt. I don’t think my head was in the right place to play. Which is why I’m surprised I’m still having fun. I’m not in the best of places at the moment, I’m almost always stressed with work, finances, or my current living arrangements.
It could be because of all those issues I’m having so much fun playing the $3 +$0.30 Rebuy tournaments on Stars. I’m not worrying about anything else. I’m in the moment, trying to make good decisions and focusing on the game without having anything else interfere. It’s given me 4+ hours each time I play it to forget about everything and just relax. So far I’ve played in 4 of them since the middle of last week, each of them with over 1200 players and I’ve cashed every time. They haven’t been big cashes, but that’s not really the important thing at the moment. The sense of achievement of outlasting so many people and having 4+ hours away from everything else is.
I’m going to try to play at least 2 or 3 of them every week and hopefully my finishes will continue to improve each time. You never know, I might even take one of them down one of these days.
This is one of my favourite pictures from my holiday this summer so I thought I’d share it.
Plus I wanted to see what posts from flickr looked like
