Poker

Poker - The UK

Lack of promotion

November 5, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

That 21-year-old has managed to get Covid, or so he said, so neither of this week’s scheduled lessons have happened. Covid does certainly provide people with an excuse, if they really just don’t fancy it for whatever reason. For now, though, I’ll trust him.

My cold didn’t last long, by my standards. Last weekend I was still suffering, so I didn’t play tennis. Instead I played a few poker tournaments from the micro buy-in series. The last of them was a marathon: I went 5¾ hours in the single draw, hanging on and hanging on and for a fleeting few minutes I thought, heck I could win this thing, get my name on the trophy (wouldn’t that be nice?) before ultimately finishing 17th out of 1300-odd entrants. I didn’t make much money – so much of the money is handed out to the top three or four, even in a big-field tournament. My bankroll is $1015. This weekend there’s another series taking place – it’s the brainchild of Mason Pye, a Twitch streamer, and includes anything but no-limit hold ’em. My kind of series. We’ve got a wet weekend in store – perfect for poker.

Last night I had a Zoom call with my friend from university. He’d just been to Manchester and Blackpool for his birthday. We talked about the contrast between visitor-friendly Manchester (a city I’ve never ever been to) and his home city of Birmingham, which does little if anything to promote itself. We’re talking Romanian levels of promotion here. Even Liverpool, which I visited in 1998, does a much better job there. He talked about Lord of the Rings, so much of which is Birmingham-based, and how the city completely failed – refused – to take advantage of the film series that came out in the early 2000s. (When I moved to New Zealand at that time, you couldn’t move for Lord of the Rings stuff. I flew out on a 747 which had been totally Middle-Earthed up.) My friend told me the alarming news that his 40-year-old sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but should be OK. What a shock though.

It’s been an unusually warm and windy Thursday in Timișoara. A whopping 23 degrees, with a strong breeze – a southerly, and I’m guessing force 6 on the Beaufort scale. Seeing the autumn leaves swirl in a whirlwind is quite beautiful.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Making the news for all the wrong reasons

October 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Romania’s Covid woes – excavators being brought to cemeteries to cope with the sheer weight of mortality – have made the news in New Zealand, which is saying something because Romania hardly ever makes the news anywhere. Covid is now killing one Romanian every three and a half minutes. Romanians are now getting vaccinated in much larger numbers, because of the increasingly severe restrictions that they face if they don’t. Far too late for this wave, but it will help in 2022. My parents are worried about me. They fear that all lines of communication could be cut in the event that I get whisked off to some Covid ward. Or corridor. Or car park.

I played tennis this afternoon. First I played singles with the guy of 60-ish, whom I’ve had close battles with until now, but this time I was up 6-0 5-0 when we were joined by a third player; we then played what they call American doubles. The singles match was bizarre because the score was more down to him than me. I really didn’t play that well in the first set. My forehand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, though in the second set that started to click. I sometimes wonder about etiquette in such situations. Is it poor form not to let someone win at least one game? (To my mind, absolutely not, but I know others see things differently.) After the first set he was marvelling at the colours of the leaves on the big maple tree that overhangs the court, so I’m guessing he had no problem with me.

House hunting has taken a back seat. It involves meeting unknown people which isn’t particularly safe right now. That agent has stopped contacting me. Today I had a look at a place in Mehala, but only from the outside.

Living on the edge of a time zone has its oddities. We’re still on summer time until next Sunday morning, so right now it’s dark in the mornings until eight. There has been serious talk of EU countries ending their twice-yearly clock changes, though that has stalled, probably because of the Covid crisis. If Romania were to observe permanent summer time, it wouldn’t get light until 9:15 am in December in Timișoara. I like the long summer evenings here, so clock switching gives us the best of both worlds. I imagine it’s a minority position, but I’d choose to keep the time shifts.

Last night I had a marathon poker session, and a deep run in Omaha hi-lo, but only made a tiny profit from the four tournaments I played. My bankroll is in four figures for the first time, at $1001.

The two pictures above are from Parcul Regina Maria.

The last three pictures are from Mehala. The sign on the power pole is telling dog owners to clean up after their “quadrupeds”, or four-legged friends.

Coronavirus - Photos - Poker

Rise and fall (with some photos)

October 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a lovely autumn day it’s been today. I managed to cycle along by the river in between my lessons. It’s the last day of balmy weather we’re getting.

Vaccination numbers are stepping up in Romania, but it’s all way too late for this wave of the pandemic. (I read that at the current rate, Romania will hit 70% vaccinated in May 2024. First or second dose wasn’t clear.) In this morning’s lesson, my student said that the case numbers had been kept artificially low until all the political shenanigans (that I don’t even understand) had been completed on Monday, then a big dump of cases were reported on Tuesday. Seriously mate, you’re an intelligent bloke, and the first thing you do is reach for the conspiracy option. Why? There was a spike in cases on Tuesday because it was a Tuesday. Sunday and Monday’s numbers are always low, thanks to the limited reporting and testing over the weekend, then there’s a catch-up on Tuesday. Happens every week, like clockwork.

Talking of case numbers, New Zealand has recorded a three-figure daily tally for the first time. I’m surprised it took so long. South Islanders are dreading the inevitable appearance of the virus on the mainland.

I spoke to my brother and his wife last night. She’s been going through a tough time and has taken time off work due to stress. She’s one of many recent victims of burnout in the NHS. I just hope she’ll be OK.

In the last few days I’ve listened to Tubular Bells several times. It’s that good. Mike Oldfield wrote the album when he was still a teenager.

In poker, I had a third-place finish in a small buy-in pot-limit badugi tournament yesterday, but didn’t get a single bounty. My bankroll is $998.

Autumn is always beautiful here as the leaves change colour. This weekend we’ll have the ritual of sweeping the courts of leaves before we can play. Here are some pictures that I’ve taken in the last week. A Romanian-style bike, the Bega bathed in autumn sunshine, the park under the full moon, and ultra-modern and not-so-modern architecture.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker

Walls and doors are good

October 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a look at another flat on Thursday. It was only three years old. At €100,000 (NZ$165,000), it was cheaper than the previous one I looked at, but the layout, with the kitchen and living room all together as one room, made it a non-starter. “Look! You can have your lessons here,” the agent said to me. Just no. I need my office to be accessible without entering the kitchen area at all, and certainly not inside the kitchen. The shelves in one of the bedrooms were loaded with fishing trophies. Dozens of them. I then met the current owner who wore a kind of fishing tracksuit. He showed me to the garage, which was predictably full of fishing gear. For some reason I asked him if he also had guns, and he answered no, unequivocally. I wasn’t a big fan of the area either, but as there’s a nice park nearby, I didn’t dismiss it entirely. But the unremitting newness of everything would have got to me. “See, they’re building a big supermarket, and a kind of mall. Right there,” the agent said, pointing out a large steel skeleton. Great. Timișoara is not exactly lacking in that department already.

Viewing that flat was useful, as now the agent knows what is and isn’t suitable for me. She told me that almost all new builds have that open space, with a combined kitchen and living area. That just means I need something less new. The trend is for fewer walls and doors, but walls and doors can be good a lot of the time. I recently watched breakfast TV, where they did a piece on people in various countries returning to the office as the Covid situation improved, and when I saw an open-plan office I just about broke out in a cold sweat. I worked many years in that environment, but how long would I survive now? I could do six months, if I knew it was only going to be six months. They also showed an office full of cubicles, which looks more austere, but it’s actually less awful to work in. Even mini-walls help. (As for hot-desking, don’t even get me started.)

After a week of mostly crappy weather, it’s a bright, sunny mid-October morning. I had some decent lessons last week, but I still wouldn’t mind one or two new students. The low point was on Thursday when my student (a guy in his mid-thirties) got a phone call from his father to say that his 83-year-old great uncle (whom he was very close to) had died from Covid, after his doctor had told him not to get the vaccine. (Just wow.) I suggested that we stop the lesson, and after pressing on with a translation exercise for a little longer, he agreed. He was understandably struggling to concentrate. Yesterday my student, a woman of 26 (I think) told me that her 74-year-old grandfather had survived a three-week battle in hospital with Covid. Petrică (mid-fifties) from the tennis club had a kidney condition, then was hospitalised with Covid last winter, before the vaccines came. He’s now on dialysis three times a week. He told me he hadn’t had a pee since March.

For my parents and anybody else living in New Zealand, especially the South Island, the virus must still feel abstract, a bit like it did for me in the early days. But it not, it’s killing people and doing long-term damage to those who survive it, and it’s coming your way. I was delighted to read that 2.5% of NZ’s population got the jab on a single day, in a high-profile Super Saturday “vaxathon” campaign. They were late to get started on vaccinations in NZ, but they’re certainly making up for lost time now.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. They’d just been down to Moeraki. Mum has sent me some pictures of the boulders, some broken and filled with water. I was happy when they told me they didn’t do much there apart from read. With all the house stuff, they really needed the break. We talked about our globetrotting experiences from 30-plus years ago, a subject that comes up quite often. Modern long-haul flying involves mega-hubs where you’re basically cocooned in airportworld. It didn’t used to be like that; the process was slower and more arduous. Dad remembered a time we landed in Jakarta (either ’86 or ’89) and just breathing in the air told you that you were in some faraway land. Airports were fascinating places then (the smells!), before they got all Guccified. Planes themselves were different too; if you didn’t want to be stuck in your seat you could slink off to the area around the galley – my brother did this all the time. You saw more out of the window too – the crew didn’t enforce artificial night-time. My younger students are amazed when I tell them that you could smoke in the back half-dozen rows of the plane. That would be unthinkable now.

Poker. I haven’t been able to make much headway of late, but I’m only down a few dollars for the month so far. My bankroll is $987. Staying up late to play seems to give me headaches, so I’ll try and avoid that.

I’m meeting the British teacher this afternoon. (Should I be worried about this, even though we’re both vaxed and he’s had it? He sees kids all day. These are the sorts of things I have to concern myself with.) Then I’ll be playing tennis.

Coronavirus - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Keeping my distance and some old Romanian

October 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.

Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.

In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.

From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.

I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

I’m not a therapist

August 31, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had my 225th two-hour lesson – or should I say therapy session – with a woman who is becoming a giant pain in the arse. I would love her to go away. I have lessons with her son too, and those are highly productive, in complete contrast to anything I have with her. It amazes me how bright and well adjusted he is, considering both his parents are messed up in their own different ways.

Last Thursday I had a lesson with a guy in Brașov; these lessons are always productive and a pleasure. We spent the second half of the session on phrases to use at restaurants. One of these was “the hamburgers are off”, meaning “we’re out of hamburgers”. (Confusingly, we also use “off” to say that food has gone bad.) He said that if he was told that the hamburgers were off, he’d tell them to damn well turn them on then.

Having a bike again is a massive help. It speeds up my life, gives me more options. On Sunday I made a trip to Sânmihaiu Român, for the first time in ages, and got back just before the downpour. The rain totally wiped out the weekend’s tennis.

Poker. Well it hasn’t been that easy to play of late (see next paragraph) but I’ve had a good, or should I say lucky, August. My bankroll is $930, up $226 on the start of the month.

My laptop has been repeatedly crashing. Endless blue screens. CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. Doesn’t sound good, does it? DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE hardly gave me warm fuzzy feelings either. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Not less or equal?! Why not just say it’s more, for crying out loud? But more than what? Why be cryptic and meaningless at the same time? At UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION, the fourth blue screen error, I noticed my hard drive was pretty chocka so I dumped a load of my photos onto flash drives, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. Yesterday morning I took my laptop into the repair shop, and they told me I’d need to reinstall Windows 10. It crashed again the moment I switched it on when I came home; it gave me that crap about not less or equal. At that point I gingerly reinstalled Windows 10, and since then, touch wood, it hasn’t crashed. I rely on my laptop for everything. Without it I can’t do my job, it’s that simple.

Last night I talked to one of my students (mid-forties) about this general malaise that seems to have set in around the world, or the western world at least. From a collective standpoint, what’s there to look forward to anymore? What’s the new, big, positive change on the horizon? In the early nineties the Soviet Union broke up, Europe opened its borders, and the internet age began. Greater peace and prosperity, we all hoped. What have we got now? He said he was excited about the prospect of computers becoming more intelligent than humans and starting to dominate us. That doesn’t excite me, that’s for sure.

I was going to write the last part of my trip report, but I’ll tackle that in a separate post.

Life :) - Poker - Romania - Tennis

Blunders and bikes

August 24, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

After my lessons on Saturday I met up with Mark, the teacher from the UK. He’s just starting as a music and ICT teacher at British School where his wife will be teaching English. He said that they’ve so far been wined and dined and given the red-carpet treatment. They’ll certainly be wanting something in return. I’m sure I would crumble under the weight of all that expectation, not least from the parents who are paying top dollar (or euro, or leu) to send their kids there. Mark and his wife are in a different financial league from me. On Saturday we drank in the beautiful Piața Unirii at places I wouldn’t dream of going to normally. He seemed impressed with my command of the local language as I ordered drinks. He’s also clearly impressed with Timișoara, and Romania in general, although he wasn’t a fan of Bucharest. He said (and I agree) that most Brits’ preconceived ideas of Romania are founded on nothing but ignorance.

On Saturday evening I played tennis for 90 minutes. Another geriatric player has joined the fray. This bloke, I later found out, once played for the Romanian national rugby team before emigrating to the US. He’s now 79 and back living in Romania. When he heard that I was British, he introduced himself to me as Simon and we had a bit of a chat in English. Now he plays senior tennis competitions. Yesterday he told me about a match he’d played that morning, which he lost in a third-set tie-break – a real third set, none of that ten-point shoot-out crap. I could tell he just felt good about being out their competing, win or lose.

When I got home from tennis I fired up some poker tournaments. At a very late hour I made a horrific blunder in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was chip leader with 13 players remaining, but inexplicably got all my chips in the middle against the second-biggest stack with a marginal hand, and that left me nearly chipless. I was extremely lucky to finish sixth after that, but that was still a far cry from where I could and probably should have ended up. I made $24 from that tournament, taking my bankroll to an even $900, but I was still reeling from that awful decision, which was all the more frustrating given how well I felt I played in the rest of the tournament.

I dragged myself out of bed yesterday morning and staggered off to the market at Mehala to look at bikes. And guess what, I bought one. It’s a seven-speed racing bike, from the nineties I think, and it’s in very good nick. It’s bigger than my other one which was a tad too small, and it isn’t fitted with tyres that give me an allergic reaction. The make is Union; I still can’t tell if that’s German or Dutch. It cost me 400 lei (£70, NZ$140) and I’m happy so far with my purchase. It should make a big difference to my life. I just need to make sure it has a damn good lock.

Today I’ve struggled to stay awake in the hot weather – the temperature is now forecast to drop. Tomorrow I’ve got four lessons. After they finish at 9:30 I’ll play one of the $11 WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) tournaments, so it could be another late one. No lessons on Wednesday morning, thankfully, or I wouldn’t be playing it at all.

The Covid numbers in Romania are climbing again. This Delta variant is an altogether different beast, as even New Zealand is finding out.

Coronavirus - Poker - Tennis

Competition — an escape from all the bad news

August 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Sunday and Monday were hellishly hot, to the point where I struggled to sleep at night even with the fan going full blast, but later in the week the temperature fell and the air took on that late-summer feel. I played singles tennis on Sunday against the super-fit guy nearly two decades my senior. We started at 7pm but the temperature was over 30. At 3-1 down in the first set, I decided to slow the game down in the hope of drawing errors from his racket. (I was the one employing old-man tactics.) I won some close games to lead 5-4, only to then play a shocking return game. I eked out games 11 and 12 for the set, but it didn’t feel like a win. I was taking giant gulps of water while he was as fresh as a daisy. In the second set I found myself in a much deeper hole at 5-2 down, but my opponent then started to tire ever so slightly. I fended off two set points in the tenth game to level at 5-5, then in the last two games I was able to tee up on my two-handed backhand, which naturally targeted his slightly weaker backhand wing, and I ran out a rather fortunate 7-5 7-5 winner. A remarkable stat from the match: he double-faulted only once, while I didn’t do so at all. (He did swat some of my weak second serves away for winners though.)

In my only other competitive pursuit, I snapped a run of three winless months in poker tournaments to win two on a single day. I made $93 on Tuesday to take my bankroll to $877. My wins were in no-limit single draw and pot-limit badugi, and both times as we got heads-up I was what you might call in the zone. For such small-stakes tournaments I don’t think I’ve ever been so intensely focused. (I’m fully aware that it was luck rather than focus or skill that played the biggest part in my victories.) I’m still trying to get better at Omaha hi-lo, which is a fiendishly complex game.

The book. The finish line is coming into view; yesterday I hit the V section. (Nobody in Romania can say vegetable or vehicle.) The book might never see the light of day, but having already come this far… Putting aside a set number of hours each week has really helped.

Afghanistan. My brother has been following it much more closely than me. After all, he’s been there twice. Some of the scenes have been upsetting almost beyond belief. I recently started A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author who wrote the brillant Kite Runner. But this story is so harrowing that I wonder if I should even continue.

New Zealand is now under lockdown. The cluster of Delta cases has now spread to Wellington. What a bugger. I’m just glad they’ve gone fast and hard, and hopefully they can avoid the current Australian situation. Here in Romania, cases have risen tenfold in six weeks or so, and with our embarrassingly low vaccination rate, the near future is bleak. I can hear those ambulances in my head now. Soon I expect I’ll hear them for real every other minute.

I was going to write the next chapter about my trip, but I’ve gone on long enough already. That’ll have to be next time.

Family - Poker - Travel: Romania

Done my dash of trains and buses

August 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a very quick note to say that I got back to Timișoara on Saturday evening after a long stint on the bus. More about my travels next time, when hopefully I’ll have some pictures to show you. Sunday was a real scorcher here – one of the great things about my trip was escaping the searing heat.

I played a marathon poker session on Sunday morning, cashing in all three tournaments I played, including a pair of third places (in single draw and pot-limit badugi). My bankroll received a welcome $45 boost; it’s now $749. That evening I had a good chat with my brother and his wife. They’d been to London to celebrate my brother’s big four-oh; they visited Kew Gardens and ate at a pretty nice restaurant. They’d spent a few days in St Ives and managed to drop in on our aunt. He said I’d hardly recognise her now – she’s piled on weight and has let herself go. He said the front door had almost seized up from the length of time since it had last been opened. She’s used Covid as an excuse to make her world even smaller. My brother thought she might not be long for this world. Dad said he felt angry at how his sister, blessed with such natural talent and good looks, has been able to chuck it all away.

At the doctor’s surgery last night I met a British couple of my sort of age; they’d just arrived in Timișoara so that she could take a job here at a language school, following a one-year spell in Bucharest. Meeting anybody from the UK is such a rarity for me. We swapped numbers and I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.

Almost time for a lesson with Bianca.