Poker

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

All jabbed up

May 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I got my second shot of Astra Zeneca on Wednesday morning. There were far fewer people there than the first time around. I think a lot of people became skittish about Astra Zeneca in March and April, and now Romanians who have taken Pfizer outnumber the AZ takers by eight to one. Because it was so quiet, I was done and dusted in no time. I entered the building at eight, the needle was in my arm at 8:10 – a young man administered my jab this time – and then at 8:25 my name was called and I could go. It’s always a bit funny having my distinctly English name called among all the Ciobanus and Popescus. They also called me by my middle name rather than my first name; that happens quite often and I don’t mind it – I like my middle name.

I was vaccinated in the youth centre, which is right next to the stadium where Poli Timișoara (the local football team) play, and just across the road from the main hospital. It’s also right next to the outdoor market which is full of local produce and is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so that was convenient. In the same area is a sports centre with several clay tennis courts, and next to that is an abandoned piece of land which was supposed to be a university building but never happened. I know this because there’s an old peeling sign there, dated February 2000 (I was in my second year of university then). They got as far as putting in the steel rods, but then they presumably ran out of money. Now it’s a wild area, full of trees and birds and the intermittent ribbit of frogs.

After my first jab I didn’t feel any side effects apart from a bit of a sore arm. This time was different. On Wednesday night I shivered in bed so I put on an extra duvet and of course I was soon sweating. I didn’t sleep well. Yesterday evening I had a slight temperature again and suddenly felt very tired. Thankfully I had a good sleep last night and now everything is back to normal. My symptoms were all pretty standard and a good indication that the vaccine was doing its job.

Four more poker tournaments since I last wrote, with little success. On Tuesday I made good starts to all three but could only scrape a min cash in the PLO8. Last night I managed to bust out of the fixed badugi after just 30 hands without winning any of them. That’s a new record. My laptop crashed in the middle, so I didn’t want to rebuy just in case it happened again. My bankroll is $699.

I was able to play last night because my 19-year-old student has decided to give up his lessons with me. Honestly I’m OK with that – he was never the easiest to teach – but I have lost a few people lately and it might be hard to get replacements with summer on the horizon.

The newly renovated Lloyd building in the square
Language learning - Poker - Tennis

Romanian Commentary 14 — Dumneavoastră (and some poker)

May 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Most languages have words that seem too long for what they represent. English, for instance, has understand and disappointment. Today, pedestrian came up in a lesson, and I’ve never liked that word – it’s too long, too cumbersome, and I suppose too pedestrian. French has maintenant, which is far too long for something that means “now”. By the time you’ve said or written the word, now has passed. Romanian also has its fair share. The numbers from 11 to 19 are all stupidly long – 17 is șaptesprezece – and most people shorten them in everyday speech. But the biggest culprit, literally, in almost any language, has to be dumneavoastră, which is the Romanian formal version of “you”, just like vous in French, only (unlike in French) it doesn’t also serve as the general plural “you”. It’s also used for the formal “your”. When I first tried learning the language, I was immediately intimidated by this 13-letter monstrosity, which literally means “your lordship”. Surely they don’t actually use this in conversation? But they sure do, in all its glory. Fortunately, Romanian is a “pro-drop” language, which means you can get away with just using the verb form without the subject, so you can often dispense with dumneavoastră. But you can’t always, and when it serves as the formal “your” (rather than “you”), you’re forced to use it. Yesterday I played tennis, partnering a bloke of a similar age to me. Hmmm, can I use the informal tu with you (I hardly know you), or should I play safe and use the formal version? In doubles, it’s fairly common to shout something to indicate that either you or your partner should take the next shot, but you can hardly say dumneavoastră, can you? That’s practically a whole sentence. By about the third syllable the ball will have whizzed by. So what can I say? Yesterday I decided on the English “go!”. I mean, go is universal, right? I’m pretty sure you pass go in even the Romanian version of Monopoly. My partner unfortunately interpreted my “go!” as eu, which means “me”, and our communication breakdown cost us the point.

Last night I realised how much work I still need to do if I’m ever really going to get good at Romanian. Someone from the police called me, and I was lost. In our five-minute conversation, or should I say monologue, he must have said over a thousand words. Just too damn fast, and of course it was on the phone and that makes it even harder. Plus it’s the sodding police – what have I done? It seemed that I hadn’t done anything, and one of his colleagues wanted me to translate something into English later this week. He gave me the phone number, I called this other policeman (I assume that’s what he is) and that was indeed the case.

It tipped it down yesterday morning. Good weather for poker. I got up early and FaceTimed my parents before the tournaments kicked off just after eight (while I was still eating my porridge). I made a decent start to the PLO8, then while that was going on I fired up a single draw in which I broke the best hand to bust out after 40 minutes. Never mind. I was now in the process of amassing a giant stack in the Omaha hi-lo, which was helped immensely by making quad threes to inflict a very unfortunate bad beat on my opponent. I easily made the seven-man final table, and from there anything could have happened. There was a Romanian who hurled insults at me in his native language for some bizarre reason (he could see I was playing from the same country) and I just blocked his chat, before knocking him out in fourth place. The final three were all pretty evenly stacked, but I had basically zero experience at the game short-handed. After a decent number of hands I was out in third place for a $22 profit after just over five hours. By that point I’d also made the final table of the knockout pot-limit badugi (two final tables simultaneously is a rarity for me) and came back well from being relatively short to make the final three. Then, crucially, I was dealt two pat nines that helped me chip up and eventually knock out a good player and grab his healthy bounty. I had a big chip lead as I got heads-up with an inexplicably passive opponent, and soon I’d won a bounty tournament for the first time, making $62. A lucky day. I made $81 overall, and my bankroll is now $705.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Edging back to normality

May 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Slowly but surely, we’re edging back to something resembling BC – before Covid. Today, for the first time in ages, we’re allowed to roam mask-free in open spaces, with the exception of markets, bus stops and the like. I’ll get my second AstraZeneca jab on Wednesday (I’m one of relatively few takers of that in Romania – for most people here it’s Pfizer or nothing) and after that I’ll see about taming the great rodent-like mop on the top of my head.

Today I had my weekly lesson with the young beginner couple. After that I was thinking I’d benefit hugely from daily lessons with beginners. Think of all the Romanian I’d get to speak. I still get confused, as evidenced by the lesson with the eleven-year-old girl on Thursday. She asked me to translate whole sentences, and she could see I was struggling. (She can laugh as me as much as she likes, but if she pronounces “pie” as pee, I’m not really allowed to return the favour. I guess I did laugh when that boy pronounced “yanking” as wanking; I just couldn’t help it.)

I finally got through to my aunt on the phone. She said she’d been suffering from a bout of depression, although she seemed bright when we had our chat. She’s a highly intelligent woman after all. But ever since the nineties, when her husband was still alive, she’s fallen deeper and deeper into a cycle, and has lacked any sort of willpower to try and break it. For me, that was what coming to Romania was all about. I had to do break the cycle, goddammit, or at least try. It’s sad that despite her considerable brainpower, she’s never even sought a way out.

No sign of a buyer yet for my parents’ house in Geraldine, and winter is on its way. Maybe my cousin was right. Who would want to part with bucketloads of cash just to live in Geraldine? Every second time we talk, Mum and Dad go on about Maori issues. I have little to say about the subject, but it seems things have clicked into another gear, and one my parents find uncomfortable, in the time I’ve been away. As an example, look at how Maori, or should I say te reo, now dominates Wellington City Council’s home page. What I would say is that the last thing New Zealand needs is to be a divided country. There’s generally been an impressive lack of division in NZ. That’s mainly why they pretty much kicked Covid into touch. They’d do well to keep it that way.

Poker. I had two goes at that those SCOOP Afterparty thingies this week, and didn’t get very far. I started OK in the PLO8 but I couldn’t flop anything and I made a mess of my bust-out hand. Then in the single draw I was extremely card dead to begin with, and did well to still have 80% of my stack by the first break. I had a bad table draw – regulars, hyper-aggressive players, and even professionals – and I was just gagging for a table move that never came. After the break I made some half-decent hands, and at one point Mason Pye, a young British guy who promotes mixed games on the streaming platform Twitch, moved to our table. He got short and I called his all-in as a slight favourite. If I’d won that hand, maybe I’d have been in business, but I didn’t, I then went card dead again, and the end wasn’t far away. The good news is that I avoided those late nights and I had some time to look through my hand histories and figure out where I might have ballsed up. In my last dozen tournaments I’ve only managed one small cash, but my bankroll can withstand that kind of run and far worse. I’m sitting on $624.

Family - Language teaching - Poker

V-signs

May 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a good chat with my brother earlier today. We talked about his long-running course where he has to teach very scary army stuff and be assessed on his teaching ability, and then we chatted about old family photos. He sent me a picture from the VE Day 50th anniversary celebrations in 1995 (26 years ago yesterday, in fact), with our extended family, including my grandparents who’d been there. We were all giving a victory salute. I think that might have been the first time I got slightly drunk.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a dead loss because I had heel pain which almost stopped me from walking. My shoes were to blame. I tried icing my heel but in the end I figured I just needed to rest it, and now it seems just about back to normal. I hope I can get back on the tennis court next weekend – the benefits of that are enormous.

Just before Orthodox Easter, a woman rang me asking me if I’d consider teaching at her language school. It sounded like the lesson times at the school would clash with my private lessons, but I thought there’d be no harm in meeting her, so we arranged a meeting. Then she called me to say she was going away for the long weekend, so could we meet on Tuesday, then I never heard back from her. That’s all pretty Romanian. When I arrived here I was offered a job at a language school, only for them to un-offer it to me just before I was due to start. Another very Romanian thing is that the new owners of my apartment said they’ll keep my rent the same until 1st May next year, after which they’ll put it up by 50%. Nothing much, just a slight increase. At least they’ve warned me. So that gives me a deadline to find somewhere else.

I’ve lost some students of late, so I’ve just put up a couple more online ads. I’ve also bumped my prices up, but not by 50%.

Poker. I’m going through a bit of a barren run. When that happens, I feel I don’t know anything anymore. How did I ever win? Last night I tried a new game called Big O, which is Omaha hi-lo with five cards instead of four. I first watched a stream from a live Big O game played in San Antonio last November, a few days after the election. Covid was raging in Texas then. Nine men, including the dealer, were huddled around a table, fingering chips and dollar bills that had been god knows where. OK, they were masked, but I wouldn’t have been within a mile of that table. I felt particularly sorry for the dealer who was just doing his job. I then found out that one of the players, a middle-aged bloke, has since died. I don’t know if it was Covid-related. My first go at Big O didn’t go too well – it played nothing like on the stream (people just wanted to gamble) and I was mostly card dead. In a rare bright spot, I had a decent run (and a small cash) in a standard four-card Omaha hi-lo game this morning. I plan to have a crack at a couple of big-field events in the next week, as part of the so-called SCOOP Afterparty. My bankroll is currently $635.

Books - Life :) - Poker - Romania - Writing a book

Hristos a înviat

May 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The vagaries of the Julian calendar, the spring equinox and phases of the moon mean that today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. Sometimes it falls on the same day as what they call Catholic Easter (and what I would call “normal Easter”), sometimes it’s a week later, and sometimes (like this year) it’s a whole month later. Easter is big in Romania; I’d call it a tie between Easter and Christmas for which is most important here. Last night the tennis-playing couple (who live next door but one) gave me some salată de boeuf which, despite its partially French name, contains chicken rather than beef. They also gave me an egg painted the traditional reddish-brown using red cabbage, and invited me to “knock” it with another of their painted eggs. The “knocker” said Hristos a înviat (“Christ has risen”), then the knockee became the knocker and said Adevărat (“really”). Although I was unaware that it was a game, apparently I won because my egg remained almost unscathed through all the knocking.

At quarter past midnight I was woken up by the Easter vigil service at the cathedral. A huge throng of people with candles spilled out in front of the cathedral as a sermon played over the loudspeaker, much of which I actually understood. I wonder how many of those “vigilantes” picked up Covid. There have been services and processions and bells ringing out all this long weekend. I missed my first two Romanian Easters because I went to the UK. Then last year the restrictions meant that everything was far more muted. That leaves 2019, and I think I must have slept through the vigil service that year because I don’t remember seeing it. My blog posts from two years ago aren’t helping me. Just like last year, the Easter market has gone by the board, but they’ve Easterised the end of the square where I live, as in a normal virus-free year.

I still watch John Campbell’s informative Youtube videos on coronavirus, but I’m less dedicated than I was. After I watched one of his videos last week, Youtube suggested that I watch a different one from a American medical doctor and religious nutcase, called “Why I’m not taking the vaccine”. It had three times as many views and likes as Campbell gets (and he gets a fair few), and it attracted a long stream of comments saying that the deep state are trying to force us to take the vaccine and I’m not having any of it. I’m defiant! Six hundred thumbs up. Many commenters referenced the Bible. No Covid vaccine! Matthew 7:25 says so! I really doubt that the Gospel of Matthew said anything about vaccination or herd immunity. (I picked that verse at random; it happens to be about floods and storms, not a pandemic, but I’m sure you could find a connection there if you really wanted to.) Covid has been an eye-opener. I knew we had fake news and echo chambers, but here we have millions of people, some in positions of authority and influence, willing to dispense with the truth even when it comes to matters of life and death. I’ve even seen this in my own brother. A supporter of Brexit and the Tories, he’s happy to divorce himself from the reality that the British government have done a breathtakingly shitty job that has cost many thousands of lives unnecessarily, just because it’s his team. It’s become just like football.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Inocenții, a Romanian book that one of my students bought me for Christmas. It took me a while to get going, mainly because the language is hard. But I’ve made some headway finally. It’s all about a woman’s childhood in Brașov in the sixties, the early Communist period. The book is full of humour, though it certainly has its dark moments too. I’ve been jotting down words I don’t know, including some that I’ve come across before but forgotten, so I can look them up later. I think it’s the sixth Romanian book I’ve read.

Poker. Lately I’ve been playing tournaments exclusively. I’m at a bit of a standstill, with a run of tournaments in which I’ve either just missed out on or just made the money. I’ve been persevering with Omaha hi-lo, with little joy. Unlike the other games I regularly play, I can’t hand-read in Omaha hi-lo. That’s partly because the tournament buy-ins are tiny and people play any old junk, even hands that are real disasters like the 9993 that someone raised pre-flop with this morning. My bankroll is $661, although I expect that to drop a few dollars when I play the fixed badugi this evening. Pessimistic I know, but that tournament with its eight-minute levels plays like a turbo, especially in the early stages, and most of the time you’ll fail to make the money no matter what you do.
Update: As expected, that tournament was a waste of time. The game is played with three draws, but if I’d had ten I still wouldn’t have hit anything. Bankroll now $655. (I don’t exactly risk much of my bankroll in these tournaments.)

I’ve gone back to the dictionary part of the book I was writing, after losing heart when that Romanian teacher decided she had better things to do than help me. I’m now on the letter R, and I hope I can make some more progress this week.

The cathedral at 12:15 last night
Just after 4pm today
Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Springtime pics

April 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Anzac Day and my sister-in-law’s birthday.

I’d just gone out to withdraw 1990 lei from the cash machine, or bancomat as they call it here, and guess what. I saw my bike. It was chained to a nearby lamp-post, with a slightly more sturdy combination lock than the one I had. Then I bumped into Bogdan. He thinks that someone in our block, “the bloke with the beard on the sixth floor”, took it. He said he’d chat to the guy. I asked him not to involve the police. I never thought I’d see it again, and it’s so weird that someone from my block decided to pinch it. It didn’t get much use over the lockdown period, so perhaps he figured it was abandoned.

I didn’t think I’d ever get into poker again. It is engrossing, it does exercise my brain, but there’s so much I can’t do when I play poker. I can’t enjoy the sunshine. I can’t read a book. I can’t answer a FaceTime call when I’m playing a tournament. Heck, last week it was even stopping me from sleeping. Tournaments are the worst for having your hands tied. It was all fine over the winter months and the lockdown, but with the improving weather (and maybe even potential bike rides!) I don’t know how much of this I want to do. I got in three tournaments today. I won small prizes in two (single draw and badugi) while Omaha hi-lo once again eluded me. My bankroll is $652.

Lots of tennis this weekend. Yesterday we played three-and-a-bit sets of doubles. Today there were just three of us so we played two-against-one in rotation; singles in that format gives you a real workout. I really had to scramble. It was great stuff, and the weather was just perfect for it.

Spring and the loosening of restrictions have brought seemingly the whole city out to the parks. The many flowerbeds, mostly full of tulips in a multitude of colours, are a big attraction. Here are some pictures:

Gearing up for an anti-lockdown protest. From late March.
This rusty motorbike still has its old Ceaușescu-era number plate
Central Park
Poker

Making deep runs

April 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a weird week to navigate, with two late-night poker tournaments interspersed with lessons. It’s also been beautiful outside. Springtime in Timișoara is hard to beat.

On Monday I had a short prelude to what would await me: four lessons plus a single draw tournament where I took a nice big fat stack to the final table but was unable to capitalise as I finished fourth for a modest profit of $13. Then Tuesday came. My birthday. The SCOOP single draw (with a buy-in of just $5.50, it drew a whopping 3295 entries) started at 7:05. The last of my day’s lessons was due to finish at 7:30, but I managed to move it forward 15 minutes. You can enter late, even ridiculously so if you want, but being a bounty tournament you give up so much value by doing that. I wanted to get started ASAP. I was soon dealt the nuts and knocked out an ultra-short stack, but I mostly hung around my initial stack or just above until I eventually made some headway. I got moved to a table with someone running red hot to my left (he would go on to finish fourth), and that was a bit awkward. I also went card dead for ages and had to stay patient. I watched my opponents like a hawk as I folded hand after hand. A big moment came when a loose player fired out a large bet after the draw and I had no choice but to call with my 97, knowing that I’d be on the wrong side a fair amount. That time though he had a 98 and I chipped up to 80,000 when I’d have been down to 21k had I lost the pot. Other big moments were to follow. I was building a healthy stack but couldn’t pick up the bounties, but then I called an all-in out of position with a nut draw to try to change that. I cursed as I paired my deuce, but my opponent paired his three as he drew to only a ten. In another hand I got a pat number five – a true colossus – and eliminated someone who had a pat 87. When we got down to three 7-man tables with chip stacks now in the millions, my birthday was ancient history. It was the second-longest – 7½ hours – and perhaps the most absorbing tournament I’d ever played in. The end, for me, came at quarter to three. My queen didn’t come close to cutting it and I was out in 18th place for a profit of $80.

There was more to come. Wednesday night was badugi time. My student was happy to move my early morning lesson from Thursday to Friday, and if she hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have played. You just can’t teach if you’re going to be utterly buggered for your lesson. Teaching is one of those jobs that actually matters. The $11 tournament, which got 1305 entries, started at 9:15 in the evening. Badugi on PokerStars is normally played eight-handed. Eight is great: people play too loose in the early positions, and if you’re disciplined those players are a source of value. This tournament, for some reason, only featured six-handed tables, which I figured would reduce any edge I might have. The levels, only ten minutes, were pretty damn fast considering we only started with 35 big bets. I haemorrhaged a third of my opening stack in the first ten minutes and half-expected a quick exit, but I recovered. I was on a tricky table with experienced players, so I played tight in the hope that I could get moved somewhere slightly more opportune, and luckily that’s what happened. From that point I ran well, no question. I won many pots at showdown that I expected to lose. Unusually, I was never in real danger of elimination for the next five hours, and for a brief moment I soared into second place. Just like the night before, the major prizes beckoned. In the end, things all went pear-shaped rather quickly. With 23 players left, I was suddenly pretty short, and there were no pay jumps until 17th, so I had to make something happen. At 2:45, just like the night before, I was next out for a $49 profit after doing battle for 5½ hours.

Knackering stuff, and a case of what might have been. A spade instead of a club here or there and who knows. I played well though in both tournaments, taking my opportunities when they presented themselves, and that’s all I can really hope for. Together with the triple draw the previous week (not my best game, but I acquitted myself OK), I made $164 over the three SCOOP tourneys I entered, and my bankroll is now $647. If I’m really going to build on that I should master another game, or at least try to. I enjoy Omaha hi-lo and that’s my obvious choice, but it’s just so complex.

On Thursday, when I had a break in the afternoon, it was great to just wander in the park and not worry about anything. Next time I’ll post some pictures of Timișoara in spring.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music - Poker

Years that end in one

April 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ll be 41 the day after tomorrow. Yikes. Ten years ago today I started that job in Wellington; I only just lived to tell the tale. Ten years before that, I was doing my year abroad in Lyon and Mum came to stay with me for three days. I seem to remember us getting through plenty of pizza and wine. I’d just had a skiing accident (I haven’t attempted skiing since) and I was hobbling around the city. Ten years before that, on my 11th birthday, I was again with Mum, this time a bit closer to home in Bedford. I was taking part in a tennis tournament, and it rained and hailed and even snowed, highly unusual for the time of year. The tennis still went ahead, and I remember I won two of my four matches, just missing out on qualifying for the next stage. When I came back (rather damp) I was greeted by my best friend who was a year older than me; he was getting me all excited about starting at my new school in September. I can’t easily go back a fourth ten years, but I’ve just been looking at picture of our garden from the day after we moved into our family home which was (at the time) totally unsuitable for kids. The grass is knee-high and my parents have been incinerating something in the middle of it. There is washing on the line, and Mum is carrying my baby brother in her arms. Mum has dated the photo exactly to 14/10/81; my brother was eleven weeks old.

Romania’s Covid numbers are still high, but they’re coming down fast; hopefully the effect of the vaccines is starting to kick in. It’s very real here though. A woman cancelled a lesson on Thursday because she’d picked up the virus. Another of my students got Covid several weeks ago but is still compromised – he’s always run down and can’t smell anything. Yesterday some of the tennis players were in shock when they learned of someone’s death from the disease. At some level (minor for me; utterly devastating for many others) this is affecting us all. It’s maddening because so much was preventable. I have day-by-day figures since the pandemic started, but for Romania as a whole and for Timiș, my local area (hence the graphs). The daily new cases in Timiș (population around 700,000) for each of the 30 days of last June were 00200 01000 01100 00111 00020 01003. We had about as much virus as New Zealand at that point and could have ring-fenced Timiș or something a bit wider. Everyone could have had a great summer in the park or at the pool or at the pub or any other P-word, but no, they had to go to Greece or Turkey or the Black Bloody Sea (couldn’t think of anywhere worse in the height of summer, not that I’ve ever been there). How many deaths worldwide have been caused by stupid unnecessary travel? Well, officially there have been three million deaths, so I’d say at least three million.

On the subject of cutting back on travel, I read quite a moving piece in the paper about a Welsh sheep farmer in his early seventies who has remained single all his life and has never been out of the valley. He even eats the same dinner every day. But he wants for nothing. I thought it was lovely, and runs counter to everything that we’re told, to want more, bigger, better, to have big ambitious goals, to even strive for happiness. Yes, we must achieve happiness. You can’t just be content anymore. Do people still even use the adjective content, other than in negative contexts like “I’ll have to be content with that”? I remember at a young age asking my grandmother (Dad’s mum) what the purpose of life was. She said to be content.

I’ve just been listening to Out of Time, the REM album, which came out in 1991 (of course, it ends in one). A great album, and one of the Youtube commenters said that Low, Near Wild Heaven and Endgame are an unbeatably beautiful back-to-back triplet of songs. I have to agree.

Three poker tournaments at the weekend. I failed to cash in any of them. I played a fixed badugi this evening – that’s a rarity, and I only managed it because tennis was washed out. I had a good, highly aggro player at my table who plays an absolute ton of all kinds of games and must be playing with a nice fat bankroll. I don’t like the way I played my bust-out hand – my opponent correctly broke and outdrew me, when I might have got him to cling on hopelessly to his hand if I’d played it differently. My bankroll is $505, and I’ll be playing two more SCOOP tourneys this week.

Life :) - Poker

Police and poker

April 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday the woman in the UK cancelled her 2pm lesson – she misses Romania and is going through a tough time mentally in general. With that extra break in my schedule, I played a $1.10 buy-in satellite into last night’s $22 SCOOP triple draw tournament. Out of 94 entrants, the top four made it through. In the early stages I profited from being at a table of people who were either sitting out or hadn’t the foggiest idea of the rules. If I made any sort of hand I could just keep betting and raising. These players were quickly eliminated, and from then on I needed to win the big pots when it mattered, which I did. At one point I made the nuts against the second nuts. On the final table I found myself in the unusual position of having the biggest stack by far and being able to coast into the main tournament which started at 9:15 pm. As soon as the satellite was over, the police called me, asking me to come in early the next morning to make an official statement about my bike. Damn, this tournament could go on all night and I could be buggered by then. Should I even bother?

In all probability my two-hour battle to win a SCOOP ticket would be for naught; just over 15% got paid. Unlike in the satellite, most of the 1319 players in the main tournament actually knew the rules (though how they played varied enormously), and some of them were high rollers and/or had intimidating badges to say that they’d won SCOOP events in the past. They’d probably played hundreds of the things. By the first break I had a bit more than the 25,000 chips I started with, by the second break I was up to two and a half times my starting stack, and by the third break I had over five times. In other words I was doing pretty well. But when we resumed at midnight it all came crashing down in the space of a few hands. My number four was beaten by number two and that left me crippled, but I partially bounced back. Then, with 72,000 chips in my stack, I got involved in a huge three-way pot with an excellent draw and immediately made the second nuts, but on the last draw somebody clearly made a big hand. If my hand had beaten his, my stack would have been 158,000 and I’d have had an eye on the top prizes. Had he shown the same hand as mine, I’d have had 91,000. But no, he showed the stone-cold nuts and I was left with 24,000. So much can hinge on just one hand, and after that unavoidable disaster I was almost dead meat and unlikely to get a payout at all. I hung in there somehow. The top 215 paid, and as the money bubble approached I went into near-shutdown mode. (Normally I don’t care much about min-cashing, because it’s such a small payout compared to your buy-in, but because I’d satellited in, the min cash was many times my original buy-in, so I was unusually bothered.) There was a player at my table with even fewer chips than me, and he stalled to try and flop over the line and get a min cash. Finally the bubble burst, and I was soon out in 202nd place for a $36 prize. Not quite what I managed in my only other SCOOP all those years ago (second place for a few grand), but at least I got something. My bankroll is now $516. I intend to play two more SCOOP events (directly; no satellites) next week.

The rollercoaster ride (maybe it was more like Oblivion at Alton Towers) finished just before one o’clock, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my parents (when will I see them again?) and my cousin’s youngest son. I had to be up at seven so I could make that damn (almost certainly pointless) police statement. The city of Timișoara, as I’ve just found out, is split into five police sections, and it seems to be something akin to gerrymandering that places the station (a 45-minute walk from here) in the same section as where I live. Gosh, the statement. I had to start by writing Declarație and underlining it. Then I was interrogated about where and when and what kind of lock and are there cameras and so on and so forth. The policeman dictated the statement for me to write, and I had to pen a page and a half of Romanian. Reședință. Is that with an e or an i in the middle? He asked me to state my reședință, my residence, my home, but where exactly is home? As far as I’m concerned, Timișoara is home now, or the closest thing to it. The cops clearly had no shortage of time on their hands, and that’s got to be a good sign. This city, touch wood, is pretty safe. So I got some useful Romanian writing practice. I was knackered after that, and had a doze at lunchtime.

Family - Poker

The signs are there

April 13, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents this morning. Yesterday they went to Timaru for my uncle Graeme’s 80th birthday celebration. He’s the father of my cousin who lives in Wellington. He’s suffered from a lung condition for decades and has also had prostate cancer. In 1999 another of my uncles – one of Mum’s older brothers – came to stay with us in the UK, and my parents asked him how Graeme was. In his typically vivid way of speaking, he replied: “He’s got one foot in the grave and another on a bloody banana skin!” Well he died in 2014 at age 70, from cancer of the oesophagus, while Graeme is still going.

My cousin had travelled down with her three sons to celebrate her dad’s big eight-oh. Dad was intrigued by the youngest boy, aged 12½. You know, I think he might have a problem. Apparently he was obsessed with the cat, and was totally uninterested in any of the people present, except when he gave Dad a big bear hug out of the blue. He didn’t really talk. Dad thought he might be autistic, and he could see shades of me in how he behaved. I know my cousin recently took him out of the expensive school that his elder brothers also went to, and she wouldn’t have done that without good reason. So much time has gone since I saw him face-to-face, so I haven’t seen him grow into a near-teen, but he was always different from his brothers who were high achievers right from the start. My cousin kept a spreadsheet of all the words they knew by the age of two: the eldest one had a sizeable vocabulary, only for the middle boy to surpass that by his second birthday. She didn’t bother with the youngest one, though, because he’d hardly picked up a single word. The one thing that does stand out for me is the time I saw him at football practice. He often sloped off to the side, uninterested in the game, the whole idea of competing in a team seemingly alien to him, just as it was to me at that age.

I really did have problems, but they were largely masked by my capability at school; as a little boy I was unusually capable at reading and maths. Throughout my teenage years and beyond, I sort of got by. Few friends to speak of, but I muddled along in my unobtrusive way. Unlike my brother, I wasn’t much trouble. (Because of him, I flew under the radar a bit.) My parents thought I’d “sort myself out eventually”, and on the surface I did. I got into a quality university, came out with a good degree, got a good job. None of it was particularly easy, but I managed it. I could fake it for just long enough to maybe get through a one-hour interview, but in the job itself I couldn’t fake it. I might be expected to go out for drinks on a Friday night, four hours or more in a packed bar, and I’d just be itching to escape. (Covid must be a godsend for some people.) Or, even harder, I’d need to build up relationships with colleagues over months and years. I survived, in the only way I knew how, by keeping a low profile, but trying to keep that going just about killed me.

My problems might have seemed small, but they have affected me hugely. My ability to earn money and live comfortably, my ability to have fun, my ability to find a partner and have a family, all massively compromised. I came up with my online name “plutoman” when I lived on Pluto Place (what a name), but for me it worked because I was always on the outside, and mostly irrelevant. (At the time, Pluto had just been downgraded from a planet to a lump.) I liked “plutoman” (anagram of “not a lump”, by the way) because the “man” ending has always been slightly amusing to me, and the word then has lots of those nice friendly letters in the middle of the alphabet.

Living in Romania has been a breath of fresh air. I’m no longer living a lie. In this evening’s lesson I could play a video, make faces and wave my arms about, and that was absolutely fine. I really hope my cousin, a super-high achiever herself, recognises her youngest boy’s condition, or at least looks into it (maybe he’ll grow out of it – who knows) and doesn’t try and push him into jobs or university degrees or anything that could make his life unnecessarily stressful.

I played another poker tournament – single draw – this morning. Barely a dozen hands into the tournament, my 3000 starting stack had shrivelled to 200-odd as I called a shove with a pat 98 only to be shown a 96. So that was that. But no, I built my tiny stack up to over 4000, only for that to whittle down, and in the end I was the victim of a suck-out (my pat 97 got outdrawn) and that really was that. There were a couple of spots where (in hindsight) I was too tight. So much of this game is knowing your opponents.