Poker

Family - Life :) - Poker

More house stuff

February 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Thursday night, straight after finishing work (I was really happy with my pair of evening lessons), I called Mum and Dad to ask whether they’d got the house. They didn’t know yet. Mum was being characteristically pessimistic. My “conversation” with Dad descended into a debate about the housing market in which I was probably more than a little dickish. The very subject is a sore point for me, and I’ve been over that several times on this blog already. Then within minutes of getting off the phone, Dad emailed me to say that they’d got it. So they’re going to be busy for the next little while. Dad has mixed feelings I think (they’ve been in their current place 16 years), but if it makes their lives less stressful then I’m all for it.

As for me, I’ll be a homeowner for only the next two days. It’ll feel good to pocket that money, much more of it that I was resigned to getting. Then I can maybe get the ball rolling here. The immigration stuff has stalled for now; I need my landlady to draw up an updated contract to prove that I actually live here legally.

Naomi Osaka won her fourth grand slam title today. Gone are the days of Steffi or Chrissie, or even Serena, hoovering up grand slams. Four is a lot. And this time, she had to fend off two match points against Garbiñe Muguruza in the fourth round. I only watched bits of today’s final, after I’d been knocked out of whichever poker tournament it was. After the match the commentators pointed out that Osaka has yet to taste defeat in a grand slam final and she must be fearless every time she steps on the biggest stage, but how will she fare in front of her own crowd at the Olympics in Tokyo? Seriously guys, fuck the Olympics. We can all live happily without them until 2024.

Four poker tournaments today and I blanked the lot. Either I started well and then hit the wall, or I slammed into the wall right at the beginning. Not to worry; that happens. My bankroll is $280.

Family - Poker

Winning ways

February 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents have put their offer for the house. Seems like a ton of money to me but I’m no expert on this stuff. Or rather, I haven’t a clue. They’ll find out in the next few hours, I expect. The stakes aren’t really that high – if they get it they win, but if they miss out they also win.

Dad diced with disaster again at the weekend. He fell off an unstable stepladder, his big pot of denim blue paint went flying, and so did he. He landed on his back in the grass, narrow missing a large rock.

I had a rare free evening last night, so I played a low buy-in poker tournament, and guess what, I won it. It had 165 entries including rebuys, and I was the last man standing after 4¼ hours. It was good old fixed-limit badugi, my mainstay, and my win came after a very barren run in that tourney. I wound up on tighter tables than usual this time, and played more hands than normal in the timeframe because so many of them ended long before showdown. I was pretty sure I was dead meat well before we entered the money, but when I got almost all-in, my opponent either misread his hand or was clueless, probably the latter. A bit later with a dozen players left, I hit a four-outer on the last draw to survive, meaning I had a 90% chance at that point of instant elimination. I rode my luck a bit from there, though when we got heads-up I was at a small chip disadvantage which became lop-sided when I lost the first few hands of our 62-hand battle. Luckily for me, my opponent wasn’t that great, and I gradually chipped away at him. On the last hand I hit a lovely low spade to make the second nuts – a colossus of a hand – and that was that. Because it was a limit tournament, I didn’t have to worry about knocking people out, and my win netted me an $85 profit. My bankroll is $296, almost twice what I started the month with.

Dad sent me some information about an app for learning Urdu. I don’t have much use for Urdu right now, though it would surely be fascinating. The Urdu script, known as Nastaliq, is difficult to typeset. Because of this, there is an Urdu newspaper called the Musalman, based in Chennai, that is handwritten – calligraphically – to this day. It’s a thing of beauty.

It’s been a slowish start to my work week, but I’ve got ten lessons scheduled for the next two days.

Family - Life :) - Poker

Money talk

February 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents are about to put in an offer on that place in Geraldine. If it’s accepted, they’ll try to sell their current place. (They don’t need to sell it to afford the other one. Must be nice.) If they do get a buyer for their current house, I wonder how many digits they’ll get. To have such affluent parents feels, I don’t know, a bit weird. All that affluence does come with added stress, though. (Years ago I read Oliver James’ depressingly accurate book about that.) Mum, who let’s face it, deals with 80% of the money-related stuff, gets pretty stressed by it all. Dad would be happy if they stayed where they were, but I’m all for the move.

All this talk of properties and money leaves me ice-cold, honestly. Even my brother has an app pinned to his front screen so he can see how much his place has increased in value since breakfast. It was the most liberating thing in the world to teach here and get rewarded with rectangular pieces of polymer with pictures of Romanian artists and writers on them, and then hand those same sheets of polymer to the old man or lady at the market. This is how money is supposed to work. Yeah I know, life is way more complicated than that, financial security is really important, and having a place of your own is hugely beneficial especially as you get older, but there’s a threshold beyond which having more doesn’t achieve a whole lot (apart from boosting your own status, of course, if that matters to you).

I had a shocker of a day on Saturday. Intense sinus pain, or more likely a migraine, and I was up to my eyeballs in paracetamol. Not much else I could do, and it’s all so debilitating. I was still feeling sluggish yesterday (Sunday). My late-night poker tournament on Friday night probably didn’t help. I came second in a pot-limit badugi tournament for a $47 profit. (Nice, and I ran pretty hot for most of that tournament, but the bounty thing keeps killing me. I’m really bad at knocking out other players.) As for the fixed-limit badugi tourneys, I’m going through a dreadful run – I’ve blanked my last ten. My bankroll is currently $210.

Family - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Simplifying life

February 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

We’ve had a mild – spring-like – start to February. I think back to a Saturday in late October, the city enveloped in thick fog, ambulances wailing incessantly, and the very real possibility of Donald Trump’s re-election looming darkly. In spite of two deadly hospital fires in Romania since then, things do seem much less awful now. People are being vaccinated. In the UK, more than eleven million people have now had their first jab, including my aunt and sister-in-law.

I hadn’t used FaceTime video for a while until last Tuesday. Mum, what’s happened to you? She looked shattered and had four cold sores on her lips. (She’s long been prone to them. Stress seems to bring them out.) The 40-degree day had taken it out of her, I think. That, plus all the house-related stuff. They now want to move, maybe as soon as next month. This, and a realisation that they should simplify their lives, has all happened quickly. They’re about to put in a “deadline sale” offer on a place in Geraldine. I’m all for the change. They don’t need the hassle of owning and maintaining multiple properties. I was relieved when they called me from Hampden on Thursday that Mum was back to her usual self.

I FaceTimed my parents again this morning. Dad asked me if I get tired after a big day of lessons. Yes I do! But the tiredness is nothing compared to the feeling I got from working in insurance. This week, during some spare time, I used an Excel macro to try and model a limit poker tournament. In my insurance work I had to use macros and Access and (occasionally) fancier tools to model or analyse this or that, and I kept running into the same problem, that I didn’t care about what I was modelling or analysing, which anyway was only a tiny piece. Where, or indeed if, that piece fitted into the whole picture was mostly unclear to me. If I’d been modelling poker tournaments or tennis tie-breaks or coronavirus cases or elections or flood forecasting (I did that in a job once), things might have been different. (Some people get an almost euphoric high from just using the tool. In fact some practically whack off when they hear those processors whirring away. I’m not one of those people.)

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I cashed in one, finishing fourth of 90 or so, but again (this is a theme) I was hurt by it being a bounty tournament. Though I came back well from being almost dead and buried early on, my short stack meant I couldn’t amass many bounties. I felt I made good decisions throughout all three tournaments, and on all of my bust-out hands I got my money in with the best of it. My bankroll is $163.

Tomorrow morning it’s back to ANAF. Here are some pictures:

A well in Parcul Regina Maria
This well in Piața 700 is out there, man
Well, well, well. This one on Strada Alba Iulia has four taps and is covered in first names
Someone filling up his bidoane (big bottles) outside the church in Iosefin
This place looks haunted
“Don’t stop to read this. Stay healthy.”
This was once where people learnt to bake bread
An old street sign. Strada Iosif Rangheț. The small writing says “militant of the communist front”.
Before and after
Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not interested

February 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Friday was a tricky day. I met my student in the Botanic Park so she could pay me for two weeks’ lessons. I’ve mentioned this woman before on this blog several times. We’ve now had 177 lessons in which English has been second and therapy first. She flirted with me and yet again asked me personal questions about my mental health and illegal drug use (of which there is none, sadly). She’s married (he’s a dick, but makes good money) and has a teenage son, whom I also teach. Whatever she wants, I’m not in the least bit interested. She’s become a pain in the arse. When I see her online on Tuesday I’ll make it clear that any more of that rubbish and it’s game over. No more meetings with either her or her son (which would be a shame – he’s turned into quite an accomplished English speaker during our 108 lessons, and all the computer games he plays have helped too).

Also on Friday I got a surprise letter from the immigration office, written in OK-ish English, saying that yes I can apply for residency because I was registered here prior to Brexit kicking in. I just need to come armed with all the necessary documents. Excellent. But there’s nothing to say what the documents are. So very Romanian. An employment contract? A marriage certificate?! I’m sure I’ll sort it out, and crucially they’ve given me until the end of the year to get everything in place.

It’s been a funny weekend. Bright sunshine yesterday, tipping it down today. I had a good lesson with a different teenage boy this morning – we watched more of the series on the Challenger disaster on Netflix, and got to the end of a long (but very good) grammar book.

I played six poker tournaments over the weekend. They were brutal, every one of them, including the only one I cashed in. So much crashing and burning and colliding with other people’s big hands at just the wrong time. In one of the tournaments (triple draw, which is insanely swingy at the best of times), it felt like being slapped over the head repeatedly with a stinking wet fish for two hours. Imagine doing this stuff as a job, where the stakes are much, much higher. (My ex-student who said he played professionally described it as extremely stressful.) My bankroll is exactly the $152 I began the month with. Yes, even for the month, but it feels far worse.

I’ve changed my preferred well for filling up my water bottles. The water from the Central Park well started to have a brown sediment, maybe caused by the snow. The one in the rose garden, which I went to today, seems to be sediment-free.

I’ve got a new student starting tomorrow, my first in a while.

Update: I’ve just been on the phone to ANZ, to set up a new account for the proceeds of the apartment sale to go into. The guy had to read out a disclaimer statement. As he read it I was thinking, here comes the word, any second now… Ombudsman! Yes! There it goes, what a fantastic word. It’s fun to say, isn’t it?

Life :) - Poker - Romania

Another bad day for Romania

January 30, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tragedy has struck Romania yet again. At around five o’clock this morning, four people burnt to death in the hospital in Bucharest. (Update: a fifth person later died.) This has happened just 2½ months on from the fire in a Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, which cost ten lives. On TV this morning the scene looked so bleak, with the burnt-out husk of a Third World-looking hospital wing while snow was falling all around. There will be plenty of words now. They’ll say it’s human error. Maybe someone plugged the wrong thing into the wrong thing. But they’ll do bugger all to ensure that someone plugging the wrong thing into the wrong thing doesn’t mean that people die. All that making sure costs money that has been siphoned off by god knows who. And they don’t seem to bother with smoke alarms here, let alone sprinkler systems. In the UK, there were campaigns to get everybody to fit smoke alarms back in the eighties, but in many ways the eighties haven’t yet arrived in Romania.

My poker experiment hasn’t been going so well of late. My bankroll has dipped from $224 to $166. I’ve been running like crap, that’s all there is to it. That happens. Maaaybe I’ve been calling down too much – at the stakes I’ve been playing, people bluff only rarely. The biggest problem is that I’m not able or willing to play that much. I work most evenings (the best time to play), and I don’t fancy gawking at a screen for hours when I do that in my job anyway. I’ve got a free day tomorrow (unusually), so I might fire up a few tournaments and see what happens.

I’ve had things to sort out to finalise the sale of my apartment in Wellington. On Thursday I had to call the IRD. Hearing Salmonella Dub while I was on hold really took me back. It’s all so Kiwi and cosmic at the same time. It’s been scorching over there. Mum said that Temuka hit an infernal 40 degrees on Tuesday.

Last Sunday the temperatures hit the teens here in Timișoara, and there were loads of people milling about. If it wasn’t for the masks, you wouldn’t have imagined there was a pandemic. Hmm, this is a cool place, isn’t it? I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live at the moment. I mean central Wellington is fantastic, but if you have the sort of job where you’re stuck in an out-of-town office, there’s kind of no point in being there. I only just found out that the column in the centre of Piața Unirii commemorates the plague that hit the city in 1738-39, killing one in six residents.

The monument to those who died in the plague over 280 years ago
Coronavirus - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Keeping the heat in

January 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s cold. Last night I put the central heating on for the first time this winter. Amazing, really. These great hulking blocks of concrete that were put up during communism are almost unbearably ugly on the outside, but they sure keep the heat in. We also have communal pipes that travel down all eight storeys – there must be a giant boiler somewhere, and one day every year in late October or early November you can hear the water gurgle. My student in Maramureș has taken a break – I hope it’s only a break – and that meant I could visit the supermarket yesterday as it opened at eight. The temperature at that time was minus six. It’s a great time to go because it’s almost empty. The lady at the checkout even had time to compliment me on my choice of spuds (“they’re so good for mashing, but you have to eat the mashed potatoes as soon as you make them”). It’s hard to know what to say (in Romanian!) in reply to something unexpected like that.

Yesterday was a funny day. I managed to get in three poker tournaments. The first was no-limit single draw (just like good old five-card draw, but the worst hand wins). I’d forgotten what a good tournament game that is. With only two rounds of betting, it’s very fast-paced. I finished in fifth place out of 93 runners after 3¼ hours, but only made $10 in profit. That’s because it was a bounty tournament, which means you get rewarded for knocking people out, and your reward is bigger if your victims have previously knocked people out themselves. None of my four scalps had eliminated anybody, so I only received small bounties. In these tournaments there’s a premium on building up a nice big stack, which I almost never had (relative to the field). My badugi tournament was over in a flash, and then I had a go at a turbo no-limit hold ’em tournament with a massive field. The buy-in for that was $22, but for some reason I got it as a freebie. I chipped up fairly well, but made an atrocious play (I think) with pocket jacks and I was soon out the door. My bankroll is now sitting at $220.

At the weekend my cousin showed her disdain for the way corners are being cut (as she saw it) with the vaccine roll-out in the UK. She thinks that delaying the second dose, so twice as many people can get their first dose, compromises the whole thing. Well, news flash, more than a thousand people are dying from Covid there every day. It’s an emergency. Sometimes you really do need to compromise. (Update: 1610 more Covid deaths have been recorded today. It’s Tuesday, which always gives the highest numbers, but still.) I sent her a link to one of John Campbell’s latest videos but I doubt she’ll watch it. I’ve just taken a delivery of six months’ worth of capsules containing zinc and magnesium.

We’ve got Dolly Parton on Musicorama right now.

This is what it looked like outside my window an hour ago:

Life :) - Photos - Poker

Winter scenes

January 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my cousin in Wellington this morning. They’d been down in the South Island and dropped in on my parents. I had a total brain fart when I asked them if they’d been skiing. In January. In New Zealand. Normally that’s why they’d be passing through Geraldine. Their eldest boy is about to fly the nest – next month he’ll be off to Canterbury to study engineering. My parents remarked that he’d developed a distinctly non-Kiwi – almost British – accent, and yes, he picked that up within weeks of starting his expensive school. It was amazing, and a little unsettling, to hear such a sudden change just because he’d started a new school.

Maybe I asked about skiing because I had snow on the brain. We got chunky flakes of the stuff most days last week, only for it to melt away. Now we’ve got a blanket. Walking through fresh snow – crrrunch – is one of life’s pleasures, and one I missed out on in all those years in Auckland and Wellington.

I made $57 in a badugi tournament yesterday, finishing third. It’s the seventh time I’ve cashed in eleven attempts, including three appearances in the top five. (I doubt that sort of strike rate is sustainable.) There were one or two things I might have done differently in hindsight, but I thought I had a pretty good tournament overall. I’m making a lot more player notes than I used to – the same players show up time after time, so knowing what you’re up against is so valuable. After my wander into the endlessly fascinating Iosefin area of Timișoara this afternoon, I gave back a few dollars at the cash tables (a very profitable game on average, but I couldn’t hit a damn thing). My bankroll is currently $214.

Two days left of Trump, we hope.

Here are a few pictures from Iosefin, pre- and mid-snow:

This shop used to sell seeds. There is a seed shop (still doing business) next door.
The kids’ theatre
These two pigeons have found a warm spot. Here is one of many notices warning of falling bits and pieces.
Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Politics

Hard to stay optimistic

January 11, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s hard to stay optimistic at the moment. A month ago I felt that the end just might be in sight. Help was on the way, in the form of vaccines that had been developed at lightning speed. But the virus has morphed into this mutant monster, the vaccines are being rolled out mind-bogglingly slowly, and all that optimism was just a mirage. The UK is nothing short of a disaster zone. Once it was divided into three tiers, then a fourth was added, but the whole country is now officially in Tier Fucked. Leadership is been lamentable since the beginning, when Boris Johnson missed five straight emergency meetings. Daily death tolls – a lagging indicator – are already in four figures. My sister-in-law might not be a podiatrist for much longer. She could soon be a nurse. The south coast got off lightly during the first wave, but now it’s mayhem there, just like everywhere. Here in Romania it’s bad, but nowhere near that bad. However, we’re still dealing with old, non-mutant Covid, as far as I know. If the new variant takes hold (or should I say when?), all hell will break loose. In some ways I’m very lucky. My little job is extremely doable from home, and avoiding people is almost the norm for me.

Then there’s Trump and the riots in Washington where four people were killed. My god, where do you even start with these people? What will happen to Trump now? Could he be removed before the inauguration in ten days’ time? Could he end up in the slammer? Let’s hope so. And Covid is a massive shitshow in the US too, let’s not forget. It already feels a lifetime ago, but Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, horrendous as it was, probably helped the Democrats pick up those two seats in the runoffs, giving them control of the Senate (with Kamala Harris’s casting vote). That’s good news.

I need to stop it with all the disaster (and dystopia) porn on Netflix. Black Mirror, The Social Dilemma, David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (brilliant though it is), and this morning a documentary about the Challenger accident in 1986. I remember that happening when I was in Mrs Stokes’s class in primary school. I liked Mrs Stokes. She died of cancer only three or four years later.

I finished 11th in a badugi tournament tonight, making eight bucks. There were 110 entries, including those who busted out and rebought. On a few occasions I was just one pot away from having a real shot at the final table and the bigger prizes, but it wasn’t to be. (I could easily have missed out entirely, too.) My bankroll is now $162.

Weather update: it’s snowing!

Life :) - Poker

Face time

January 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had my first meaningful face-to-face interaction since October. I met up with my long-term student couple at their modern-looking place in Sânandrei, a picturesque village about 10 km from here. The husband picked me up, and had an unbearable (to me) music station on the radio of his BMW. When I got there, the same station was playing on their 60-odd-inch TV. Shoot me, please. Perhaps they sensed something, because they switched it over to some traditional Romanian music, and then wall-to-wall Christmas music on a loop. Then Andreea gave me the happy news that she’s three months pregnant with a girl.

They’re a normal couple, and normal people scare me slightly, or at least trigger me. Wedding photos are always a toughie. Soon there will be baby photos too. I’d eaten before I left, so I didn’t fancy all the food they brought out, although I tried bits and pieces anyway – salată de boeuf, sarmale, and various prăjituri (cakes). Then it was time to drink. Palincă, or țuică, the distilled stuff that’s made from plums. They gave me some to take home. I’ve now got four bottles of homemade highly alcoholic liquid lying around, two of which look like water and the other two like pee. I really appreciated them inviting me over, but it was nice to get home. Maybe I’ve become so unused to socialising now that almost any amount of it is too much.

Răzvan told me he’d deleted his Facebook the moment the new year started. Good on him. It’s poison. I feel like I’m the only person on the planet not to be hooked by Facebook. When I moved here and I briefly toyed with it because I thought it might help me find work, but I soon found it creepy and a chore. The magnet for me worked the other way – I was repelled, or repulsed, I suppose. And it’s not like I didn’t try. Over the years I set up several accounts but couldn’t make myself actually do Facebook. I think for me it’s simple – I’m not normal. I’ve never ever, not since I was a little boy, had the need to interact with a large group of people all at once, and that’s the whole point of Facebook. (I don’t think this blog counts.) I hated sending emails to groups at work. In fact I couldn’t stand work email full stop. And now I have virtually no work email – isn’t that great?

I now have Netflix. Are they spying on me? What can they determine from my preferences? Or my avatar? The first thing I saw was, naturally, The Social Dilemma. In fact that’s why I subscribed to Netflix. My 13-year-old student had watched the documentary, and if I watched it too I could ask him (hopefully) thought-provoking questions about it. It was well worth watching. I found it telling that parents who work in social media don’t let their kids near the stuff. I used Twitter to inform myself during the early days of Covid, and before and during the US election (I received but hardly ever transmitted), but now I don’t use social media at all. I have WhatsApp, but I only use it like a text message; I’m not in any groups (and I would hate to be). I can get by fine without all of this, but I must be in such a small minority as to wonder if I have something badly wrong with me. I’ve now just seen White Christmas, the episode at the end of season two of Black Mirror. About as disturbing as I expected.

PokerStars use every hook imaginable to entice players into their quick-fire games and quickly generate rake for the site, but I’m not biting. My luck at the tournament tables hasn’t so far transferred to the cash tables where I’m running like total arse (over, admittedly, just a few hundred hands which is nothing). My bankroll is $128.