Month: January 2021

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
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Know-alls and have-alls

January 27, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Windows 10 is starting to infuriate me. When it wakes up from sleep mode, I find that all my programs have shut down. I can’t work like this. I’ve googled things and tweaked a few settings, but I bet it’ll make no difference.

There’s one problem, if problem is the right word, that I keep running into in my lessons. The Man (and it usually is a man) Who Knows Everything. Who knows what he wants and how to get it. I find these people offputting, and my usual motivation to help them isn’t quite there, partly because I feel unable to help them anyway. They also seem to have everything. They’re already winning. What motivation is there to help one of life’s winners to win by even more? The poker guy, who has disappeared from the scene, was a bit like that. The super-smart 18-year-old who I saw on Saturday is like that. Lessons with him are never easy. This time I went through some expressions like “money for old rope” and “kick the bucket”. The rest of the time he told me about the world of gaming and anime that he inhabits. When I asked him whether he was a risk-taker, he said he played gacha, so obviously yes. Umm, what’s gacha when it’s at home? A kind of Japanese toy vending machine, from what I can tell, that he must play in a virtual form. It didn’t occur to him that I might not know what what the hell he was talking about.

On Friday I had a lesson with the 31-year-old guy who lives on the outskirts of London. He and his wife moved there from Bucharest almost three years ago, and they have an 18-month-old son whose little brother or sister is on the way. They’d just put an offer in for a house. The first one they looked at. Nearly £600,000. As you do when you’ve come from Romania. Heaven knows where their money has come from. I’m thinking he might not need me either.

This all reminds me of the maths tuition I did in Auckland in 2010. It was an eye-opener to see the insides of the houses where these teenagers lived. I’m supposed to get excited about pushing your privileged Oliver or Olivia from Excellence to Excellence Plus, am I? They weren’t all like that, of course, and the exceptions were where most of my motivation lay. Here, so far, the Men Who Know and Have Everything are the exceptions, and long may that remain so.

On Sunday I had a session with the 13-year-old boy who lives in Dumbrăvița, which is joined on to Timișoara, and is currently in lockdown for the second time since the autumn. Here in Timișoara we’ve been lockdown-free since May. The prevalence of Covid in Dumbrăvița has been consistently higher than here, and I think I know why. By Romanian standards, Dumbrăvița is rich. I’ve heard that it’s Romania’s second-richest suburb. It’s all BMWs and Audis, with the occasional Porsche and even a Maserati thrown in. When you go to Dumbrăvița it’s mostly dead. They’re all jet-setting and doing business deals just like this boy’s dad does in Hong Kong. They’re highly economically active. Most of Romania isn’t like that at all, and that’s why (I reckon) Covid hasn’t quite been the disaster in Romania (yet) that it’s been in western Europe.

The Covid situation in the UK is still dreadful. More than 1600 deaths have been reported today; the overall death toll is now in six figures. My brother, whose optimism has evaporated, said we might all be facing lockdowns for the rest of our lives. His wife had her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. In Romania we now have five cases of the UK variant. If that takes over – and why won’t it? – we really will be in deep doo-doo here.

It was a huge relief to see Joe Biden’s inauguration go off without a hitch, after what happened two weeks earlier. President Biden. Sounds great. The near-octogenarian has his work cut out but I’m sure he’ll give it a damn good go. I’ve now been in Romania for three US presidents and six Romanian prime ministers.

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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.
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The big chill

January 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The snow I mentioned last time pretty much melted away, but now the white stuff is coming down properly.

Dad sent me a great video about Fen skating. The Fens – the pancake-flat part of East Anglia which I lived on the edge of – regularly floods and sometimes freezes. Before the half-arsed winters we get now, the meadows might be frozen for weeks, and people would skate on them, especially Bury Fen, near Earith where my aunt lives. I had a go once or twice, but was just about talent-free. The Fen skating tradition dates back at least a couple of centuries, and racing was serious business that drew bumper crowds. The men in the video are getting on a bit now; they reminisced about the famous winter of 1962-63 and three successive harsh winters in the 1980s – people came in their thousands then to participate or watch. They said that another deep freeze could revitalise the tradition, but I’m not so sure. Even the eighties are a world away now. Back in Romania, temperatures are forecast to dip into the double-figure negatives, so the Bega might freeze as it did during my first winter here. There was even ice fishing.

I watched the replay of Dad’s cousin’s funeral. The video only lasted half an hour, and a good part of that was music before and after the service. I couldn’t see very much. He was a potter, and much of the focus was on the relative fame he achieved in that sphere. He was a PR man, he gave lessons, he talked pots, he was all over social media, he met the great and the good of the potting world on his travels, and he blew his own trumpet loud and often. The complete opposite of my father, in other words, who can’t stand any of that stuff (you can see where I get it from) and has always preferred to let his paintings speak. He was described in the service as being curmudgeonly, cantankerous, and always right. Surly is the word I would use. I think he was actually quite friendly though if you got to know him (I never really did).

Coronavirus deaths in the UK have reached 100,000. Yesterday 1562 deaths were recorded. (On a per capita basis, this is equivalent to almost 8000 in the US.) People are often dying alone. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries. This level of excess death hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. It’s a tragic toll.

Last night’s Musicorama was dedicated to Joan Baez, who has just turned 80. What a voice, and what an incredible life she has led inside and outside of music. In the winter of 2015, just before I started this blog, I found myself playing Diamonds and Rust over and over. On Monday’s show that a variety of artists including Sting. Why do I like his All This Time so much, I wondered. Ahh, because it sounds so much like Paul Simon.

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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.

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The good guys

January 2, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

We literally rang in the new year a few minutes after my last post, as the cathedral bells chimed like billy-o. A few people set off fireworks from their gardens but the streets were empty; there was an 11pm curfew. Shortly afterwards, the eleven-year-old boy I teach sent me a lovely text to wish me a happy new year.

I saw this coronavirus logo today. I thought it was clever and effective:

This new Covid variant is more transmissible, so the threshold for herd immunity will be higher. We all need to take the vaccine – it’s that simple – but scarily many people will refuse. I saw some eye-popping figures from a survey in France. Last week the woman in Maramureș said she wouldn’t be taking the vaccine, that it’s bad to wear a mask unless you know you’re infectious (?!?!), and that the virus is harmless unless you’re already very sick beforehand and it doesn’t kill anyone who wouldn’t have died soon anyway. Sorry, but that isn’t true. “My English isn’t very good. I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.” No, you’ve got your points across perfectly well. It’s just that you’re talking utter dangerous bollocks. And she’s training to be a nurse, would you believe. My hope is that when people that the vaccine isn’t causing severe side effects, they’ll eventually fall in line and take it themselves.

The renowned music-and-poker guy I mentioned yesterday goes by the name of Steve Albini. He seems a thoroughly good guy. I wouldn’t mind being him, I think. Another good guy is a friend from Wellington who I thought might have blipped off the radar for good, but it was a real pleasure when he replied to my Christmas email. I hope we can stay in touch.

I visited the mall very briefly yesterday. Part of the reason I don’t like modern malls (Covid or not) is their slickness. I realise I don’t do slick. For instance, just before Christmas I watched a live online broadcast of the “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn, where the two planets merged in the same line of sight. The commentator was Italian, and his English was rudimentary, but he had a passion for astronomy that came across more fully because of his imperfect English. (Some things I prefer to be slick. Public transport. Online banking and payments. In fact all service industries in general. But otherwise I’m happy for things to be more imperfect and authentic.)

I looked at some of my stats from last night’s badugi tournament. I won 23 out of 43 showdowns, a little over half, but I went just 3-from-11 when we got heads-up. The heads-up part lasted all of 31 hands; I could have sworn it was longer. On Wednesday I played my craziest hand ever at the micro badugi cash tables, crazier than any of the tens of thousands of hands I played back in the day. There were two maniacs at the table, betting and raising until the first three streets were capped. With my hand I had no choice but to come along for a very bumpy ride. I could hardly believe it when the nine of diamonds I spiked on the last draw was enough to give me the $24 six-way pot. When you’re running a small bankroll, a hand like that can make an outsized difference.

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Good riddance to 2020

January 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Minutes left of 2020 in Romania as I write this. (The time stamp will say 1st January 2021. I’ve never moved my blog off New Zealand time; they’re eleven hours ahead of us.)

New Zealand is one of the few places on earth to have a real New Year’s Eve. It’s (yet another) good advert for NZ to see the Sky Tower fireworks beamed across the planet. Sydney managed to have their famous pyrotechnics from the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, even though they’re not out of the Covid woods. And that might be about it. We’ve got the odd banger going off in Timișoara as a write, but the usual organised stuff has been canned, as far as I know.

I’ve just finished second in a badugi tournament, for a profit of $45, after 4½ hours. (Badugi is a kind of poker, my favourite kind of poker, in case you’re wondering.) I survived a pretty dire moment in the second hour, but from then on I steadily chipped up. I pulled off some pat bluffs (not drawing any cards when you don’t have a real hand), which are the coolest, most adrenalin-pumping part of the game. Then when we were down to three I picked off pat bluffs (also known as snows) from both the other two players. When we got heads-up I had an enormous chip lead, but my opponent drew out on me twice when he was all-in, and mounted a comeback. He hit hands, I didn’t, and after quite a long back-and-forth I had to settle for second. So it could have been better, but my bankroll is up to $152.

I recently communicated on a poker forum with a guy from Chicago who’s knowledgeable about all kinds of weird variants, enjoys the game immensely, and is obviously a good player. But I had no idea (until I did a spot of googling) that he was famous. He’s 59, and a long-time production engineer for some of the all-time great indie bands, including Nirvana back in the day. The sound on In Utero, that’s him. He charges very little for his services, hence why he’s always been in such demand. And he’s been in a few successful bands himself (one of which was called Rapeman – I can think of better band names). He’s very outspoken about commercialisation of music, and I don’t blame him. Somehow he’s also an amazing poker player. In 2018 he took down the seven-card stud event at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. And he writes so eloquently. He’s a man of many talents.

Six minutes of the old year to go.