by 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.
