Rolled On The River

I took some time off to finish a flash animation for a competition and head away for work, where I had no access to the net, hell the town only had one phone. But now I’m back in suburbia, and I’ve been reading Small Stakes No Limit Hold’em again to refresh and get my head back where it needs to be. Not much to update really, competition gets judged on Tuesday, though I know I won’t win it, there were entries that were far better than mine, and that’s not even being modest, oh well!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I have a diploma in digital media, which doesn’t mean much, but it does mean I’m pretty handy in making cartoons, comics and animations, which is a hobby of mine (I made the little Cake Poker advertisement on the right hand side of the blog). I promised myself, after many half completed projects that I would make a submission for Madness Day, a flash animation competition run by Newgrounds.com with cash prizes. The entries are due on the 22nd of september (10 days), and I realised I’m heading away for work on the 20th. We have to run powerlines through some hillbilly outback town, a job which we have to live away from home for a few days, and won’t have access to the internet.

So after setting myself up with a huge project it dawned on me that I had little over a week to do roughly 80 hours of animating so I kinda freaked out. I’ve made myself unavailable for any afternoon overtime at work, and requested to put poker study on the backburner for this time period. So you’ll have to forgive me if my blogs are spaced a little wider for the time being.

If anyone is interested, I’ll link my submission when it’s submitted.

I live in Australia, so there’s a pretty big time difference between me and the average poker player, therefore, there’s a big time difference between me and the average fish. I don’t like to make assumptions on such a vast populace… well, that’s a lie, I actually enjoy doing it, but that’s beside the point. I think fish work during the day and play during the night, when the average person has free time, this is bad for me. My time zone runs up through New guinea and the eastern extremities of Russia, so when I finish work, come home and play poker, the fish around the globe are generally doing something else, namely sleeping or working. Skelm has the luxury (I’m gonna cop shit for this) of playing during the morning which pits him against those around the world most likely not playing poker for a living.

I can attribute this to a small amount of my slow progression, as I’m generally up on the weekends and break-even/down throughout the week, HEM tells me the tables are horrible, but I still have to play since I have a 5 or so hour gap between work finishing and when I need to get my 4-6 hours sleep. My other option is not playing during the week, which is unnacceptable since I often have to work on weekends, and sometimes, on rare occasion, go out and enjoy life.

Speaking of enjoying my life, I went to a buck’s party for my friend Ben yesterday, which began with a solid 5 hours of paintball, followed by a game of poker (a serious game mind you, we even removed the Uno cards from the deck), a strip club dinner, and a night club afterwards. Quite an enjoyable experience with what few friends I have in this state, got many photos and had a great time. But it did cause me to miss another day of my Iron Man challenge, and the Saturday morning games (which are Friday evening for the western hemisphere), so I’m a little upset.

Thanks for those couple of guys who took the time out to leave comments on the blog too, appreciate that.

I don’t really tilt, well, I haven’t yet. I think the reason why I don’t is because it’s been drilled into me from day one. ‘This is an emotional game, it will fuck with your mind.’ Tilting is spoken about like it’s an inevitable part of the game, that even though you know your decision was correct, the outcome was against you, therefore you should be angry. Since so much of my time playing has been with Skelm, learning from his decisions and his guidance I guess I would feel like a dick if I got angry, he has played many many more hands than me, had downswings longer than my career (hands-wise), anything I had to say in anger would seem petty and irrelevant.

It’s been throwing me around like a ragdoll lately, still going up and down, hovering around the one spot for thousands of hands, but I find no reason to get angry, as each time I log on, I’m slightly better than the last time, my decisions are that much clearer, and I know there’s money out there to be made.