Bittersweet February
First thing’s first as there’s only a chance at hockey Gold every four years, and in 2006 we came up way short: WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!
Sure, we’re proud of all 14 gold medals we won (most ever for our country!), but the only one that really mattered was hockey. Vancouver 2010 would have been a failure had we lost.
Full credit to team USA who whooped us 5-3 in our preliminary game, and had me scared as shit for the entire Gold medal final. That was probably the closest, best game of hockey I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately copyright laws and stuff make it pretty hard to find an embeddable link to a highlights video, but these might help:
NBC Olympics (USA residents only, I believe)
CTV Olympics (see bottom-right, tiny video)
As if the game wasn’t tight enough in the third period, Parise had to put a game-tying, overtime-forcing goal in with just seconds left to keep us all on the edge of our seats. Crosby netted the game-winner in overtime, which the media definitely overplayed unfortunately, taking the focus away from the rest of the team who all played great.
I was at a small bar with friends and as soon as we won we went apeshit, and hit the streets to head downtown. The roads were shut down and FILLED with people. I’ll post video and flicks when I get a chance. It was just nuts, exactly the same feeling I remember from back in 2002 when we won. I ran damn near across the city, high-fiving what seemed like a quarter of Toronto’s population.
My feet hurt, my voice is nearly gone, and somehow I’m up at 9AM today, ready to grind. I guess the early game-time yesterday had me in bed earlier than I thought.
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Poker wasn’t quite as peachy for February.
January saw my winningest month ever, but with the cancellation of one of my rakeback deals, moving to a new site and playing new game types with a new player pool, I had a lot of changes this past month which turned out for the worse. I think the only reason I managed to make my hands/day quota was because of a certain new ‘Turbo poker’. I actually cruised past 33k hands back on the 26th, easily the fastest I’ve ever played that many hands. I took a break for the last few days just because I’ve been running pretty bad, plus the hypnotizing Olympics have been destroying my focus.
I had some really weird stuff happen with respect to my winnings, namely because I was hopping between so many different stakes this month and swings were crazy (click for full pic):
My AIEV is all over the place, most of that being in the first 6k hands, mostly at 200nl/400nl, in which I ran pretty good with some speculative backraises, flop CRAI in 3bet pots with overcards and 4bet shoves with Ax. It’s kind of a strange feeling in that I remember the first 6k hands in super run-good mode, but the rest of the month has been me running into the top of my opponent’s range over and over again. It really felt like another “one of those” months. I definitely had some days at 100nl where I was thinking “how the fuck can I not beat 100nl? Am I any good at this game anymore?” etc etc.
But I digress…March is here, I’m up before 11AM for the first time since early January, and I feel pretty damn good about grinding this month. I spewed a little last month, but did pretty well with respect to my hands/day (which I’m now graphing using OpenOffice.org so I can keep track of my progress).
This month, I think I’ll shoot for 40k hands, maybe more. I could easily have done it this month had I been grinding the last few days instead of resting, but I really think I needed it.
Anyway, I didn’t even play every day of last month and still managed decent numbers. Time to plan my days better and bank some coin. Next month is Mexico afterall!
4 Responses to “Bittersweet February”
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Hey chuck, looks like we both had really shitty February’s. Best of luck in March. You are playing at Full Tilt now?
Best of luck in March, enjoy the new site.
Where you going in Mexico?
GL this month
Thanks guys, good mojo for your March’s too
Schwallie: Mexico isn’t set in stone, and we only have about a week’s time for the trip, so most likely it will be somewhere in/close to resort area in Cancun.