Monday, October 24, 2005

Happy United Nations Day!

Yes, for those silly gooses who forgot, October 24th is United Nations Day. Here at work we voted 13-0 to order pizza to celebrate, but when it got down to choosing toppings discussions broke down. Pepperoni passed but not by the required two-thirds majority (due to a fracturous sausage contingent). Negotiations continued for the rest of the morning and in the end a compromise was reached (one pepperoni, one sausage and mushroom) but the resolution was defeated when the person who was going to pick it up exercised her veto and ate a Lean Cuisine instead. Alas. Much the same thing happened in Darfur.

If you read the final leaderboard of the Poker Stars Online Blogger Championship (whew) you'll see that perhaps United Nations Day kicked off a day early. The winner and lucky-goddam-bastard easy_wind hails from Massachusetts, but six of the top ten hail from across the pond, four from the UK, one from Spain, one from Norway. We Yanks didn't hold up our end too well, what? Kudos to Otis and Ryan and the rest of the Poker Stars gang for putting on such a fabulous tournament. Let's do this again. And again. And again.

Thinking back to my own play, I now fully realize what "dead money" means. Because "dead money, c'est moi". You can't win a tournament if you're not willing to die, and I wasn't willing. I wanted to play a nice long time, and so I didn't push the edge of the envelope and never got my stack above $6K. I would've needed a load of luck and, and while I didn't get unlucky in a single hand (the only showdown I lost was my last one) I needed a leprauchan to shower me with four-leaf clovers to have a chance. I didn't get that 6K stack until we were down around 350 players and I was at a table with three very deep stacks who liked to gamble. Every pot was raised to the point where I'd be pot-committed if I called and the chip boss would be pot-committed if I went all-in. And if you only have one bullet in your gun, you'd better have really good aim. I ended up 50% on my late-game all-ins, and that wasn't good enough.

Still, a great time. And a good day, as my Steelers made orangey-stripey paste out of the Bengals. After the game Carson Palmer said the Bengals are still the better team. Watch the game film, Carson. Ask your defensive linemen if they agree with your assessment. Silly goose.

posted by Gene @ 11:36 AM   |