A Poker Post, just like a promised..

I've got a couple of hands that have been plaguing me from a couple of live tourneys this week. First we'll start with Thursday night in a double chance tourney.

Blinds: 100-200
Average: 12000

Me: 13000 chips, played like 5 hands all night incl KK, AQ and 99 and won smallish pots with them, nothing spectacular, but everyone can see I'm playing much tighter than usual. I also passed QQ after I raised and got shoved on and a caller after the raiser's hands couldn't stop shaking. I passed that face up and watched AA destroy AK.

V1: immediately too my left, not a reg, and don't know him at all but seems fairly solid but open to silliness like calling 3 bullets with 2nd pair medium kicker. Has about 18000.

V2: 14500 -- Chris is a reg and is a decent player but can be far too aggressive at times and this tends to cost him if he can't outflop people. Doesn't like to fold when he has chips in the pot or is on the button (like in this hand) and will squueze/steal from the blinds a lot if there are a few limpers (as there tend to be in the early levels of a tournament -- we're at level 4.)

I'm UTG, V1 is UTG+1 and V2 is OTB.

I have As Ks and raise the 700.
V1 thinks for 5 secs and flat calls.
V2 calls on the button and the blinds fold.

Pot: 2400

Flop:

9c Ts Js

That's about as perfect a flop I can hit with my hand that doesn't contain an A or a K.

I decide to bet 1500. Q1: should I check, bet more, or bet less?

I'm (almost) immediately min raised to 3000 by V1.

V2 thinks for 15 seconds and announces all in.

Actions back to me. My options are call (v2 covers) or fold. What should I do? I know I'm behind, but by how much? I figure I have 3 Queens and 9 spades in the deck (assuming V1 and V2 don't have spades and queens...).

Any thoughts on what any of them had?

Will post second hand later.

Language Fun

Watching people in the office trying to speak various language versions of 'call back tomorrow' is always fun and almost certainly involves people getting the customer even more and more confused.

Ha

Fun Customer Times

Me: Hi [Customer], how can I help?

Customer: This is your problem, fix it.

Me: What seems to be the problem?

Customer: There's no money in my PayPal account!! My bank won't put it there!!

Me: and how can I help with that?

Customer: well you can help me so I can buy things from you.

Me: Ok, [Customer], and how exactly can I do that, bearing in mind I neither work for PayPal, nor your bank?

Customer: Well, couldn't you do it for me?

Me: Erm.....well....

Customer: Nevermind, you're providing me with terrible service. Good day! *click*

Me: Heh?

I hope you enjoy this little insight into every call I ever take.

I'm not the only one with zero momentum, obviously

So yeah, clearly I'm not the only one because I've come into work to find that nobody has actually done any work over the weekend, leaving me to play catch-up and hold people's hand through so very simple processes. More than that, I've got an office full of staff who are asking me questions they should know the answer to. I wouldn't care, but the answers are well documented and accessible and I seem to be getting the same questions all the time, e.g. "how do I do this thing that I learned on the first day of work over a year ago?" Thanks.

FFS. It would be fucking marvelous to get 5 minutes peace to play catch up on the weekend work, but I'm doubting that's going to happen.

QWOP..

QWOP may be the most additively infuriating flash based game ever made. My current best is 50.1m, can you do better?

Find out here.

I'll buy a beer for the first person to do better than 50.1m.

Gibraltar? WTF?

WTF?!?

So I just found out that a friend of mine has moved to Gibraltar, approximately 5 weeks after he moved.

This is making me think about the effort that I make to connect with people these days. It's certainly true that I'm more likely to @reply or post on someone's facebook wall than I am to send a good old fashioned email. The logical extension of my failure to communicate more broadly is that because my friend uses neither Twitter nor Facebook, I had one of those 'WTF?!?!' moments when I found out. Kudos to him, he's shipped a great job out there and is obviously loving every second of it.

From Gibraltar to Vienna...

Another reason this news is making me think is because I've been wanting to move to Vienna for almost a year now, and had it all set up to move this October; until life kicked me unequivocally in the balls. The plan is now to move either in March, or in October 2010. If you've never been to Vienna - GO! It's the coolest city on the planet, and it's where I feel at home.

What I used to think...

I had always thought that the after University I'd become some sort of hotshot lawyer, but then I realised that I didn't give a shit about most of the issues teetering on the current bleeding edge of the legal world. As a consequence, never wanting form a career in anything that I can't put 100% of myself into, I decided that I couldn't be a lawyer. After 4 years, and a fuckload of student debt, I ended up with a law degree that I didn't want. Excellent.

So what I did instead...

Instead of being a lawyer, or some other corporate suit type, I decided to take some time and think about what I really wanted. When I couldn't decide, but still needed money to buy beer and otherwise support myself, I took a job working in a call centre managing a customer service team. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt that the swings between 'shittiest job ever' and 'the greatest job in the world' are immense. The thing that makes the difference is the people. Some of the people I work with are the funniest, most genuine, compassionate, caring, wonderful and downright fucking fantastic people in the entire world. But they aren't enough to keep me here. More than anything, after 2 years, I'm bored, and as I said previously, I'm stuck.

What I think now...

Right now I think the hope is that getting out of the North East might give my life some traction again. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love the North East, it's where I'm from, it's part of who I am and I'm incredibly proud to be a Geordie; but the sad fact remains that there just aren't the opportunities to develop and grow here like there are in other parts of the country. Before this turns into North vs South or some other bland politico-shite of the form often spouted by the equally uninformed tossers on both Newsnight and Jeremy Kyle; I should say that, for me, I don't think there's any place in England that has the right mix for me to grow and develop. It might well be that I never get to Vienna, maybe. One thing is for certain though, I feel that now is the time to be gaining traction, moving forward and finding that élan which has been gone for so long.

Tokio Hotel

For the uninitiated, otherwise known as the blessed, Tokio Hotel are a terrifically awful German teen angsty emo band that apparently are trying to conquer the world.

I say this because currently they are a trending topic on Twitter -- I suppose this is in connection with promotion for their newest album, Humanoid, released recently.

The prospect that the entire world is duped into believing that the the extent of German music is Rammstein and the Tokio Twerps causes me great concern.

For the record, then, there is a lot more that German Language music has to offer. Point your browser at one of the following which should be enough to convince you:

Silbermond

Wir Sind Helden

Xavier Naidoo

Still not convinced? OK, OK, here's a classic:

Nena - 99 Luftballons

The most happy song in the world? Probably...

Lost Momentum

So, welcome to my blog.

'À la recherche de l'élan perdu' translates as 'in search of lost momentum'. It's a particularly telling title because, 2 years after graduating from University, I'm still in the same job, still living in the area I grew up, and still monstrously bored. More than that, I feel stuck; almost on the verge of having an utterly clichéd (mid-) life crisis -- which I'd be far too young to pull off properly.

I'm hoping that blogging about my experiences of how I lost my momentum in life will help me regain it. I'm hoping that I can find that force, that classic impulse, which will move me forward.

So what should you expect?

Well. I'm fairly multilingual so expect to see the odd post in French, German, Dutch or some equally impossible language.

I'm a fan of the (in)glorious Newcastle United FC so I expect I'll post about them. Frequently, during the Championship season.

I play cards. I'm not a bad player, but not good enough that I don't have to work. I'll post about that from time to time.

I'm almost entirely computer dumb. That's like saying that I can recognise all of the parts of the web, but I couldn't reproduce them, even if my life depended on it. In that respect, don't expect much more than very basic formatting on my posts.

My thoughts wander, randomly, all the time. I'll vaguely recall past memories and future possibilities, so coherence is probably not my strong suit. (a slight nod to Marcel Proust, author of the marvelous 'À la recherche du temps perdu' whose title I've nicked). You can expect that I'll start having a very inconsistent and, frankly, crap, writing style, and after a time I'll reach the level of complete and utter mediocrity where I shall remain till the end of my days.

For now, I suppose that's enough of an introduction.

Peace,