* I started writing this blog on October 1, 2006. You are about to read my 4500th post at kelloggbloggin'.
1. The more I watch poker on television and after watching a documentary movie today, Bet Raise Fold: The Story of Online Poker, I understand even better, in a kind of cold and rational way, free of self-deprecation, why I am not now nor ever will be a good poker player. My mind just doesn't work like a good poker player's: I don't have a good short term memory, I don't have a good understanding of odds, and if I were to arrive at a good understanding of the texture of a board, it would take me about ten hours. My mind works very slowly when it comes to such things.
No problem. I still enjoy playing a little poker at the WSOP site. It's free. No money involved. And I can just mess around. And, well, I'm not very good.
I started watching poker on television back in 2003 during visits to see Mom. In the ensuing years, because I didn't have a television at home in Eugene, I would catch WSOP Main Event telecasts at Mom's during the summer and Russell and Anne invited me over to their house to watch the Main Event final table during the early years of the experiment of playing the final table in November.
On April 15, 20ll, the federal government shut down online poker in the USA.
I didn't understand very well, at the time, just what was going on, but this movie I watched today did two things I liked a lot: through its, well, up close and personal portrayals of Danielle Anderson, Tony Dunst, and Martin Bradstreet, I gained a much clearer understanding of the impact of the online poker bust on professional online players -- for many, it was devastating -- and I gained a much clearer and deeper understanding of the shady enterprise that online poker site Full Tilt Poker was operating.
I also gained a much clearer understanding of how playing online poker accelerated many players' development and improvement. They gained accelerated experience by being able to play mind boggling numbers of hands on any given day. In addition, for the mathematically inclined players, poker software is a tremendous aid in analyzing the possibilities and the odds of countless hands. As a viewer this was all fascinating to me, but as a person who has a casual interest in poker, I can't imagine ingesting or digesting, let alone retaining, all this information.
2. When I was on my walk home from the store on Friday, Jake saw me, roared into the area in front of the Silver Valley Tires car wash, and invited me to join him at the Lounge on Saturday while Carol Lee and other of our women friends went to an event at St. Rita's church.
So, today, around 3:00, I jetted on up to the Lounge. I hadn't visited the Lounge for a couple or three weeks. Cas greeted me, I bellied up to the bar with Jake, enjoyed a couple of Maker Marks on the rocks and Jake and Cas and I got in some first-rate yakkin'. I hadn't seen Cas since the World Series ended and he and I went over our impressions of the last couple of games and Cas reported that Seth was unhappy with several of manager Dave Roberts' decisions, including the pulling of Rich Hill in game 4 and the way he managed the Dodgers' offensive lineup. I'd been missing some good baseball talk and this bit of baseball gabbin' did me a lot of good.
3. I returned home around 5:00 and soon sauntered over to Christy and Everett's for a delicious pork roast, potato, carrot, and gravy, and cabbage salad dinner topped off by a scoop of pumpkin pie ice cream. Christy had her Thanksgiving timeline set down on paper and she and Everett have figured out how to set up tables in their living room for when we have dinner at their house on Thursday afternoon.
For no good reason, I was sleepy after dinner and passed on watching an episode of Chopped and returned home. I tried to get myself interested in watching something on television, but what I really wanted was to go to sleep. By eight o'clock, Maggie, Charly, and I were sound asleep.
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