Murder Mystery Party

I warned you that double post day would probably mean I'd disappear for a while, which I did because I'm swamped with work lately. Well my loyal readers, I'm back (though still swamped w/work) for another instance of my ever interesting blog! And there's more good news, this post won't have anything to do with poker, hehe.

Right, ok, let's get started with the story then. Some friends and I were invited to a murder mystery party yesterday evening. What the hell is that you say? Well it's a party, erm, with a few mysteries and erm...mhhh yeah some murder is involved too. Ok, in case that wasn't clear enough it's a party where everyone is given a character and where a murder has occurred, some role play takes place, some clues are uncovered and at the end you have to find the murderer.

The game takes place in Casablanca in the midst of WWII so everybody had to dress accordingly. That meant men had to wear smart suits and 40's hats and girls had to wear nice dresses and fancy hairdos. Most of the characters are French; the black cat who is the murder victim and who was a very renowned mime artist who in the end turns out to be a Gestapo agent, Monsieur et Madame le Grandbutte, who are the hosts, the former is impotent and his alibi is that he was asleep with his wife at the time of murder while the latter had an affair with practically all the male characters in the game including the black cat with whom she had a daughter raised unknowingly by her current husband and Miss Cherie Boot, a member of the French resistance who turns out to be a guy in a drag. My character was Otto von Pinkelwurst, a German Gestapo agent who hates the French, the mime artists and practically everyone who doesn't sympathize with the Nazis. His backstory is that as a child he was taken to the circus to see the black cat and his performance left him amazed, he went backstage to ask for an autograph but the Black Cat not only refused but he destroyed his autograph book and threatened to kill him. This left him scarred for life and now he's clinically crazy.

As you can imagine, this wide range of characters (I didn't mention all of them, there were maybe 12) led to a very amusing role playing and everyone had a very nice time trying to impersonate their corresponding character. I tried to do a German accent but failed miserably :P

Almost everyone turned up dressed in 40's style, as you can see in the retro pix below, which gave the game an even better atmosphere.

Nalleli, Edgar and Leticia totally gettin' it on 40's style!

Sophie and Danielle; Madame Le Grandbutte and Mme. Cherie Boot, respectively. Party was at James's place, Sophie is his gf and Danielle his sister, forgot to take a picture of him...just as well, he's an ugly mo'fo hehehe

Me and the girls, is that hat cool as hell or what?

All in all it was very nice evening, we got to make something different and after we discovered the murderer we just dedicated ourselves to get pissed! :D

Bye for now.

Poker Poker Poker

What's this? Another post? On the same day? Yes! It's double post day! Since I've been a little busy lately I'm making up for it by posting twice today. Maybe this is a sign that I will finally right the ship and start updating more often. Although it more probably means that I'll disappear for a while after posting so much in a day, hehe.

Anyways, as I told you I've been playing my fair share of poker lately; with some friends and online. It's good fun and I really like it but the online thing isn't really my cup of tea, it's not the same as playing against real people; online you always get the feeling that the computer somehow compensates a lot... and with my friends, well it's fun and all but there's only like 4 or 5 of us who play and to convince them all it's a bit tricky.

The good news is that I found out that there's a poker society at the university. I don't know exactly how often they play but it seems to be every week or every other week. Long story short, they had a tournament yesterday and I decided to go with a couple of my friends.

There was something special going on yesterday though. It wasn't a regular tournament where you buy your chips and then play until you either lose your chips or take everybody else's. Oh no, you could rebuy which made it more interesting. But the really interesting bit wasn't that you could rebuy but that you could rebuy unlimited times during the course of the 1st hour! And each time you rebought you could double rebuy which means you could rebuy double the amount of chips you bought at the beginning.

Entrance fee was placed at a very reasonable price of £1 which bought you 1000 chips. So, in the event that you lost them you could rebuy another 1000 chips or for £2, you could by 2000 (the aforementioned double rebuy). You can imagine what this scheme led to....yeah, complete and absolute madness and anarchy as the world has never seen before! Well not quite, but it was quite crazy out there. Everybody was going all-in (betting all their chips) without even looking at their cards knowing that they'd probably lose but they could alwas rebuy (or double rebuy). Of course the attractiveness of this approach lies in the fact that if you get lucky once when several people called your all-in bet then you'd end up with a monster pile of chips. Then again, you could probably lose that stack again quite quickly. One of these double-rebuying-jackasses was in my table and he decided to go all-in on almost any hand no matter what he had. As you might've already guessed he spent quite a few quid, 26 to be exact, and he ended up getting knocked out just right after the hour of rebuys was over.

When the rebuys ended the real poker started, if you had more than 1000 chips you could choose to add-on 1000 more for £1 and if you had no chips you could buy at most 2000 (£2) . When all was said and done there were £211 available as prize money. Taking into account that we were around 30 people, the average money invested per player was around £7 (or 3 double rebuys per person which is quite a lot).

At the end of all this carnage I managed to survive with almost 11k in chips (after having invested £4; 1000 initial chips + a double rebuy + 1000 add-on chips) ...safely above the average stack of 7k. Although there was a guy in my table with around 20k and another guy in another table had 30k at that point.

Now it was crunch time; you lose, you're out. The players were spread in 3 tables and the number of tables was going to be reduced as the players were knocked out. My 2 friends didn't make the cut from 3 tables to 2 and they had to call it a night. I on the other hand, was a bit luckier and made the 1st cut, where arounds 18 players were left. The number of players eventually boiled down to 10 and bingo! Final table came up, and I was still alive :D

I haven't mentioned how the prize money was going to be spread. 5 places were payed; 1st prize took around £60, 2nd took £50 and so on up to 5th place who took £20.

Whilst in the final table my stack was as high as 35k at one point when I won a huge pot with a pocket pair of aces but it was cut to around 18k when I raised a couple of times and someone went all-in on me and I had to fold my hand. Players were slowly getting knocked out and by the time 7 little piggies were left I was still counting myself amongst them.

Then, of course, came the demise...the blinds (which started at an innocent 25-50 level) were already at the 1500-3000 level and I happened to be in the big blind, ie, I had already committed 3000 chips + the ante which was 200. Everything was going alright, everybody was folding and shit 'til this guy raised it to 15k. This particular guy was in my 1st table (4 of the last 7 players were from my original table btw) and I had noticed that he was pretty tight, meaning that he usually only played when he had a legit hand, and I'd find out moments later that he
indeed had one. So the guy raised to 15k and everybody else folded which left only me tryting to defend my stupid big blind (remember I only had 18k at that point, which while a good stack on its own had me around 5th or 6th in the table at that point). I decided that 17% (3k) of my stack was well worth defending (I wouldn't have called if I wasn't on the blind, mind you) and although I pretty much knew this guy had a hand I felt I had to take a risk with my A 9 (I had folded A 4 twice in earlier hands) so I went all-in. He quickly called, since he only had to throw in an extra 3k, and showed a pair of Jacks, J J.

So it came down to that, a coin flip...he was probably the favorite to win but not by a lot (it was around 55% to 45% in his favor). I mean, I only needed the ace, right? Well it wasn't to be; the flop came 8 10 10, so far so shit, turn was another 8 which left me only with 3 outs, ie, the 3 A's left in the deck (and who knows, someone might have folded one) . River came and took all my chips with it, it was a fuckin' 9 which made me 3 pair! Make that 2 pair, 9's and 10's. My opponent's J's were enough to beat that and so I was out in 7th place, so close yet so so far from payday.

I can't help but think that if only had folded I might have cashed-in, but I guess if I was in the same situation again I'd probably play it exactly the same way.

All in all it wasn't a bad experience, it was my first tournament with more than 5 people and I made it to the final table and quite close to being in the money.

So watch out bitches coz here I come and I'm not plannin' on finishing 7th next time! Though, havin' said that, I'll probably finish 30th :S

Víctor

p.s. Stop touching yourself and leave a comment...

Dodgeball Update

Hey guys, so as I told you in one of my earlier posts a group of people from Manchester university, in which me and some of my friends were included, formed a team to play in the national tournament in Halifax last month.
We did well but actually not as well as we would have wanted to, though for the 1st time playin' together I think we did a good job overall.
It took us one hour by train to get to Halifax plus a half an hour walk to the site of the tourney which was a high school. We had to walk because it was a sunday and buses were nowhere to be found. It was cold too, I remember checking the weather forecast and it said we were at -4 or something like that.
When we finally got there we registered and the guys in charge of the organisation told us that there where a total of 13 teams divided into 2 groups of 6 and 7 teams respectively. We got drawn on the 6-team group.
After that, the action got under way. Our first match was a complete disaster! We played the guys from Staffordshire Uni and I dunno what happened, I guess we just weren't clicking as a team since it was the 1st match we played together. The matches were to best of 5 games and at one point we were losing 4-0 then we finally decided to show up and won the last game ending the hammering at 4-1.
Next up we played against another university team, which one? I can't remember the name, but we finally got clickin' and beat'em 4-1. The next 2 matches we also won, beating one of the other staff uni teams 3-2 and some guy who called themselves balls of steel 4-1. Our final game was against Artful dodgers, a bunch of 16-17 year old brats who were actually pretty good, in fact they were the defending champs from last tournament held in Milton Keynes last november. We gave'em a run for their money (we were actually 2-1 up) but they ended up beating us 3-2.
After the group phase was completed, the top 4 teams from each group qualified to the quarterfinals. We qualified in 3rd place and were drawn to play the 2nd from the other group; Baby Ballet a group of overgrown rugby players in tight shirts tryin' to play dodgeball. They turned out to be quite tough and even though we took the 1st game they then took the next 3 thus knockin' us out of the tournament. They went on to lose to Staffs Uni's 1st team in the semis and they all the way beating the defending champion lil' brats, Artful Dodgers in the final.
So that's how our first dodgeball adventure ended. As I said before, I think we made a good effort and hopefully we'll get another shot at trying to be national champs ;)

St. Valentine's Day...

...sux ass!!! It always has and it always will, period. It's all about marketing + phoney sentimentalism + shitty hallmark cards. You shouldn't need to be told when to let people know you appreciate them, you can do that any freakin' day if you freakin' feel like it.

Call me a bitter motherfucker, but deep down you know I'm right.

Anyways, no that that's outta the way, let me know what you think about st. val's. Me? I'm just gonna 'celebrate' playing some poker tonite.

Víctor

p.s. I'll be posting something more copious soon I promise. It's only that at this particular moment I'm kinda busy.

Destination Germany!

Over the weekend my flatmates and I were informed that our application for world cup tickets was successful! We applied for 7 matches and guess how many we got? Yes, just one. But hey, at least it's the best one out of the 7 and it could be worse, many of my friends didn't get any.

They gave us tix for the round of 16, match 52, Sunday the 25th of June in Nuremberg; Winner of Group D (Mexico's group) v Runner-up of group C (most probably the Netherlands or Argentina). Although with my luck we'll probably end up watching Iran v Côte d'Ivoire hehe.

So there you have it, we're already looking for flights since prices are surely going to skyrocket any day now. Now it's up to 'La Selección' not to let us down and win the friggin' group. After all, they only have to beat Portugal, that's doable, right?...Right?

Nos vamos al mundial, nos vamos al mundial!

Víctor

Poker face

I'm writing this after a night out in town, it's quite late and I'm pretty tired but I felt like posting something so excuse me if I misspell something or if I simply don't make sense and get over it you ingrates! (Just kidding hehe I wouldn't dare offend you my loyal readers ;)) The shitty part is that I had to queue for nearly 2 hours to get to the fuckin' place, I was there on my own and it was freezin' cold. The not-so-shitty part is that I met some interesting people in the process. I met a couple of half drunken girls, one from Finland and one from Windsor, they were good fun but they ended up cutting the line coz they knew the bouncer. Then I met some mexican girls I already knew but with whom I didn't speak all that much so the queue helped us (or better put, forced us) to socialize. I also met many spanish people along the way and some german dudes and dudettes. In fact, I think I may have had more fun whilst queuing than when I actually (and finally) entered the club.

Anyways, I'm starting to ramble... I think the original motivation of my post was to say something about my venturing into the mysterious territories of online poker. Oh yeah, that's what it was, so here goes.

As you may or may not know I'm kind of a competitive person by nature. I love to play any type of board game (dominoes, poker, risk, rummy, battleship, you name it) and beat the crap out of anybody who might be playin' against me, and I must say I'm actually pretty good at it, maybe because I sometimes take it to seriously and I'm stubborn enough to master the game or simply because the people playin' against me just don't give a rat's ass if they win or lose, personally I like to think that is the former but who knows.

Also, you might have noticed lately that poker, in particular texas hold'em, has become pretty big especially in the states and in the little island they like to call britain the craze has caught on as well.

Motivated by the fact that I've won a couple of pesos and pounds over the last month playin' poker with my friends and my aforementioned competitiveness, I decided to create an account to play online and kick some virtual butt. Signing up and depositing money into your account it's pretty easy peasy (after all the bastards are after your money) and once you do that, on you go! You're ready to get yourself some money! Turns out you can even qualify to a real life poker tourney, with thousands of pouds in prizes, by playin' online satellites which only cost 2 usd. I've been tryin' to win one of these satellites but at the moment of writing still haven't been able to, close as I may have come.
What I did win though was a welcome-to-our-site-we'll-let-you-play-this-one-for-free-but-after
-that-you-must-surrender-your-soul-to-us kind of tournament. It was a free tournament for players that had signed up at most one week before. I said 'What the heck, it's free so I might as well play it' and out of the 51 good for nothing loafers that entered I came out the victor (clever, huh?) winning a grand prize of 90 usd. That was pretty cool at the moment and I was very excited until I found out that the stupid site didn't like the fact that I won and now it's out to get me. All that's left of the 90 dollars is something like 21, the rest I've dilapidated on satellites to try to get to the stupid british poker open and other tourneys. But you can bet your ass that I'll spend the rest of my bounty (and perhaps even more) tryin' to do it and get on national tv! :D

So there you have it, if you play poker online you don't require to have a good poker face since nobody else can see you but you'll certainly never become rich unless you play against carbon-based life forms and not the silicon-based ones that can bend the odds in favour of whoever they feel like bending them. Damn computers! Orwell was right! (Have you seen that AOL ad?)

Victor

p.s. I didn't like this post at all, I hope that if someone reads it it doesn't come off as crappy as I think it is. But an update is an update, innit? And if you don't like it, well...go read my to kill a mockingbird post, I think that it's the less vain and better written outta the 4 I've done.

p.s. Leave comments! Yes you! Don't act dumb ... ¬_¬