Win some-lose some

Been grinding a decent amount this week while back at my parents' house.  I'm back here because my boiler broke down in my flat and the people in charge of organising getting it fixed are pretty imcompetent so these things take a while.  I have to tell the property management people who have to tell an engineer to come round who then tell the property management people what needs doing who tell the landlord the quote for this and after he approves it the work can get underway.  Each one of these processes seems to take a day.  Meanwhile I have a freezing cold flat and no hot water.  The only way to really hurry this process up is to bust peoples balls and phone around constantly to see whats going on but this is also a pain in the ass.  Next time I rent, I won't be doing it with Leaders.

Being back at the 'rents has been good though because I have just been able to concentrate on the grind whereas for some reason in Brighton I always seem to have a bunch of errands to do.  I'm lucky that my parents don't mind me being very lazy and not really contributing to anything in the house.  Poker has gone ok, yesterday I had a good session and really felt like I was playing my A-game, doing stuff like turning made hands into bluffs in spots where I would usually just give up.  Unfortunately, I had a pretty bad session today where I may have made a couple of mistakes.  These mistakes arn't half as bad as ones I see other regs making so thats reassuring.  I predict that 2011 will be the year that certain regs who have previously made a lot of money on pkr don't make any.


Recently a lot of the poker community has been really intrigued by the Ashman bet that went down recently where he attempted to run 70 miles in 24 hours.  For a very detailed explanation of exactly what happened check these two blog entries: One / Two.  To someone with a low level of fitness like myself this seems impossible but when I asked my mum (who can run a sub four-hour marathon) she thought his chances of winning were very good considering he is a very fit individual who runs regularly.  I was more interested in the concept of two friends betting massive amounts of money (and very significant to them), in circumstances where one of them could have endangered his health.  I always think bets are supposed to be fun, or with an intention to do something positive, like quitting smoking for example.  Really sweating the result because the money won or lost is so significant to you is not fun in my opinion, and I wouldn't enjoy winning much either because you will have the bitter feeling of seeing a friend lose a lot of money.  Haseeb acknowledges that it was a bad idea in the end, though I don't agree with some of his reasons for going ahead with it in the first place.

I'm going to see Arsenal vs Barcelona on Wednesday with free tickets from pkr.  Though I'm a Spurs fan, it will be a good opportunity to see the best club team in the world, BARCELONA (after Spurs of course).  I read this interesting interview with Xavi in the Guardian today.  The guy's just a football genius, and has a lot of insightful things to say.