Alkmaar

Our first stop in the Netherlands was Alkmaar, a small city in North Holland. The town itself was charming enough, but mostly it served as a base for making a few day trips in the region. The most famous thing about Alkmaar is probably its cheese market, where men in traditional clothing run around carrying huge wheels of cheese out into a market square. It’s no longer a real market – purely a tourist attraction – and it’s extremely boring. There is some neat stuff to see around the town, though:

The view from our hotel

That's not a canal - it's a moat!

A narrow sidestreet in Alkmaar (the main streets aren't so scenic - they look more like shopping malls)

Egmond

A short bus ride from Almaar brought us to Egmond, a seaside town that happens also to be within bicycling distance of some lovely tulip fields. We rented bikes and set out, more or less following a designated “Bloemen Route” between vibrantly colored rows of flowers and quaint little houses (and a few gaudier, newly built homes):

Yep, that's a Confederate flag. Your guess is as good as mine...

Bergen

Our next day trip was to another seaside town, this one for its tree-covered dunes. The weather was gray, but the dunes were awesome nonetheless. The trail that we walked started off looking like any old trail through a forest, but soon the trees got shorter and the ground softer. Eventually the trail was more sand than dirt, and the vegetation was mostly shrubs and squat stubborn pines. I remarked that it looked quite a bit like the desert in Utah, to which Emily pointed out the obvious: deserts are in fact dried up seabeds, and the Utah desert used to look quite like this:

In the Netherlands it's socially acceptable to have pankoeken for dinner!

I’m the Hero. Villain is a regular in the mid- to high-stakes 6-handed NLHE games on PokerStars. We’ve played together a fair bit, though I couldn’t tell you what he thinks of me. He’s active in those games, playing something like 25/22 with a 70% Fold to 3-Bet and 20% 4-Bet. Of course it’s open to interpretation how that would translate to the early stages of a 9-handed tournament. Overall he’s a smart player and good hand reader and almost certainly a winner in those rather tough games.

It’s still very early in the tournament, and neither of us has done anything too significant. The table isn’t soft, but it’s probably par for the course in an online $2K.

PokerStars – $2000+$100|30/60 NL – Holdem – 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

BB: 9,290.00
UTG: 9,903.00
UTG+1: 11,228.00
Hero (UTG+2): 10,517.00
MP: 7,131.00
MP+1: 11,411.00
CO: 14,790.00
BTN: 6,490.00
SB: 9,240.00

SB posts SB 30.00, BB posts BB 60.00

Pre Flop: (pot: 90.00) Hero has Qh Qs

UTG raises to 120.00, fold, Hero ?

What’s your play and why? I’m going to accelerate the timeline on this a bit so that it doesn’t take a month to get through it. So post your thoughts, comments, and questions here, and I’ll plan to post my own thoughts along with the full pre-flop action on Thursday.

The weather in Berlin looked iffy, but after nearly an hour on the train to Oranienburg, the sun was shining and the sky was a clear and beautiful blue. Foregoing the bus, we had a nice stroll of about 1.5 miles through quiet suburban streets.

We later learned that prisoners bound for the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen sometimes arrived by more or less the same route, taking a public train from Berlin to Oranienburg where they were paraded through the streets. Residents of the town were encouraged to shout and throw stones.

I stepped off of the sidewalk to make way for an old woman on a bike. As she passed, she gave me a merry “Danke schön!” It was the friendliest interaction we’d had with a random German on the street, most of whom seemed brusque and withdrawn. At the end of the block she dismounted and walked into a house directly across the street from the entrance to the concentration camp cum museum and memorial. How does anyone, let alone some so cheery, live across the street from such a place?

Finding the idea of picnicking in a concentration camp odd, Emily and I sat on a bench at a bus stop just outside and ate the sandwiches we’d purchased at the train station. It turns out that one of the old camp administration buildings is now a cafe, but we weren’t expecting any food to be available inside.

The beautiful weather seemed inappropriate for the place, which is perhaps why I never felt the sense of sheer horror that I expected Sachsenhausen to exude. Many of the original buildings had been demolished as part of a misguided attempt by the GDR (the East German government) to memorialize the camp. Even walking through the execution pit, seeing bullet holes in the wooden embankments, the hooks from which men were hung, and the rusted remains of the cremation furnaces (for the dead only, as far as I know – no indication of anyone burned alive here) was only mildly eerie. The evil of the place felt long ago and far away.

It didn’t help that the audio guide, acquired for three euros in the visitor’s center from a young woman sporting multiple piercings on her face and a low-cut shirt, was so rambling and disorganized. The museum’s current incarnation is relatively young, and much of the audio guide hints at the self-serving nature of the old GDR memorial and at future plans for the museum. After a while we started to get a sense of the political/bureaucratic backstory that might be driving some of this content. In any event, the result was a garbled presentation that failed to drive home the horror of the place.

Nonetheless, I came away from Sachsenhausen with a new appreciation for a few things that I’d only vaguely understood before. At least in the early days of the concentration camps, the Schutztaffel (or SS – the Nazi’s elite paramilitary organization) were apparently to some extent operating “rogue”, ie doing things of which other parts of the Nazi government did not approve. Thus they sometimes had to make murders look like suicides or escape attempts. I’d always thought they were hiding their crimes primarily from the outside world or the judgment of the future, but in one case a camp leader was actually sentenced to a year in prison by a Nazi judge because of the execution of a prisoner.

Consequently there’s a lot that still isn’t known about what exactly happened here. Who was in the camp? Why? What happened to them?

Much of what we do know is owing only to the courage and foresight of extraordinary people. One prisoner, ordered to photograph 10,000 Soviet POWs who were subsequently executed, saved the negatives and smuggled them out of the camp. Others collected and counted the dog tags bearing the POWs’ names. Without these efforts at documentation, the Nazis might have succeeded in hiding their crimes. Probably in some cases they did. It was only in 1996 that large deposits of human ashes were discovered at Sachsenhausen, mixed into the material with which the roads were paved.

In some ways it seems like extraneous information: what moral difference does it make if 60,000 or 70,000 died? If they were shot rather than simply starved or worked to death? Yet these things do make a difference, for there are still perpetrators alive to punish (young men were deliberately hired as guards for the camp because they could be more easily socialized into the depraved culture of the SS) and victims to compensate, when specific crimes can be proven.

The Holocaust was about dehumanization, about treating people as an indistinguishable mass. Now there is a need to undo this, to determine exactly what happened to each and every individual there as a way of affirming the value of that person’s life.

A mistaken check can be expensive. Not only does it cost you the equity you would have accumulated from worse hands that would have called, but it sometimes costs you a much larger third value bet that you could have made on the river had you built the pot on the turn. Checking can also cost you a bet from hands that would have paid off on the turn but not on the river, and in worst case scenarios it can cost you the pot when a hand that would have folded gets to see the river for free.

The May issue of the magazine is just now being published, ten days into the month, because of the hacking and subsequent forum downtime at Two Plus Two. I know that a lot of people are frustrated by this, particularly those with SCOOP and/or WSOP packages to sell on the marketplace, but I actually think that Mason Malmuth et al deserve considerable praise for the decision to shut down the forums rather than put sensitive user information at further risk.

I don’t know enough about such things to estimate how much this downtime is costing them, so let’s just agree that it’s a lot. Two Plus Two gets boatloads of traffic that’s targeted and extremely desirable to a number of companies with big advertising budgets. They voluntarily shut down that money machine to protect our personal information. Yes, it’s the right thing to do and I’d expect nothing less, but it deserves a hat tip all the same.

1. Washer/dryer - This may not seem like a big deal, but we’re carrying virtually everything we’re going to use for three months (minus a few items mailed ahead to our penultimate destination in Germany) on our backs, which means very limited clothing. Nearly everything we have with us is quick drying non-cotton, for ease of washing in hotel sinks, but it’s nice not to have to do that.

2. Monitor - The owner of the apartment agreed that I could use his computer monitor while we’re here, which of course is tremendous for playing poker. It’s especially helpful since the computer I have with me is extremely small. I love how lightweight it is, since remember I have to carry it everywhere on my back, but the small screen does make poker tricky.

3. Rooftop terrace - This was the real selling point. Check out this view:

There are, however, a few drawbacks:

1. Weather – It’s not actually that warm here. The other day I spite-shivered through twenty minutes of reading-on-the-terrace time before throwing in the towel, but truthfully it’s not all that pleasant to sit up there right now.

2. Stairs – Only the top units in the building have rooftop terraces, naturally. So getting to the apartment requires walking up five flights of stairs. And these aren’t just any stairs – they are classically Dutch, meaning narrow and extremely steep.

3. Nationwide Internet Outage – I arrived home about a hour before the scheduled start of Monday’s SCOOP events to find that the internet wasn’t working. After unplugging and re-plugging the modem and router a few times, I called the landlord, who’d apparently been doing the same thing at this apartment. He looked into it further and realized that there were problems all across the country. So I didn’t end up playing the $5, $50, or $500 rebuy events.

Haha , wow- Just now, as I was in the midst of typing, “Here’s hoping for better weather and no more outages!”, all the lights went out in the apartment. Going to investigate now…

OK, turns out it was just a blown fuse. Crazy timing though!