“No you’re not, you’re not playing the game right.”

“Yuh-huh, I’m gonna win $100. Look how many words I found.”

“You’re not following the rules. You’re only supposed to scratch off your letters.”

“Look how many words. I’m gonna win $20,000!”

“You can’t win $20,000, you’re 11 years old.”

“I’m ’bout to win $20,000!”

“No, you’re not. Those cards were already scratched off, that’s why someone left them behind.”

This finally quieted the boy for a moment. Then he looked up at his teacher and told her, “Yo, you bad luck!”

__________________________________________

While playing at the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races, I watched a regular with a set get all-in against a flush draw and lose on the river. “You always do this shit to me!” he shouted at the dealer, in such an exaggeratedly angry way that I assumed he must know her and be joking around with her, because how could you actually be that angry at the dealer?

It quickly became clear, from the way the other regulars reacted, that this clown was serious. They tried telling him to call down, but he kept on. “No, you guys don’t see it all. It’s just her, and she’s been doing it to me for months. Stay away from me!” he told the dealer.

Finally an old Chinese man sitting to his right chimed in. “What you yell at her for? She don’t shuffle the card, the machine shuffle the card. She don’t do nothing to you.” You know you have a problem when an old Chinese gambler tells you you’re too superstitious.

For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011- my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

A dark omen in Montreal.

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.

Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.

I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.

The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.

I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.

The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.

Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.

The breath-taking scenery in the Canadian Rockies was just one of the many hardships I faced this year.

Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.

The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.

As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.

Carpet-Bagging the British Columbia Poker Championships

Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.

Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:

Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.

The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

Norm was the first to go. I heard him walking behind my seat on the way to the payout station, muttering about “Ace-Queen against Ace-King”, and that was the last I saw of him. We actually lost three more players in the first half hour, one of whom I eliminated with A4s > KQo.

There were more players than I realized still in the tournament with whom I had no experience. To my left was “Scott”, a hometown hero from Chilliwack with an Irish accent and an inexplicably large cheering section, all of whom were wearing matching “It Could Happen” jackets and shouting loudly whenever he won a pot. Scott eliminated one of the other early departures and was pretty obnoxious about it, getting nervous and calling for cards even as an overwhelming favorite and then celebrating vigorously when his hand held up.

He was also a human tellbox. I don’t see a lot of them, but guys like Scott make me glad that I read Caro’s Book of Tells. His bet sizing gave away a lot, and on top of that he liked to sigh and act frustrated with good hands but play with chips and act strong when he planned to fold.

I’d been hearing about this guy throughout the tournament, though this was my first time sitting with him. Apparently he’d been among the chipleaders throughout the tournament thanks to making an abnormally large number of full houses, often against opponents holding lower full houses. When I’d hit the milliion chip mark the previous day, he was the one guy in the room who still made my stack seem large. Everything about him, from his behavior to his bet sizing to the way he handled his chips, suggested a rank amateur on a heater. This was confirmed when I watched him call an UTG raise from a tight player, then raise a continuation bet and call a shove on an A96 flop. Naturally he was behind Ace-King, a mistake that cost him about a third of his stack. He looked pretty despondent after that.

For my own part, things were going well. In addition to the hand where I eliminated a player, I won a small one by calling a small raise from a young player in the HJ with AJo. I checked and called a bet on a Q82 flop, we both checked a J turn, and then I checked and called a K river. He announced Ace-high and I showed, but in retrospect I think it would have been good to see what he’d raised me with, since I didn’t have much of a feel for how he played.

The next time I tangled post-flop, a guy named Adam who I’d played with previously and knew to be good opened for a small raise from MP. The same kid from last hand called in the CO, and I took a flop with 96s.

It came Kh 9d 6d. Bink. I checked, Adam 40K, the kid folded, and I made it 100K, wanting to give him room to shove his remaining 400K on me with a straight or flush draw. He did shove, and it turned out he had both a straight and a flush draw with 8d 7d. To make matter worse, another player told me, when I turned my cards over, that he folded a 9 and a 6. That left me drawing pretty slim when the Qd came on the turn, and suddenly I was short stacked.

That hand left me with about 350K at 8K/16K/1500. Twentyish BBs is an awkward stack size for stealing, so while I picked up a pot or two, I was mostly card dead and got ground down to about 290K. I hadn’t yet shoved, not on a steal or a resteal, but I was thinking it was about time to start. Then finally, for the first time all tournament, I picked up a pair of Aces. I shoved. Everyone folded.

This was a mistake. I’m not generally a fan of doing shady stuff with AA that you wouldn’t do with any other hand, but in this case my stack wasn’t so small that a min-raise would be suspicious. In fact I’d made a few with only a slightly larger stack before, whereas I’d never open shoved. Moreover, only two of the four players behind me had any chance of picking up on a sizing tell like that and doing anything about it.

Based on how quickly everyone folded, I doubt I would have gotten any action anyway. No one was even curious how much I’d shoved. However, the shove may have influenced what happened next.

I folded for another orbit, grinding my stack back down to where it had been before the Aces. With five minutes left in the level, this was a critical moment for me. Once I paid my blinds and the stakes jumped to 10K/20K/2K, I stood to lose my ability to resteal. After open raising to 40-50K, my opponents would be hard pressed to fold for just 200K more. There was a lot incentive for me to make a move now.

I posted my big blind. I watched Scott look at his cards. No reaction, but he raised to just 35K, which meant he didn’t have a premium hand. Those were worth 3BBs or so to him. I resolved to shove him with anything decent. The action folded to me. I looked down at KTo and announced “All in.”

Without a count or a second thought, Scott said, “Call” and turned over KQo. It was exactly the sort of hand I expected him to have, and while it wasn’t a bad call, it wasn’t one I expected him to make for half his stack, especially not so quickly. He clapped his hands in excitement when he saw that he had me dominated, and again when his Queen came on the flop. Aside from that he was a good sport, though. He offered no further celebration and shook my hand.

A floorman arrived to escort me to the payout station. As we walked, he said to me with a knowing smile, “Wow, he just snap-called you with that King-Queen, huh?

I just checked the results of the tournament. I don’t think I ever played with Rajdeep Pooni, the eventual winner. Adam took 2nd, and Lee, another of the best players I encountered, finished 3rd. Scott final tabled but busted in 9th. My own 13th place finish was good for $15,000. This was a convenient time for a CAD score, because my Canadian bank account was getting low and transferring money from the US usually costs about 3%, so it was nice to get an infusion of local currency. All in all it was a fun tournament and a nice window into the Canadian poker scene.

A nice fall day in Kits

Such a great day! Where to begin? My day actually started around 9:30. Emily was sick and needed some things from the grocery store, so I biked over to the Whole Foods (I told you we’re in the yuppy district!) before leaving for the casino. It was a beautiful morning. The sun is slow to rise this time of year in Vancouver, so the day still had an early morning freshness to it. The sky was clear but the ground wet from the previous day’s rain, so everything sparkled. Our place is on top of a hill, so I could see down past the red and gold trees to downtown and to the mountains beyond.

The lovely ride and crisp air put me in a good mood, and after dropping off the groceries, I walked off smiling to the bus stop. It’s so nice being able to play a live poker tournament but still sleep in your own home and just take public transportation to and from work like any other commuter. I could see the bus approaching from a block away and so sprinted for it, very nearly falling on my face in the process. I really thought it was a sure thing that I was going down face-first, don’t know how I managed to keep my feet. I made it, though, and as I boarded the bus I thought, “Hope that’s the only time I run bad all day.”

It wasn’t, but it was a good day anyway. My table was relatively soft, though my buddy Steve was with me again, our third table together. I was pleased to find Riley on my left. To his left was a mountain of a man named Norm. He was like 6’5 and thickly built, with a weather-beaten face, a full head of shoulder-length hair, a thick mustache, and a rough, booming voice. The best way to picture him is to imagine that George Thorogood and Lunch Lady Doris had a child who was raised by yetis and fed only broken glass. He was intimidating as hell but thankfully very friendly and nice, all around a really cool guy who made the table a lot of fun.

Norm brought a beer to the table with him when we started up at noon, and he had a woman, pretty in an aging barfly sort of way, bringing him beers throughout the day. I asked if she was his wife and he deadpanned, “My wife’s at home,” but later told me he was recently divorced. The drinking generally made him more entertaining. The only drawback was that he liked to bump fists whenever he won a pot, and the more he drank, the harder his bumps got. I was legitimately afraid that his massive fists, easily twice the size of mine, were going to break my fingers.

Riley and Norm were both good enough to agree to pictures, though neither of them came out that well. Steve saw me taking Riley’s picture and said, “What is this, Riley is a celebrity now? Can I take your picture too, Riley?”

“Sure, but don’t jerk off to it.”

“Jesus, why would you say that? Have you done that?”

“Oh ya.”

“To a picture of yourself?”

“To picture of you! I come on your face! Ahahahaha.”

I feel like this just comes across as crude in print, but in person Riley has this impish charisma that makes him seem playful rather than coarse.

The pro’s from CanadaPoker got a much better shot of Riley and Norm than the ones I took with my camera phone:

The day got off to a good start pokerwise. Blinds were 200/4000/300, and I picked up a few smallish pots from short stacks, busting one with AK > AT and another when I min-raised QQ UTG and got two callers, inducing the BB to shove A8s.

I was deep in conversation with Norm when I looked down at my cards and found KQo. I shut up, perked up, and looked to see what had happened in front of me. Steve had opened to 9000 UTG+1 and looked to have about 120K behind. KQ didn’t seem good enough to call, but stacks were good for a 3-bet. I had some reservations after 3-betting him so much the previous day, but I was also aware that I probably gave off some strong tells when I looked at my hand. That settled it, and I popped him to 20K. He agonized for a while and folded.

At 1500/3000/300, I opened to 7500 with J9s in middle position. Norm, not seeing that I raised, tried to put out a raise that turned into a call, and the BB came along as well. The flop was T83, giving me an open-ended draw and an overcard to the board. I bet 16K, Norm raised to 35K, the BB folded, and I shoved and took it down.

Meanwhile Steve had gotten short enough to where he was shoving pre-flop. He shoved 25K from early position and I picked him off with Ah 9h only to lose to his Qh T. Then a few orbits and lost pots later he shoved 30K that I called with 55, losing to his KJo.

At 4K/8K/500 I raised to 18K with Jd 8d and called by the BB. He checked and quickly called 22K on a Td 9c 4d flop. The turn was a K, and he checked again. I considered barreling, but his stack was pretty ideal to check-shove, which would be a disaster, so I checked it back. The river was an A, and he quickly checked again. Arguably I should bluff now, but I actually put him on Ace-high on the flop and was planning on bluffing a lot of blank river, so I checked this one back. He showed 88 and I felt a little silly, since it probably was mine for the taking on the turn or river.

There was another pot at that level where one of the better players at the table opened to 18K and got called by a guy who only had about 200K to start the hand but was probably calling too wide of a range given that fact. I woke up with KQo in the BB and popped it to 58K, intending to fold to the initial raiser but reluctantly call a shove from the other guy. In the end I got what I wanted and they both folded.

At 5K/10K/1K I raised to 22K with 66 in early position and got called by the BB. On a K52 flop I put out a suspiciously small bet of 24K hoping to induce floats and other weak calls. He called. We both checked a J turn, and then he bet 24K on a 9 river that completed a backdoor flush. It didn’t take me long to call, since my whole plan on the flop was to induce a bluff, but I raised a few eyebrows. Naturally I was right.

By this time I had such a badass image that people weren’t going out of their way to tangle with me. Quite a few times, the button open folded and left me to slug out from either the SB or BB. As the BB, I got three walks, folded once to a SB raise, and called one SB raise after which he check-folded the flop.

Riley was in the BB when I was in the SB, and he did not like to fold pre-flop. The first time I raised him he barely looked at his cards before calling, and I ended up check-folding the flop. I gave him a walk or two after that, then picked up AK and raised to 3.5x. He re-raised and agonized when I shoved on him, finally folding A4o face-up. “You were in bad shape,” I told him.

“That’s OK,” he assured me. “I like to get it in behind and suck out. That’s my style.” So that gives you an idea of what he thought of me and provided some context for our next blind battle.

I raised to 30K with Ad Js at 5K/10K/1K, he called, and I bet 30K on an Ah 7c 7h flop. He quickly raised to 60K. I stared hard and made it 100K. He quickly shoved for 325K and I beat him into the pot with my call. He looked so excited when I called that I asked him, “You have trips?” He turned over Kh 5h. “You seemed pretty excited to get called,” I said as I tabled my hand.

“I told you, I get it in behind and suck out!”

“There’s no one I’d rather lose to, Riley.”

“Me too, me too,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. My hand held up, and that was the end of Riley.

I already had a big stack, and that was a big pot, so after it I think I was probably 2nd or 3rd overall with more than 1 million chips. It didn’t last long. I dropped 160K getting it in with AKo vs. ATs from a short stack and losing. Then towards the very end of the day, I got QQ all-in pre-flop against AA and lost 360K. Despite that, I ended the day with 500K, which was about 110% of average. There were only 18 players remaining, and a lot of the people I was most worried about at the start of the day (Scott Clements, Shawn Buchanan, Steve) had gone out, so I felt good. There’s a temptation to dwell on unfortunate things that happened, but plenty had gone well for me, too, and all in all it was a great day.

I did more than my part to bust out the short stacks, waking up with AQ in my big blind when someone shoved KQ and then with QQ when an even shorter stack 3-bet shoved TT. I shot up from 50K to 90K and took the liberty of opening a few more pots. At 300/600/50, I opened to 1300 with T8s and the BB defended. He quickly bet out at an A94 flop, but I called him with nothing but my backdoor draw and he check-folded the turn. The next orbit I raised him again with QTs. He quickly shoved 6600, and I did some quick math to determine that it was close but I had enough chips to establish a “don’t shove on me” image. I called and was pleasantly surprised to see his Q3s, which did not get there.

The table got tougher as empty seats were filled by tough players with lots of chips. The only one I recognized was Matt “Ch0ppy” Kay, who I first met on Day 6 of this year’s WSOP main event, but I could tell the others were good because they all knew each other, and not just from playing locally. They would laugh and groan collectively as yet another sicko arrived carrying an armload of chips.

Among all these male hotshots came also Lacey Jones. I’ve perused her pictures and never thought she was all that special, but in person she was pretty captivating. On top of that she came across as really nice and humble, making her an all-around pleasure at the table. I was almost disappointed to bust her with 55 > 87s.

My biggest win of the day came against one of the tough new players, who was sitting two seats to my left. We were playing 400/800/50 , and I opened to 1600 with QJo on my button. He defended from the BB, and we both checked a J98r flop. He bet 2600 on a 6 turn, and I called. The river was another J, he checked, and I bet 6600.

Here’s where things got interesting. He quickly raised to 24,500, and my first instinct was to fold, because I only beat a bluff (actually he could be on JT for value but that didn’t occur to me at the time) and you don’t see a lot of river check-raise bluffs. This was a good player, though, and after a bit of thought I realized a few things. First, this is about the strongest hand I’ll ever have ever, since I’m not likely to check Jacks up or better on the flop. I suppose AJ or KJ would be slightly better bluff-catchers, since they beat a bit more of his value range (though I’m not confident he’d go for a check-raise with KJ anyway), but it’s not a big difference.

Second, he may not expect me to have trips in my range at all. If he assumes I’d always bet top pair, then he can really check-raise the river with impunity.

Finally, holding a J gives me a significant blocker to his value range. So I called, and he told me I was good. This was another of those spots where it was interesting to see how others at the table responded to the call. One guy seemed surprised that I had to think about it all, whereas another told me, “Nice call,” and seemed genuinely impressed.

One of the new whiz kids at the table was a 25-year old Vancouverite named Steve who made a compelling case that we’d played together at the NAPT Venetian a few years ago, though I had no recollection of this. He played very well and was opening pots at the appropriate times, so I started 3-betting him in position.

The first time was with A2o on my Button. He called, we both checked a K64 flop, and he check-folded a J turn.

The second time I had AJo. He opened to 3500, I made it 9000, and he called. We both checked a QJ4 flop, he bet 11K on a K turn, and I folded. My intention was to fold most turns, but that was a particularly bad one. Among other things, I think his range is mostly broadway cards and pocket pairs- I’m behind the former and I doubt he bets the latter. He was really insistent that we talk about this hand at the end of the day and told me he had QQ, which would explain why he was so eager to know what I had.

The third time I had JJ, and he pointed out what a fish he was for continuing to flat call me as he flat called my 9000 raise. We both checked an A76 flop. The turn was a 4, and I considered betting, but I’m actually not sure I’m ahead of his calling range plus there’s a chance he could check-raise bluff me, so I checked it back. The river was a 5, and he checked again. I thought for a long while and was near-certain I had the best hand but still wasn’t sure how often he could call with worse (only TT and 99 I think), so I checked. I was so sure I was good that I said, “I’m such a coward,” as I turned my cards over, but he thumped the table in frustration and showed me 88 for the rivered straight.

There was one other big pot that I played in here that I’m saving for a “What’s Your Play?“, so maybe I’ll edit this to add in the details after that’s over.

The next pot after that one was costly. Blinds were 600/1200/100, and I had KQo in the BB. A guy I’d chatted with during break, who’d made clear he was an amateur, raised to 3200 UTG+2 with about 18K behind. Against some people I’d just shove here, but I didn’t think he was opening all that wide, so I elected to call. If I really think his range is that tight, folding might actually be better.

The flop was 346. He counted out 3400 chips but pushed the 400 out first, so the dealer made him bet the minimum of 1200. I would have folded but elected to peal for such a small bet. The turn was a Q, I checked, and he shoved. Now again I maybe should have thought a bit more about what I really wanted to do here, since I even told him as I called that, “Your misclick might have just made you 17K” and sure enough he showed Aces.

That put a hurting on me. At my high point I’d had 150K, and now I was back to the 50K I’d started with. The one bit of a good news was that the broke our table, probably the toughest in the room, and I ended up at a softer one, though Steve was still with me and now seated a few seats to my left.

On my immediate left, however, was a hilarious Chinese guy named Riley. It’s very possible that his name was actually Rai Lee or something, since I never saw it in writing and Riley doesn’t sound too Chinese, but I’m going to spell it that way because it’s easier and I don’t know any better. Riley was far and away the funniest guy I’ve ever played with. Partially he just had a presence and charisma that put everyone in the mood to laugh, and partially I just think every joke is funnier when delivered with an accent.

My favorite exchange began when Steve mentioned Tiger Woods. Riley chimed in, “What’s a matter with him? He fock some ugly woman.”

“Yeah, his wife is a smokehouse though.”

“Ya so? If I am 1 billion dollar, all my woman is beautiful.”

Steve laughed. “At least he wasn’t paying for it.”

“When you that rich, you always paying for it. Every woman is professional.” Maybe you had to be there.

Anyway I chipped up a bit, but my comeback really began when the weakest player open limped his button for 2400. The SB completed, and I found AJo on my BB. I raised to 11K, though in retrospect I think just putting 10K on top and making it 12,400 is a little better. The BTN quickly called and the SB folded.

Despite my gutshot, the T87 flop was too good for his limping range, so I checked. He quickly checked behind, which I think screams weakness. The turn brought a K, giving me a double gut shot and a good bluff card, so I bet 15K. My opponent quickly raised to 30K, but I was sure he was weak. At best this was an information/freeze raise designed to find out if he was good and stop me from betting. Having a double gutter just sweetened the deal. I shipped it for 70K total and his cards hit the muck in seconds.

By the end of the day I’d chipped all the way up from 50K to 128K without ever seeing a showdown, and I’d had fun doing it.