Posts Tagged ‘Personal’

It was one year ago today that my girlfriend and I left our apartment in Boston and became officially homeless. For the past year we’ve been without permanent residence, living out of a Subaru Forester, camping, renting garages and spare rooms when we can, and staying in hotels when there’s poker to be played or coached.

It’s been an exciting and eye-opening experience. We’ve visited a lot of cool places including about a dozen national parks, visited some old friends in new places and met two new babies- guess I’m at that age where my peers are starting to pop them out, and gotten a better feel for parts of the country that we barely knew before. I’d never been to the American South or the Pacific Northwest, and I ended up liking the former a lot better than I expected and the latter somewhat less (though I’m just getting to know it).  Read the complete post...

Emily and I left Missoula, Montana this morning, passed through Idaho, and crossed the border into Washington, bound for Spokane. With that, I can now say that I’ve been to every state in the continental United States. No immediate plans for Alaska or Hawaii, but I’m pretty sure I’ll get there eventually- the girlfriend is very interested in both. She’s actually been to Hawaii before, but she won’t be finished with the continental US until we get to Oregon. I, on the other hand, spent a week in Portland after my senior year in high school for a national debate championship.

We were in a bit of a rush to get to the hotel in time for a coaching session I had scheduled, so there wasn’t time for me to pose with the welcome sign or anything, but I did manage to snap a picture as we blew past it:  Read the complete post...

I know a lot of you have seen these already, but I promised a few people big clear links in the body of a blog post, so here we go:

Poker News Video Interview

Poker News Hand Analysis

Let me explain for the record why I am wearing the ridiculous backwards hat in the video. I’d been wearing a hat all day, which I usually do when playing poker. They wanted me to take it off because the brim was casting a shadow over my face, but I had awful hat hair. So we compromised on a backwards hat.

This year’s WSOP journey ended for me about an hour ago. Out of more than 7000 players, I finished 87th and won just shy of $80,000. There was nothing dramatic about it. I lost two very standard pre-flop hands to Eric Baldwin, once with A4s < KJs for a 700K pot and once with A8s < JTs for a 1.6M chip pot. Then I made a standard preflop shove with A7, got called by QQ, and lost.

There is always a modest amount of disappointment when it’s all over, but of course all in all I’m quite pleased with the result. I’m also very happy that for the first time ever I feel like I played through this whole tournament without making any big mistakes and with only a few small ones. That doesn’t mean that everything always went my way, but as they say you play the cards you’re dealt, and I believe that I would play most of them the same way if I had it to do all over again.  Read the complete post...

It’s hard to keep track of the proper procedures for encountering various potentially dangerous animals in the wild. With someone you are supposed to wave your arms and appear threatening, with others you are supposed to back away slowly, etc. While hiking in Yellowstone National Park we came across this not very reassuring sign about bears. Note the instructions for “If a Bear Charges”.

Thanks to everyone who’s asked how the series is going for me or what my WSOP plans are- I’m flattered by your interest. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m not in Las Vegas now. I will be playing the main event, hopefully Day 1C (July 7), but nothing else. I just don’t enjoy live poker very much, and there are things I’d rather be doing with my summer than hanging out in the Amazon Room every day. For instance, I’m currently camping in Grand Teton National Park (this missive being posted automagically by Wordpress), and will spend Fourth of July in Jackson, WY before flying out to Vegas.

There will most certainly be WSOP hands and a trip report, hopefully in quite a few installments!

It wasn’t the Boston Debate League, but a team from our sister league in Chicago recently won the National Forensics League Grand Tournament in Kansas City, making them the first Urban Debate League team ever to win a national championship (there are several- the NFL’s are the largest, though arguably not the most prestigious). The Chicago Debate League was one of the first UDL’s in the country and is considerably older and larger than the BDL. The winning team hails from Whitney Young High School, which actually had a debate team even before the CDL got off the ground.

Not that I can take any credit for this victory, but I worked with the CDL for several years while I was in college. In fact, it was a formative experience that led to my starting up the BDL when I moved to Boston. Even absent that personal history, I’d have to say that this is a very impressive accomplishment that hopefully will pave the way for more UDL success on the traditional debate circuit in the future.  Read the complete post...

While I was in Germany, my girlfriend was hanging out in Northern Minnesota (long story). One night, she ironically attended a monster truck rally where she ironically purchased this camouflage hat for me. We’ve been camping in the Badlands of South Dakota, and between the hat and the scraggly beard, I’m starting to feel like I fit right in. This might become a new non-ironic look for me!

Apparently rattlesnakes are rather common in this area:

We haven’t seen any rattlers, but we did see a baby rabbit. Emily thought it was adorable, so I insisted on demonstrating what it would look like if a rattlesnake unhinged its jaw and swallowed the rabbit whole:

Sorry, no pictures of rabbit or girlfriend.