Days 8 and 9 – Pancakes, Football, Not a Whole Lot of Poker

March 11, 2011

Well, I say ‘not a lot’, but I guess I am setting fairly high standards in terms of volume. Over 2 days I have played 12534 hands and I’m $92 down over that period and I have mixed feelings about it. The good news is I’m running good ! I’m actually running $500 above ev in the sample. The bad news is that I’m playing badly. I’ve found it very difficult to play my A-game for such long periods and have found myself just auto-piloting. This has lead to sloppy decisions in big pots. This is probably partly responsible for the lack of volume; I’m not going to force myself to play when i know i’m playing badly. I’m still going to play a minimum of 6.5k hands per day this week but probably wont be putting in huge days again until i get my A-game back.

On Tuesday, Stefanie returned home from work armed with milk, flour and eggs proclaiming it to be pancake day. I had no idea. So we made pancakes, with a little help from a Delia Smith recipe.

They turned it out pretty well IMO. (Stef, being Stef, blogged all about it here)

Another factor keeping me away from the tables has been the Champions League. I completely forgot about the Arsenal-Barca game until it was finished, so i dont really feel qualified to comment. But that has never stopped me in the past. It seems Barca were by far the better side but Van Persie got a ridiculous red card after and hour with the scores level and Arsenal poised to go through if there were no further goals. Let me get one thing straight, I don’t like Arsenal. I don’t like Wenger, I don’t like their fans, I didnt like Henry and Pires, I don’t like Fabregas, I’ve never been to the Emirates but I’d imagine I wouldn’t like it. Normally I laugh at Arsenal fans when they are supposedly “robbed,” but for the first time I actually sympathise. I feel their pain in being cheated out of the Champions League by a referee making dodgy decisions in Barca’s favour. It happened to Chelsea two years ago when Tom Henning Ovrebo denied us three blatant penalties in what some conspiracy theorist claim was an attempt to ensure Barcelona progressed. Still, Barcelona are comfortably the best clubside i have ever seen play and would almost certainly have beaten Arsenal anyway. They were comfortably the better team in the first leg (Sorry Craig they were AINEC) and by all accounts absolutely dominated the second. I’m hoping we don’t draw them in the next round , assuming we beat FC Kopenhagen, a team whose name is abbreviated on Costa Rican TV to FCK. Enough said.

Somehow of all of the Champions league fixtures over the two days, the only football iImanaged to see was the second half of the Spurs game. Not the most thrilling 45 minutes of football but was nice to see Spurs progress to the quarters. I know as a Chelsea fan I’m not supposed to like Spurs, but somehow I cant help it. They have great fans that sell-out their stadium every single week, a great manager and play good football. Also my brother and all my best mates are Spurs fans soIi don’t have much choice!