These are the 3 News stories that immediately spring to mind. Not the definitive 3 "biggest"-but ones that stick in my mind. In date order:-
1. The 1970 World Cup. It had pretty much everything. Quite possibly the best English team ever. In Brazil, quite possibly the best team ever. Great football, scandal...
2. The Miners Strike. The impact on our economy cannot be underestimated. From the Unions, to the abandonment of Heavy Industry and whole Communities, to the posturing of 2 rather similar people in Thatcher and Scargill
3. 9/11. Just got home with my Wife and new-born 2nd child. Went upstairs, turned on the Computer, and watched with a mixture of fascination and horror
1970 World Cup - was that when there was the Bobby Moore Bogota bracelet thing?
Miner's strike. What a memory. Hard to imagine Mr Scargill & Lady Thatcher agreeing on a single thing whilst sat across a negotiating table. Real immovable force meets immovable object stuff. We had electricity on ration, 3 days on, 3 days off (or was it hours?) if memory not deceiving me? Imagine that happening now. WOT, NO TELLY?
Almost novel to discuss Poker on here these days, but scenes at DTD last weekend, whilst I was up in Scotland.
They have introduced a new weekend schedule, a £50,000 G'tee £125 on Saturday, & a £50,000 G'tee £250 on the Sunday, both one-dayers so inevitably a bit "sharp", though they did have a 20/25 minute clocks. And for reasons we can only guess at, they were "reg-free" if you regged before it started.
I had bumped into Rob last week & he was musing on whether it would hit the guarantees, which looked very ambitious for 1 dayers.
Well he need not have worried, the Saturday £125 got 662 (SIX HUNDRED & SIXTY TWO) entries. WTF? That must be some sort of DTD record for a 1 day affair.
And that's despite it being during Ramadan, which with the DTD demographic, means quite a few absentees.
Rather oddly, the £250 on the Sunday "only" made 268 entries. Which, compared to 662 for the £125, really seems to emphasise that there's a price-point sweet spot.
When the dust settled, the £125 went to Mark Habbershaw and the impressive Ben Shannon chopping it up for just north of £25,000...
1 MARK HABBERSHAW £12,550
2 BENJAMIN SHANNON £12,550
In the £250, I believe it was a 5 way chop, with the winner being shown as the fella with the best name.
1 GHOLAMREZA MOHAMMADI MOGHADDAM £9,600
2 ANONYMOUS £8,045
3 GEORGE HOLMES £7,975
4 ANDREW MAPP £7,690
5 KAI CHAN£6,500
In a post script to those extraordinary numbers at DTD when they ran the £125/£250 on Saturday & Sunday.
I was able to play the 2nd weekend of them. And the Saturday £125 dropped from 662 entries to 451, with the Sunday £250 going from 268 to just 140. Explain that. Safe to say, the £250 got promptly dropped from the schedule. Rob arrived for his Sunday night pow-wow with the Team & it disappeared from the schedule within minutes, having missed g'tee by a mile. Can't say I blame him.
All of which is an excuse to shoehorn in the fact I cashed in both.
Full on min-cash in the £125, (£250), minus £25 for a 10% swap with Thewy. Gonna take me a very long time to get even with him on staking at this rate. But we had great fun, & the meet-up crew during breaks was Ian Gas, Maria, Thewy & me. Lovely.
Even more surprising, was somehow bimbling & bumbling to 9th & the FT on the Sunday, collecting £1,810. A £250 NLH is top of my range in NLH really, the kids are just too good, only the WSOP Seniors would I play a higher NLH affair. A 10% swap with Moulty cost me £180, but I suppose I should not complain as he ran 2nd (chop) for £9,400, lol, so that was a bit of a bonus. How good do I run with swaps?
And on the subject of run-good, in both the £125 & £250 I had two remarkable strokes of luck.
In the £125, it's walked to the SB who has A-K, & I'm sat in the BB with Aces. Match ups don't come better than that - & it happened TWICE, in identical positions.
And in the late stages of the £250, there's a shove & a call & I'm sitting behind with Aces, which held. Then, on the bubble, rinse repeat. And still I only ran 9th.... In fact, that was the last hand I won or even played, I just went totally card/spot dead after that, & just bled away. The Final was painful, three levels without a) anyone busting or b) without me playing a hand. It's variance doing it's thing, & I had to get payback for all those Aces.
Really pleased for Moulty though. And for myself, I'm on a mini-heater right now, 6 or 7 cashes at DTD this year now, though of course never threatened a win, Top 3 or even "business". And it was one of the most enjoyable weekends of poker I can recall, 12 hours play two days running, it does not get better. Loving life.
Fat Mitch drew a Mystery Bounty at EPT Paris - & scooped €60,000.
And also at EPT Paris, Stato made Day 2 of a Sidey with ONE BB. And won it, collecting €126,580.
I've no idea how Stato does it. I rarely watch NLH streams, they bore me, but I have tried watching Andrew, & I've no idea what he does that's special. Certainly does not seem overly aggro, or a high VPIP.
I was having a clear out of old clothes yesterday. Right at the back of the closet, crumpled on the floor, was a tracksuit top made by a company called View From. I think the British Olympic team wore this brand in the early noughties. It was a top I sometimes played poker in. I smiled because I remember it being associated with a personal top ten poker moment. Probably 8th or 9th but memorable, nonetheless. More about that in a moment.
In the late 90’s I was aware of a very small and well-hidden aspect of my character. It had manifested itself just a couple of times in real life, usually when in conflict with my bosses. It was like when David Banner stubbed his toe and got the eyes…but without the anger. I would be prepared to lose my job, my house, everything I owned; but I wasn’t going to lose that argument. My head would just go PING! and this serene, stubborn, fearless asshole would emerge. It served no constructive purpose, I couldn’t conjure it up at will, but strangely, I absolutely loved that feeling. Lol.
One day I played my first game of live poker and from the opening hand my head went PING! Every time I played after that my head just went PING! automatically. It was brilliant. Early on I read about a million books and considered strategy deeply. I thought it was all mostly bullshit though. I still believe character, people skills and natural attributes get you a long way across the winning line in no limit. I can only talk about the level I played at of course.
I liked it best when there were big personalities trying to dominate the table with speech play. My head pinged like crazy, because that guy was getting a new arsehole ripped for himself soon. I played a tournament in some moody backstreet casino in Morocco once, all shady locals, bristling atmosphere. Absolutely loved it. You’ve got to remember here that I’m a General Manager of golf clubs, sensible and affable. Yet PING! I’m feeling like I’m going to rip a lot of new Moroccan assholes before this night is done. Winning money was proper good fun in poker but nothing beat that asshole ripping feeling.
I brought my poker mentality onto Blonde a lot of the time, maybe I was using it as a training ground. Wanted to keep the PING! fully functional. To be fair there were no shortage of candidates, because this was the new era of the wizards. A big part of my poker strategy was that I needed to control the emotion and get opponents to react to my action. Blonde was perfect because there were ample super confident, bedroom dwelling wizardy types who perhaps were not so adept at emotional intelligence. No harm done, just bants really. Oh and I am always conscious of the commercial aspects of things so because I took something from Blond I wanted to give back viewing figures. So I needed the likes of Greekstein like my Benn needed his Eubank. Or thinking about it, maybe I'm Eubank.
Incidentally, I did think the most entirely inherently unintelligent thing in the whole history of poker was when the wizards destroyed their own game by belittling all the feel players and the newbies, but meh, everything has it's day. Truth is I don’t know the true character of anybody using Blonde, probably all solid gold guys, nothing personal.
Anyway, back to this View From tracksuit top.
I could never really have been busto during my playing days because I had a good job, owned a house and car. Always had a decent salary at the end of the month. However, my wife went to spend a few days with her mum in Norwich and I took the opportunity to embark upon a 48hr drug-fuelled poker bender. Lost about £10k, maybe a little more. Don’t get me wrong, totally brilliant weekend, but I was left with about £3.42 ready cash to my name. And it was still two days until my salary dropped. When my wife arrived home the fridge was empty and I hadn’t done the shopping. This was on account of I hadn’t really fancied eating since she left. I always do the shopping and always doing the cooking so no problem I say and skip out the door to the local Tesco.
A few steps up the road and with my mind full of pasta orientated dishes of the sub £4 variety it starts to rain. I mean I’m feeling a little low at this point with the cold and rain, mother of hangovers and loose change rattling in my pocket. Turned back, went in the house and grabbed that track top from the closet. Halfway back to Tesco I put my hands in the pockets and THUD! My right hand hits a brick. I grab whatever it is and pull it out. It was a huge block of crisp and rather lovely £50 notes, around £3.5k worth. What a flip flop of emotions and such crazy times with poker. Anyway, burst back through the door with bags of shopping. Here you go honey, got you a choice of sirloin or lobster and a lovely bottle of Chateau nerf de pap. Abs lol!
I sometimes still play poker, mainly to see if I still have the PING! I played the Goliath in 2024 and never had it once, felt emotional, like something had died. I played it again last year and suddenly PING! it was there for the whole first day. So who knows, this time next year Rodders!
Well worth the wait.
Really enjoyed the PING thing at poker tables.
I'm the EXACT opposite. I had many decades of Management jobs where the nasty problems all landed on my desk & all I yearned for was a peaceful existence. And now I am retired I have that, & I don't want any bad blood, arguments, personal feuds, nothing, I just want to cruise along in calm waters. I don't want ANY aggro at my poker table.
When I play poker my priorities are...
1) Enjoy myself. The result does not matter, I just want to have some fun in the company of gamblers.
2) In MTT's, run deep, last third ideally, where every decision is crucial.
3) Min cash & get myself another Hendon, but going home empty-handed does not bother me one iota.
4) Anything beyond that is all bonus.
5) I do get a thrill from cashing though.
When I exit, no matter how, I've forgotten all about it by the time I stand up. Bad beats, idgaf.
So many poker players only enjoy it when they win. Pros, fair enough, but it makes no sense for recreationals. And 99% of us are recs.
It's a bit like football fans who may have travelled a few hundred miles to watch their team but then walk out if they go 2 down after 20 minutes. Where's the sense in only enjoying something if you win? In MTT's even the best players only cash 1 time in 3 or 4.
You must be ~10 or 12 years younger than me, I seem to recall I had been working 2 or 3 years when it happened, & it was definitely on my long short list.
Vividly recall Harold Wilson visiting the scene a day or two later. And the then Chairman of the NCB (National Coal Board) Lord Robens handling it all so terribly, & denying responsibility.
It being Ramadan should make no difference to numbers as gambling is Haram for followers of the Muslim faith. However I live in the real world and suspect that it probably does. Ho hum, life goes on.
My first job after university was in one of the livelier William Hills in NW London - the clientele was full of characters.
One day two of them got into a massive row about something or other.
One of them said to the other 'You shouldn't even be in here - you're a Muslim'
To which the Muslim replied 'You shouldn't be in here either - how that judge only gave you a suspended sentence for throwing that traffic warden through that shop window I'll never know'
So lovely to hear from you Andrew.
Do you & your brother still play Online poker? One of you was "Dr Marbles" iirc?
Still in touch with Claire/Claw? Anyone else from the old gang?
What IS the matter with you people? Ever tried proper music?
I was sceptical, but took my best friend to see her at Wembley for her birthday last summer, and it was fantastic.
Now I'm on Vegas sabbatical I've turned into a concert boy, and have a good set lined up for the middle half of the year.
Think I've got 8 or 9 in the next 6 months.
Glad I'm on electric now, and not paying for petrol anymore at these prices!
Pros & cons of electric cars?
I have nothing against them as such except the sort of insecurity of having to stop for a few hours on a long journey to re-charge, the faff of plugging them in every night, & the lack of the "vroom vroom" noise of an ICE.
Incidentally, for those who have not seen them, the Tiny Desk Concerts, all of which are on You Tube, really are very good & feature some great bands.
Sadly, I'm not sure they are making any more, as they were on USA NPR (National Public Radio) & Mr Trump withdrew all funding for PBS & NPR shortly after taking Office.
But, as far as I'm aware, they are all still on You Tube, so a quick search should soon find them.
Agreed, some fantastic finds on there.
Dua Lipa's was great
This one too. So talented.
Nickel Creek?
And Marky went for Dua Lipa, whoever he is.
What IS the matter with you people? Ever tried proper music?
Allow me to rescue this
Better. MUCH better.
At last, someone with taste.
Incidentally, I just went googling & Buddy Guy is now 89, & even Clapton is 80. WTF?
Starting with a weird one, the Tiny Desk Concerts.
Chompy mentioned the Nickel Creek one, then Marky chimed in with some tart named Dua Lipa or somesuch.
I'd never heard of either & had not the slightest interest in finding out.
But here's the thing. As always, last thing that night I opened up You Tube on my TV & the first two listed in "Recommended" were those EXACT TWO videos. What are the chances of that being a coincidence? Very little I imagine. (There are scores/hundreds of Tiny Desk Concerts).
OK, I understand how algos work, but blonde to You Tube is a stretch, isn't it? Are the algos really that all-encompassing?
Gill often sends me an e-mail "do you like this dress/handbag/ornament I purchased?" and for the next week every time I open Amazon or search for something online, those EXACT items are being promoted in adverts. I get all that, but it still seems a stretch that it includes blonde.
It does not bother me as such - my online stuff is all legit & mostly nerdy & geeky stuff - but it's extraordinary, isn't it, how our every written word is being searched?
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