So this is a little embarrassing. I used to shame myself for not updating after two weeks. This time it's been damn near two months. I ****ing suck at this internet thing.
The past eight or so weeks have been absolutely nuts. I spent a week in Ann Arbor. The new house is coming along. I've played a TON of poker and been running like absolute dog****. And I started two podcasts and posted introductory episodes for both. Let's get to the pictures, in no particular order...
Ann Arbor!
It was my first time visiting Michigan. I have to say, I kind of really dug it. Ann Arbor is a great college town, but the roads were clearly laid out when it was less populated. One lane in either direction for a school that supposedly has 30k employees, let alone students, on-lookers, and the whole thing. But I got to spend a week at:
ICPSR! It's like space camp for social science nerds. I need four methodologies courses for my PhD (even though my dissertation won't use any kind of analytical or quantitative analysis). I decided to go for the Bayesian data analysis class. It was highly recommended to me, and I got it for about the first four hours. The next three and a half days, not so much.
The overly-overly simplified version is this: A right fielder in Major League Baseball has a career average of .200, hitting 1 for 5. A pitcher in Major League Baseball also has a career average of .200, hitting 1 for 5. Who will have the better career as a hitter?
Simplified data analysis would say that it's impossible to tell - both players have the same number of hits over the same number of at bats, and that the sample size is too small to really make a determination. Bayesian analysis says the right fielder should have the better career, since we know right fielders are usually better hitters than pitchers. So by updating the problem using prior information, we can come to a conclusion. Simple, right? There was a 945 slide power point that went with the class, that ended up showing us things like this:
... the ****?
Somehow, I passed:
Basically everything in Ann Arbor pandered to the UofM crowd. I can't blame them, really.
Everyone in that town wears the UofM colors, except two kids I saw walking around wearing Ohio State stuff. I asked a buddy of mine from Columbus about the rivalry, and his response was "When someone asks us how to get to UofM, we tell them go west until you smell it, north until you step in it". Lovely.
One night, there was a fifty degree difference between Ann Arbor and Vegas - 65 to 115. I guess that's 18 to 46 degrees in weirdo degrees.
I flew with Spirit Airlines, which I've never used before. Thinnest seats ever:
And smallest trays ever:
The week I was away was the week the Vegas Golden Knights had their expansion draft and unveiled their jerseys. Since I wasn't around to get a pre-order in, my wife, the worst secret-keeper on the planet, managed to sneak over to the VGK store (called The Armory) and pre-order one for me and keep the secret from me until I got back from Michigan. Hell of a broad, this one.
In any event, I've gone full Golden Knights fanboy:
Plus six t-shirts, a hoodie, a 3'x5' flag, a banner, a puck, license plate frame, and can coozy. Yeah...
The house!
It's sort of exciting to see how this is progressing. We went from an abstract concept and a model home, to words on paper, to an actual lot, to a plumbing trench:
To the frame-in for the foundation:
To today, where we discovered an actual frame:
We spent about six hours over two trips in the design center:
(Ignore the paint color in the 3-ring binder sleeve; we changed that). All cool grays and whites. Not a stroke of brown or beige in the house. I can't wait for this sucker to be finished sometime in early fall.
The poker!
I've been getting my ****ing teeth kicked in this entire world series. Probably the worst I've ever run since I started playing with any kind of study or plan behind it. The games have been great, I just can't get there. Only played cash twice, posted small losses both times. One was after my AA got it all in pre v AK and TT, and there was a T on the river. My last two tournaments, I busted out with JJ by 65, and AA by 75. But like I said, there's been a lot of tournaments:
That's about half of them. The ONLY cash I had was at a WSOP nightly:
My first ever WSOP tournament cash, by the way.
It's a short stack semi-turbo tournament, so if you don't build a stack early, it's tough to move too deep. I tripled up in the first level. AA v A9 v KdJd. Flop was AcQd9d. Got it in with top set v two pair v straight flush draw and held.
The TI decided to run a freeroll for tournament players. The winner of any of their tournaments for the month of June got a seat, and you could get extra chips for extra wins. I didn't win/cash a tournament, but I did play one where the winner didn't want the seat. The floor just gave it to me. It starts in 11 hours, so hopefully I'll have an update on that sometime before October.
Random bull****!
I like this art on the side of the Plaza:
REALLY good food:
I think this is Neeme's favorite bar downtown (or one of them).
The wife talked me into making barn quilts for the new house. I think they came out pretty good. I made the white one:
The podcasts!
Yeah, I decided it was time to get in on the action of actually producing content rather than just being a sponge. And because I can't do things the easy way, I decided to do not one, but two podcasts:
You can see Bikeking_19's chicken legs in the shot here. He and I are running Seat Open in Sin City:
We're focusing on all things relating to the Vegas poker scene: news, rumors, tournaments, room openings/closings, specials, promos, etc. We're going to try to get people to come on, like dealers and floor personnel, professional players, other characters around town. Hopefully we can make this thing work.
The other one is just me. It's called Poker School Dropout:
Poker School Dropout is going to talk about and review the daily poker tournaments all around Las Vegas. I'm trying to gather as much information as I can about these things by actually running them (hence the giant number of donkaments I've run lately). I'm also going to talk about thing related to tournaments, like tipping and chopping and such. There are enough of these things to keep me busy, that's for ****ing sure.
Both podcasts are being put out under the Vegas Poker Network label:
It's just something I made up a) to make life easier so I don't have to switch back and forth between accounts and b) in case there are other shows that want to climb aboard, whether they be podcasts or vlogs or whatever else. I figure that once VPN builds an audience, I can expose a new personality to a ready-made audience right away.
Everything is being uploaded to the YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-J...Jp2ribmOsLQ5Jg
And SoundCloud here:
https://soundcloud.com/user-826011957
iTunes and Stitcher to come.
I'm also posting pics on Instagram here:
https://www.instagram.com/vegaspokernetwork/?hl=en
I guess that's enough for now, eh?