Rec player first time in Vegas, no aims goals or self improvement, just some spew, some poker and whatever else I end up writing.

Why write about it? Dunno, I've often felt like writing might be good for my mental health but always been too pre-occupied or apathetic to bother trying it, now I'm at a pretty major junction in life and figured fork it I'll give it a shot.
Still, why put it in a public forum, why not just an old school diary? You're gonna hear this a lot - dunno really, presumably some combination of needing validation? Validation that I'm interesting or entertaining or summit, subtle desire for attention, vague urge toward providing some miserly morsel of entertainment or distraction to a handful of strangers? Dunno, maybe some of that stuff, maybe something else entirely that I can't figure.
But whatever, I'm started so I'll roll on

I'm an upper-mid-30's brit/canuck who was recently dumped by a brilliant women, we'd been together a while and I didn't see it coming (obvs should have but I'm not the most emotionally aware person in the world), it was a heavy dick punch and I'm still reeling pretty wild.

I work two weeks on two weeks off in a way out there old village in BC Canada, pretty great job that pays plenty and gives me 2 whole weeks off every month, so now I'm single and have a bunch of two week slots with nothing to do and plenty of cashflow to do it with.

So I'm no fixed address, no point renting a place when I can fly and hotel for pretty much the same price. Gonna do a lot of flying and hotel/airbnb for the next 6-12 months, at least until I get sick of it and decide to settle somewhere.

Which brings us to today. Done work on Oct 31, flights are booked to be in Vegas Nov 3-13, staying at the Excalibur. A good buddy and his high school besty are gonna be there too, they're sweet rec players too who hit LV up for MTT's once or twice a year. He always invites me but I've always been busy - well not this time. This time I'm free to do whatever I gotta do to repress the phat pillow of unprocessed sadness that the breakup inflated in my mind.

Too much spew for a first post so I'm gonna watch some soccer.

JR

I am officially too old and out of touch when 30+ yo men are talking about
someone having a "besty"

Good luck , sounds like a dream year is in store for you.

This could end up being a blast, as long as you run good!

The only sin in LVL is to not be entertaining.

Work out a lot. It'll help with all kinds of post-breakup mental tilt, and get/keep your body in shape to where someone will want to help you with some of the rest.

Great first post, subbing gl

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I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for out in the desert

Yah it's kind of a dumb sense of humour thing - speaking in a somewhat mature, thoughful tone and splicing dumb sounding but functional slang in...

Noted!

ty ty

Thanks, I def don't wanna end up like Bono

Subbed. Will need pics in thread

Subbed, I second the notion on working out. I went through a bad breakup about 5 years ago, she was 23 and I was 38 and yet I didn't see it coming either. Fast forward 5 years later and I'm getting married to a wonderful woman next month (In Vegas). Gym will definitely work wonders for your psyche. Run good and definitely need some pics in this thread.

Just figuring out how to post pics - this one is my workplace this morning

Agreed, part of the reason I booked at Excalibur is it's proximity to the Refuge bouldering gym - place looks legit and I'll be putting in a session there every second day or so

Poker Resume Part 1

I got into poker in the mid 2000's, probably 05 but I'm not certain.

Back then I worked as a treeplanter in BC, which is a crazy job. The logging industry in BC requires that a tree is planted for every one cut (or something like that), so each summer millions of tress need planting. The problem is that the work is savagely hard - carting heavy bags of little trees all over the often extremely rugged terrain presented by clear cuts in BC. The pay is piece rate, usually 11-20 cents per tree, so if you can work you nuts off all day without losing your mind to the incessant insect onslaught you make solid cash. I did it for six years and would average $400/day.

Like most bush jobs, your living costs are pretty much zero, so you bank the lot and come out from the three month season with 20k or so in the bank. The lifestyle is made passable by the benevolence of the Canadian EI system, which looks after seasonal workers in the off season to the tune of about $400/week. So long story short you disappear and flog yourself for three months, come back flush, then try and get through the winter on the pogey.

Great for a lazy deadbeat stoner like young Rebus, I'd idle the winters away in Victoria and watch poker on TV. Downloaded Pokerstars and starting flailing around in micro stakes 6max. I thought I was good but I was woeful, had literally no clue what I was doing beyond stuffing all my draws on the flop and 'mixing it up' by raising 24ss UTG. I probably lost a grand or two over the course of that winter, but the seed was planted and I was now officially a recreational poker player......

Me planting trees in '08

One of my sisters was a tree planter for many years. She said there was good money in it. Not sure she ever had what one might call a "regular" job. I believe she is semi-retired on Bowen Island, doing landscaping or somesuch.

Yeah it's easy to get sucked into the planting life and before you know it you're 30 and your resume is looking like a clear cut.

Bowen Island. Nice!

For those who like books as a finished product of tree cutting, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant is one of the best books I've ever read. The intersection of logging in BC, First Nations vs settler culture clash, and one logger who basically goes nuts and manages to piss everyone off by cutting down a sacred tree.

What do you do these days if you do not mind me asking? 2 weeks on - 2 weeks off sounds like a pretty sweet setup!

This book has been recommended to me so many times over the years and I haven't gotten around to it, yet.
I read a fair bit but exlcusively fiction for the last bunch of years, nice easy to read narrative driven pulp with the odd classic thrown in to stretch my brain a bit.
GS is creeping up the list though, just a matter of time...

I'll probably write a bit about my work and it's interaction with my poker resume over the next few days, but in short - exploration geology.

Poker Resume Part 2

Maybe a year or so after I got into pokerstars I heard about HUDs, I didn't know they were called HUDs, just that people were using programs to analyse stats and feed them info during hands. I figured that playing on was pointless without one because just lol at having an edge over that (I still thought I had an edge... remarkable). I was, however, way too lazy to want to get one and put the work in to understand and utilize the tool. I quit online poker and have probably played about 100 hands since.

That summer I'd been playing $20 tournies in camp after work, and one Saturday in Quesnel after a long day of tending a hangover, doing laundry and sitting in the hottub, I went to the Billy Barker casino.

The game was 1/2 and playing in a quiet little second story backroom, just the one table, and I think it was short handed. Four or five locals and a couple of planters from a different company, talking about how they make more playing cards than they do planting.

I sat with $200 and got to work showing the suckers what was up. I think I was done within like 45 mins, got stacked AK<KK in a 4b AI pre. I was a bit choked and thought I'd screwed it up bad, but I was psyched and the seed was growing, starting to sprout even....

GS is definitely easy to read, narrative-driven. A page-turner, imo.

Poker Resume – Part 3

The next few years I played a fair bit. I was living in Victoria in the off season, collecting EI and working under the table as a furniture mover, my girlfriend was in full time school and she was pretty dedicated, so anytime she was extra busy I’d book a room in Vancouver, hop on the ferry and get into the twilight zone.

The trips were usually three or four days and where I stayed sort of depended on how I’d run during my previous trip – if I was flush I’d get a hotel downtown but if not I’d get a private room in the cheapo hostel on Main St. I’d pretty much just play cards and sleep, make plans to meet friends for dinner or whatever but always blow them off, revel in completely disregarding normal circadian rhythms.

I remember the games at The Edgewater being crazy, just constant wild action, but part of that impression is no doubt because I was playing like a full on aggro donk, often half cut or taking
a smoke out on the smoking patio. I f***ing loved walking into the place with a buzz on, rolling up the escalator and just blasting off. My level of strategic sophistication was pretty much just whatever Mike Sexton was saying on tv, but the same was true of 90%+ of my peers so the games were great, I never tracked results and anything I won I just used for living expenses.

I can only remember three specific hands from that period, one win and two losses. The winner was J9o in a 3bet pot with this young dude who I played a bunch with, he was a total maniac and we were both like $1500 deep at a ½ table. With a bunch in the middle I turned a one card straight and he payed me off with an overpair – the chance of something like this happening in todays Vancouver games is ~zero%. That night I cashed a 4k win, all at 1/2. My gf and one of her friends were in town that night and I remember walking into the hotel room thinking I was the man and tossing the whole roll of c notes all over the bed, good times.

Obviously I was always busto and overdrawn by the time the new planting season started, and eventually I started feeling a burned out by the dead endedness of my lifestyle. This was probably like 2009 and the gold price was starting to explode, people kept saying ‘dude, you have degree in geology, wtf are you planting trees for….’ I looked around at some of the other career planters in my crew, they were generally wrecked physically, smoking 30 a day, and a decent proportion of them smoking crack on pay day, I said fork this I’m going back to school………


Apologies for lack of pics - I'm stuck up at work and it seems pointless spamming a buncha scenery pics in here. Once I'm on the move I'll up the pic count.

Enjoyable, well-written read so far.

Hope you keep it up

Cheers, I appreciate it.
Next post will be based in Leeds so you might dig it

Poker Resumé – Part 5

I’d applied for and been offered partial funding to do an MSc at Leeds University in the UK, the same place I’d done my undergrad between 2000-2003. The funding pretty much covered tuition and a bit of rent, so I’d been extra disciplined and squirreled away a few grand to pay for flights and living expenses. I did the first nine months of classes ok before I ran out of $ and had to fly back to BC to work. Between saving, doing school and smoking weed/partying with old buddies, poker had been on the back burner.

I worked a few contracts in the spring of 2010, then flew back to Leeds to do my thesis. I really didn’t give a s**t about the content of the thesis, I just needed to do it to freshen up my resume and get me out of planting, so I ended up with this shitty project which consisted of day after day of f***ing about in the lab extracting sulphate from fossils to blah blah…

I was living in a crappy three bed apt near the uni, sharing it with two random dudes. J was a West African business student who lived off a 100% red meat diet, and A was a local East Indian bloke who had some weird story about selling his house but not getting possession of his new spot for a few months. Whatever, we got along but hardly saw each other, none of us looking to make friends, only united by a need for cheap rent.

I had a relatively ok liferoll at that point and realised that there was a casino spreading NLHE a 15min walk away, so I went down and ran hot as hell. It was a dark, dirty hole called the Grosvenor and the game was (I think) 0.5/1 with a £2 straddle and an uncapped buy in. Cash was allowed on the table so dudes would just sit with a handful of chips and pile of dirty 20’s. The game didn’t usually get going until 9 or 10pm, and would run through the night, so I quickly slipped into this weird routine of being in the lab 9-5, sleeping 530-9, Grosvenor 10pm-4am, sleep 5am-830am….. I was also drinking a good amount of supermarket own brand gin out of hip flask that I carried around, but despite all this I was doing ok, winning a bunch sunrunning making boats with K3ss and straights with 34o (I still played like a really bad LAG), and dealing with the lab work pretty comfortably.

I was feeling and flush and would stop at this pub called the Fox and Newt (I think that was the name, not certain) to flirt with the barmaid, flash my wad and sample the single malts from the top shelf. I loved the peaty stuff and settled on a ritualistic glass of Laphroaig 10 before every session.

The wheels started to come off after a few months. I had all my samples in little beakers in the lab, and as some arcane part of the process I had to leave them in some sort of steam chamber or something, the details are fuzzy cause I was a sleep deprived half drunk joke. I’d written the sample #’s on the beaker in permanent marker and gone to get lunch. When I got back to the lab all that was left of the sample #’s were streaky black marks on the beakers, I’d used a dry erase marker by accident, and now had no way to distinguish one sample from another – in short my entire summer’s thesis work was f***ed. I did a quick check to see if anybody was around who might have seen the mess, there was nobody, I ran through the consequences in my mind – dire, I’d need to start over, which would mean waiting for new samples and spending another three months re-doing the whole process, no way I could afford it….. So I just bit the bullet and cheated, re-labelled the beakers at random and carried on like nothing had happened. When the results came in they were obviously all over the place, completely at odds with a bunch of similar studies which had been done. I remember sitting with my prof while he ran the final mass spec, plotting the results and being like ‘weird, wtf could have caused this?’. I think he suspected the truth, but he never called me out, so I just wrote up a bunch of hypotheses to explain the wild results and got a good grade for it.

The Grosvenor heater got turned off in grim circumstances. I’d been naively keeping my roll tucked in the middle of a book in a draw in my room, and one day I got in and it wasn’t there, £1500 or so, more than my remaining liferoll. I must have just forgotten to lock the door and one of the flatmates went in for a look around. They both knew I’d been winning because I was cocky as f*** about it, just horrendously naïve… Anyway I flipped out and interrogated the piss out of them both, threatened them, told them I knew it was them etc etc, all the moves that cop shows teach you. But at the end of the day I’m not Dirty Harry and they both swore blind it wasn’t them – I couldn’t prove to the cops that I’d been robbed, and I couldn’t prove to anybody who’d robbed me. Crushed, I couldn’t risk any of my meagre liferoll on poker because losing it would be totally crippling.

I finished up my school and flew back to BC to look for a new career as a geologist.