and I'm still sitting here waiting for part 2 (or 3?) of the last trip report. I don't even know anymore if it was cuba, moldovia or kyrgyzstan??

Probably all of them

Have you been to the Middle East(?)/where in the Middle East have you been.

I guess we are both referring to not where you went, but which trip reports are due to be completed.

I haven't explored there much, I was always more interested in Central Asia. But Iran is in my top 3 countries I want to visit, and I have already made plans with a friend to go next year. He has a real-life job and can't make it sooner, as we want to stay at least 3 weeks and tour the whole country. Another two spots I'd really like to visit are Oman and Lebanon.

I've been to Istanbul (amazing city, although I wouldn't travel there right now, sigh), Abu Dhabi very briefly, and Doha (Qatar). According to Wikipedia Cyprus counts as Middle East apparently, so that too. And I feel like I'm missing one place but I can't figure out what right now.

I came fairly close to going to Iraq once, but didn't make it. One of my best friends from Finland, a girl, had an Iraqi boyfriend whose father was some very high-ranked Iraqi general or something. She recalled being taken to an underground bunker where they sipped tea with the dad while bombs were going off somewhere.

Afghanistan doesn't count as Middle East, but once also came very close to going there. I know someone who used to live in Kabul for a long time, a Westerner. He said he loved it there although he came very close to huge suicide car bombings twice.

Yeah, my friends are way cooler than I am


Uhrenknecht: Yeah I know, that's what I meant too. I've just been lazy, sorry.

This actually reminds me, I think of all possible subjects in the world traveling is pretty close to what I have the most to say about. I've been thinking about writing about it in a broader sense for quite some time, but I haven't found a good angle yet. I wish I had a regular traveling blog back when I was on the road all the time, nowadays it's mainly these 2-3 week trips and longer periods of living in one place. But I do feel like I have quite a lot of perspective, not only because I've been to 66 countries but because I've done so much of different types of traveling, from staying in 5 star resorts on poker trips to absolute zero budget backpacking trips, and I've gone off the beaten path quite a lot.

Maybe I'll find a good angle at some point, but in a nutshell, I think it's all incredibly easy. Be respectful of people around you, it doesn't matter where you go, always respect their culture, habits, religion and so on. And use common sense. Those two will get you so far that you can visit three quarters of the world's countries and be as safe as you'd be at home. It's mindblowing how bad people are at both. I've certainly had my own lapses in judgement - the one time I was robbed at gunpoint was semi-avoidable, and the two times I got robbed at knifepoint were 100% my own stupidity. But I've always, even during my dumbest days, always respected locals and I suspect that's why I've never really landed in any significant trouble.

I know that there are a lot of people who simply aren't interested in the unbeaten path. They don't want to go to Nicaragua or Tonga or Iran because they think it's not safe. I think it's perfectly fine to not want to go outside your comfort zone, but I also think there are a LOT of people in this world who would love to, but simply are too afraid / don't know how to get around to it. The most beautiful thing about all my travels, at least, has been noticing that people really are the same everywhere. They might be rich of poor, black or white, muslim or jew, but as long as you're respectful to them, they will be respectful to you, and you will be just fine. When you get to this point, going to new places starts feeling like you're going to visit new relatives you haven't met yet on the other side of the world.

There have been many instances where I've been in countries that the Finnish foreign ministry's website has deemed as "unsafe and unsuitable for traveling" where I've allowed myself to be completely under the mercy of the locals I've been with. I've been outside civilization with people I barely know who could easily have killed me and dumped my body in some swamp without anybody ever finding out, yet I've always been fine because of the aforementioned reasons*.

A good example story: On our last night in Kyrgyzstan we went to this huge club in Bishkek. They had a typical door policy where you could get in past the queue if you were foreign and had to queue maybe 20 minutes if you were local. I thought it was a no-brainer to go to the back of the queue. This is both common sense (half the club won't be mad at you) and respectful (they won't think you think you're above everyone else. And quite frankly, I don't want to get past the queue to some dumb club because of my ethnicity). So we went to the queue, and some locals even offered us alcohol from a flask while waiting.

Fast forward to 4am when some idiot tourists got into a brawl with a few young Kyrgyz guys, and it escalated, and soon half of the club were in a massive fight. It was very much like locals vs westerners, the latter being outnumbered by about 5:1. At this point I should probably also include that Bishkek has a huge US army base, and during the Afghanistan war it was where the US soldiers went on weekend breaks just before going to war. As you can probably imagine, Americans weren't very well liked there, and at four in the morning we'd easily make for Americans in the eyes of drunk people looking for a fight. Anyway, so the brawl broke out, and the security forces rushed in with tear gas. Yes, actual ****ing tear gas, not pepper spray or some ****, and they were spraying it all over aimlessly. Luckily we were with some local friends we had made, thanks to being respectful earlier, who escorted us out from the back door, called an off-duty cop they knew and ensured he took us back to our hotel in the back of his police car safely. I have no doubt we wouldn't have made it out without either getting beaten up or tear gassed or both if it wasn't for our friends. (We even went to a karaoke bar on the other side of town with the cop and our friends for a moment before going to bed, good times.)


Or another, smaller example: When we lived in Mexico in a gated community (lame I know, it was just for a month when we were grinding what I think was WCOOP), the guy working the night shift at the gate was working seemingly seven days a week in his booth. Whenever we came home late at night, we always brought him some tacos or similar that cost maybe $1. There were a lot of obnoxious tourists living in the building who I had no doubt weren't even saying hi to him when he opened the gate. We always called him by first name, and he was always so happy when we brought him his tacos, and although nothing ever happened, I always had a feeling that if something was to go down he would have our backs.

Or another: We were coming back from surfing in San Jual del Sur, Nicaragua, riding the back of a small truck. I actually happen to have a picture at hand, so I'll just post it here to show what I mean:



It's a warm day, and the driver is driving very fast on empty forest roads, and the breeze is cooling us nicely. It's an awesome, liberating feeling standing up, very similar to riding open roads on a motorcycle (close to my favourite feeling on earth).

Anyway, so we come to this small village, and seemingly every single person in the village is gathered outside, slowly walking on our road towards the direction we are coming from. Whenever the group passes a house, people come out and join the walk, until the entire village is blocking our way. It's the only way for us to get back, and we have to slow down and let the group pass us before we can keep going.

At first I have no idea what's happening, but as soon as I spot the casket, I know. A funeral. There's a large picture of an elderly woman someone's holding, and four young guys carrying the casket. It appears to me like it's their custom to carry the casket through the village in this fashion whenever there's a funeral. We immediately sit down and put our heads down in respect, and I rapidly reach for something to cover my shirtless upper body.

I'll never forget the first guy's (who's carrying the casket and sort of leading the way, and who I assume is the deceased's son) face. I don't really look for eye contact, I'm just staring at the ground, but I look at him just for a passing second. He looks so sad, tears are running out his eyes like waterfalls. He looks like he has just lost not only his mother, but everything that's ever mattered to him.

He looks back at me, now having covered myself, looking down and doing my best to look as sad and respectful as possible, and gives me the tiniest nod. His eyes light up for a split second, and they say: "Thank you."

It was a very beautiful moment, and as a side note I was also very touched about how the whole community joined in the mourning. Based on what it was like in the bars at the nearby SJDS, I have no doubt had it been someone else, people would have grabbed their cameras and taken selfies with the "cool funeral". It's unbelievable how so many tourists lack basic decency in spots like this.



PS. None of the above means that you should tolerate anything and allow hustlers to take advantage of you. There have been many instances where I've lost my cool completely and yelled in the faces of both locals and tourists. I once completely lost it at some 50 year old dad in front of his family on a boat trip in Thailand and I'm sure they still remember me as that awful, abrasive Scandinavian. But they sure deserved it each time, not from a privileged westerner point of view, but from any reasonable point of view really.

Disclaimer: I most certainly don't claim to be some traveling authority, that was just a random, impromptu post.

*it does help to have people-reading skills though, poker ftw

Simple but effective, respect is universal across any cultural or linguistic barriers. I would definitely like to do some more traveling and exploring the world, never been out of the US yet. It is interesting to hear stories and get a small glimpse into those places.

Back in 2011 when I started the bbv thread that spawned the book (I can't believe that was five years ago?), I stated writing things down before I forget them as one of my main motivations for making the thread. The book's narrative ends in late 2011, so I now have another dilemma, as I have a lot of fun/crazy/exciting stuff from over the years post-2011 that I haven't blogged about. I've decided to again write down some memories from the later days.

I think this will be an ongoing series, as in that I'll likely be posting a few of these parts, as I think I have material for ~5 posts like this. As a fair warning, I'll very likely be extremely lazy in posting and the o/u line for catching up with the present is approximately never. Also, I have a bunch of stuff that didn't fit the book's narrative and were left out, so some of these are from pre-2011, too. Lastly, I'm just writing these for my own fun, not bothering to spell check, so I hope people will understand that the quality of these has nothing to do with the books. Anyway, without further ado...

Random situations poker has landed me in, part one

-The Literary Death Match invitation.

I assume your first question is, what's a Literary Death Match? Here's a Wikipedia article. The guy behind creating the whole thing, Todd Zuniga, contacted me in what I think was early 2012. He wanted me as a contestant in this thing along with some actors, comedians and authors. To this date I have no idea where the **** he discovered me from, given that back then I had never published anything in English. It almost had to be the 2+2 BBV thread, which was blowing up back then. Anyway, he asked me to do it, and sent me a list of other people who'd be in that particular episode, who were all famous one way or another. I tried to convince him that I'd make for a terrible contestant, but he was being really persuasive, and I agreed to do it. When I learned about the dates, I realized I had a vacation with my girlfriend already booked and paid for that week that I couldn't really skip, so in the end I had to turn it down. I watched some clips from one of those shows on YouTube afterwards and I was incredibly relieved I didn't end up there, because I really would have sucked. I guest this isn't much of a story, but this is probably the most random single thing I've ever been invited to.


-The Main Event rail and victory party.

In the autumn of 2012 I was living in Mexico with a couple of poker-playing roommates. Come November 9 time, they said they were going to Vegas to rail their friend. I asked which one it was, and they said it was Greg Merson, who would start the final table third in chips. I didn't know much about him before that summer's WSOP, but I had read his excellent thread in HSNL, and I was already very much rooting for him. It turned out that I knew basically half of his rail, as a bunch of people I knew from poker were going and many of my friends had pieces. I'm not the kind of guy who wants to crash other people's parties, but someone arranged me a ticket to the ESPN stage, so I decided to tag along. I've never been a "poker fan" either, in the sense that I've always thought of poker as a predatory/lonely/hedonistic sport where it feels kinda stupid to root for someone else. But I really was rooting for Gregy because of his thread already, and since I was now made one of his support troops, I decided to go all the way just for this one occasion. I got my hands on one of the eponymous #weneedit t-shirts (I still have it), and was one of the loud we need it people you could hear and see in the ESPN coverage. (I was also very drunk the whole time.)


I'm in the top right, the guy with a yellow bracelet in his wrist.


While I've never been a poker fan, I have to say that the atmosphere at the Rio was just out of this world. I'm not sure how much they show in the coverage, but especially the last hour before the start of the final table was insane, the whole room was electric and people were incredibly jittery and nervous. Even I found myself nervous in the same way like I'd be before the start of the Olympic ice hockey final with Finland playing. I found this very strange, since I was really just waiting to see whether another poker player would win the Main Event or not. It's just a very well made show. My memory is letting me down a bit, but if I remember correctly, they also have someone there working for ESPN whose sole purpose is to get the audience going. So the second there's a commercial break, he gets up there on stage and tries to get everyone to do chants and claps and whatever. He was very good at his job.

That reminds me, there's an insane amount of commercial breaks. Everything feels three times as long live as opposed to watching the coverage, even that the coverage is live with commercials. It felt like they played 3 hands, there was a 5-minute break, etc etc.

It was also quite handy that my friend had a room at the Rio. The coverage that year was, I think, on a 15-minute delay. So we'd watch an interesting hand go down, try to guess what everyone had, and then run upstairs to see it on tv 15 minutes later with hole cards. It was a lot of fun. Every time we went up, which must have been at least 20 times, we ordered drinks on the way back.

On one of the trips upstairs I remember spotting one of the already busted November Niners at a craps/roulette table. I won't say who it is (it doesn't matter, and it's not my place to spread gossip), but I've rarely seen a man as devastated. He was just a broken man, a complete mess, and he was spewing his winnings around the high limit tables as fast as he could. If he had been there alone, I'd have gone there and tried to say something, but he was surrounded by a dozen friends who were all cheering and chanting when he was making his gigantic wagers. It was like a scene from a movie where someone has a bachelor party in Vegas and everyone's in good spirits around a craps table, except that the stakes were gigantic, and the main player looked like his heart had just been torn out of his chest. I could read his thoughts, because I've been there many times myself. Whatever money he had in front of him, no matter how life-changing, he was just looking to get rid of. He didn't win the main prize, and what money he got for his score was just a consolation prize. He wouldn't feel good until he'd lose it all, or alternatively go to sleep and wake up the next day realizing that he had still made a BUNCH of money and life's still pretty good. Take me out of here, his eyes where saying. But all he was capable of doing was placing more and more max bets, not even caring for the outcome. But not one of his "friends" apparently thought to intervene. In fact, they were actively encouraging him to punt all his money maybe 30 minutes after he had busted the Main Event. It was a sad sight to watch, and as much as I wanted to do something, it wasn't my place. I couldn't watch that for longer than a minute so I have no idea how it ended, I hope someone had enough common sense to drag him out at some point. [For the record, I didn't really witness him lose much, as I left pretty much as soon as I realized what was happening. For all I know, maybe he binked ten million that night. But let's just say that it didn't look good.]

Day 1 went on absolutely forever, but we were there up until the very end. It was such a rewarding feeling when the fourth player finally busted, it was 4-5AM, half the soldiers had already gone to sleep, but we were still there immediately behind the main stage cheering. I didn't even know why I was cheering so much, but I was jumping up and down like an energizer bunny. The magic of WSOP, I guess.





Gregy was 1/3 going to the night break, and you just knew he was going to win it. I had no doubt in my mind that after all he had gone through, there was no chance he'd not win. Because of that, day two felt like a victory party from the very beginning. We started drinking early on, and had a lot of fun. I remember at one point we started chanting "SHAUN THE DEALER! SHAUN THE DEALER!" in honour of the legendary WSOP dealer who was dealing the table at the time, and our chant made it to the ESPN coverage too. I was talking to the people who had the biggest pieces of Gregy and the plan was very much to go out big time once the final table would be finished.

What we hadn't planned for was that the final table went on... and on... and on. It was the longest final table of all time at the time (maybe still is?). At like 6AM it was still going, and we went to check yet another hand from my friend's room. I remember the sun was already up, it was extremely hot in his room, and we had drank every beverage in his minibar on previous breaks. I sat on the couch just for a second to rest my eyes, watching the coverage with one eye halfway open, considering calling room service just to bring me water, because going back downstairs felt like an impossible feat.

I woke up from the couch at around nine in the morning. My friend was fast asleep in his bed, and ESPN (that was still open on his tv) was showing something else than poker. We'd missed the climax. Neither of us had any idea who had won.

I just had my European SIM card at the time, so I didn't have internet in my phone. The wifi in the room didn't work. But it was morning anyway, and I was so, so thirsty, so I decided to head down and back to my hotel anyway. I walked into the Rio sportsbook and asked who'd won. Not one person knew. I must have asked at least twenty people, floormen, hotel workers and managers. No one knew. I had to cab it up all the way back to my hotel to find out that Gregy had indeed won.

It was close to 11 when I got to go to sleep in my own bed, and just before I closed my eyes, I got a message from one of my friends: "The final table went on so late that the victory party was postponed until tonight. It's also Halloween, go get a costume!"

So, let's just have that sink in for a second. We have a guy who's just won the World Championship of Poker and $8,5 million in the process, who's made several people very rich, and it's the ****ing Halloween, in ****ing Las Vegas. Sounds like quite a party. [I should probably point out at this point that Gregy's been sober for a long time as he stated in his thread, but he seemed to be very fine about his friends consuming whatever they wanted at the party.]

I woke up late in the afternoon to my friend calling. He said that we have two hours to get costumes until we'd have to be at Gregy's party for his toast. I'm not sure how this happened or what we were thinking, but somehow we ended up lost in a cab 30 minutes outside the Strip looking for some specific costume store we never found. By the time we got back, still without costumes, we were in an insane rush to make it. I don't know how it's possible, but somehow we couldn't find a single store in Las Vegas selling Halloween costumes on Halloween night. (Being extremely hungover probably played a part in this.)

We ended up buying these horrendous blinking t-shirts from a souvenir store. Basically just t-shirts with batteries inside that had bars lighting up to the tune of the sounds in the room. So if there was a loud bass track, the bars were going green to the rhythm of the bass.

We were told that the party would begin at Gregy's suite he was given by the Rio. I'm not sure but if I remember correctly, it normally costs $20k/night and the champion gets it for two nights. All I remember is that it was huge. As in, there was a ****ing barber studio INSIDE the suite. It could've filled the entire population of a small country.

I felt so weird going inside the party. There were only maybe 30-40 people there, and I was probably close to the only one who basically didn't know Gregy. Yet there I was with my Finnish accent and stupid blinking t-shirt about to enter a $20k/night suite. I asked Gregy's best friends (who were in charge of organizing everything) like seven times if it's ok for me to come, and they said that of course it is. I did know more or less everyone at the party though, and after all I had traveled from Mexico all the way to Vegas just to be a part of the #weneedit people, and it was just too juicy an opportunity to pass, so inside I went. Luckily I was made feel very welcome, and Gregy was very nice and warm. Poker couldn't have received a more deserving champion.

We left the suite pretty early to go to some club in Vegas. I'm not a clubber, I hate EDM, I hate dancing, and this kind of thing isn't really my piece of pie at all. But if there's ever a time to completely lose yourself at a Vegas club, this was probably it. The queue outside the place was completely insane, must have been 400 meters as Kaskade was playing. But we got past not only the queue, but also the VIP queue, as Gregy's friends had bought us the most expensive tables at the whole club, the kinds of tables that Hollywood stars would normally book. I have no idea what the bill was (I drew the line at buying my own drinks at least, and just hung out at the tables) but it must have been a truckload of money.








The above are random pics I took on my 2011 Samsung phone from the club. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so no trip report from the party. Let's just say that we were treated like Hollywood stars due to our table status, all girls were scantily clad and very accommodative... it's a night I'll never forget.

All in all the whole trip was an amazing experience. I'm not sure if I'd do it again (unless a close friend was playing). It's hard to put into words, but in a way it feels like a once in a lifetime type of thing to me. I don't have much interest in the WSOP in itself, I don't care that much who's the new champion or who wins what. I wouldn't go just to be a poker fanboy. But this one time that I had a guy to root for, and thirty friends rooting for the same outcome, I was completely sucked in by the atmosphere and the WSOP/Vegas craziness. I definitely had much more fun on that trip than on any of my own WSOP trips*, and when my poker days will be over, this will be one of my favourite memories.

*quite possibly because I'm 0/23 for cashing in WSOP events myself.


PS. A hand history from the $1590 Wynn Classic from this same trip. I have 22kish from 30k starting at 100/200/25.

Annette_15 opens to 500 UTG
I flat AA UTG+1. I haven't played live poker in ages, it's literally the first time I physically see aces in months. I can feel myself shaking, I get nervous, and it feels like everyone at the table is staring at me. My head is a mess for some reason, I'm not normally as shaky, but I can't calm my thoughts down. All I can think of is they know, they know, they know you have aces! I can feel my cheeks turning red.
Todd Terry makes it 1800 from CO or BTN
Annette_15 calls
I make it like 6300 or whatever. As I raise I fumble chips and all I can think of is THEY KNOW THEY KNOW.
Todd Terry folds
Annette_15 calls
Flop T52 I bet/call and Annette somehow has 55.
"Player out!" I was the first person out of the tournament wondering wtf just happened*.

*I still don't know if Annette really put me on precisely AA and was setmining or if she misread my bet or stack or something. She did say something along the lines of "sorry I didn't see your stack" so maybe she thought my 4bet was all-in or something? I definitely wasn't hiding my chips in any way though.


I was going to write another, but that was already quite long so I'll continue at a later time. Coming up: Lost in a haunted hotel in Connecticut, trying to convince PokerStars that they have a problem at their HQ + about a dozen other random stories.

will read the above later, just cought up with ur previous posts and yo nbd, i assumed sth came in the way of u coming here. i ll be very booked out until the end of wcoop i think BUT if u wanna come over for wcoop you can do that, out one spot is currently free. that would require u dong some grinding tho as drinking hapens after the series otherwise just pop over after wcoop is done. i ll be going to barca so maybe i ll see u there? its actually weird that we ve never met personally. gotta change that

When is WCOOP? I can't find the dates on Stars website and I'm not installing that software on my computer again.

I'll be in Kosovo-Macedonia-Serbia-Bosnia-Croatia-Montenegro-Albania from September 10th until ?? (2 weeks-ish). After that I have no idea what I'm doing with my life, and before that I don't think I'm leaving Finland. But I like the idea of going to Vienna/Berlin maybe? For a month or so of actual grinding around late September, and then heading to warmer temperatures after. Not sure how that matches with WCOOP/Barca?

Barca Is Till the 29th of August, wcoop likely sept like 5/6/7 till that plus 22 days. So late septembro would be the time and I d also look to play one more full month after wcoop when glory hunter regs are all dead and then do some trip to some place warm. Would actually match up quite nicely as a buddy could then come grind wcoop and you take over once that's done. Also there is still hop for nice warm autumny times in October here

That sounds super awesome actually. I don't have a regular apartment in Finland, so I have zero function to be here after the Balkan trip anyway. But at the same time I'm flexy with dates so I could switch whenever around then (late Septemberish) your buddy wants, I have no problem stalling at the Balkans for some extra days drinking beer #lifeisgood.

And yeah that's the best month to grind. I think I really want to put in like a proper actual full month of grinding around then so it would work perfectly. Let's do this! Find me on Facebook if you have one, I'm pretty findable with this confusing rare name of mine.

Still had quite a bit of this flu over the weekend, soldiered through on Nyquil* and bulletproof coffee. I'm not sure if I've a) forgotten how to play poker, b) the flu/drugs numbed my brain, or c) just ran into a record amount of interesting spots but man I felt like I didn't know what I was doing in ~80 spots over two days. The good news is that I marked all of them, I think these are virtually all really good to look at, so gonna take a lab day tomorrow. This weekend's grind was whatever, I probably didn't play very well, but also lost four different 500-1000€ equity pfais with AA in pretty much my four biggest fts. Ended up losing heaps at NL MTTs, which was quite a feat really given that much opposition was like this:







Luckily I won nicely at PLO cash and PLO8 MTTs. Whatever, I'll take a small win and lots of good studying material. 83 marked hands total apparently, from just two sessions I guess that means I either really don't know what I'm doing or was just very much in the zone questioning everything.

Retirement fund week 12

(I accidentally marked two last weeks both as #10, so catching up)



Monday -
Tuesday -
Wednesday -
Thursday -
Friday -
Saturday 7h -135
Sunday 10h +339
=17h +204



Retirement fund deposit: 40,8€
Deposits total since 1.5.2016: 1559,20€
Total hours since 1.5.2016: 286,25

Looking forward to a full week of poker next week, gonna play or at least study intensively every day unless something comes up.

*It's amazing how much better American flu meds are. The stuff they sell over the counter in Finland is like eating vitamin C. This American daytime stuff makes you jilted like you're on speed and the night time stuff could knock out an elephant. I always stock up on these when I'm in the States/Canada.

Nyquil: the nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, aching, coughing, stuffy-head, fever, how the hell did I wake up on the bathroom floor medicine.

When you go to Macedonia ( i live there) if you want to go to casino go to Gevgelija abot 180km from Skopje, is at border with Greece, they have really good casinos Princes and Flamingo good service and good games

I think Greg win was so great. He really seems like a great guy, very down to earth.

I fully agree, I was so happy for him when he won. I've been acquainted to some level with almost every champ in recent years and Greg is definitely my "favourite".


Thanks, but I don't really play live anymore to begin with, and if I did I definitely wouldn't do it when I'm on a vacation with non-poker friends. I can't really think of anything worse than sitting inside some casino playing tedious live poker on a nice summer day.

Part 1 is here

Nicaragua, part 2

I've been stalling writing part two of this partially because I've entirely forgotten what we did between Granada and the Corn Islands. Three months later, I still can't remember, so I'm just going to skip ahead. I guess having already forgotten about events that only took place 1,5 years ago confirms my suspicion that it's a pretty good idea to write these down.

So, after spending time in Granada and Masaya, exploring the surroundings and doing lots of nature-related fun and hiking we found ourselves on a propeller plane to Big Corn Island via Bluefields. There's also Little Corn Island, which was our actual destination, but that one doesn't even have an airstrip. Not that Big Corn would be very big, either – I'd say it was roughly 2km from coast to coast if even that. You could walk from anywhere to anywhere on the island in 30 minutes.


Ain't a bad view to land into.


The Big Corn Island airport. This might be the smallest airport I've ever landed into, at least it's pretty close. Just one runway, only for small propeller planes, no surveillance of any kind. They didn't even have a machine to scan our bags on the way back, and our flight was slightly delayed because, wait for it... there was a horse on the loose on the runway. You get the picture.


We stayed at Big Corn for three days. Most travellers who make it this far tend to go all the way and head to Little Corn, which is the real Robinson Crusoe 2.0 spot (more on that later). This was also our goal. I'm not a big Lonely Planet person, but I did end up buying the Nicaragua edition, and it basically said that Big Corn is very underwhelming and the best thing to do is to head straight to Little Corn. I tend to disagree, honestly. I had very low expectations for Big Corn, but it definitely exceeded them. The best beach on the whole trip was at Big Corn, for example. And we had it entirely to ourselves basically every day. There was one local dude working at a small bar/restaurant who made us cocktails inside of fresh coconuts and pretty much anything we asked for, and he was the only person in sight. We didn't do anything that special at Big Corn, so I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures.



The bungalow we stayed at, it was actually quite nice. Even had electricity most of the time (I'm not being sarcastic, this was the last place with proper electricity we had).


This was the main beach, I believe it was called Picnic Beach. You can spot a very relaxed Chuck Bass in this picture if you look closely.


...and the opposite direction from the same spot. Not a soul anywhere, and this was during the tourist season. So relaxing.


The beach bar/restaurant and the very friendly dude who kept making us drinks. We pretty much let him prepare us whatever he wanted to, which was usually a mojito-like drink made inside of a young coconut that had a LOT of alcohol in it. Iirc the price was $2/drink, which was probably quite an overprice, but I'm not about to start haggling about a price of a freshly made coconut mojito when I have a 1km pristine beach to myself.


A typical sight on the couple of paved roads on the island: At least two farm animals on the loose for each vehicle.


This factory was seemingly the only business employing more than five people operating on the islands. I just had to get this photo to send to my old roommates from Australia, with whom I worked at a similar shrimp farm nearly a decade ago and where my poker career got started. This place looked okay, but I didn't come to consider resurrecting my shrimp peeling career.


I have no idea what this place was. We tried to check out the place, but some guy came from inside and yelled at us in some language we didn't understand (probably Creolean?) so we had to leave.


This is the island specialty called Rondon (Rundown). It's a soup with all kinds of fish, lobster and plantain. This was cooked by a local woman, we ate at her house. She said the soup takes 12 hours to cook. I didn't think it was too great. As a side note, I ate more lobster at the Corn Islands that I'd eaten in my life. They have so much lobster there that it's actually the cheapest thing to eat. You can go to any beach and there's a bazillion lobsters a stone's throw away. Fish was cheap too, but still more expensive than lobster. It's funny, even now I still always think of lobster as "cheap, trashy food" because I overdosed on it pretty hard on the islands.


This is the meal I had the most: shrimp (or lobster) in garlic sauce with rice. They always threw a few french fries in there without me asking, possibly because they thought we were Americans, but the garlic thing was legit amazing.

The "centre" of Big Corn Island had a couple of "grocery stores" that were selling everything and nothing. For example, they didn't have batteries or plastic bags for sale, but they had seemingly endless amounts of copper wire and free range eggs. They didn't have any kind of bread, but they had 20 kinds of flour (on the island you buy the bread straight from the people who make it, and the local coconut bread is delicious). They didn't have men's deodorant of any kind, but they had Western shower gels. Same thing in every shop. It's my understanding that everything the stores sell arrives by ship, and inventory depends entirely on what's left until the next shipment.

Aside from the little shops, there was a post office, a local incredibly overpriced ice cream parlour, a cafe, a police station, and a couple of bars. Most restaurants were scattered around the island in people's homes. Basically Big Corn has a semi-functioning tiny little centre (as opposed to Little Corn that has nothing at all). I wouldn't describe the centre as charming, if anything it felt like a place where you don't really want to end up alone after sunset (there were some reports about tourist muggins, and although I usually tend to shrug these things off, Big Corn had a certain vibe at night that didn't make me feel too safe - even all the bungalow places were inside gated communities that were surrounded by barbed wire and required waking up the owner to get in after sunset). Not that you'd want to end up anywhere, really, as there are no street lights and it's just pitch black dark everywhere. There was one "club" (basically just an empty beach bar) we went to, but there were about three people inside so we just had a couple of beers and went to sleep. The best thing you can do even at Big Corn, not to mention Little Corn, is to synchronize yourself with nature by going to sleep at 9PM and waking up at 5-6AM. Which is what I was very much looking forward to do, anyway.

I'd love to post more pictures from Big Corn, but somehow I've lost the folder they were at. So I guess I'll just move to Little Corn, which is where the story gets interesting, anyway.

So, after a few days at Big Corn, we finally headed to Little Corn. The only way to get there is by panga, which is like an extended Thai banana boat with a faster engine. There's just one company operating these panga rides with one or two daily departures. I'd read a lot of warnings about these boats, but nothing could've prepared me for that ride. The pangas were clearly designed to carry ten, maybe fifteen people, yet they crammed about 40 of us into one boat. Maybe more. And when they started the 11km crossing, they went full speed, smashing into huge waves, the panga going up and down like a roller coaster. And this was on a nice day. The Corn Islands are so far on the open ocean that the next piece of land you'll get into in the direction opposite from the mainland is Africa, hence the waves. I talked to a couple later on at Little Corn who'd arrived in poor weather, and they said it was the most horrifying 1,5 hours of their lives. I don't doubt them. I was legitimately scared for the whole ride even in good weather, because the panga was seemingly on the verge of capsizing pretty much the whole time. It seemed evident that sooner or later something would happen on one of these crossings. A year later, thirteen tourists died on this very same panga. It was a long time coming. (I'm also missing my pictures from the panga ride.)

I'll get into Little Corn in the next post. A lot of pretty interesting stuff went down, including some pretty deep **** we managed to get ourselves into. Twice. The worse of those cases was all because I reaaaally wanted to go freediving with sharks. In a storm. It really wasn't the brightest idea.

I'll try to take less than three months before I get to the next part! Meanwhile, here's a happy Nicaraguan crab:

Nice. With you retirement fund are you planing on doing anything with it, like shares or just letting it sit?

Current plan is mainly to stay alive until retirement, seems like a coinflip with some of my habits / tendencies

I think it might be best plan to save those monies in some long-term investments. Like buying some index funds which do not charge additional costs (Nordnet Superrahasto?). Easy and don't need to spend time and effort for investment planning.

Nice blog which makes me feel that I need to travel (a lot) more. And play (a lot) more.

This is so well said and unfortunately it applies to me as well.
Nice read by the way. More pics please.

Retirement fund week 13

Monday 8,25h +155
Tuesday 5,5h +2
Wednesday 5h +22
Thursday 8h +550
Friday -
Saturday -
Sunday 8,25h +265
=35h +994


Retirement fund deposit: 198,8€
Deposits total since 1.5.2016: 1758€
Total hours since 1.5.2016: 321,25


If I hadn't failed so hard on Saturday I'd give myself a pretty strong grade for this week - I went out with a friend on Friday which was a lot of fun, and I really thought I could maybe not get too hungover to actually be able to play on Saturday... yeah right. Wasn't particularly close Other than that I was really happy with my attitude, I'd have grinded more on Tue/Wed as well but games were just completely dead after midnight. Still a pretty reasonable 35h of volume on what was the warmest week of the year here so far, and I also managed to do a decent bit of outdoor/social life stuff + ~4 hours of studying so was all good. Today was a bit sad, I really thought I'd have won much more, felt like I was binking heaps and on top of that had sooo many runs that didn't quite materialize in the end.

My biggest score all week was less than 300 euros, which is pretty amazing for ~25 ABI, just couldn't really finish. Again won more at PLO than NLHE, I don't even remember when I last binked something in a no limit tournament. Then again it's not like I care where the money comes from as long as it comes from somewhere.

I'm going to aim to get another week of similar volume, might be a bit difficult tho since Mr Bond18 is coming to Helsinki on Thursday so I suspect I might find myself not in front of my computer over the weekend too much.

Some random hands:


1. The opener is a dumb reg, I swear I had auto fold on after he donked river before the other guy even acted. I was basically 100% he had the nut flush. The gentleman in question is 82% cbet, 80% cbet in 3+way pots over a large sample. Facepalm.jpg



2. I don't know if this is necessary (villain is a fish) but I just feel like they have a low PP here almost every time?





3. No value in mtts etc





4. I think this is pretty bad by me, the second I checkraised river I almost slapped myself because I really felt like I was going to get called Like, I guess I can't call turn if I don't do this on rivers, but at the same time people just don't fold. Except this guy, apparently.





5. Some reg with a 9% fold to cbet over a 700 hand sample, pretty amazing when you think about it





6. Try harder





7. Nobody else seemed to want it



8. Another one where I think jamming the river is just lighting money on fire, no idea wtf he folded


[converted_hand][hand_history] (250/500 blinds, 40 ante) No Limit Hold'em Tournament, 4 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.

SB: 29,019 (58 bb)
Hero (BB): 19,450 (38.9 bb)
CO: 29,815 (59.6 bb)
BTN: 44,394 (88.8 bb)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 9 T
CO folds, BTN raises to 1,000, SB calls 750, Hero calls 500

Flop: (3,160) 7 8 4 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero bets 2,107, BTN calls 2,107, SB calls 2,107

Turn: (9,481) 8 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero bets 5,000, BTN folds, SB calls 5,000

River: (19,481) 2 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets 11,303 and is all-in, SB folds

The little corn trip report is so good, more plz!

Part 1
Part 2

Nicaragua, part 3

Upon surviving the panga ride, we had finally made it to our final destination, the Little Corn Island. This took five flights from Helsinki (Helsinki->Copenhagen->Miami->Managua->Bluefields->Big Corn) plus the panga, but my first thoughts after seeing the island were that this was so worth the trouble. I don't know why, but I've always wanted to avoid masses for the most part, and strived to find holiday spots as far away from the modern world as possible. And finding these places in 2016 is harder and harder, because even every ”touch of paradise that hasn't been discovered by tourists yet” has its own Wikitravel article and Lonely Planet page. In fact, it's pretty damn hard to find an island both remote but with some kind of accommodation, unless you're very rich. Little Corn Island certainly came pretty close to meeting my requirements, despite the fact that it keeps appearing in every single ”20 hidden paradises you should visit before it's too late” lists that generally ruin these hidden paradises very quickly. I suspect that the only reason why Little Corn still has that feeling of remoteness is because it's, well, so remote. It's so incredibly hard to travel to that you don't run into anyone but the most adventurous of travelers. Especially tourist families with kids just don't make it to the island. I'd say there were maybe 200-300 tourists on the whole island (during holiday season), and they were practically all young backpackers. This could be way off, and while it may sound like a lot, I can assure you it's not. It was entirely possible to not run into a single other tourist in the entire time if you avoided certain spots.

A couple of quotes from the Wikitravel page to paint the picture:


We had a booked a bungalow from a tiny place called Dobedo, which is ran by a Canadian guy and his local wife. It was the furthermost place from the pier, aka the ”centre” of the island (the centre was formed by the pier, a café called Tranquilo which had an occasionally working wi-fi and was thus where all the backpackers were sitting every day, a church, a dive shop, a very strange clothing store that seemed to be open about two hours a week, and a tiny grocery store that had maybe 5% of the stuff you'd find at a 7eleven).

The people at Dobedo were supposed to come welcome us at the pier and guide the way to the place, but there was no one in sight, and no cell phone reception. This wouldn't be a problem in a normal location, since you could just walk to the hotel, but turned out a bit tricky on Little Corn since 90% of the island is covered by thick jungle and there are no roads to walk on. We asked some local about where Dobedo might be, and he pointed us towards a narrow dirt road leading straight into the jungle.

Lacking other options, off we went with all our luggage. The first kilometer or so was steep uphill in +35c heat, and I was covered in sweat only a few minutes in. It hadn't been long since it had last rained, and the path was thus basically mud, which didn't make things easier.

[At this point I regret to say that I'm somehow missing 80% of my Little Corn photos too. I really don't get what's happened to them. So if these pics seem kind of random, it's because I'm missing some of the key ones I'd have prefered to use.]


A field in the middle of the jungle, and roughly the central point of the island, around halfway through our walk. I loved this field, it was so serene. The trees surrounding it guaranteed there was never any wind. It felt like a piece of African savannah, and I was always halfway expecting to spot zebras and giraffes. There was never anyone anywhere, just sounds of birds and crickets and lizards and whatnot. The path in the picture is how wide it was pretty much at its widest in the jungle.


I'm not sure what these birds were, they kinda looked like a mix between chickens and turkeys, there were heaps of them running around the jungle. Let's call them Jungle Turkeys, because how cool is that?


The gate to Dobedo. The picture really doesn't do justice to the remoteness of the place – if I turned in any direction there would be just thick jungle and the dirt path maybe three feet wide. It felt very absurd when we finally located the place and spotted the gate, because in the thirty minutes spent in the middle of the jungle we already felt like we had gone 2000 years back in time and even seeing a fence felt like a magical invention.

Dobedo in itself was quite charming. It was surrounded by a lush garden, and there were chickens and dogs and cats running around the yard. There was a 1,5m long lizard in a tree right next to our bungalow. There was a well with perfectly drinkable water (it was also the only source of water, as there's no tap water system), and you occasionally had electricity depending on if the solar panel caught anything. There was a swing in the yard, and not a sign of modern life in any direction.


The aforementioned church at the ”centre”.


I don't know if this seems like much to you guys, but seeing this fella was one of my legit coolest traveling experiences ever. A wild land turtle, right on the path to Dobedo. I showed this picture to the Canadian guy and he seemed quite puzzled, as he said he hadn't seen one on the islands in his five years (iirc) there. He actually said that maybe it was a sea turtle that had decided to go for a walk, but this was like 30m above sea level and at least 500m from the water. So **** it, I'm calling it a land turtle, still the only time I've seen one in the wild.

Dobedo was only about 100 meters from a tiny little beach. When I say beach, I don't mean the kind of beach with sun chairs and a beach bar, but a remote beach with no one anywhere, perfect sunsets and a coral reef right in front of it. After being shown around the premises and chatting with the owners, I did what any sane person would do as his first act on the island; grabbing my snorkeling gear and running into the sea. Sadly the waters were quite choppy and there wasn't that much to see on our beach, although I did spot this barracuda:



The beach [technically this is from the next beach over in case someone wants to nitpick, I can't locate one daytime picture from the nearest beach to Dobedo]:



...But here's one from our own beach at sunset:



There are roughly eight restaurants scattered around the island. We wanted to go to one of the two ”real” restaurants just to celebrate our first night and wash down the memories of the panga nightmare and dragging our luggage through the jungle with a bottle of wine. The only problem was that the sun was already setting, and the restaurant was about an hour's walk away. We'd have to walk all the way back to the pier, and then take another path from there. But technically, the restaurant was only about a kilometer away, and it was pretty close to the beach. I asked the bungalow owner if we could just walk along the beach and find it, and he said it's doable, but we should carry torches and we might have to revert to the jungle for some of the journey since the tide was high.

Now, let's backtrack to the Wikitravel article and what it said about torches and the tide:

You can walk most of the east side of the island along the beach, with a couple of tricky spots at high tide. Carry a flashlight (torch) if you won´t be back before dark, getting lost in the jungle wouldn´t be fun for most people.

We didn't have torches, but we had the lights of our cellphones, which I assumed would be enough. I sort of assumed that there would be some light by, I don't know, the stars? After having lived in the city for long enough, you can't really comprehend how dark dark can be.

Pretty ****ing dark, it turned out.

So, I proposed the idea of taking a shortcut past the jungle to my girlfriend. I should point out that before this trip, she had never been a) outside Europe, b) anywhere near a jungle, c) anywhere that could be considered remote, d) anywhere where she couldn't call 911 if she found herself in a pickle, (say, for example, getting lost in the jungle).

”Are you sure it's a good idea?” she asked.

”It's a pretty small island, I don't think it's possible to get very lost,” I replied. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about.

The walk started off pretty easy, as we just followed the beach, and it was still somewhat light. But the beach got narrower and narrower due to the tide, and soon we were knee deep in water. The last shades of daylight disappeared around the same time with the beach, and soon it was so dark we couldn't see what we were walking on. It happened very insidiously; first we were walking on the sand at sunset, and then we were standing knee deep in the sea in complete darkness without a clear idea of how we ended up there. It wasn't like the sunsets in Europe that go on forever, but as if a light had been switched off. We had to get out of the water, because slipping on an underwater rock in the dark didn't seem like an enticing experience.

The only problem was that there was only jungle in sight. It wasn't so thick you'd need a knife to get through it, but we regularly had to push trees and branches and bushes to get past, and we had no idea where we were going. The island is only about 2km from one side to the other [note: I previously described Big Corn being this size, it turned out that it was actually over 5km], and I have a built-in sense of direction that usually functions like a high-end GPS. It seemed completely incomperehensible to get lost in a tiny piece of jungle like that, but lost we got. We spent one and a half hours going in circles, dodging branches and listening to sounds of the jungle (which were probably just created by pocket-sized birds and lizards, but that sounded like dinosaurs). Then my phone ran out of battery, so we were down to my girlfriend's phone's torch. The phone was some ****ty old Samsung and the light was so faint it was basically useless.

It was such an absurd feeling. It was barely 10 P.M., a time of the day when you go to the movies in the first world. Yet 10 P.M. in the heart of the jungle might as well have been 4 A.M. Actually the latter would've been much better, as at least the sun would've been about to rise. We felt like we were a thousand kilometres from civilization in some sort of blinding eternal darkness. I wouldn't describe it so much as scary (my girlfriend would strongly disagree with this assessment), but beautiful. I really felt like I'd been teleported into ancient times.

We finally found a small dirt path. We weren't sure if it was leading somewhere, as it looked quite abandoned, but it was the first sight of any kind of life we had encountered in ages. After walking on it for a minute it suddenly became lighter, as if tiny little christmas lights had lit up around us.

Fireflies.

I'd seen fireflies before, but never before so many or so beautiful. There were hundreds of them everywhere lighting the way. If my girlfriend hadn't been so scared I'd probably have camped right then and there until the morning just to look at them.

Oh, by the way, there's another characteristic about the island I forgot to mention. There's a **** ton of wild dogs. If this were a normal destination, they'd be loitering in the streets, looking for scraps from restaurants or whatever. But since Little Corn Island is basically jungle, that's where the dogs reside. Jungle. I'd read about the dogs, but I completely forgot about them upon assessing whether the shortcut would be a good idea. And I didn't remember about their existence until we ran into a flock of angry dogs in the middle of the pitch black jungle.

When you encounter a stray dog in the daytime, even if it seems to have rabies and is acting aggressively, it never seems like that big of a deal. You ignore it, slowly walk away, and if **** gets real you run away. Worst case scenario, you get bit a little and go to the hospital to get a rabies shot. But let me tell you, when you encounter stray dogs in a dark jungle without an escape plan, it can be pretty ****ing scary. Bear in mind that it was so dark we couldn't even see the dogs as much as hear them barking all around us.

I'd like to think that I'm a pretty rational person and operate quite well under sudden, stressful situations, but I came pretty close to losing my **** right then and there. I don't know what the stray dog guidebook says about running away like headless chickens instead of trying to make a calm, controlled exit, but that's what we did. By some miracle we didn't get bit (one dog tore a small piece of my shorts, and that's as close as he got), but now we were in even more trouble as we had basically ran deeper into the jungle and lost the last of our sense of direction in the process.

Funnily enough, we were probably still only about a kilometer from the restaurant (which was closed by now) that we were trying to find. But a kilometer on a paved road is more like ten kilometers in a dark jungle, and everywhere seemed hopelessly far. But we had no choice but to walk, so we walked and walked, losing our balance in the bushes, tearing our knees and elbows in the process. Every now and then we'd hear angry barks that seemed to be coming closer, and every little sound of a branch cracking nearly gave us a heart attack. The torch could only point maybe a meter forward. There was no way to see what or who was lurking in the jungle.

Eventually, after walking what felt like seven times around the whole island, we found ourselves at some woman's backyard. She was living on the edge of the jungle, and was pretty scared when two strangers emerged from the darkness in the middle of the night. We didn't have a common language, either, but luckily we were pale Scandinavians and she realized pretty quickly that we must be dumb tourists lost in the jungle, not murderers. She reluctantly let us exit through the front of her house, which led to a slightly wider jungle pathway, which eventually led us straight into the jetty.

When I spoke to the Dobedo owner the next day, he couldn't believe the story.

”You crazy scandis!”

Heard that before.


Come next day, all was well in paradise, and we were back to being happy little eco-tourists: