Yep, some things have happened in the last week or so. And I have lots of pictures to prove it. I mentioned last time that I was about to play in the ALTA city championships (a huge tennis league in Atlanta) at one of the highest levels. Well, i think this picture sums up the day pretty well...
Yeahhhhh, we won, and it was an awesome day of tennis, drinking, and racket smashing. The way ALTA works (well, playoffs) is there are 5 doubles matches and it's simply first to win 3 of them. I was playing line 2 with the guy on the far left bottom... oh wait more picture time
Anyway, by the time we got on the court, line 1 was down a set and not looking too good, which was surprising as one of the guys on our line 1 is hands down one of the best players in the city. He played D1 at Michigan State, and actually was a poker player before he inevitably found blackjack. Ah, how that story resonates. But back to our story.
My partner played, for lack of a better word, reallyfuckinshitty. It happens, people have off days, and we still kept it close, but we ended up losing our first match of the year in the finals 6-3, 6-3. After the match, I took a racket to a concrete walll and created a good amount of destruction, scaring the women and children in attendance. However, line 1 came back and won in 3 sets, so it was all square at 1 match a piece headed into lines 3 and 4.
Action shot...
Line 3 ended up playing pretty bad as well, and went down in straight sets, and line 4 ended up losing the first set. Things weren't going very well as line 5's took the court. It turned out one of the guys playing line 5 for the other team was someone I used to play juniors with, and remember him being pretty good, so at this point I though we were pretty much a lost cause. To make things worse, 4's went down a break in the second set. However, they got it back and went on to win the set 7-5. And 5's scooped up the first set easily as well, so it was all coming down to the 3rd set of line 4.
Now, you may be wondering what the rest of the team is doing while all of these matches are going on. Since we only get 2 courts, and most of the matches went pretty long, we ended up being there for about 7 hours. That's a lot of time spent drinking in the hot sun yelling at the other team. Needless to say, we were all pretty much gone by this time and children were starting to cry as the volume level and profanity level had gone through the roof.
The 3rd set of 4's was incredible. It's a few days out of memory now, but I believe it was on serve to around 3-3, until we got a break, and then had one of our biggest servers serving for the match at 5-4. Well, needless to say that went poorly and then it was 5-5. We ended up getting another break there (and racket of opponent was smashed), and then held at 6-5 to take the match. A couple minutes later line 5's won their 2nd set and clinched the title. And the champagne was flowin', and the plates were ours.
PLO:
I started dabbling in some PLO (pot limit omaha) recently as the holdem games have been pretty bad in the morning time and I don't want to have to drop down limits or play shortstack tables to fill up the 24 table queue. Naturally, I jumped right into 24 tabling the game with little experience, and have had some decent success. The best part about it is my hands/hour and vpp's/hand are slightly higher playing a mix of .5/1 and 1/2 plo then playing 2-4/10-20 holdem so I get closer to SNE faster. The downside is I definitely make more $$$ playing holdem, but PLO is a nice change.
The game is definitely very much more exciting then holdem, as you get it all in a lot more, and will rarely be too far behind when you do. This is great for the weaker players as they don't realize the significant edge they give up until much further down the road, which keep the games going longer. However, the game does come with an extremely high variance level, so it's easy to get frustrated if you lose 10 all-in's in a row. I played for about 3 days or so while on my holdem break, and ended up slightly positive, while running slighly below EV. I also managed to figure out how to not get absolutely murdered in non-showdown winnings, which is really important.
Although, it does take some getting used to (coming from a holdem background) that aces are more or less trash, and hands like below are the moneymakers.
TAHOE:
I'm all but booked to move to Tahoe for the first 3 months of next year. I don't wanna post pics until we've actually signed the contract just in case one of you aholes decides to scoop up the place from me. It should be a blast. The group as of now is ryanmack, speedle, blaabar, and myself, so I'll be the only american in the house amongst 2 euros and a candian. Drluck might end up coming out if we stay longer, but it's still up in the air. I purchased my season pass for heavenly, and I'm ready to buy a board and hit slopes almost every day while I'm out there.
I still need to decide what I'm doing after Tahoe though. Vegas for the summer is still definitely going to happen, although I'd like to go for a considerably shorter amount of time than this past year. So, I'll either keep the place in Tahoe for an extra couple of months until the series or do some traveling around the world.
- notontilt
You'll love tahoe, beautiful place if you havnt been
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