Back Country Boarding

So after finally getting about 5 feet of snow out here, we had an awesome week on the mountain.  Unfortunately our passes were blacked out for President's day weekend so the mountain could rake in tons of cash, but we were able to catch some of the remains of the powder yesterday, and I'm headed out to mountain in just a second.

Blaabar and I finally decided to get off the groomed runs and go through some trails in the woods and it was absolutely amazing.  Fresh powder, not a lot of people and tons of natural jumps made for an awesome time.  Although I did spend a fair amount of time buried in snow, I can't really complain at all.  After getting some pretty big air right under the chairlift and getting some cheers from the group on the lift, I went for a few more jumps and fell on my ass a ton.  This time they laughed at me.

Poker has been ridiculously swingy this month.  In 50k hands i've had 10 separate $5,000 swings which is pretty ridiculous for me.  I'm still putting together a decent month given the swings, but it's pretty depressing to lose 5k every other day and spend the next couple of days grinding it back.  Oh and here's a shoutout to rvb80, who I play against a ton and apparently follows my blog.  Hello sir, you are getting owned by my overbets lately!

Other than that life is pretty good.  Cow's been crashing with us for a couple days, but not too much epicness has happened.  Or at least not much that I'm willing to talk about here.  We did both get kicked out of Montbleu casino though.  My temporary paper ID from the state of GA still is not passing at the craps tables or poker room.  I don't think it helped when I walked up to the bar and told the bartender "I'm 15 but I wanna get drunk."  He then called the same security guard over that had booted me from the poker room, and I was told to exit the premises.  Cow quickly followed as they took his green card and started drilling him about his INS number.  I mean for fuck's sake, here's a bunch of kids in their early 20's, causing no trouble, with valid government issued ID's, who are willing to lose thousands of dollars in your casino.  But you kick them out.  Well played Montbleu.  I guess I'll have my passport on me next time to prove I'm not the 15 year old I appear to be.

Tomorrow, Speedle, Blaabar, and I will be flying pretty much the entire day getting down to West Palm Beach for the WSOP circuit event.  I still haven't really decided what I'll play, but as of now I'm planning on playing the main event and maybe a $1k the day before.  Mostly though it'll be a lot of beach time and likely some good food.  I'll try and update once or twice from down there as I know most of you sit on your computer looking at my blog smashing f5 until a new one pops up!

Bye for now,
- Weinman

Out On the Town, and Bowling with Euros

So I haven't updated in a while, and figured everyone would just be dying to know what's going on in my life.  Actually I'm fairly certain most people read this just to get a glimpse into the life of Speedle, but since it's my blog I'll pretend ya'll love me too.

Yes, there is the legend himself.

We've been awaiting a snowstorm out here, as the mountain's getting a bit icy, so we haven't been out to slopes in a couple of days now.  Instead we've been finding some other things to do in the fabulous Lake Tahoe.  After a pretty terrible Friday/Saturday of poker, we all decided to go out and get hammered in style.  Speedle wore the infamous 12 piece baller suit, and Dmitri wore white shoes with Velcro.  Sweedish people are weirdos.  Unfortunately, all of the tables at every club in town were booked that night, and we were stuck standing at the door.

Well, I shouldn't say all the tables, because when Chuck Liddell walked up with some hot blonde, I'm fairly certain they were given a table right away.  I considered fighting him for it, but this image kept fluttering through my head...

The night proceeded to get worse as Ryan didn't have his passport with him, and every bar in town refused to serve him with just his Canadian ID.  Which was somewhat funny as he's the oldest one in the house by about 3 years.

Eventually at 2am or so, we finally got a table at a club in Montbleu, which was pretty awesome, right on the dance floor, and super cheap.  Unfortunately, there were probably 8 guys in the place for every girl and we were all a bit too messed up to actually talk to anyone.  It was like being back at Georgia Tech, where this happens just about every weekend!

The night continued with some more drinks, and some horseracing game which ended up being pretty awesome.  You bet quarters on which two of these little plastic horses are going to win a race every 30 seconds.  Basically it's a super cheap way to get free drinks and get rowdy as the little horses battle for glory. Some locals were upset at how excited Speedle and I were getting over this game, but that's really just their loss.

A couple nights ago we went bowling, it was Speedle's first time.  Drinking and hilarity ensued.  The first game, Dmitri and I took down Ryanmack and Speedle.  The Portuguese legend put up a 75 or so, pretty decent for his first game ever.  The next game we switched it up and Speedle and I took down the other two. We were clearly gambling as is standard for just about everything out here, and things were going well.  Until game 3.  I drew Speedle as a partner again, and he put up a whopping 23.  At least 3 different times during the game I offered him a $1,000 bet that he wouldn't hit 1 pin.  He denied each time, and threw a gutter each time.  So that was kind of unfortunate for me.

I'm fairly certain we were the last people at the alley that night.  A few pitchers and pizza and goombay's later, and an awesome game of pool vs. Dmitri where I ran the table (thanks bro!), we found ourselves back at the Montbleu horseracing game.  We ran good and made a couple hundred dollars including one race where I bet the maximum on the biggest dog and hit, and broke the machine.  The attendant had to come over and pay me in $100's from a 25c machine.  The old regulars in the game were not thrilled with our winning, or our drunkenness for that matter.

Well, that's about what we've been getting up to out here.  I'm just waking up to about 6" of fresh powder so it'll likely be a long day on the mountain for us.  Speedle still hasn't been out on the slopes yet, and I have a bet against him that he won't ski one run the entire trip.  It'll likely be the easiest $500 i've ever made.

Next week we're headed down to West Palm Beach, Florida for a World Series of Poker Circuit event.  I've heard the games are amazing down there as the recently changed some of the poker regulations making it much easier to play.  I'll likely play the $1.5k main event and maybe a few others, but really just want to get some beach time in and see some buddies that I haven't seen in forever.  Oh and the legend Vinivici lives there so we'll likely have to go check out his sick pad.  And by that I mean his parent's house!  Sorry Vini had to take the shot, especially after reading about your favorite hand from 2010.

edit:  I'm going to get one of those helmet cameras, so hopefully I can post some boarding videos in upcoming posts.  Maybe I'll just wear it whenever we go out as well, as that would probably be more entertaining.

- Dan...iel

Oh I'm 23 now, cool!

So I went back home for the 23rd birthday, and had a pretty decent week.  I played a whopping 2 hours of poker the whole week which was a nice break (even though I've been pretty lazy this year so far) .  Luckily I got a bit of a boost from Poker Stars for playing the Main Event last year so I'm still well ahead of SNE pace.  Hopefully I can get some hands in now that I'm back to Tahoeville and maybe finish the month with 200k vpp's which would be about 2 weeks ahead of pace.

But I can't write about poker since I didn't really play any poker.  I don't remember doing much actually, besides a few nights of drinking.  I do remember it being ridiculously cold, however.  Someone had told me it was 70 and sunny the weekend before I flew back, so I only packed some t-shirts and shorts.  I'm pretty sure the high was 40 for the whole week I was home so I ended up having to go out and buy some clothes, as I left all the warm stuff back at the mountain house.

I went out with the parents the night I got into town and we went to some wild place called Wahoo which served, you guessed it, wahoo.  Don't worry, I didn't know what it was either.  Apparently it's a type of fish, that tastes quite good, especially in fish taco form.

I also had some seared tuna which was pretty awesome, so I'll definitely be back.  My parents couldn't wait to tell the waitress it was my birthday and demanded that she sing to me, however it didn't happen.  Most unfortunate, as I was really looking forward to being serenaded in front of a bunch of random people two days before my actual b-day.

The birthday started out pretty poorly actually.  I went to the bank to cash some checks (I can't pay for everything with Poker Stars dollars) and waited in line at the ATM for about 30 minutes while a young mexican couple played with all of the funny buttons.  I've used a lot of Bank of America ATM's in my life, and whenever you mess up it beeps at you repeatedly until you make the correct choice.  Well this couple clearly couldn't get something right as the machine just constantly beeped at them while I waited outside in the cold (in a t-shirt and shorts because I'm awesome).  Eventually I gave up and went inside and got to wait in another line for a half hour, all for a whopping 38 second transaction.  Upon leaving the bank, I saw a steady line growing behind the young couple, and the machine was still singing along.  Here's something to aid in that mental picture that's clearly forming.

Things only got better from there as I headed to the DMV to renew my license.  I was asked to fill out a big form, without a pen.  C'mon what guy carries a pen with him.  I asked the lady at the front desk if I could borrow one of her 5 pens lying around.  I was told that it was against policy.  I'm fairly certain it was because I was white.  And Jewish.  They don't like our kind apparently.  If the people running the DMV weren't just completely incompetent, it'd be a much more pleasant place.

An hour later I was staring at the blue dot and getting my picture taken.  I asked the lady if she could ship the ID to Nevada even though my address was in Georgia.  The following conversation ensued.

Her: Oh, so you wrote down the wrong address
Me: No, I live here but will be in NV for the next 2 months
Her: Oh, so you want to change your address
Me: No, I still want it to be listed with a GA address
Her: Oh, so we'll just ship it to the address listed here, ok?
Me: No, please ship it to Nevada
Her: Oh, so you want to change your address on here to NV?
Me: Do you have any sharp objects?
Her: No, that's against policy

The best part is, you now get a paper license instead of a plastic laminated one like everyone else.  And then they ship you the real one.  Well the ATL airport apparently knows about this and let me through no problem, but LAX wasn't as nice.  I was detained for a bit, while they called someone over the radio who had the position of Super Elite.  I kid you not that's what they called him.  When he arrived I showed him my Supernova Elite card in hopes we'd hit it off, but that didn't do me very much good.  I got to stand in the awesome radiation thing that my buddy Rob told me is bad for you.  And I listen to Rob because he's a nuclear engineer and probably has experience with these things.  Luckily I didn't get cavity searched, but I think Rob may have experience in that area as well, so I'll ask him about the details at a later date and report back.

On the night of my b-day a big group of us went out to this bar in Atlanta that serves fishbowls full of liquor.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  After a couple of them, it didn't seem like the greatest idea in the world.  I'm lucky we didn't go for the tequila one, or I'd have broken my 1 week long streak of not praying to the porcelain god.  At one point I stole a fancy hat and took a picture with Sydnee.  I think we look spectacular, mostly because of my hat, but she looks quite amazing as well!

Sorry, it was dark, and it's an iphone picture, and a small asian woman took it, so we didn't do too well with the quality photography.  After some fishbowls and beers, the two of us and Becca and Zack headed over to Famous Pub near Emory.  They were having karaoke, I'm fairly certain it was all part of Becca's plan to get me hammered and watch me make a fool of myself in front of tons of people.  I dodged that one though as I just ordered tons of drinks and refused to sing.  Zack sang some rap song, he did well for a white person.  My stepbrother Jerel ended up meeting us there as well.  We ordered some Goombay smashes for old times sake and called it a night.  I'm sure other things happened, but given it was my birthday I have the god-given right not to remember them.

More things happened, but this is getting long so I will make a list.

1) We saw an Imax film on Earth's greatest places.  It was excellent.  I now have to go to Madagascar and the Amazon and a desert in Africa of which I'm forgetting the name.

2) I tried longboarding.  It looked like a snowboard so I thought I'd be a natural.  Unfortunately there's no snow so I fell a lot.

3) Luke, Yohe, and I went out for oysters.  We ate more oysters than I thought was humanly possible.  Then we ate clams, then we did oyster shooters, then we had some goombay smashes (I think you're starting to see the theme of this blog by now).  Jacker ended up showing up which was great as I hadn't seen him in close to a year.  Everyone seemed intrigued by my life, I told them it's not all the great.  I don't think they believed me.  Here's some pictures of that night though...

Yep, that's a pepper vodka shot with an oyster at the bottom.  After 3 rounds of those, and 2 rounds of goombays and a ton of oysters, we ended up playing credit card roulette for the bill.  Naturally I lost and paid.  Your welcome guys, I agree it was a good meal.

4) The Packers and Steelers played a football game.  The Packers won.  By more than 3.  So I won some money.  But I lost about 4x that on squares pools so I no longer am a football fan.  Chris won a lot, and will likely now have enough ammo to buy April a few more purses.

Yesterday I was on planes and buses for about 13 hours, so now I'm sore and tired and just want to get some sleep.  So I'm going to stop writing now as I'm sure you're all getting sick of reading anyway.  Oh, but I do remember getting in last night and have Speedle beg me for about an hour to take him to the bunny ranch. This will likely happen soon and I will report back with a hopefully epic trip report.

Goodbye for now,
- Weinman