stevesbets

For Labor day weekend I have been at my friends shore house in Stone Harbor on the bay. I have learned that most people from most of the world don’t really understand that shore means beach in the Philly-NJ-Del dialect. I have known the family whose house I am staying in for the majority of my life and the house is absolutely amazing, I had a wonderful time. I’m just going to write about some activities that I feel are worthy of note.

Yesterday I had a long awaited game of one on one basketball with a freind who inexplicably challenged me a few months ago. We have played together countless times throughout our lives, and while he excels in many areas, basketball is not one of them and I have always been better at it. A few months ago at Long Beach Island (see Dear Diary blog), he suddenly exclaimed that he could beat me one on one and we played. I won that game but the ball was fairly flat and made for a convenient excuse. Since then he has continued to assert that he could win and we finally got a chance for a rematch yesterday. I am proud to report a 21-8 victory which only proves to myself that while I’m not great at much, I’m very good at knowing when I have an edge.

One of my friends’ girlfriends who I only met for the third time this weekend is a marathon runner. I find the drive and work ethic she must have to be astounding and inspiring and I am raising the bar for my fitness goal…well not for the freeroll (sorry). This girl runs a half marathon in Philadelphia every September and I am hoping to be able to do that (or at least be decent enough to be able to attempt to do it) in September 2009. I will update my progress on the blog for both that and the December freeroll as I work to get into shape.

Tonight everyone wanted to learn poker so I offered to teach the basics so that we could play a makeshift game. The group consisted of me, 4 other guys all with mild homegame poker experience and 3 girls who all had zero poker experience. Teaching someone from total scratch is always interesting as it reminds me of all the little things I take for granted while I play. First I needed to simply go over the hand ranking, then the basic holdem rules (our game was going to be a single table NLHE tournament). 2 pair getting counterfeited becomes an advanced topic when teaching people who just learned what a flush is. I started dealing sample hands face up and then asking the girls what everyone had and what cards would improve their hands. On one amusing hand, the 3 players held 9s 9c, jh 8d and 2h 8c respectively on a flop of 8h 7h 3h. When I asked that card would put the 8c 2h into the lead I was surprised at how difficult it was for them to figure out. I have to preface this by saying that all 3 girls are very very smart and I would bet on them over myself in most forums (but not poker). They just started yelling out random cards “T, Q,7, 4?….” in a seemingly haphazard and thoughtless manner though I think they had some sort of logic for the guesses. It just struck me as odd that reading a board even immediately after learning poker hands can actually be so difficult. A final note on teaching, I found the best and only way to get the girls to figure out their best 5 card hand between their two cards and the five community cards was to put their two cards right with the community cards and sort out the best 5. In the James Bond movie Casino Royale they did that with each and every hand as they announced what the player had and I found it ridiculous. I now understand that they had to do it so that people who didn’t play poker could better understand.

I get back to NYC tomorrow and classes start Tuesday. Hopefully this blog will become more interesting than just telling stories from my lazy vacation.