I haven’t really posted much of an update in a while. I have Twitteritis™: plenty of things to say a few words about, but nothing to say several hundred words about. So rather than try to write more than what I feel like saying about a single topic in order to eek out a legitimate-ish blog entry, I’m just going to say a little bit about a couple of different things.
I’m giving “tweeting aggressively” (as @ShaneSchleger would say) a trial run to see what it’s like. Until recently, I’ve mostly resisted the idea of using Twitter (I didn’t even have an account until last summer) for a few reasons. First, I just figured it was something that 12 year old girls do. Like first MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter. I wanted to get off that train, so I was a Twitter Hater for a while. I also figured that anything you can do on Twitter (i.e. post short messages about anything), you can do on Facebook. And since Facebook came before Twitter, I just used Facebook whenever I had a little something to say.
But now it’s become pretty apparent that Facebook and Twitter are for two different things. Facebook is where the kid from your 8th grade science class you could have easily gone the rest of your life without communicating with again can post 104 pictures of him and his wife holding their new baby. Twitter is a fresh start from that: a chance to “follow” and even be followed by only the people you actually want to hear from, including high-profile individuals.
I’m still in the very early stages of building an entertaining list of people I follow. I’m going for a mix of comedians who tweet funny stuff, politicians, random people who regularly pass along links to interesting news articles, favorite local bars and restaurants, athletes/celebrities who tweet interesting stuff, and also any poker players or gambler-types since that’s basically what I am.
Twitter is a great way to catch a little dose of what’s happening in the world mixed in with some humor and insight into the minds of some pretty smart people (if you can succeed at finding them and following them). Right now I’m only following like 60 people. Once that number has another zero after it, I’ll probably post a blog that links to some of my favorite tweeters. If you care to follow me, I’m @coryalbertson.
Double Deuce
One of my favorite weekly online poker tournaments, just for its sheer lottery-value, is Full Tilt’s “Double Deuce”, a $20+$2 buy-in tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $200,000. Yesterday’s event allowed multi-entries meaning you can enter the tournament as many as six times with the same account. It’s basically what ZeeJustin and JJProdigy and all those guys were doing years ago (and surely some are still doing to this day) except that now it’s allowed. The ability to multi-enter created a larger-than-normal field-size of 17,000 players.
I entered it twice. At one point on one of my entries, I was the chipleader with 360 players left with 1.2 million in chips while second place only had like 700,000. I told my girlfriend, “getting a stack in this was one of the worst things to happen to me all day because now I actually care enough to be disappointed at any result except a win.” A first-place prize of $51,000 has a way of getting one to care.
With around 100 players left, I glanced at the leaderboard and saw that my friend Ray “Exitonly” Coburn, who is basically the guy that taught me to play poker several years ago, was still in the tournament as well. Getting down to the top 100 in the Double Deuce and seeing that one of your friends is still in it too is kind of like bumping into someone you know on the street except that the street is in some small European village and it’s 1 am in the morning. Since we were virtually dead-even with one another in chips, we agreed to swap 10% of our action. “This is going to be disappointing,” Ray quipped over IM. I had no choice but to agree. Getting through the first 16,900 players? Not that hard. Getting through the last 100? You’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery. Well, not really. But that’s the way it feels.
Pretty much as expected, Ray and I both fizzled out in like 45th and 64th place, respectively. My decent from chipleader to busto really wasn’t all that interesting: I lost a few all-ins to shorter stacks, got ran over in a few small pots, annnnnd before you know it you’ve got 15 big blinds. From there it’s just a crapshoot and I didn’t run hot enough to win.
ATX Food Swap
I guess I had more to say than I thought I did on those above topics, so I’ll try to keep this one short. My girlfriend found an Austin food-swapping group after seeing an article about it in the NY Times. The premise is about as old as society itself: people get together and swap food. What makes it fun is the “foodie revolution” in our culture. Fifty years ago people would have swapped flour for sugar or bacon for chicken. At the ATX Food Swap yesterday, people were swapping homemade blueberry marshmallows, maple bacon popcorn (yea, you read that right), homemade blueberry peach jalapeño jam, fresh farm eggs (including duck eggs), and an assortment of other interesting things.
My girlfriend made some mini pecan pies and banana bread. Both were a big hit. I just stood downwind and reaped the benefits of the hours she spent in the kitchen so that I might devour someone else’s maple bacon popcorn. Overall, it was a really fun event and concept. I’d encourage anyone to see if there is some type of similar group nearby where they live and, if not, to start one. I’m not much of a cook, but I think the food swap concept can be a lot of fun for someone who is. Food is great for bringing people together.
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