O-Poker

MiamiDon has tagged me with that "Seven Random Things" thing that is going around. Please read all of this if you are having trouble sleeping. It will probably work a lot faster than counting sheep.

1. Sports Betting/Bad Bookies
I got my first real taste of gambling in high school when we went to the dog track with my friend's grandfather. I was hooked from the moment my dog crossed the finish line first. In college, I bet on football and basketball. The funny thing was every losing player thought they could be a bookie and make a killing - we punished them. Most of them had no clue how to pass off bets if they got too much action on 1 side of a game - instead they would jump the line, sometimes as much as 4-5 points in basketball games. Me and a couple friends used to punish them by betting both sides of the lines when the disparity go too high between bookies. One weekend, we won all of one side of the bets from the same guy. He finally paid us after calling his grandmother and getting her to cash in some CDs.

2. Online Poker Beginning
I moved from betting with bookies to betting on sports online sometime in early 2000s. I used to bet on WSEX and around early 2003 they opened up their first version of a poker room. I opened up the software shortly after they began offering it and would take some of my sports betting money and play Limit Holdem. I lost more than I won and it motivated me to do some research. I started reading 2+2 and RGP and sucking in every piece of information that I could find. I even bought Holdem for Advanced players by Sklanksy. I moved onto Pokerstars and then to UB when I saw that you could win a trip to Aruba. I immediately started winning a ton a tourneys (by pure luck and having a minor amount of knowledge on what hands to fold) on UB and even won an Aruba trip without knowing a lot of the concepts that are essential to tournament poker now. I thought I was great and didn't realize how horrible I was at poker until I went to Aruba. I was sitting next to TJ Cloutier and he said, "You sure do play a lot of hands." to me. I took that to heart and that one comment probably helped my game more than anything else.

3. Grey Hair
I first noticed some grey hair when I was 21. I used to pull them out. Fast forward to Age 34 and two kids and I would probably be bald if I pulled out all my grey hair. I think I recently passed the more than 50% grey mark. The grey will probably completely takeover by the time I'm 40. I would rather have a full head of grey hair than no hair at all though.

4. Other Countries
I have only been to a few other countries. My sister was in the Peace Corp and worked for the UN World Food Program. She worked in Nepal and Tanzania and I never visited either place. The countries that I have been to are:

Hong Kong - Three separate business trips while working on Disney's Hong Kong Hotels. I liked HK, but there were too many people packed into too small of a place IMO.

Macau - On one of the trips to HK we took a day trip to Macau to do some gambling. It was joke when we stepped into the first casino. The only game I recognized was Blackjack and the people were 5 deep waiting for tables. It was so crazy that there were places on the felt for observers to bet on players blackjack hands.

Mexico (Cancun, Tiajuana, Cozumel) - Tijuana with family when I was 22. Cancun/Cozumel on a cruise with my wife shortly after we met each other.

Aruba - UB 2003 tourney

Bahamas - Atlantis for honeymoon and PS tourney this year

Miami -(oh wait, that isn't a foreign country. It just seems like it sometimes.)

5. Underage Drinking Arrest
I was arrested for underage drinking about 1 week before I turned 18 (the drinking age was 21 already). A group of us were heading to a friend's house 2 blocks from the beach to celebrate my birthday (our excuse for a party that weekend). We had 6 cases of beer and stopped at a Convenience store to ice down the beer. Two undercover cops walked up to us and said, "Can we see some IDs, Here is our ID." as they showed us their badges. As they were taking our beer and about to take down our information, they said, "I sure hope one of you boys is 18 so we can take you downtown." We were all under 18 and I luckily made the cut by mere days. The cops released us to one of the guys' parents. The math never worked out. There were 5 of us, 6 six cases of beer, and 2 cops. Apparently only one of the cops turned in his reports - there were 2 cases of beer and 2 names turned in (mine being one of them). I had to write a 500 word essay on the evils of alcohol and my parents had to sign something saying that I had done 40 hours of work around the house. I somehow managed to write the sentence, "Alcohol is very very very bad for you and you really really really shouldn't drink alcoholic drinks ever ever because it is really very very very very extremely horribly bad for you to do so." in several different variations.

6. Soliciting on a State Highway
I was in a fraternity in college. One day we were collecting money to help prevent child abuse. It was fun, we were standing on the side of the road and talking to all the girls that stopped at the traffic lights. We had permit. Apparently the permit was not good for state or federal roads, which is pretty much every road except those in your neighborhood. A cop decided to give us all notices to appear in court for "Soliciting on a State Highway." I think that is what they use for prostitution. There were 7 of us and only 5 of us signed our notices. One of the guys was going to go to law school and did a ton of research. My Dad is a judge and I asked him what to do. He thought that the judge would immediately throw it out.

When we got to court our assigned public defender read the charges and said, "Soliciting on a
State Highway. You boys ought to know better than that." I am not sure what he thought we were doing but we told him the whole story. When the case got called the guy that was going to go to law school noticed that every ticket was signed and that there was thumb print on every ticket. No one ever gave thumb prints. We told the judge, they took our thumb prints and the case was thrown out a few months later after the prints didn't match. It just goes to show, some cops can be crooked even in the most pointless meaningless cases. (OJ was framed - just kidding)

7. College
I always made it to every class until the first exams each semester. I would ace all the exams, decide the classes were easy, and maybe attend once or twice a month after that. This lead to me finishing with a B average, but having a lot of fun.

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It appears most bloggers that I would tag have already been tagged, so I'm not tagging anyone. The buck stops here.