Naked Paul Toast’s Insights

Decided to try my luck at the bowling alley tourney again.

First hand of the night, I get KK in middle position. I raise 200, folded to Small blind, he raises it to 600. Folded back to me I make it 1500, he pushes, I call.

So there I am, first hand of the night and all my money is in the middle of the table. He looks at me and says, “You don’t got aces do you?”.  “Nope” and show him my Kings. He grimaces and turns over Queens.

This is the absolutely best hand he could have. Well except for crap like 7-2, but he wouldn’t have been in the hand with 7-2. Of all the hands he could have had QQ was the best. If you don’t know poker, then you might wonder why him having QQ was better than him having 88 or 98 suited.

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Went to see 1408. I really liked it. It’s a Stephen King short story within Everything’s Eventual. It’s about a writer who travels the country writing about haunted houses he stays in. He doesn’t believe in haunted houses, but that doesn’t matter to his readers.

And then he stays in room 1408. A typical Stephen King haunting.

After the movie we got talking about the shear number of King books and short stories that have been made into movies or mini-series.  Wiki lists about 90 conversions to some media. Sure, some of them are pure crap, and it’s a given that they rarely meet the quality of the book or short story. The guy’s contribution to the Hollywood is unparalleled. Some of them really are classics.

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Yesterday, I enquired about the Sit n Go tourneys. They work just like the net, 10 people start, the blinds go up, top three get paid. Entry fee $35.00. The brush said to sign up at about 12:00 and I should get into one of the first few.

So I show up at about 12:00, and sure enough I’m registered in the third Sit’n Go. What he didn’t tell me was the first one was at 1:00, the second 2:00 and the third 3:00. What am I gonna do for the next 4 hours?

Hey wait a minute, I’m in a poker room!

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I have played a little no limit on the Internet, but I consider myself strictly a limit Player. I know that I need to focus more on NL, but I keep going back to limit. That’s where I have had all my success.

Mrs. NakedPaulToast, Megan, and I are spending the week in Niagara Falls. I wanted to go to Casino Niagara, so the girls went shopping. I showed up at about 11:15 AM and there is only one game going. $1-$2 No Limit Hold’em. Well I’m not about to leave, I decide it’s about time to try NL. I put my name on the list.

At 12:00 they opened up some more tables, including another $1-$2. The call my name. I was really glad that I was at the new table. The maximum buy-in was $100.00, and since everyone just bought in, nobody had a big-stack advantage.

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Went to the bowling alley signed up for the tourney at 6:00, it started at 7:00.

I get a kick out of the players. There are a lot of young men, who have been raised on TV poker. All they know is all-in poker. They don’t have a clue about small-pot poker. Probably haven’t read a poker book in their lives. 

There is a pretty good cross section of ages. The majority are obviously young men, a few roughies. But I was surprised at how many older players and women there are.

While waiting, there were at least three or four taxis dropping of the poker players. Gee, they must have a lot of money to cab it everywhere.

I played terrific poker. Played very tight early on, when I came in I came in raising, almost always came out with a continuation bet on the flop. Took a lot of blinds and don’t think I showed down a hand for the first half of the tournament.

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I hate bowling, apparently so does everyone else. There is a 60-70 lane bowling alley nearby. It’s on summer hours. This means it’s only open Friday nights, Saturday afternoon and evening.

Now I don’t give a shit about bowling and don’t care, except that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays they hold poker tournaments. I think it’s ironic that a bowling alley has to host poker tournaments to make money in the summer.

The tournament costs $20.00, and every dollar comes back out. They don’t take any money for the rake. I don’t think it would be legal if they did, they make there money from bar sales.

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Mrs. NakedPaulToast and I had our first lesson. Things turned out great. My slice is gone. Well mostly gone.

Don, our instructor was terrific. He recognised some things fairly quickly and concentrated on them. He said that I had a real nice, natural swing. I needed to concentrate on set up stuff:

• Bend my knees a little
• Balance more on the balls of my feet
• Line up more forward
• Hold the club looser
• Bend over slightly more.

Mrs. NakedPaulToast was the opposite. Her set up was terrific, but needed work during the swing. I think it’s tougher on her to fix things during mid swing then my challenges.

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[originally posted on the GMC link]

Browsing through the Novice and Advanced forums, there seems to be a significant number of topics about creating Multi-Player games. It’s not unusual to see 2, 3 or more topics on the first page of each of those forums.

Many of these topics often start with:
“Is it possible to…………” or possibly “How do I get started…………..“. What is painfully obvious is many, probably most, and perhaps all of the topic starters are no where near the skill level required to make what is arguably the toughest type of game using Game Maker.

Of course you can’t possibly tell these budding young developers that they should wait a little before attempting such a project. They get all huffy, start stomping their feet, decrying, “You don’t know anything about me, how do you expect to learn. I’ll show you.” Or something similar anyway.

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Was at the drive-in.

Some of you may recall, the old days, where the poles used to hold two speakers. You would hang the big, clunky speaker, on the inside window for the sound.

Not sure when, but those speakers were replaced with AM radio, now FM radio is the preferred medium for listening to the movie.

In any event the poles still remain, though just to delimit where the card park. On the pole where we were parked was the included sign.

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I first golfed as a teenager, last year was the first time I picked up a golf club since then.

Got out golfing about five times last summer. Been out a few times this summer. For our Anniversary Mrs. NakedPaulToast and I decided to take golfing lessons. I’m looking forward to them.

I am a terrible golfer, I have this awful slice that I have absolutely no clue how to control or fix. My workaround is to set up, so the ball will go 50 yards left of the target. If things work out the ball will slice to the right and come near my mark.

Things don’t always work out. Sometimes I hit the ball straight. Now the damned thing is 50 yards to the left of where I want it to be. That’s often a forest, lake or corn field. It once was a busy highway.

My brother is an avid golfer. He was glad to hear that I was taken lessons, he wanted to set me up with the pro at his course. I told him we already booked lessons, at a different course. At this point he started chastising me, “Most Golf Pros are hacks”.

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