2012 plan

NB: skip to end for poker content.

Yesterday my girlfriend and I headed down to Greenwich Park to check out the last 3 events from the men's Modern Pentathlon. I knew next to nothing about it before going (studied up on what the events were but that's about it). For those not in the know, first of all everyone has a fencing bout vs everyone else (not all at the same time unfortunately), then there's a 200m swim. My tickets didn't cover either of those events.

The event following that is show-jumping. I've never been a big fan of this on the telly but it was pretty exciting, to be honest. Something that adds to that excitement in the pentathlon is that for the 36 contestants there are 18 horses and which athlete gets which horse is down to a draw that happens an hour before the event. This led to a lot of horses and riders clearly not getting on with each other. A few horses tried to throw their rider, one succeeded and it got pretty close to being very nasty; looked like horse had fallen on rider but turned out to be fine. The horse was caught and the rider ran after it, got on and completed the course, all while the clock was running!

Based on scores after these rounds there's a combined run and shoot (with laser pistols, I kid you not - imagine my excitement when I saw that in the programme!). It's a bit like the biathlon with less snow. After a tough race the winner was David Svoboda of the Czech Rep. Well done to him. The home team got 10th and 13th so sadly no more medals added to the frankly awesome tally GB have got so far.

When did we get good at this sort of thing? Used to be we were rubbish at the Olympics and decent at football. Now our footballers are pretty embarrassing on and off the pitch and it's this stuff we're good at. What happened?

Right onto the poker. I've moved totally over to HU, got myself a coach and plan on working hard to get good at the game. I spent a couple of weeks going through a ton of DC and CR HU content to get a feel for how preflop and postflop ranges differ from 6max, had my first coaching session last week and have played a bit.

So far I much prefer it to 6max. It's more like an argument or chess game than I experienced playing against 5 other people, even folding preflop doesn't feel like "oh I'm not playing this hand", but rather it's part of a strategy for manipulating this opponent. No doubt that's highlighting my weakness at 6max rather than anything else. I probably should have been thinking that way but for some reason never felt in the game enough to do that. When it's one on one there's no escaping it, you ARE part of the game ALL the time.