I’m off work with a cold today. Amy’s been at nursery and Kerry and Evan have been over at her parents new house helping redecorate. This means, for the first time in months, I’ve been home alone. I have used my time productively, despite the streams of mucus poring out of my nostrils. For a start I have been messing around with the falbum plugin for wordpress. The result? About three hours of weeping, wailing, and mashing my forehead against the keyboard. It all turned out ok in the end however and now I have a rather spiffing new gallery here on the blog.
The other thing I’ve been toying with today is online gambling; internet poker to be precise. Recollecting stories told me by Dave and Jon about how they go online and reap petty cash from inexperienced rubes, I thought I’d dive in and get me a bit of the action. What I should have remembered is that Dave and Jon have a tendancy to reap cash from me too.
I enjoy poker, but I am seriously useless at it. I just don’t have the patience or the analytical mind to be a half decent player. At the end of about an hour’s play I found myself slightly poorer and pretty much bored of the whole thing. When I play cards in real life I am surrounded by good friends and a jovial atmosphere, whereas when I did it online I was siting on my own staring at a screen and watching c0ckn0bb3r237 take all my money. Still, I only lost five dollars - that’s about twelve pence in real money.
After I had enough of the nickel and dime games I headed over to the big stakes rooms to have a look what was going on. There were people in there that were betting hundreds of dollars at a time. Some of the pots were tipping over one thousand on a regular basis. It was heady and scary stuff.
I’m sure most of the players could afford to lose what they were betting, hell most of them were probably professional poker players anyway. But I imagine there have been a few pass through the doors who in a fit of bravado and over-confidence lost everything they had.
Gambling - Everything I ever needed to know I learnt from the Muppets.
My only serious bout of gambling related to a fruit machine with a £50 limit 25 years ago. Serious money! People would feed it all night, waiting for the big one to drop. One night, stumbling towards the bar for my round, I absently fed it 10p. All the lights and bells on the machine went off at once. I hit a random button, the noise re-doubled and a flood of fifty pence pieces cascaded out of the machine.
Spooky thing is, next night I gave it about 40p.
And the same thing happened.
After that, I quit whilst I was ahead.
The fact that Mushy won the game should prove once and for all that poker is just luck anyway. :)