Kevin 07

November 24, 2007. The day on which the Australian people collectively said of the previous decade:

WHAT THE FUCK WERE WE THINKING?

Ode to a Nondescript Bird.

Every now and then we can have our lives drastically affected by outwardly minor events. Tiny happenstances, chance meetings or non-meetings which incrementally adjust the lens through which we see the world - taking a hazy, chaotic mess and leaving our sight clear if only for a precious fleeting moment. It could be a small, nondescript bird that flies into the cell of some prisoner locked in solitary confinement in some black pit of a dungeon somewhere that reminds him of a greater world that still exists outside his own torment. It could be a trusted friend informing us that it really isn't as socially acceptable as we had heretofore assumed to wear our underwear on our head. I am here today to inform you, dear reader, that I, too, was touched in such a way over the weekend. At precisely 19:35 on friday night I recieved the following text message from an unknown sender:

Are you fuckers coming or what?

The profundity of these words I have even now, quite frankly, failed to adequately come to terms with. There is, I feel, something in them for all of us as we sit here awaiting the outcome of today's pivotal federal election. Are we fuckers coming........ or what? or what, you fools? Only once before now have I been so affected by a mis-sent text message. This occured to me a little under a year ago when I recieved the following two messages involving three individuals who, in order that their identitys be left protected, I shall refer to as Scrotum, Wench and Slapper. The first went as follows:

Hey there scrotum im slapper younger sister. WENCH IM 20 N I HEAR YOU LOOKIN 4 A
GIRL FRIEND. GIVE ME A CALL TONIGHT. HOPE YOU DIDNT MIND SR¹ GIVING
ME UR NUMBER.

It was shortly followed by the following message:

Scrotum its sr¹ sis wench, id like to meet u my sister says ur a
really nice guy! send me a txt..

Needless to say, it has to this day been a great source of sadness and regret to me that I could not, at the time, think of a suitably pithy way to tell the hapless Scrotum, Wench and Slapper just how much their situation had touched my life and, of course, to inform Wench that she had the wrong fucking number². I do not wish, dear reader, to live with such regrets as regards Senor Are you fuckers coming or what? His or her words were simply too deep and world changing to go unheeded and unthanked. Should anyone reading this feel the need to thank this person³, just let me know and I'll send you their number.

¹This is intended to be a 2-word abbreviation of Slapper. A fact more apparent when real names are being used.

² I briefly considered pretending to be Scrotum, but this seemed kind of cruel, even by my standards ....... and also more than a little creepy.

³ Preferrably in a cryptic, non-sensical manner.

Poker

Suppose you are a sporting club or some other kind of similar organisation and you're looking to host a fishing competition. There is an entry fee and a cash prize for the winner which is drawn exclusively from the sum raised by such entry fees. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine that this would be a perfectly legal thing to do in the state of Queensland (and if it isn't, why the fuck not?). In fact, if you were to substitute 'bridge' for 'fishing', well, that'd be ducky too, yeah? Bridge is a nice, respectable game, after all. You play it wearing dorky bow-ties and vests. It's like the golf you play when you want to play golf instead with a deck of cards, a partner and a table.

So, given the post title, I'm sure everyone reading this sees where I'm going with this (this is probably trivially true.......), but I'm going to spell it out anyway. What, pray tell, would happen if you were to now substitute the word 'bridge' for 'poker'? Well. Now it becomes gambling, therefore bad and therefore illegal unless you've payed for some ridiculously expensive license that lets you do so (when the real benefit of such an event is not in takings from the game, but in the crowd you draw). Apparently, it's perfectly alright for a sports club or pub to own row upon row of pokies into which hypnotised cretins can pour money to see the pretty shiny lights. It's alright for the Treasury casino to skim of the top of people's winnings in a stupid structured-betting version of texas hold-em (rules that make consistent big winnings much more difficult). That shit's just ducky, Charlotte - but heaven forbid we allow people to start playing the kind of game with each other, from which a casino cannot really profit that much and which, with practice, you can actually learn to consistently win. What the fuck is the deal here? Here endeth the first part of my polemic rant.

Now for the second. I was at the season QPE final in Ballina on sunday. There are 300 qualifiers from, I think, 20 clubs (no-one has paid to enter). First place gets $5000, 2nd place $2000 and downward from there. I came in somewhere in the 40s. So why am I pissed? It's not entirely sour grapes at being more or less forced by blind sizes to go all-in on pocket jacks, because to be fair I would have been in real trouble anyways seeing as the flop showed a 10, a 9 and an 8 (giving me an open-ended straight draw on top of a pair higher than anything on the board) .......and I was facing off against a half-drunk bogan with pocket aces (and obviously I didn't subsequently get a queen, a jack or a 7). After coming back from the final break they were rising the blinds by a lot every 15 minutes (there were about 70 people left in and they kind of want to force an out-come). Having broken the second table I was sent to just prior to the break (I mean this literally... I knocked 5 people, half the table, out of the tournament - I left with 21,700 having started the tournament with 2,400). I was forced to move. This is bad at the best of times - you have to learn a new table and you want to establish some fear there. Worse, I look down the table: person 1: half-drunk bogan, person 2: half-drunk bogan, person 3: half-dr....... I mean, if I'd wanted to play against a table of heavy drinking bogans who treat the game like 'bingo', only with more cards and beer involved I'd be playing in the Australian Poker League. The up-side is that if I hit something really good, I can be pretty much guaranteed to sucker these people into insane calls when they feel their manhood is at stake and they don't want to look scared off. The down-side is that I can't afford to bluff too early or try to steal pots because I'll get called for pretty much the same reason. I get a run of un-playable cards in unplayable positions. Table gets broken up, and I'm shortly at another bogan-heavy table in about half an hour, where blinds are now 3000-6000 and I have 18,000 left. The blinds started at 25-50 and I made almost all of my 21,700 (the highest I saw) with blinds at no more than 300-600. The point being, I had to work a lot harder to gain those chips than those who took them by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. I really see no reason for the blinds to rise at such a meteoric rate..... especially when you're going to be pushing people around from table to table like that. It doesn't need to be this way QPE!!! Not fucking happy Jan.