…abroad for the last 5 months. I was playing poker for the first three of those months, but I was staying in Tokyo and wasn’t 100% sure whether online gambling was legal there, so I took the really, really, prudent line and decided not to openly advertise that I was playing a hundred thousand hands of internet poker while there on a tourist visa. And after that I was just on holiday throughout March and April, so nothing to update from that.
The 3 months of poker went; mediocre; disastrous; bad, with a big downswing at the start of January. I got coolered and outdrawn a lot playing 10/20, then dropped down and got into a situation where I couldn’t seem to remember with what frequencies to make plays – because none of them were ever correct at any time, so I was definitely not playing perfectly at the end of January and throughout February. Probably a perfect time to take two months off and start the year fresh actually. The end result is that for the 3 months working abroad I broke just about even, meaning I’d sunk to the depths of a lowly rakeback grinder. As embarrassing as that is, realising that I did at least have the rakeback means the hours at the laptop weren’t entirely meaningless.
Since I’m going to date the graph pages correctly, so I don’t think they will be at the front ever, here they are:
December
January
February
March
April
I chose the picture at the top because it seemed like good travelling/Japan imagery, but I took it because it shows a great example of the universal-ness of religion. Its from a temple in Tokyo in which people get a wooden plaque to write their dream, message, prayer, etc on, which they then hang on a rack in the centre before moving to an altar-place where they finish there contemplation by throwing a coin in a box.
Or in other words, a load of ’educated’ (this was in central Tokyo, not the distant countryside) idiots queue to go into a recently-built mock up of something historic, to spend money on a worthless piece of wood which they dispose of 10 minutes later, throw money in a box, and then… … … head to the gift shop to buy junk. Too cynical? 
Photos of the money-throwing boxes and gift shop are below if I can get them to format properly.
Related Posts:
Fri, Apr 23, 2010
Work