Golf TR.

I actually managed to get out to a golf course this morning for the first time in 2 years. I used to golf fairly regularly back towards my high school days, probably twice per week but life has kind of just filled up with other things since then. 5am felt pretty early as I had a ~2 hour drive to meet my group for a 7am tee-time  at their local course but it was a really nice morning at 23 degrees already.

They decide they want to degen it up and play $1 per hole skins with one mulligan allowed on each 9 holes which I obviously oblige to even though I haven't picked up a club the past few seasons. Keep in mind these guys are even bigger nits than I am and prefer to play $0.10/$0.20 with 25bb at our home games. =)

The first two get off some decent drives and I set up my tee fully expecting my ball to get a bit of air time by being driven downwards off the tee, bouncing up 10 feet in the air and making off for the weeds on the right. To my surprise, my ball decides to take off 225 yards straight down the middle and I win the first 3 holes in similar fashion, knocking down 8 foot puts while everyone else was 2-putting.

After that things kind of evened out and I my forearms started to ache a bit once they had a chance to rest during the breakfast break. The skins started to carry over a lot and I ended up with the best overall score but just didn't win the right holes and finished at +$7. I got destroyed on the island green par 4, first nailing a rock, bouncing off the bridge and back into the water and then overshooting the green where I was able to take a drop on the fringe, as well as on a monster par 6 that was a chore to get to in 7 considering I wasn't hitting my irons that far by the 17th.

They use a weird rule with respect to lost balls penalties: +1 for literally lost ball and +1 for the drop resulting in +1 if it's out of bounds and you pick it up and +2 if it's in the water and unretrievable. Sounded kind of silly to me, but it added a bit of strategy in that it seemed better to take two safe shots than one risky shot that would cost you on average 50% more than normal if you mess up. Final tally was 104 which they of course counted as 108 considering I "lost" four. Not terrible considering the circumstances although I think I could have shot 97 if my short game wasn't completely out of whack on the back 9 on at least 8 of those causing a lot of chip shots to get on. Definitely going to try to get out there a bit more this year.

Poker

Every time I've sat down the past few days I start loading tables from the lobby, get to about 8 and then say eff this I don't feel like playing and insta-close them before I post blinds. Not that I haven't been winning, but I just plain haven't felt like it and have instead headed over to the 6max hyper-turbo shove fests with mediocre results after running super hot at 49% ITM one day followed by 8% ITM the next to even out at 33%. I think these are defintely profitable although I don't much care for the change to the 10/20 start for 25bb rather than the old 25/50 10bb start. I think I understand shovebot strategy a lot better than the average person that plays these and just end up bleeding off a couple blinds sitting around waiting to implement it because by the time you have unknowns' 25bb stackoff range figured out along with the nuances of what a minraise means, you're down to a formulaic 10-15 bb anyways.

In one of my last posts I said I was going to withdraw and move down to 10NL 6max. My plan seems to change every time I write up a new blog post as I'm feeling kind of wrestless and impatient with poker at the moment. Almost immediately after I wrote that, I did withdraw but kept playing 25NL Full Ring after a couple of sessions of 6max. I'm just at that point again where I'm torn between making easy money and getting tired of the same thing over and over again without seeing large improvements although I feel like I'm playing extremely well right now. Waiting for the next boom I guess.