perhaps the noid should have avoided me

all in
I played a couple of satellites for the Heartland Poker Tour in TRF over the weekend. (sorry, derek. it would have been -ev for me to bring you along, as they only ran one at a time.) I have never seen a game with worse blind structure.
winner-take-all
1500 chips
blinds start at 25/50
blinds double (not increase, double) every 10 min.
the dealer has one deck, and uses the same three-stage shuffle he uses at the cash game

...so at each level, you play about six hands. it's like a super-crazy-luckbox turbo. I'm accustomed to playing online turbo games, but this was just nuts. I'd taken one guy down with AK when I pushed preflop and he called with JT; the board missed us both. I pushed with QQ a few minutes later, five handed, and knocked out two other players, one with AT and the other with 88. Later, I folded KQ behind the chip leader's push and another player's call, only to see the three cards that would have made my A-high flush fall. I folded a ton of crap hands near the end, leaving me severely short-stacked and simultaneously allowing me to survive to heads-up.... with a 3:1 chip disadvantage. with the blinds at 400/800, I lasted about three hands. bleh.

luckily, I recouped my $50 loss several times over at the cash game over the next two days, with the highlight being a fairly suspicious SB limp with 35 suited that gave me a straight on the turn, and a blank river card that let me extort a capped round from two players who had flopped 3 of a kind. (final pot: somewhere in the neighborhood of $300, probably the biggest I've ever won)

signs of spring
the weather has been remarkably pleasant the last couple of days. unfortunately, the river is still quite high (receding, now; the point bridge remains closed, but the city reopened the sorlie bridge today. it was sorlie needed, as traffic was getting pretty awful on gateway drive. har har har.); as a result, the disc golf course at lincoln park remains underwater. too bad. what's almost worse is the inevitable coat of flood mud that will remain for weeks after the river's eventual return to its banks.

home for easter
everyone at the house is going home for easter. except me, of course; I am home. most people at BWW are going home for easter, too; somehow, i still got the entire weekend off. i'm looking forward to doing .... nothing. heh. that's not true; there's a local poker tournament going off on saturday, with a $120 buy-in, sponsored by the convention and visitors bureau. they're running $15 satellites at a bar the rest of the week, and unless they're equally ridiculous, I plan to qualify for saturday's game by playing a few until I win. wish me luck.