Chris Halverson’s Blog

If you’re heading to the Minnesota State Fair (or any other place where there’s lots of people), you may find this Fair Bingo card set useful.

Enjoy!

Blogging to you live from my deck. I took the day off today since it’s now the middle of August and I still have about 5 weeks of PTO to take. Oy, it’s going to be hard to fit it all in. Again. I do this every year, you’d think I’d learn by now.

It’s been beautiful around here the last few days. Well, “nice” if you mean in the 90s or so, but I can handle that despite the fact that I’m not what you’d call and outdoors person. Outdoors to me means sitting on the deck having a drink and ideally a cigar. Lawns are looking a little brown, but our new landscaping looks great (we had a new retaining wall put in earlier in the summer).

I did find a new cigar store that I think I’ll come to love. Previously I went to one that is close by and has a decent selection, but the staff knows absolutely nothing about cigars. It’s attached to a liquor store and is staffed by people from there instead of having dedicated cigar store people. It’s nice because it’s close, but other than that I was left wanting. I used the new fangled Internets and did what the kids these days call a “search” (I used “Teh Google”) and found one further from my house, but fairly close to my office that is really nice. It has a 400+ sq ft walk in humidor and couches and chairs to sit at and smoke in the store! They have a big screen TV and free WiFi. ZOMG! I went up there about 1pm today (Monday) and there were like 4 people sitting around chatting and smoking. The sales people were knowledgeable and helped me pick out something new. I’m now sitting on my deck trying it out and I have to say I like it. Locals, if you’re in the Maple Grove area it’s called Tobacco Grove, check it out.

Oh, I finally learned how to blow smoke through my nose without passing out and choking to death. When done a few times during a smoke of a decent cigar, it does add a lot to the flavor.

The August heat does mean one thing in this area: The Minnesota State Fair. I know Drizz is already getting psyched for the beer drinking, kid chasing and people watching.  Personally, I’m of the mind that humanity basically sucks, so I tend to avoid things like the fair. Seriously, I get no enjoyment out of watching overweight people either squished into clothes that are too small, or hanging out of wife beaters while letting their 8 kids run all over the place. If I wanted entertainment like that, I’d just watch CMT or something. My guilty (geeky) fair pleasure is listening to the fair police on the scanner. It’s amazing the stupid things that stupid people do when they get looped up on Leinies in 100 degree heat. Hopefully they haven’t moved to digital yet (I forgot about it last year, so for all I know they already have). I do send the boy out with some money to bring me back a bucket of Sweet Martha’s cookies, but other than that I avoid it like the plague.

It’s been a while since I’ve given any sort of update, so let’s back track a bit. I’ll expand on things as time goes on. Oh, I changed the RSS feed URL to use Feedburner, so if that tripped up things for you, sorry.

Looking at this blog I see I’ve basically done two posts in two years. Not exactly what you’d call prolific. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First off, this started out as a “poker blog” and I basically quit playing poker. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but it became “work”, the proverbial and literal grind. Instead of that, I spent time with my wife in Second Life, and then in World of Warcraft. Despite the friends I had made playing poker, playing anything with my wife is more fun.

Another reason I took a break was that I was bored to tears with “poker blogs”. I came to the realization that reading about people’s games were, to be honest, very boring. I looked at a fair number of my posts and saw the “last night recap” of thing and went “meh”. The “poker blogs” I like to read (and there are very few right now) have poker as a background or secondary theme. Reading some of the blogs and such makes me realize that I don’t know many people in the current “poker blog” arena. Again, it’s interesting to me because the people that started this have basically moved on past blogging about poker and into more interesting things. Sorry if this offends you, but it’s true.

I do feel bad that I didn’t keep in touch with people better. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of us old timers have, through one way or another, stuck together. I signed up for Twitter to follow Wil or somebody, and next thing I knew I had a fair number of the old timers following me. (If you’re really that interested go to Twitter but don’t expect much) Ditto for Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm and others (I’m “chrisdhal” at most places, give it a try). There’s been a few IMs, but those have kind of dropped off and I miss the IRC (is that still around)?

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time playing World of Warcraft. For the past year or so I’ve been the leader (GM) of our guild of a couple hundred people. I won’t bore you with that, but suffice it to say that’s where I’m at most of the time. There’s a lot of drama at times and is actually pretty stressful. Lots of fun at others.

WoW has led me to appreciate the Manhattan.

My son has graduated high school and is into his second year of college. Oh Em Gee.

I have been playing a few SNGs on FTP lately. Usually one a night. I’m enjoying it again and who knows, maybe I’ll start to play more again. There’s a new card club that opened up that’s closer to me than Canterbury and I plan on visiting that soon.

Wow, twice in one year. See, there’s hope yet…

From Tao of Poker:

and the one and only professional poker player Chris Halverson. I thought I was seeing a ghost. A blast from the past.

It took long time friend and blogger Pauly to pull me out of retirement and play in a blogger tournament. As a world reknown Professional Poker Player(TM) I have been keeping a low profile as of late, where “late” equals “about 18 months”. When you reach the pinnacle of the poker world, the $200 NL on the late Party Poker, there’s really not much left you can look forward to. So I took a break. However, when I saw that Pauly was celebrating his 5th year of blogging with this tournament I decided I had to show my support, so I quietly signed up. It took about 45 minutes and then I was recognized.

Fear suddenly rippled through the tables.

About this time my friend Jason stopped by my house and sweated me and helped a bit, including chiding me for my trademarked weak tight play. Some plays were made and I stayed about average through the next break.

All in all it was a great time. In the end I saw this pop up:

Tao Poker Result

So I got in the money for $9 (woot!) and outlasted over 450 people in my first tourney back in a long time. Not too bad, and even more importantly, I had some fun.

I’ll update more shortly, I think I’m going to try to resurrect this blog a bit and see what happens.

Thanks Pauly for the 5 years of great posts and for the fun tourney.