Chris Halverson’s Blog

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.

Congratulations Jon. There wasn’t a prouder family at graduation last night. Here’s to a bright future.

Felicia: Sorry, I had to remove you from my links because you never post anymore

Iggy: Are you ever going to post again?

AlCantHang: POST!

My friend Jason: Do you even blog anymore?

And the main way you know it’s been a while since you posted last: There’s been a couple of posts on Henry’s Cards Speak since I posted last.

Yes, it has been a while, and I apologize. I really have no good excuse other than not a lot has been happening. I haven’t been playing poker, which kind of defeats the purpose of a poker blog and will definitely mean that Felicia will have nothing to do with it.

So an update…

Been playing a lot of World of Warcraft. My Night Elf priest is level 56 and I have a level 15 human Warlock. We’re having some guild drama which caused my wife to leave and I’m probably not far behind. I think half the guild is younger than 21, and know for a fact that the more vocal ones are still in high school and they piss me off to no end. *sigh*

Wow, does that sound geeky.

I want to reiterate that I hate cars.

Work has been kicking my ass the last couple weeks due to a migration project relating to the sale of my company last year.

I understand there’s a big poker tourney going on in Vegas right now. I have a vague idea about who’s doing what.

My Bloglines category for “Poker” showed over 2000 unread articles on Monday. I started to read some individual ones and then accidently marked them all read. Ug. I did take the opportunity to prune down my subscriptions a bit though, and will continue to do so. I’m not so much interested in the poker as I am the people and such. As opposed to Felicia, to me, if it’s all poker all the time,
I’m just not that interested. I’m going to have to go back to individuals to read about the blogger get together in Vegas.

Thanks to those who have kept in touch, I admit I’m not the best at that. It’s nothing personal, I’m like that to everybody. I’m trying.

OK, this is like breaking the seal, let’s see if I can start posting a bit more often now.

Thanks for stopping by, sorry for the unexpected absence.

Wow.

No, not WoW, although that’s been consuming about every waking hour that I’m not at work, but “wow” as in, “my new computer is freaking fast” wow.

I ordered a Dell refurb last Sunday and it showed up on Thursday. I left work early and got it setup and I’m very impressed. I got a Dell XPS 600 (P4 dual core, 2GB RAM, 500GB HD). It came with a Nvidia 6800 video (256MB) which seems to be working well. I still will probably upgrade to the 7900 to be current (and may splurge for the 512MB version).

I went the refurb route for a couple of reasons. My time is important to me. It may not seem like it since it’s now spent playing WoW, but I play it with my wife and friends, so it is a good social time. Researching which motherboard to get is tedious and not worth my time. There’s also the warranty. When you piece it together yourself and something goes wrong, you’re screwed. Now I just call Dell and they send somebody out. Again, time. I’m capable of doing things myself, I’ve done it before, but hardware problems are not things I like to screw around with.

One thing that suxors about buying from somebody like Dell is all the crap they put on there. A brand new machine should not take 5 minutes to log into. Even after you go through and get the stuff so it doesn’t ask you anymore, it is still slow as hell. This is a terrible user experience when getting a new computer. In some ways it’s worse then having an infected PC.

Thankfully my friend mentioned an app that will remove most of it automatically. If you are getting, or know somebody who’s getting, a Dell, run and get the Dell De-Crapifier. It kind of crapped out a couple of times, but I just re-ran it and it uninstalled everything. Awesome! Reboot a couple of times and things are flying without any of the junk on there.

Going into Second Life is a whole new experience. The graphics are so smooth now it’s not even funny. The particle effects are stunning. The avatars move smoothly (negating any network/server lag). Incredible. This is how it was made to be run.

World of Warcraft is much smoother too. I think that’s more due to the extra memory and CPU power than the video, but the video is sharper and faster. I am able to keep up running because the computer isn’t swapping all the time. Much better experience.

All in all I’m very, very happy. Things are so smooth and fast it’s unreal. I made an image of the disc after removing all the crap so I can quickly get back to a known state if need be and not have to spend hours doing the OS install (hopefully). Just need to install a few more things, copy my music over (and free up space on my laptop) and I’ll be good to go.

Oh, and this was paid for with poker winnings. Even though I suck, I was still able to pay for it all with poker winnings. So it’s like it was free.
Woo hoo!!!