Week Ending 07/31/04

What an up and down week this has been. I was all over the map this week and even though I played 5 nights, only one of those nights was spent playing from home. My adventures taught me a few things about playing while traveling.
1) Make sure you know your bandwidth limitations
2) Make sure you will stay in service
3) Make sure you are prepared for disconnects

And so the story goes..
Sunday
Played while at my Mom's house. She has a cable modem with a wireless network and I cruised along nicely for a nice win.
54 minutes, 24.75BB, 63 hands, 39.29BB/100

Monday
Camping=no poker

Tuesday
Now hold the phone, er cellphone. We went camping from Mom's house so I had my laptop, cellphone, car charger adapter for laptop, cable to connect cellphone to laptop, and cell service. Everything I needed to play was available and I convinced my wife to let me climb in the van after everyone was asleep in the tent so I could play. I had never tried playing through a cellphone connection and I knew I was only going to get about 14.4kbps but I gave it the old college try. Much to my suprise I was able to connect to PartyPoker with very little lag. I'm so used to playing with poker tracker running and downloading hands, and using the game time window that I fired those up and tried to incorporate them. The problems started to arise when poker tracker went to check my pop 3 account. I hadn't checked my email in about 48 hours so I had over 400 messages. All but about 25 were spam and poker tracker wanted to scan through them. This sucked the bandwidth and before I knew it I was timing out at the table. This continued for what seemed like a millennia as each message scanned one at a time. I'd get a few hands in and then time out and miss a few.
I then got the bright idea to download the email into outlook so I could have a clean inbox for tracker to scan. I know, stupid, stupid, stupid, I was thinking I would only have to suffer the bandwidth loss once this way but it was taking so long it was ill conceived. Needless to say I began to get pissed at myself for the huge delays and missed hands. This led to an awful night of play.
73 minutes, -18.75BB, 58 hands, -32.33BB/100

Wednesday
Got some play in but then we received some bad news as my Mother-In-Law was going to have heart surgery Thursday morning. We drove all night and everything turned out ok.
134 minutes, -7.42BB, 132 hands, -5.62BB/100

Thursday
No Poker

Friday
Found out my in-laws have DSL service and their modem doubles as a wireless router. After some setup I retired to the 5th-wheel trailer in the back yard. (My in-laws trailer where we were staying) All in all a good night of play.
86 minutes, 22.75BB, 66 hands, 34.47BB/100

Saturday
Cellular experiment number two. After passing St. Louis on the way home to the Kansas City area I decided to try playing again while traveling. Verizon was supposed to have service through all of I-70 and the wife took the wheel for a while so I could play. It was working rather well. I learned my lesson from Tuesday and only had partypoker fired up. The 14.4 zipped right along with one table going and I was having a good time. My cards were not joining me in my jovial state though. I wasn't getting dealt much of anything. If I could see a flop it would miss me. The only two pair I rec. was 2's and 4's. Neither made trips on the flop. I tried to push a few players off of pots but was unsuccessful (I know, what was I thinking..but I wanted to win a hand damnit). I played for near 45 minutes before winning my first pot. I thought I was on the verge of a card turnaround when I was disconnected. I couldn't get back on and I found out that Verizon has the interstate covered but not necessarily with their own towers. Since I needed a Verizon tower to get on the internet through them I had to pack it in with a loss. It was enjoyable though and if I get the chance to do it again I will. I'll just make sure to verify the type of coverage in the area.
63 minutes, -14BB, 54 hands, -25.93BB/100

Totals
Despite the wild fluctuations during the week I still managed to finish up a little ahead.
6.83 hours, 7.34BB, 373 hands, 1.97BB/100

I meant to do it last week but with everything that went on I didn't have time so on Wed. I should have my write up on "luck in poker" posted to the site.