Updated travel plans

I have been back for two weeks after a long three week trip to Beijing (2 weeks) and Edinburgh (1 week). I was in Beijing working with my new team on project planning, we made a ton of progress and I am eager to get moved to Beijing so I can dig in and get started full-time on the new job. I was in Edinburgh for the WWW conference. I also got a chance to spend a day with Ashley, an old friend from Vancouver that I worked with at PCsupport.com. We had a great day hiking up arthur's seat (a decent sized hill overlooking Edinburgh), walking around town and capped off the day with a great dinner at The Dome, a great restaurant in Edinburgh.

I am going back to Beijing from July 16th through the 22nd, for more planning work and to finalize some of the details for our move in August. We will be moving the whole family over sometime around the 17th of August. I will likely attend SIGIR (a big information retrieval conference) in Seattle, then move to Beijing. From what I have heard fall is the best time of year in Beijing, so the timing should be pretty good.

I will be heading to Vegas for a friends stag from June 21st through the 25th. I hope to spend pretty much every waking hour playing poker, since once I move to China there won't be any regular casino poker games for me. I was hoping to play while I was in Edinburgh, but couldn't find any live games. I played online a bit and did pretty well, up about $1000 for the week. Since then I have played a few sessions at Tulalip and have been doing pretty well. I am up about $1,300 for the week. Last Saturday night I played a $3-5 blind no-limit game, with a $200 maximum buy-in for about 5 hours and managed to get up about $300. Then the game broke and I bought into a $5-10 blind no-limit game, with a $500 maximum buy-in and hit a couple of big hands in the first 30 minutes. I got up about $700, so I figure it was wise to head home, since it was almost 2:30 am.

I will try and blog my poker sessions while I am in vegas. I did some research on the Internet and I think I will try and play at Caesars and Treasure Island, they seemed to have pretty soft no-limit games. I haven't done any hand reviews yet, so I will provide some details on one of the big hands from my $5-10 no-limit game last saturday.

I had about $500 in front of me, I had just bought in for the maximum, and the table was seven handed, most other players had about $1-2,000 in front of them. I was in the six seat and was dealt 68s (hearts) in early position. The table was pretty aggressive and I don't normally play this game, I knew the table would try and take advantage of any passive players, so I wanted to come out aggressive right off the bat. So I raised to $30. It folded around to the small blind, a player I didn't really know very well and one with a real deep stack. He made it $70 more. I figured this was a great position for me. He likely had a large pocket pair, and with a 68s that's the hand I wanted to go up against, so I called.

The flop came 589 rainbow, so I had a middle pair and an inside straight draw. The board was pretty non-threatening so I hoped I could get the raiser to play slow and let me draw to 2 pair or a straight. I figured either 2 pair or the straight would be pretty well camouflaged so I could get him to pay off it I hit and I could get away from the hand easily if it got too expensive.

He bet $80 making the pot $295, so I was getting a bit better then 3.5-1 odds on my $80 call. With 9 outs I was more then a 5-1 against hitting my hand, but I figured I could get him to pay me off if I hit my hand, so I figured I would call, then bet or raise out if I hit my hand or a scare card came off.

The turn was another 8, given me trip 8's. He bet another $80 and I called. I thought of raising, but I thought there was a decent chance he would throw his hand away and I thought I might be able to get him to pay me off on the river.

The river was a blank. I bet $100 and he called. Then immediately showed KK.

The call pre-flop was a little suspect, I probably needed a deeper stack myself to really make this play payoff. Plus I probably should have raised him on the turn, but I thought he might make a final bet on the river and I could get more money that way.