ski trip, HU nl and broken bumper ftw

Well, the ski trip was a super fun time but as far as ski trips go it was a pretty big bust. The snow was super windblown and crummy thick with subzero temps for the first few days and the sun beat it down for the middle of the trip. Brad and I both got a semi-nasty cold which worked out ok cause the skiing wouldn't have been great anyhow so we took a few days off and skied short days for most of the early part. This didn't bother us because it looked as if a big storm was coming in for the end of the trip and we were really enjoying focusing our attention on learning heads up no-limit together. More on this later.

Well, the storm was a little slower than anticipated so it looked like sunday was going to be the only sweet fresh powder day but the weatherman was very confident it was going to snow nicely, so this kept spirits high. We were excited to wake up to 8" sunday morning. We quickly got ready and got out only to find the main lift was broken. A lot of resorts have plenty of lifts so if one goes down, it may be a pain to get to where you want to go, but Whitefish isn't like that. Well, they have an old rickety lift that can get you to part of it but that wasn't open either. Given that it was a sunday and it snowed, a lot more people came than normal (probably 4x the other days) and we were all stuck on a couple small lifts with some okish terrain that got tracked out really quickly. It was also kind of sleeting at this point and we were soaked. We went to lunch and afterwards they said they doubted it was going to be fixed so we decided to play the sunday tourneys instead. Ugh.

As we are playing the tournaments it just keeps snowing harder and harder and it's really piling up. Brad kept insisting it was soothing, but I found this very tilting as I felt screwed out of good snow and I wasn't going to be able to ski it as we were leaving the next morning. When we got back from dinner a fresh foot or so was on the driveway. :(

I read the snow report this morning to find 18" new and a mid-morning update said that this was the best skiing he'd ever had on the mountain. ugh ugh ugh. Days like that are the ones I dream of and keep my head up in low times. When I say I live for days like that I pretty much mean it. Not a whole lot compares. This is life though, there will be enough in the future, it just sucks to miss one by 'that much' especially after such a bad day the day before and a week of mediocre skiing.

We looked into staying but since brad lives in vail and they were going to get snow it didn't make sense to extend given it would have cost a bunch for him to change his flight because he fly's into eagle airport in vail. I thought about switching my flight and joining him but I had made plans to visit kels and it makes more sense to just go there and watch the weather and go next week if it's good.

Brad and I decided to chop action and make a huge effort to learn heads up (1 on 1) no limit. We played a combined 25k hands at mostly $2/4 ($400 buyin) during the week and ended up down 4 buyins but running 13 buyins under all-in expectation. In other words if you took the luck out of it and split the all-ins by how much equity each player had in the results of the hand we would have had 15 buyins more of money. So while in reality we lost money, we played well enough to win 12 buyins. This includes some 'dumb' plays we made because we were learning or tilted from all of the sick beats. We played a lot of sessions with one person controlling the mouse with the other sweating/giving opinions.

While we are competent, we still have tons of room to improve but we've made leaps and bounds in the learning process and it was a really good experience. If a few hands went a different way I really think we would have done a bunch better because I find it really frustrating as far as the learning process goes when you get a ton of negative reinforcement from good play especially when it's vs the same donkey over and over and he has quite a few stacks of your money on the table. (basically we tilted a little :( )

By the end I'd had enough and felt like winning again so I pulled up some 6 max for the last 2 days and crushed while even running terrible (5 buy-ins under expectation). I'm giving serious thought to just playing 6max nl for the entire month of february just for some total peace of mind. It seems like if I put 2-3k hands in every day, there really isn't a whole lot of frustration. Sure you lose a handful of buyins some days, but the edge is just so much greater and it's not all to the same guy and it's not in the tilting ways of high stakes limit holdem. It really seems like so many more days are the very grindy win a couple buyins and quit satisfied days. I feel like i really keep going on about this in my blogs and I really should consider it for a little while. The other games are just often fun and interesting. Time will tell but maybe I'll give it a shot. I really think $30-50k is doable most months doing this so that is very tempting. It's just pretty boring and takes a super good work ethic (which I feel like i have but most poker players don't)

Weather is so annoying. It made me upset cause i wanted to ski, then delayed our flight a couple hours which I'm supposed to just get home at like 7pm and drive 2 hours to visit Kels, but the timing of the freezing rain/snow is a little further into the evening, which I may not be able to get there now and tomorrow is a snowy/blizzardy day with wind chills reaching -40 and I can't drive there in my TL (baddd in snow esp cause I am lazy and never bought winter tires) and that would put me in on wednesday which is her last day off (she has tues and wed off). Again, this is life but just like I was looking forward to the snow, she's really been looking forward to spending her days off with me (and me with her, but with her just starting work and me travelling it's a bit different...) I'm on the plane now so i don't know what the weather is like but I'm really crossing my fingers I can make it out tonight.

/update I made it but when I got here the rain had frozen in the parking lot into a glare sheet of ice on a slight slant so my car slid at about 2 mph into another car. Her car has a scratch on the fender and mine has a cracked bumper. Stupid weather.