Damian's Blog

Here's the graph for August. Pretty much down and up and then down. I stopped playing at Absolute Poker over the number of hands I lost on the river. As usual it doesn't contain my tournament winnings. I did finish in the money 4/7 MTTs I played in August.

There won't be any stats for Sept since I have yet to play a hand online. I'll post a Vegas report soon.

August 2007 Graph

Had a great month of poker. Here's my graph over July 2007. This doesn't include my profits from tournaments. I made the money 3 times in the $7k Guarantee on Absolute Poker. Finished 3rd in one of them which paid out ~$800.

July 2007 Graph

Sorry for the long delay since the last post. I've been extremely busy and now I'm out of town on business and finally getting a chance to make a post.... Don't worry a poker update will be coming soon for those who are interested.

How does this make any sense? A friend whines to his/her parents cause they want to move out with their boyfriend/girlfriend. They are in their late 20s. Parents finally agree... 3 months pass and they still haven't moved out. They finally say "I'm moving out at the end of the month". Of course I offer to help like any friend would. Even offer to pay for the moving truck. End of the month comes and goes... no mention of moving out. So you say to them "Why don't you just move out?". I guess offering to pay for the moving truck seems too pushy. And it seems the way you tell someone they should move out makes them ignore you for weeks.

So who's the idiot? Me I guess.... for befriending and encouraging such a person in the first place. Some people are just all talk... I only bluff at the poker table. Otherwise I do as I say.... of course, unless I'm drunk. BTW, I'm posting this from a bar using the free wifi.

Many of my friends think I'm exaggerating about house prices in Vancouver. This is for those of you that don't live in this wonderful city. Many of you wonder what you can get in Vancouver for $1,000,000. Here's a house I found listed on MLS (V651106):



Only $968,000 and a huge 1700sqft of living space. What a bargain!

Vancouver is constantly rated as one of the top 3 cities in the world to live in. There are lots of reasons as it is a wonderful and beautiful city. When I was leaving Vancouver to move to Toronto back in 2004 the reaction was "Why would you do that? It's all flat and dirty". When moving back from Toronto to Vancouver this year I got a completely different reaction "Oh it's so beautiful, I wish I could move there".

First of all, the Vancouverites that told me it's all flat in Toronto were wrong. Candice and I actually climbed up the Scarborough Bluffs from Bluffers Park. We know it's NOT flat. Plus most of the people in Vancouver only look at the mountains, they don't use them. They don't ski or hike them. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely love Vancouver. And yes, we do use those mountains, just last weekend we hiked to the top of one. It's the attitude that is a little much.

Vancouverites love to tell you how nice their city is and how ugly yours is.

Winnipeggers love to put down their own city.

Torontonians are too busy in the hustle and bustle and don't give a crap.

Paradise comes at a cost. As much as we love the city there is always doubts about if it's worth it to live here. This morning gas prices were 127.2/L which is well over 20% more than anywhere else in Canada.

In case you decide to take transit, a 3 zone pass in Vancouver is $130/month. TTC monthly pass is just $99/month and you can ride in a much larger area than a 3 zone in Vancouver would get you. One way ticket is $2.75 in Toronto vs $4.50 for 3 zone in Vancouver during weekdays before 6pm.

Housing prices are almost double Toronto prices. We could sell our Townhouse in Toronto and maybe buy a studio apartment.

Chinese food is more expensive here even if we drive out to Richmond. You can't find that $5 meal which includes main dish, soup, drink, and tax. I worked at IBM so I'm quite familiar with Metro Square.

Groceries are more expensive as we are beginning to notice. Every container has an enviro levy plus deposit. If you actually think that enviro levy goes towards environmental programmes, think again.

Even though all the tree huggers seem to gravitate towards Vancouver we don't seem to be any more green. Toronto has that kitchen waste compost program to reduce garbage. You'd think Vancouver would have something similar, but they don't. It's hard to not separate our garbage from organic vs non-organic waste.

Vancouver is a great city. I don't feel as rushed or as stressed. Sometimes those things are priceless.


Gas Price History for Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver - April 2007

I'm still making great progress at Dream Poker (Prima Network). I didn't plan on playing today, but I was waiting for work to call me back to do some real work. Why not hop on Dream Poker and play for a little while? Boy did it pay off! Within 20 min I had turned my $100 into $500+ and I wiped out the entire table. I wanted them to rebuy, but no one would take me on .

Yesterday was the PSO Spring League Event #2. It starts at 6pm here on the west coast which makes it tough to play if you work late. Unfortunately, I had to work until 5:45pm, which means I probably wouldn't make the tournament because of the 45 min commute home. Being a little bummed out, a light bulb went off and I decided to call my wife at home to boot up my laptop. Got her to register me for the tournament. I figured the worst case I would just sit out until I got home and see if I could make a run of it with the remaining chips I had left.

What ended up happening was a "play poker by phone" experience. Having someone on the other end who has no clue about the game of poker and myself trying to navigate through the Vancouver rush hour while playing poker on the phone was quite the experience. Thank god for bluetooth! She narrated the hands to me and I had to tell her how much to bet and which buttons to click.

Surprisingly it worked out quite well. By the time I got home my chip stack was double the starting 1500 and I was in good position to start my usual style of play by staying aggressive. I even showed some of my bluffs early on hoping for a large payoff later and it worked out a couple times when I flopped the nuts.

Eventually made it to heads up with zagnuts with a 80k-30k advantage. He did take the lead at one point, but I managed to put him away and win this tournament. +$125 with $220 in PSO points added. So $345 on a $5 and 3h investment. There was also a $20 bounty on me, I should get to keep that too since no one took me out. Not bad results after thinking I'd miss this league event.

I'm not buying a house. No, it's not because I think the market will crash yada yada. For those that know me well know exactly why I don't want to buy a house. You see in Winnipeg I bought a house only to move to Vancouver soon after. In Vancouver I bought a nice place and 3 months after taking possession I moved to Toronto. After getting married and convincing Candice to move to Toronto and buying a house, we made the tough decision to move back to Vancouver.

So here we are now. You see if we bought a house that would only mean we'd have to move again. So I'm not buying a house. We need to stay in one place long enough to produce offspring or acquire some from China. Whichever comes first.

If anyone's interested... We have a nice house in Ajax, ON for sale .

For comparison, here are the average house prices in Q1 2007 (Royal LePage):

Vancouver - Bungalow $758,000 - 2-Storey $837,500
Toronto - Bungalow $387,744 - 2-Storey $489,889
Calgary - Bungalow $402,933 - 2-Storey $411,456

I've been playing Dream Poker and as I've mentioned before, I'm doing well. Tonight I was sitting with over $600 on a $100NL table. Six times the buy in for that limit. Dream Poker is part of the Prima Network. In the past I haven't had too much luck there, so I'd generally avoid it. The free gift from PSO was just too tempting to pass up. So not only do I get $120 from PSO, but I'm also up over $1k for less than a weeks worth of playing. At this point it's like my own personal ATM. Let's see how long this can continue.

Like most Canadian and US players, I'm still trying to figure out how to move my online money around. Getting money out of a poker site is easy, you can just request a cheque, but it's when you go to deposit that money into another site we haven't quite figured out yet. Most credit cards block online gambling. Poker might be a form of gambling for some people, I see it as a game of skill.

I guess I haven't really written about poker in a while. Lots of people are wondering what I've been doing and how I've been doing with poker. When pokersouceonline moved out of the great USA because of the politics happening with online gamling, I sort of took a break from online poker. Playing only occasionally at Ultimate Bet for rakeback, and live at Casino Rama and Niagara. I did play a Canadian Poker Tour event and finished 32nd out of 120. Not quite good enough to get paid, but I got a cool CPT pin .

After moving to Vancouver and with at least 4 casinos within the city, I planned to play more live games. I haven't played as much as I like, but once I clear my online bonuses you'll start to see me at either River Rock or Boulevard Casinos. 3/6NL or 5/10NL will be my game is I can get a seat.

So PSO redesigned their website and bumped up their Dream Poker promo up to 12000 PSO points. I just had to do this promo. I deposited $100 (my last deposit using Neteller) and proceeded to play $100NL. Within the required 600 raked hands and in only a week, I managed to build that $100 into $750. I used to hate the Prima network, but I just can't lose.... knock on wood.

The poker league is starting up again. The only problem for me is that it starts at 6pm on the west coast, so I'm not sure I'll get home in time to play each one.

The Johnny Chan Classic is in Vancouver May 6 - 13. I thought it would be cool to play the opening $250k tourny, but I already have plans on that day. I will think about playing the $300k short handed tourny. That should better suit my style of play. I normally play short handed tables online anyways. Anyone want to back me? It might be a good investment.