A December to Remember

After running hot at both my homegames and online in early December, enjoying a darn near “freeroll” trip to fabulous Las Vegas, having a great week of poker at various cardrooms on the strip and actually winning some $, meeting a bunch of poker bloggers live and in person, how much more memorable could December get? VERY. For starters, as soon as we returned from Las Vegas, my wife informs me she “doesn’t quite feel right”. So, she goes to see the Dr. and has a few tests run. What do you suppose we found out? How about that the Lucypher household is expecting another addition to the family? There is actually a lot more drama to this than you may imagine since inside the same week we were told first it was not going to be viable and then after much sadness, finally advised the pregnancy would be viable after all. What an emotional roller coaster ride. So, we hunkered down for the Holidays with big news and lots of good food and family.
As an old guy seeing how good things were going, I knew something bad was about to happen. Sure enough, I was right. During the holidays, someone backed into my old car. This initially seemed +EV since the car could use some new paint. The damage is minimal but the insurance company is considering totaling the vehicle due to its age and mileage. This would be a serious hardship since the vehicle is in perfect operating condition and I will not be able to obtain another decent one for anything close to what they will pay me.
I also hit a major cold streak during the holidays and lost back what I had won online earlier in the month. I had switched from NL to PL for a while to try something new. I was crushing PL Hold Em at first but by the end of the month, I had lost all the winnings back. While relaxing around the house, I took some time to reflect on 2007 and so forth. I wanted to end the year on a positive note so I finally decided it was time to upgrade the old pc (and I do mean old) so I did something I NEVER do. My poker bankroll is totally separate from any other household money and is never used for anything but poker (I will post about bankroll management in the near future.) This time I broke the rule. I used some of the money I won in Vegas to buy a new pc. To give you an idea of how big an improvement this was, I had my old pc since 2000 and it was running at 548 Mhz and 384 Meg Ram. All I run on it is the poker clients for the sites I play and ptracker/pahud. Still, after purging all other files and programs, I was near max capacity for the 10gig harddrive I had. The new pc runs at a blazing fast 1.6 Ghz and 2 Gig RAM. Yes, that is right, 548 Mhz to 1.6 Ghz and 384MEG to 2GIG RAM. What a difference! I know for you true techno-types out there, this is not particularly spectacular but for me, it is like the difference between night and day. Now that is what I call +EV.