Poker in the Eye II

Last week's feline situation overshadowed a minor accomplishment, that being my first poker victory with five other live players last Tuesday night. I can honestly say I've won more money than I've lost at poker, having played simply for fun my first time, losing $10 my second time, and winning $20 my third time. I don't think I'm quite ready for the World Poker Tour yet, though. :-)

I remain obsessed with the game at this point, playing the XBox version a little each night and having bought (and started to read) a book on it. I've never been much interested in gambling before, and that's not where the obsession lies, or I'd be playing more games with real people for money. I think it's that I've figured out where the skill lies, as opposed to being just who happens to draw the best cards, and now I'm trying to understand how to manipulate that to advantage, like any other game. It's a resource management game, really, with the resource being the chips. I'm too conservative by nature to be a real gambler, but I'm just enjoying the game for what it is right now.

On other fronts, my workload has become a bit more reasonable, and I've been working a lot of extra hours to try to clean house and create a situation where I don't mind my job so much on an ongoing basis.

Creative work is on the back burner for right now while I put in extra work time, learn poker, and get essentials done around the house. That said, I ran the first session of season two of my GURPS Firefly game this past Sunday, which went well, all in all. It felt good to be in the GM's chair again (which happened to be on the floor in this case), and the players seemed to enjoy the session. It didn't work out as I'd expected (with the PCs in prison), but we did have a surprising player character death, and it did end up with them having royally ticked off the most powerful government in the 'Verse, adding an element of true danger that's been missing from the campaign up to this point. I'd been getting burned out on Firefly, which was one reason for the hiatus, but now I'm excited about running it again for a while.