Sundays and.... Cats?

I have finally started playing a bunch of poker again the last few days with FTOPS running. It hasn't gone especially well though, but at the same time I guess it hasn't gone that poorly either. The stakes I'm playing are sort of all over the place, from big FTOPS tournaments to high stakes PLO shots to midstakes PLO grinding and some mid-high NL Holdem cash. I just play whatever looks fun or whichever games look good and try to luckbox some buyins. I know I've lost each of the last 3 days but I couldn't really say how much, nor do I especially seem to care, other than to know that there were no really ugly numbers. I feel like my play has been a bit weak at times but overall pretty reasonable, however I think some of the high stakes shots have hurt my focus when I'm grinding smaller stakes. Right now I don't really feel like talking about anything too serious poker related though, and instead I'm going to tell you about kitties. Before reading on please refer to this xkcd comic as an explanation of the inane ramblings that will follow:



So a few weeks before I went to Vegas for 7 weeks or whatever it was this summer my roommates adopted two kittens. They were tiny and adorable and they quickly grew fond of their uncle Mike (who could blame them), as I did of them. I've never been a big pet person, but as I didn't have to do most of the work in taking care of them and they were unbearably cute it was actually pretty fun to have them around. There was a grey kitten who got named Clementine, and her brother was a black kitty named Clover, because they just weren't cute enough on their own so you must use alliteration in naming them I guess. I've always said that the main problem with kittens is they grow up and become cats, and unfortunately while I was in Vegas I missed out on much of the fun times while they were still kittens. So when I finally get back here after Vegas they are of course much bigger, and therefore much bigger trouble makers. Generally when I want to get something done on the computer I have to close my bedroom door to keep them out, or else they will try to type for me, or they will climb all over my room and kick stuff everywhere, or my personal favourite is when they climb my chair and I turn quickly or rock in it or whatever which knocks them off balance, and their first instinct is to dig their claws into whatever is closest to stop their fall. Unfortunately this is usually my back. Now that being said they are still super adorable when they get tired of running around like crazy breaking stuff. However, I no longer feel their cute little alliterative names are as appropriate, so I now prefer to call them by the simple descriptive "grey cat" and "black cat". Actually I have no idea why I do that I just get bored of real names like everyone.

So moving back towards the realm of poker somewhat, I was grinding Sunday tournaments as usual today and things were not going well. I was busting out of everything quickly and pretty short stacked in the few I had open. The kitties weren't too crazy today though so I left my door open so they could come hang and maybe pick up a few tips for their home game. I was relatively short stacked in the FTOPS main event when grey cat came in and cuddled up on my lap. I immediately got dealt KK and doubled up, and then on the very next hand I got dealt KK again and doubled once more, after which I exclaimed "Grey cat are lucky cat!". I continued to build my stack while grey cat rested, but eventually she ran off again and everything went to shit and all I could manage was a couple min cashes. I was also down a bunch from short stacking some big PLO and 50/100 NL cash games, but now that I had screen space open I noticed a rare 50/100 PLO game running on Cake. I had never seen such a thing but it quickly became apparent the game was very good so I decided to buy-in short and try to run it up. I quickly succeeded in running my 2K buy-in up to 11K under the watchful eye of grey cat, but when she left I donked it back down to 1K. However grey cat later returned and decided to nap on my desk:



At this point I went on a big heater and ran my stack all the way back up to $22.5K by the end of the session to save my day (unfortunately I kept playing some other tables after grey cat awoke and left and I lost a few grand back). So that is the story of my Sunday. I leave you with a picture of black cat.



Mike