Go Sox | Main | Series returns to NY

October 18, 2004

Games Weekend at Matt's

Went Friday and Saturday to Matt's semiannual TrashCon gaming weekend and had a very good time. Played tons of Tichu (and I think won every game except the one where my partner was a relative newbie [and he did quite well given his experience - thought for a long time on several obvious plays but then did the right thing]) and Crokinole (where Rob and I lost like 4 of 5 against Greg and Bill on Matt's cheap Amazon board which was surprising but Bill has gotten much better than he used to be - also every game was pretty close except our one win which was a one round 110-0 drubbing).

I also ran a small $5 buy-in poker tournament using my new chips from CostCo (excellent buy at $60 for 500 chips [12 cents a chip] and a pretty nice aluminum case with a couple of Bicycle decks and some Craps dice). Lost half my stack on like the 3rd hand of the game to Alex's pocket aces when I had top pair - I had a bad feeling about this hand but couldn't bring myself to fold it. I then staged a pretty incredible recovery from down to 65 (out of a starting 1000) by tripling up twice. Unfortunately, I was then knocked out on a hand when I had top pair of Aces with a bad kicker and called Alec down to the river, worried he had an Ace and a better kicker. Turned out he only had KJ and I was way ahead the whole way until he hit a 10 on the river to make Broadway and knock me out but the great majority of the money went in while I had a huge lead and he had only 4 outs so I certainly didn't do anything wrong here. Brian and Kim ended up splitting at the end.

The final major event was Rob's Haste Worte trivia game which my team finally won for the first time, after being second many times. We had a strong team with everyone heavily contributing answers and me being mainly responsible for the bidding. I think I did a nice job, until the very last bid where I misjudged the leading team and thought they would bid at least 8 and make it and we were 4 behind so I thought we had to bid 12. Unfortunately, they only bid 4 and the team in 2nd only bid 5 so we only needed to have bid 9 to win which would have been easy. Also, the 4th team made the worst possible spoiler bid for us of 12 and I was sure we were screwed. However, amazingly we were able to make our 12 reading last, but down to the dregs of our answers - great job guys on thinking of obscure breakfast cereals. Of course, for the first time, there was no prize for the winning team ;( (not that I actually care but others on the team might have). I thought the categories this time were pretty good, with no nightmare issues like the Olympics one last year. No categories I was personally really good at but thats ok. My personal favorite category was the '"Fictional Drinks" one which turned out to be surprisingly large but we couldn't think of that many and probably also underbid it by 1 due to a misunderstanding I had with Rob over the handicap he was imposing that round on the leading teams. The game was slow as always but I at least still found it quite enjoyable. As it is the reading of the lists that takes forever, I think a wise thing would be for many people to play a game on the side or read or something while only the team readers (and anyone else interested) is there for the reading - this would also probably speed things up as the peanut gallery effect would be reduced.

Thanks, Matt, and Happy Brithday!

Posted by aarondf at October 18, 2004 12:05 PM

Comments

Post a comment