Fair Dius....

After doing some standard touristy things in Delhi, such as bumping into cool people from Bath that I met in Varanasi (only, what, 12-14 million people in Delhi? Pretty likely really) and being attacked by small children, I got my train to Ahmedabad.

There's something I really enjoy about the actual act of travelling. Sure it can be stressful - missed flights, delayed trains, psychotic bus drivers - but just watching the world go by can be immensely... satisfying somehow.

Take the Ahmedabad-Diu trip - I woke about an hour before we arrived. And, all passing by in fleeting seconds: thousands of steel tubes, big enough to walk through, hundreds of metres long in an enormous field; an entire school of uniformed children doing star jumps to the beat of a gigantic drum; intricately detailed psychedelic Enfield-rickshaw hybrids roaring past; a large ring of men dancing to an audience. Cows, oxen and buffalo pulling carts, pigs and hogs snuffling in the debris. The old man lying on the street with nothing but bones and a beard.


No reliving it, no going back to visit, no phone numbers, no emails addresses, no photos, no names. Just image after image washing past, rolling out of reach. But in a good way. Life going on.


Well that was pretty wiffley and airy fairy, back to reality. Brief review of Ahmedabad: I kinda liked it but I have no idea why. There was nothing to do, or see, no other travellers to socialise with and the place smelt funny. But I still sort of liked it - the casual confidence that is characteristic of Indians has settled upon the place in a type of airy, easy grace. Not a place I'd want to spend much time in though.

Anyways, now I'm in Diu, and it is FRIGGIN' AWESOME. It's a tiny island less than 10 miles across that was under Portuguese rule until '61, and it really shows. The Indo-Mediterranean vibe is bizarre, and lovely. Perhaps it's just that it's an oasis in the desert of chaos that is India, but it seems like a mini paradise - after nearly 2 weeks in Delhi anyhow.


I'm staying at the top of an old church that you can scramble around and explore, my view every morning is brilliant sun shining on a scattering of eccentrically multicoloured Mediterranean-style houses, the odd church, some palm trees, and then the Arabian sea. It's sunny and hot every day but with a nice ocean breeze, there are sandy, empty beaches and the sea is warm. It's quiet, barely any people, no touts, no rickshaws, no cars, no horns, no rubbish. Beer is very cheap and plentiful. They even take siestas here. Basically, if the church I'm staying in had wifi - nothing personal guys, but I wouldn't be coming back.


My daily routine at the moment is: wake up mid-morning, have breakfast somewhere, trundle along on the bike I've hired to a beach, swim and read in the sun, trundle along again to a nice restaurant, eat some awesome food, trundle some more, maybe explore the island a bit, trundle home, drink 60p beers and eat freshly caught shark (gorgeous), then pass out in the wee hours after talking a lot of nonsense usually with a nice/interesting group of people. Rinse and repeat.


Talking of the people one meets - one of the brilliant things about hitch-hiking is that you tend to meet a glorious mix of the great and the eccentric (such as the Polish guy in Belgium who hadn't slept in 48 hrs, had a penchant for going the wrong way around roundabouts or skipping red lights - both at once on one memorable occasion - and fell asleep doing 120 km/hr on a motorway). Backpacking - especially in a place like India - although not quite so polarised, is similar. Meeting relaxed, friendly people that I genuinely enjoy spending time with is, if not common, at least a lot less rare than average. Also, the number of... 'interesting characters' you meet rises dramatically, which can vary from entertaining to frightening.

Take a fellow guest house resident; a smiley, down-to-earth, beer-loving Jordie in her late 30s. Or so I thought - last night she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she was an angel. 'I am God. I am here to save humanity.'

Delusions of grandeur, anyone? They were drunken ramblings perhaps (well, no perhaps about it actually) but still, I'd need something significantly stronger than beer to make me think I'm God. She was literally yelling 'Shut the FUCK UP, I don't care what any of you think, you're all inferior, I'm a celestial being.' Shouting at people mid-conversation to proclaim she was The Saviour. Certainly an interesting evening.

I think I had a point when I started writing about that but I've forgotten what it was, so I'll just leave you with some words spoken by Guillaume, a really nice French guy who was staying here in Diu the last week or so. Imagine the thick French accent.


"I am not religious, I do not believe in God but life, life is... is fucking strange, non?

Varanasi and The Games

I arrive in Varanasi slightly dazed from the 12hr train ride and find lodgings at the Shanti Guest House. Not easily, I hasten to add - it's down near the ghats; the steps down to the Ganges used for a variety of activities, from washing and bathing to burning the dead. Shanti GH is near Manikarnika Ghat, the biggest of the cremation ghats, and getting there requires navigation through a labyrinth of markets and side streets that are teaming with cockroaches, touts, stray dogs, cows and shops; littered with rubbish, paan splotches, various animals' crap and an ominous, viscous black sludge that slides down the gutters. Corpses pass by on the streets, carried on stretchers by small, chanting processions.


After a much needed shower I head to the rooftop restaurant. The view is incredible and the atmosphere charged - great boulders of thunder roll over the Ganges and around the ghats, eyes stinging from the pyres' smoke. I go for a wander around the backstreets and see some of the ghats. Then I'm directed to a music shop and school by a friendly drug dealer ('I sell everything'), and end up taking a tabla lesson right there and then, and book a bunch more.

Munshi Ghat

The Jolly Music House is run by the genial Jolly, who seems to spend most of his time sitting drinking chai, getting jolly, and generally smiling a lot. He also has a nice turn of phrase and puts things in ways that only non-native English speakers can, and we have some interesting conversations. Also play a few times with him and my teacher Om, in which I'm hilariously out-drummed but that are fun nonetheless.


It's a very Indian city, and despite the superficial reservations it's easy to have about the place, it has a great atmosphere and I like it here, as do most visitors. After a few weeks of pleasant sameyness, I head back to Delhi to catch some of the madness that is The Commonwealth Games.

Rant time! The metro system in Delhi during The Games would've been better organised had it been designed by a one-year-old going nuts with some crayons. At the entrance to the New Delhi metro station, there's ONE body scanner and ONE bag scanner. This is one of the busiest metro stations in Delhi, next to the biggest and busiest train station, and the way into the city from the airport. And the hundreds of thousands who use the metro daily are let in one at a time. I just saw (and promptly left) a queue about 300m long and 4 people wide - so perhaps 2000 people - and the queue was getting longer. One at a time. The incompetence involved in designing such a system is staggering. Then there's the free metro tickets that come with the event tickets. Each one has a code that has to be manually recorded every time you enter or exit the metro station. So come the end of an event - thousands of people trying to get home - not only are they let in or out one at a time, but everyone's shouting numbers and thrusting tickets slips all over the place, one guy frantically trying to write down long strings of numbers in a huge ledger. Complete mayhem. I can't fathom how anyone in the world, ever, would think this was a good idea. Or even a vaguely passable idea.

Ok, rant over. In comparison to the other methods of city travel it's actually a pretty good service (or at least a much needed one), despite all its faults - it's just that seeing a system that a moderately intelligent monkey could improve upon annoys the hell out of me.

The Games themselves are great (again, the infrastructural elements are woefully inadequate and under prepared, but I'll refrain from more ranting) and the events that have Indian competitors inevitably lead to the crowd going completely bonkers which can be very entertaining.


I'd meant to head to Mumbai next, but the trains are booked up for weeks in advance, so instead I book a ticket to Ahmedabad, and intend to head to Diu. It's a seaside resort-type town on the southern tip of the Gujarat peninsula, and I figure possibly a nice base to head off for some biking around the bulbous coastline. Looks like my plan to head down the western coast and end up in Kerala may not come off as planned. But plans in India are made to be broken it seems...

From the top.

We get into Delhi after an 8-hour plane ride (on which I get NO sleep). I'm amazed at the airport; it's all changed massively in the 6 months since I was here last. The Commonwealth Games are here next month and it's clear they've spent some serious money preparing - all shiny marble and perfume shops. The taxi ride into Delhi is striking as well, construction everywhere you look. I ask our taxi driver if it'll be done in time for the games, he laughs and shakes his head.

We wander around Paharganj (the backpacker area I'm familiar with), dump our bags at a guesthouse and grab some tasty samosas on the street. This is also undergoing major renovation - about a metre has been ripped off the front of the buildings on either side in order to make the street wider.

A rickshaw ride later and we're in the Chandi Chowk - a big network of markets near the Jama Masjid. I'd heard of a mystical, heavenly street that just sells paranthes of various shapes and sizes where you can choose any filling (image all the things you could put in a paranthe! peppers... peas... cashew nuts...!) called Gali Paranthe Wali (the lane of fried bread). So we went on a mission to find it, did eventually and had a fantastic aloo paranthe. Shame I didn't know the Hindi for cashew nuts.

At this point I'm an absolute wreck from lack of sleep, so we relax in a cafe and hide from a thunderstorm before heading to the station to get our train to Haridwar. I'm out cold for the whole ride (my dad doesn't fare so well) and we have chai and share a rickshaw with a friendly German to Rishikesh (which I describe in my blog from last year).

We find Enfields to hire pretty easily, from Ranjeet Motorcycles (recommended!) which is actually the place I bought my bike last year. If he remembers me and my... clumsiness last year he doesn't show it. Quite a few shop/cafe owners remember me though which is nice - one remembers both my name and what drink I'd order ('Ah, Mr Ben! Lemon tea?') which I'm mightily impressed by.

Oh if only I had a handlebar mustache.

We decide we'd like to head up to Joshimath, towards Hem Kund and The Valley of Flowers, where I actually went with Tyler and Gribb last year. So, after a few days rest, we set off from Rishikesh and have a great day's riding. A few scary patches, but mostly fine, and some nice sun. We also see many incredible road signs, my favourite being 'Driving and drink: a fetal combination'. Drink driving as a method of conception? Interesting...


That night it absolutely pours down, and after a few kilometres the next day we reach a few major landslides. We sit in front of the first, eyeing it up, when an Indian biker with a passenger rides up and sails through, as though the huge rocks and foot-thick mud were nothing. Fine, we think, we're just being wusses. After bumping around like crazy and getting stuck a few times we manage to get across and stop at a chai stall - by which time the guys in front returns saying the way forward is totally blocked. It's safe to say they weren't exaggerating.

Since we can't head onwards to Joshimath we decide to head back in case the road home is slow too. Turns out to be completely blocked. The next three days go pretty much in the same vein. Every day we get up early, get about 10km down the road, get confronted by ridiculous landslides; navigate our way through one to be met by a bigger one a few minutes later. Some of the things the locals are doing are truly staggering though - basically carrying entire bikes over huge mounds of slippery mud or zooming along foot-wide paths of mud and running water, both just a few feet away from hundred metre drops... Wish I had my camera handy!

Many bikers got through this, and it wasn't the worst by a long way.

It's getting to the point where we're not sure if we'll be back in time for my dad to get the train back to Delhi and catch his plane, but luckily by the fourth day the roads are pretty well cleared, and we bomb back to Rishikesh, the 'scary' parts of the first day barely registering in comparison to the landslides further into the mountains. Pretty dusty though.

The Masked Banditos

Just time for a bit of shopping and a nice hike into the hills (where I get attacked by one of the supposedly docile white monkeys) before heading back to Delhi.

2010 roundup, plans

Soooo, I'm done for the year. I haven't actually quite updated my spreadsheets yet, but I think it's going to end up something like breakeven on my own coin, and about in about $5k of makeup, over maybe 500hrs and 6 months. I've been much worse about keeping records of the live stuff, but I'm guessing roughly breakeven there too, maybe down a little.

So, fairly disappointing. I was playing well for large parts of it, probably the best I ever have, although there were definitely times where I let the downswing get to me; -$35k at one point, so about 400buyins over maybe 2000 games. Fairly unpleasant. Luckily I had a nice score recently which helped wipe out most of my makeup: Bink. Then last weekend I got coolered for the chiplead with 15 left in The Sunday Million (and I don't capitalise lightly), which was pretty crushing, but reassuring after a bad spell (for those who don't know, The Million is the biggest weekly tournament online, 1st being ~$250k. Coming 15/8000 players and breaking even on the day is pretty devastating considering that my place in the tournament was worth maybe $70k in equity - in effect, I lost $70k in one hand). Finally, my coach Matt LaGarde, after looking over the hand history of the 320 score, said he didn't have a lot of advice, and was impressed with how I played. I think being told by mlagoo that I play pretty well is a major achievement!

So all positive signs. Shame I don't have any money really. The 28k score didn't get me out of makeup so I didn't see any of it, (despite my mum suggesting I could pocket a few $k of it for myself! shocking) and The Million was stupid and evil. Even a 9th would mean I actually made some money, y'know, for food and stuff. Oh well, it was probably the last tournament I'll play this year, as next week I'm going away. For the best I think, I doubt I'd be playing well, at least for a little while.

Which leads me to the next bit - I'm off to India again. Yay! Going motorbiking with my dad for a few weeks in the same area I was biking last year (I'm far far more prepared for the biking, hopefully no more crashes to write about...), then he's heading home and I'm off down south along the coast. Pretty excited, getting itchy feet here, in need of a break/change of scenery. I'll be turning this back into a travel blog for the next 3 months, so come look at purty pictures and read about me almost dying in a myriad of strange ways.

Sooo... that's about it, back a week or two before christmas. Might get a few sessions in then, but I'm pretty much calling 2010 closed for business. I'm distantly looking forward to getting back to it next year; assuming I can earn some moolah there are some fun trips lined up - PCA, vegas for the WSOP, probably some EPTs, and obviously the GUKPTs and UKIPTs again. But before then I'm definitely in need of some space.

Bring on the curry and motorbikes.

Live games

I had a live cash! I made a day 2! I made a day 3! I MADE A FINAL TABLE!!


So the past month or so has been mainly live games for me. All have been great fun, and I've met a lot of people that I know through forums and stuff which has been awesome. Back in June was the UKIPT Killarney. It was a €1k event, and I hoped I would be sensible and do good here. Unfortunately I got my fancy-pants syndrome again, and ended up turning QQ into a bluff on a T-high board against a range that was {AA,KK}. It was actually an interesting spot, and I think it would work against the right player, but I need to remind myself that the average live player doesn't fold, and they really really don't fold aces or kings. So that got me short and I lost a flip or something.

Played some cash, lost a €800 pot to a 1 outer on the river, that was fun. Then played the €500 side. Played pretty good, made a few spewy plays early on, but luckily they worked out this time (floated a small CR from aggressive russian dude with A5dd on 24K one diamond, binked the 3 on the turn and stacked QK) and managed to make my first day 2. Came back, made a few nice calls, generally just chipped up slowly, then went a bit card/spot dead and made the final table as the shortstack.

The final played soooo slooowwwlly, we we're 8 handed for several hours. Eventually people started busting, and I managed to win a flip QQ>AK (after an A flopped too, Q on the river!). I was the only one doing any raising really, and was just collecting everyone's blinds. Knocked out a few shorties to take us to 3-handed, and I had a nice chiplead. Then QQ < A5 (to get HU with a huge chiplead) and JT < Q5 on 9TQ and I'm done. boooo! Still, was a nice cash and felt great to get the monkey off my back.



Went down to brighton feeling good. Despite being very hungover I had a great day 1, ran good, played ok, and ended the day 2nd in chips. Made just the 1 spewy play, 4bet shoving QKs over a 3bet from a young guy who had aces... I got there. I'm getting better though, finding more patience... Day 2 went well too, with me being chipleader for large parts of it, I was playing well and just gradually collecting chips. Unfortunately I lost a few large pots towards the end of the day, and ended up coming back with 13th left on day 3 with about 20bbs. Made a few slight mistakes to start with (r/folding button vs an aggro guy in BB with KTo and 20bb) and ended up jamming 15x with qjs over a CO open. He thought for a bit before calling with AQo, and I can't get there despite the 9Tx flop. Oh well, gg me. Kinda frustrating to come so close to the £65k for first and not win, but still, 13th aint bad I guess. All positive signs. Congrats to Andy Youens (AKA 'clunged') for coming 7th!


Got the sheffield £500 summer series this weekend, then GUKPT luton the weekend after that, then UKIPT edinburgh the weekend after that. Hopefully the run/play good will continue!

http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=167630

lol juneaments

Soooo, been a quiet month really. Went up to sheffield a few times, once for SUSOP - the annual sheffield student poker tournament. £50, usually gets about 40-50 people, a good laugh. Standard was pretty hilarious. The game was open to anyone, so there were quite a few casino regulars giving free poker lessons, raise/folding with 8bbs and tutting when people moved allin pre. I bubbled, which lead to a chorus of smirks and smug comments after I'd declined to agree to pay out the entire final table (they were suggesting paying 10 out of 44!). Oh well.

I actually did pretty good out of the weekend though, made a few hundred playing 10p/20p (/40p/80p/1.60/3.20....) with my poker mates up there, and won every single flip for drinks and food; won 3 meals and a large number of drinks, so worked out a pretty cheap weekend. Thanks guys! :)


Went up again the next weekend for Peace in the Park, a mini-festival which is always fun. Nice music, sun shining, sitting on the grass. All good. Then was Peace After Dark which is the unofficial rave in the peaks afterwards which was great fun too.


Aaaanyways, so all this means I haven't played much this month. Played half a dozen sessions I guess, was breakeven until yesterday, which was the worst sunday EVER. The worst of all the sundays. Played 60, had about 3 mincashes. So I'm basically taking the rest of the month off. Got UKIPT Killarney in a few days which will be great, Dan Dave Luke and Steve will be there for some pokery drinkery funtimes, and I feel like I might actually be able to stop myself spewing all over the place in the main event. Maybe. Another good thing is that a lot of the UK based sickos will be in vegas so should be even softer than normal which is nice.

May roundup

March continued in a similar vein to the rest of the year, and by the 14th I was up to $35k in makeup. Luckily we had a family holiday planned in Greece for a week, which was just was I needed. Spent the time reading books in the sun and floating about on boats in the med, very nice, very little to do. Barely thought about poker once, which is unusual for me!

Came back ready to play, and I started binking. Think every session I played in the week days after was a winning one, and I had 2 $6-7k scores. Made ~$17k, bringing makeup down to $18k, which is seeming more manageable now. Didn't play as much as april because of the week off.


Hours: 76
Results: +$9k


Apart from a luckbox, the other thing I brought back from Greece was a different sleeping pattern - started having siestas every day now. Quite nice as it lets me wake up at a vaguely civilised time (11-12ish) and actually see some of the day. I need to remember not to play poker unless I've had one though, I'm usually too tired.

Hope you all run good in May! (though not when you're at my table obviously)