Travel Report, EPT12 Dublin, Day 6 -- Picture This

Spent the greater part of the day at the RDS again in Dublin, helping to cover Day 3 of the European Poker Tour Dublin Main Event where they managed to play down to 45 players by the end of the night.

Nothing especially out of the ordinary to report from today. I suppose one of the funnier moments for me came some time after the bubble burst.

Having covered poker tournaments for many years now, it’s been a long time since I’ve been at all inspired to take a photo from inside the tournament rooms. When I get home from these trips, I usually have a few dozen photos taken as a tourist of the city I’m visiting, and perhaps just one or two snuck in there that provide evidence that I was actually at a poker tournament.

However the one time it occasionally occurs to me to snap a pic at a tournament is on the bubble, usually during an all-in-a-call situation. The scene is just interesting enough -- probably more because it simply looks differently with players standing and media gathered around -- that I might pull out my phone and snap one.

That’s what happened today (as shown above). Of course that’s a moment when there are usually a lot of other folks taking pictures, too, namely those who are being paid to do so.

One of them today was my friend Danny Maxwell here shooting for PokerNews. (You can see Danny in the photo above, taking pictures along with Jules Pochy and Neil Stoddart.) I’ve had a few conversations with Danny this week about Ireland (his home country). A little later he tweeted a picture, noting how he could spot me in it. Can you?

(You can click on both of the photos above to embiggen.)

Will be back at it tomorrow, this time moving over to help with the first day of the €10K High Roller. Check out the PokerStars blog for coverage of that and the Main Event. You might see me around the edges of some of the photos, although I doubt I’ll be taking any pics myself.

Photo (bottom): courtesy Danny Maxwell/PokerNews.

Buzzer Beater

Had a busy weekend, still dealing with moving a few last items from the old place to the new. We’ve had until the end of this month to clear out completely, and while there’s barely anything left to move it still feels like a job that is never going to end. Then comes the business of trying to organize everything in the new place, where we’ve got lots of boxes still sitting around waiting to be unpacked.

I did find time to enjoy some sports over the weekend, including watching those AFC and NFC championship games yesterday. Was disappointed my Panthers missed out on their chance at a championship, but still enjoyed both games yesterday nonetheless, with the two teams I’d wanted to win -- Denver and Seattle -- both making it through to the Super Bowl two weeks from yesterday.

Saw that wild, weird post-game interview with Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman like everyone else yesterday, and ended up writing something about it over on the Learn.PokerNews site today where I brought up some poker connections and a funny old Saturday Night Live skit, too, under the heading of a discussion of sportsmanship -- “Compete With Class at the Poker Table.”

That S.F.-Seattle game yesterday wasn’t the only exciting one I witnessed over the weekend involving a team called the 49ers. That’s because Vera and I were invited by another couple to join them to see UNC-Charlotte 49ers play a home basketball game on Saturday night when UNC-C hosted the University of North Texas Mean Green in a Conference USA tilt.

UNC-C was an eight-point favorite, but the teams played evenly through the first half, then North Texas came out strong to start the second half to bolt out to a lead of about a dozen. UNC-C quickly stormed back to cut the lead to one, but North Texas pushed in front again and appeared in the driver’s seat when they were up by six with less than two minutes left.

But the 49ers stiffened up on defense, managed to pull even at 74-74 (see scoreboard above), then successfully defended one more time to set up a possible game-winning shot.

With time winding down, UNC-C’s savvy point guard Pierria Henry drove the lane then dished the ball to big man Terrence Williams who was breaking to the basket along the baseline. There was no more than a second left when Williams caught the ball, and he immediately rose up and flushed it through for a dunk at the buzzer.

There was a delay as the refs reviewed the play, but I knew the basket was good because I’d actually snapped a photo with 0.4 left that strongly suggested Williams had gotten the ball through the cylinder in time.

Sure enough, the basket was ruled good, and a wild celebration followed.

I don’t know why I decided to snap a picture at that moment. As I was writing about not too long ago, it rarely occurs to me to take pictures, even in instances when I later wish I had done so. I had my phone out and just held it up for kicks as the clock wound down, then when Henry passed the ball I clicked.

Was kind of fun, though, to feel like I had beaten the buzzer with the photo just as Williams had with the shot.

Selfies

I’ve been mentioning here off and on how Vera and I recently moved. We’re still in the process of making the move, actually, which is only about 15 miles but seems like a much larger step given how we’ve left the city for the country, moving to a house on a larger piece of land on which we can keep Vera’s horses.

I’m still making frequent trips back and forth to gather the last of our stuff, which now is down to many less-than-essential items a lot of which we’ll probably be taking to the dump rather than bringing out to the new place. I’ve already written about how the move has forced me to do a lot of self-assessment as I toss out certain items and keep others, including having several instances of lingering over this or that letter or photo or notebook or other memento carrying this or that personal meaning.

This past weekend I found an old envelope full of photographs, quickly recognizing it as representing the product of a couple of rolls’ worth of shots taken way back in my late teens, a time that well predated the advent of digital cameras. Taking pictures was more involved then, and generally speaking people were a lot more selective when it came to using up the 24 shots or whatever you got on a given roll of film.

The pictures were mostly from a very cool trip I took with my grandfather who passed away about a dozen years ago. I can’t remember how we came upon the idea for it -- I think he might have suggested it -- but together he and I had driven across half of the country visiting various baseball parks and some relatives, too, along the way. We saw games in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, I remember, the latter at Wrigley Field where he had gone to games back when he had been a young man in the 1930s.

It was one of those special trips that I ended up recounting a lot afterwards to others and which after his passing I valued even more having had the chance to take. When I came across the photos, then, you might think I was excited to relive it all again.

But I wasn’t. Not really. That’s because without even looking at the photos I remembered them and what I would be finding there.

Don’t ask me why, but I had used up all of the shots taking pictures of odd, unlikely objects and various landscapes without any people in them. There were a few crowd shots from the ball games mixed in there, though the only people in the photos were strangers. In other words, there wasn’t much of anything in there at all that could be used to indicate that I had actually been the one taking those photos.

That’s right -- there wasn’t a single picture of my grandfather in there, nor one of me, either.

I guess I was thinking at the time of taking photos that were somehow more “artistic” in nature, avoiding what to my still-developing teenaged brain thought to have been the mundane business of simply documenting our trip with a bunch of “selfies.” My adult self now laments that decision somewhat, though in a way I still understand it.

With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other forms of social media, a whole lot of us are now constantly chronicling our lives and publishing our activities for all to see. In fact, there’s a whole generation of people now who have essentially grown up in such a world, and thus can probably access photos, videos, and other evidence of themselves and their friends and family from just about every week of their conscious lives.

Such is not the case for those of us who are a little older. For us much of what we experienced from, say, the mid-1990s and before only remains in fading memories. It’s a little like the difference between poker players of that earlier era who only played live and kept records of their play manually and thus often in a very intermittent way and the online players who have every hand they’ve ever played stored in databases to review over and again.

I think my favorite -- and most absurd -- photo in the bunch is one of the back of a road sign. What in the world was I thinking? What is this a “sign” of, other than a missed opportunity to capture something a little more lasting, a little more meaningful?

Then again, I guess it is a “sign” of me in some way, too, though to read it that way requires some knowledge of context.