Familiar Cast in Latest Super High Roller

The 2014 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure has finished, with the three headlining events -- the $100K Super High Roller, the $25K High Roller, and the $10K Main Event -- all generating a lot of excitement and interesting finishes, with each featuring final tables filled with a lot of familiar faces.

Looking at how the $100K Super High Roller finished up, the top eight finishers for that one contained exactly zero surprises. What I mean is, all eight were players we have seen doing well in high buy-in events before (and low buy-in events, too, for that matter). That got me thinking a little about the short history of these $100K-and-higher events and how we more or less see the same people participating in them every time out.

There was a double-bustout with nine players left in the PCA $100K Super High Roller, which meant only seven were present when the “official” final table began. Thus eighth-place finisher Mike McDonald did not make that photo of the final tablists above (courtesy Danny Maxwell/PokerNews). As it happened only the top eight finishers in the tourney cashed as there were 46 entries total.

Here were the final eight in the $100K Super High Roller (with payouts):

1. Fabian Quoss ($1,629,940)

2. Dan Shak ($1,178,980)

3. Vanessa Selbst ($760,640)

4. Antonio Esfandiari ($575,920)

5. Matt Glantz ($445,520)

6. Tony Gregg ($347,720)

7. Ole Schemion ($277,080)

8. Mike McDonald ($217,320)

It has only been a few years since these tournaments with six-figure buy-ins started popping up regularly at places like the PCA, the Aussie Millions, the WSOP (with its “One Drop” events), and elsewhere.

Looking at these eight names and how all eight have turned up in high rollers/super high rollers frequently of late, my first suspicion was to guess that all of them had probably cashed in $100K-plus events before. I took a peek through Hendon Mob and found that wasn’t quite the case, but most had.

Setting aside these last couple of invite-only PartyPoker Premier League tourneys with the $125,000 buy-ins in which all of the participants cash, it looks like six out of the eight cashers in the 2014 PCA $100K Super High Roller had cashed in six-figure buy-in events before.

Winner Fabian Quoss finished third in the 2013 Aussie Millions A$250,000 Challenge to win A$750,000. Runner-up Dan Shak has cashed three times in Aussie Millions A$100,000 Challenges (winning in 2010 for a A$1.2 million prize), twice before in previous PCA $100K Super High Rollers (in fact he’s final-tabled that one three times in a row), and also cashed in the $111,111 One Drop High Roller at the WSOP last summer.

Vanessa Selbst finished third in both the $25K High Roller and the $100K Super High Roller at the PCA this year, picking up more than $1.36 million between those two cashes. I’d thought she must’ve had a cash in a six-figure buy-in event, but I’m not seeing one among her eye-popping results (which now total more than $10 million in career earnings).

Fourth-place finisher Antonio Esfandiari of course had the big win in the $1 million Big One for One Drop at the 2012 WSOP for a $18,346,673 prize. He also finished fourth in the follow-up $111,111 One Drop High Roller last year for another $1.4 million-plus.

Last year fifth-place finisher Matt Glantz cashed in a couple of six-figure buy-in events, the $111,111 One Drop High Roller (finishing 13th) and the $100K WPT Alpha8 Florida event (finishing fourth). Tony Gregg, who took sixth at the PCA $100K Super High Roller, won the $111,111 One Drop High Roller at the WSOP last summer and the $4,830,619 first prize.

Like Selbst, seventh-place finisher Ole Schemion doesn’t appear to have cashed in a $100K or higher buy-in event before this week, although he did finish sixth in the 2013 EPT Barcelona Super High Roller (a €50,000 event).

And Mike McDonald who took eighth has some final tables in €50,000 Super High Rollers on the EPT, too, plus a third-place in the recent $100K WPT Alpha8 at St. Kitts. McDonald nearly won the Main Event last night as well, finishing runner-up and taking away close to $1.1 million after a deal at three-handed.

Not really pointing out anything particularly surprising here by observing that this latest $100K event featured a lot of the same folks we’re seeing play the others. Stands to reason that those profiting in these events will be reappearing at future $100K final tables both because (1) by winning they’re replenishing their bankrolls enough to keep participating in them, and (2) they’re good players.

The “super” high rollers still retain my interest, even if the narratives they create tend to feature the same characters and produce similar plots. And while the high-dollar buy-ins and prizes probably create some intrigue just because money generally does interest many, it’s really the poker that draws me in, which is almost always being played at a high level at these pro-filled final tables.

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.

A Chance at a Championship

The Carolina Panthers at last return to the playoffs this weekend with a divisional round game versus last year’s NFC champs, the San Francisco 49ers. The two teams played a gritty, defensive game earlier this year with the Panthers managing to beat S.F. on their home field 10-9.

Of the four games this weekend, only the Panthers-49ers game features a point spread that is less than a touchdown, with Denver (over San Diego), New England (over Indianapolis), and Seattle (over New Orleans) all heavy home favorites. In fact, Carolina is the only home dog this weekend, with S.F. a favorite by as little as one point and as much as three, depending on where you look.

Most of the “experts” are picking San Francisco on Sunday. Over on ESPN their roster of prediction makers features 11 of 13 taking the 49ers. Four out of six of the SB Nation guys are going with San Fran. And 6 of 8 of the ones doing the picking at CBS Sports are choosing the 49ers as well.

Listening to Charlotte sports radio in the car today offered a predictably blinkered view of Sunday’s contest, with most callers predicting a Panthers win and the hosts similarly expressing optimism and looking ahead to later playoff rounds.

I was struck, in fact, by a host going off on a tangent regarding the quarterbacks Cam Newton (Panthers) and Colin Kaepernick (49ers), both of whom are in their third years in the league with both also having achieved significant success early in their careers.

The host spoke of Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino who everyone remembers made a Super Bowl in just his second year with Miami (SB XIX), was crushed by the Joe Montana-led 49ers 38-16, and never made it back to another championship game despite a stellar 17-year career.

On the one hand, the entire discussion seemed a bit premature given the fact that both Newton and Kaepernick have a couple of tough games standing in their way of reaching the Super Bowl. But I did get the general idea that such opportunities generally don’t come easily in the NFL, or in other highly competitive arenas either, for that matter.

There are a myriad of examples in poker of players either breaking through to win that first big tournament early in their careers or coming up short, then never getting back to anything close to the same level of success again. Poker more obviously dramatizes the luck involved in having breaks go your way to land you in the winner’s circle, but the NFL and other sports likewise demonstrate the same principle time and again.

I’ll be on the edge of my seat Sunday rooting on my Panthers, likely thinking back to a decade ago and the last time Carolina made a Super Bowl run. A lot will have to go Carolina’s way for that to happen again, but all I can hope for is that the team manages to take advantage of the opportunity as they don’t generally come around that often.

Christie’s Nixonian Moment

Was diverted a short while today by that press conference in which Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey who was re-elected back in November by a wide margin, addressed the ongoing controversy surrounding the Fort Lee lane closure back in early September.

The affair is being packaged by some under the catch-all heading of “Bridgegate,” alluding, of course, to the first “gate” -- Watergate. And indeed Christie’s statements today about staff members acting on his behalf yet without his authority -- or knowledge, as he repeated many times -- certainly echoed some of Richard Nixon’s memorable statements regarding others’ actions and his own culpability from about four decades ago.

I was most reminded of Nixon’s still-amazing-to-watch November 17, 1973 presser -- well after many of the firings that preceded Nixon’s own resignation -- in which he met with the nation’s newspaper editors (and not the White House corps) and with almost manic energy responded to questions about the scandal. That was the one in which Nixon infamously circled around to the “I’m not a crook” line, actually delivered with reference to questions surrounding his tax returns, not Watergate.

Without delving too deeply into the specifics of either Watergate or the Fort Lee story, both appear to demonstrate in different ways political leaders failing to control those whom they appoint to work for them. Watergate, of course, developed into a complex cover-up that ultimately unearthed much, much more regarding Nixon’s leadership methods. Meanwhile it appears more is to come regarding the extent of the malfeasance perpetrated by Christie’s senior staff, and perhaps even about the governor himself as far as this particular story is concerned.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have been reading and thinking about Nixon quite a bit, studying his entire life and political career and not just Watergate. Looking at his life through the lens of his poker playing, I’ve begun to develop an idea of the man as one who was intensely competitive and who unfailingly believed in the value of hard work and individual effort as a means to accomplish anything, including political goals.

I’ve also come to recognize him as someone driven to control as much as he possibly could no matter what the endeavor. Thus in his early campaigns -- indeed, in every one of them until the last one in 1972 -- he was involved in seemingly every detail when it came to planning and executing those plans on the campaign trail.

So, too, did Nixon study poker with a similar intensity when first becoming serious about the game as a Naval officer. (I’ve found that Nixon was introduced to poker well before his days in the Navy, although I don’t think he took the game seriously until he found himself playing for significant money with fellow officers in the Pacific.)

Something changed for Nixon prior to the 1972 campaign, however, or at least his preoccupations with the responsibilities of his office made it impossible for him to exert the same degree of control over his final campaign that he demonstrated with each of those that had come before. This lack of focus (to carry forward the poker analogy) led to some reckless play, then by the time Nixon finally retook his seat and began playing his chips for himself he was already too far behind to mount any comeback.

Like Nixon, Christie apparently harbors hopes for a run at the country’s highest office. Losing the “Bridgegate” hand definitely reduced the New Jersey governor’s stack going forward, but it seems he’ll be remaining in the game, perhaps even to recover today’s losses.

Latest on Learn

Just a quick note tonight to point you to some new pieces over on the Learn.PokerNews site.

Tommy Angelo has returned with another installment of his “Tilt for Beginners” series, this time telling a short anecdote from a recent visit to the Casino Montreal where he encountered French-style playing cards. That meant he was dealt some Rs, Vs, and Ds and responded with some understandable bafflement.

The article is titled “Miffed in Montreal.” Click to read, and also check out the ultra-cool photo illustrating the piece.

Nate Meyvis, co-host of the Thinking Poker podcast along with Andrew Brokos, has contributed two great articles under the heading of “Fighting Back.” Both address the situation of an experienced player targeting a less savvy new player with specific tactics designed to unnerve, and Meyvis offers some concrete pointers the newer player having to deal with such.

Check ’em out: Part I covers aggression while Part II talks about how to respond to players using talking and trapping as tactics.

Finally, Jim Dixon is a writer who has been contributing some cool pieces as of late.

One called “All I Really Need to Know About Poker I Learned From Sherlock Holmes” does some sleuthing through some A.C. Doyle stories to discover some poker-related advice.

And another one today by Jim called “Mastering Luck: It’s Not the Same As Being Lucky” that talks about the importance of not letting bad fortune at the tables beat you down, with another literary source providing some inspiration again -- Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal.

Fading Rich

I’m a little bit in awe of my friend and colleague Rich Ryan for having the cojones to make and publicize his “10 Poker Predictions” at the start of each year over at PokerNews.

His list for 2014 includes a few provocative prognostications. He thinks four Russians will win WSOP bracelets this year, for example, which seems like a total that would be over the betting line.

Rich did correctly call for the Canadians to break through in 2013, however, boldly guessing they’d get at least eight WSOP wins (they won 10, plus two more by Daniel Negreanu at the WSOP APAC and WSOPE). In fact Rich somehow got eight of his 10 predictions for 2013 correct, which seems way over the line I would’ve set for correct picks in his list a year ago.

One other prediction Rich offers for 2014 is to say that “a ‘well-known’ pro will win the WSOP Main Event.” He then usefully narrows the definition of “a ‘well-known pro” down to just the top 100 players in the current Global Poker Index plus the top 50 players on the all-time money list, guessing that with overlap he’s probably narrowed himself down to about 125 players altogether.

I think I’ll take the field versus Rich on this one.

Looking back at the GPI rankings as of July 1, 2013, not one of the eventual November Nine from last year’s Main Event was anywhere near the top 100 on the list. The only one of the group who even appeared in the Top 300 at that time was Amir Lehavot in 273rd.

Meanwhile, I believe J.C. Tran was already inside the top 50 on the All-Time Money List for tourney earnings when he made last year’s Main Event final table, sitting just inside the top 40 before snaring another $2.1 million-plus for his fifth-place finish. But none of the other ME final tablists was close.

To be fair to Rich, he does classify this prediction as a “shot” and indeed I think it is probably more than 10-to-1 against he gets it right. Being less ballsy than he, though, I’ll go out on a short limb and make one prediction for 2014 here that he misses this one.

The Polar Vortex and the PCA

Yeah, it’s cold here, too. I’m looking at the headline on the front page of our local paper -- which I think we’re just about ready to cancel, actually, with the move out to the country -- and how it is screaming this phrase “POLAR VORTEX” at me.

How could I live this long and encounter an entirely new term for some sort of weather phenomenon? This one sounds made up, like something that can’t really be achieved without CGI or something. Reading further it still sounds a bit SF, with some sort of sentient-sounding “lobe” of cold air breaking free in a rogue-like maneuver to descend upon the continent from above.

Whatever is actually causing the temps to dive so precipitously today and tonight, we’re definitely feeling it here in North Carolina where our skins are thin thanks to the usually mild winters. We’ve got coats and scarves and hats and central heating, though, so no worries for us. Our main concern here on the farm over the last few hours has been to fashion some warm places for our newly inherited barn cats to ride things out as we dip further and further below freezing.

Meanwhile the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure has already started to heat up -- haha, get it? hooo boy! -- with the $100,000 Super High Roller event kicking off the calendar year. I’m seeing the temperature there in Nassau is in the 70s, making it a nice place to get away at the moment (if one can get a flight).

This is the 11th year for the PCA and it has now well established itself as a primary stop that kind of brings together all of the different tours as players from all over the globe carve out time to be there. The European Poker Tour kind of claims it as one of its stops, I suppose, and I think in the past the LAPT might have done so, too.

Really, though, it’s easy to imagine the PCA as existing at the center of all the various tours circling around it... kind of like a vortex spinning about with the Atlantis sitting there comfortably in the eye.

Image above by the great Joe Giron for the PokerStars blog, which is a good place to follow for features every day from the PCA. Also check over at PokerNews for live reports from the $100K Super High Roller, the $25K High Roller, and the $10K Main Event.

Online Poker in the New Year

Been perusing some of the “Top Stories of 2013” lists on the various poker sites, including PokerNews where the reintroduction of online poker in the U.S. claimed the top spot on the list. The only other online poker-related story to make that list was the one concerning the process finally getting started for Americans who played on Full Tilt Poker to petition for the return of their funds (#4).

Of the 10 “most read poker articles” on Pocket Fives during 2013 (presented in two parts: 6-10 and 1-5), none really had to do with online poker.

PokerListings did a list of “The 20 Best Moments in Poker in 2013” (20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1), five of which concerned online poker: “Isildur1 Wins SCOOP $10k Main Event” (#20), “Online Poker Becomes Inclusive to Rec Players” (#13), “Moorman Hits $10m in Career Online Earnings” (#7), “US Full Tilt Poker Player Claims Processed” (#3), and “Online Poker Returns to US” (#1). They also threw in the release of the BET RAISE FOLD documentary (#15), which chronicles online poker’s glory days.

Meanwhile on PL’s list of “The 20 Worst Moments in Poker in 2013” (20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1) six had to do with online poker: “WSOP Fails to Get Online Poker Running by Main Event” (#12), “Delays Continue in Never-Ending durrrr Challenge” (#11), “Full Tilt Poker Remission Process Drags On” (#8), “PokerStars Does Not Get NJ Approval” (#6), “Sheldon Adelson Takes Aim at Poker” (#2), and “Gus Hansen Posts Epic $8.4 Million Loss” (#1).

And of BLUFF’s Top 10 videos of the year (by the great SrslySirius) just one concerned online poker -- a funny satire about the “rogue” U.S. sites presented as a “Shamelessly Honest Online Poker Ad” -- not that the format really lends itself to reports focusing on the online game. Though it does lend itself readily to lots of grins (check all of ‘em out).

(Have to say I’ve yet to listen to the TwoPlusTwo Pokercast’s episode recounting their Top 10 list of poker stories from 2013 -- I’m looking forward to seeing how Mike and Adam constructed their list.)

Glancing at PokerScout’s rankings of online poker traffic here at the start of 2014, PokerStars predictably continues to reign supreme with about eight times the traffic of the nearest competitors with the iPoker network -- which includes sites like William Hill Poker and others -- currently leading the chase pack.

Searching the rankings for U.S.-facing sites, Bodog/Bovada continues to find a place in the upper half of the list (according to PokerScout’s best estimates). But all of the others are unsurprisingly way, way down the page, with traffic in the hundreds (or tens).

I suppose comparing these lists could be said to highlight the American-centric nature of the poker news sites (or at least the ones I tend to visit). In terms of people actually playing online poker, there aren’t too many Americans doing so. Thus stories about online poker have become predictably scarcer on the news sites on which Americans do a lot of the writing and reading. (Indeed, that the return of online poker in the U.S. has topped some lists indicates as much as well.)

That said, it’s interesting also to think about how online poker has moved away from the center of the poker world over the last several years, in particular since Black Friday. I haven’t gone back to see, but I’d wager most “top poker stories” from a few years ago were related to online poker in at least a tangential way, with the online game seemingly affecting just about every aspect of the game not that long ago.

But now online poker is over to the side, big picture-wise. Will be interesting to see if it ever returns to the center, and if so whether that happens sooner or later.

Wrap Your Head Around This

For pretty much all of my life I have lived on relatively small plots of land.

My childhood home had modest-sized front and back yards. In college I lived in a dorm for a couple of years, then shared apartments for a while. Had one interesting year in grad school living in the “groom’s quarters” with Vera, actually just another apartment attached to a barn. We lived in what was basically an oversized closet when spending a year abroad in France. Got to house sit after that in what seemed a palace at the time owned by a long-time prof, a fairly big two-story house with a decent sized yard and garden. But even that place wasn’t too big to wrap one’s head around.

From there we were in another apartment, then a house in one of those “cookie cutter” neighborhoods where you could just about reach your neighbor through an open window. And now finally we’re on the farm. With 15 acres. Some trees around the edges, but most of it is cleared.

It’s a big space. Challenges comprehension, almost.

The house we’re in isn’t especially big -- in fact it is about the same as the one we left, square-feet-wise. But it has been interesting to watch our now 12-year-old cat Sweetie tentatively explore the new space.

Sweetie’s an indoor cat, her somewhat skittish ways providing a fairly stark contrast to the three rambunctious and social “barn cats” we’ve inherited. She remained under the bed almost exclusively for the first couple of days, then ventured out little by little to get to know the kitchen, living room, and (thankfully) the litter box.

She tiptoes cautiously, keeping very low to the floor as she moves in a manner that recalls the origin of the phrase “cat burglar.” I suppose she’s slowly performing a kind of “cognitive mapping” of the space, gradually taking it in and rebuilding it piece by piece in her mind’s eye.

By the way, that picture up above is a cartoon I clipped and kept near my desk for many years some time back. I only just came across it again during the packing and unpacking. That’s how I imagine Sweetie working out all the new angles she’s been encountering this week.

As someone with a terrible sense of direction, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of cognitive mapping. As I’ve told colleagues many times before, it’s kind of an irony that I found a profession that lands me in casinos so often, places the design of which can challenge even the most able-minded cognitive mappers.

I am notoriously lacking when it comes to processing directions for getting from one place to another. Having been to a place before -- even multiple times -- doesn’t ensure I’ll be able to get back. In fact, I’ll admit that in this new house I’ve found myself walking to the bedroom and missing the entrance about a half-dozen times as my brain stubbornly keeps providing me incorrect information about its location.

I remember a chapter in a book by Fredric Jameson called Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, one of many “theory” books I read in grad school, in which he spoke of cognitive mapping. If I remember it correctly, he used the concept as a kind of emblem for postmodernism and individuals living in confusing worlds in which it was difficult to orient oneself. (I could have that wrong -- the memory is dim.) I recall there also being a section in there somewhere about Las Vegas and its disorienting architecture, too.

Anyhow, those who build houses and buildings or plan towns and cities don’t really need to work that hard to confuse your humble scribbler. Who becomes ever more humbled whenever he’s forced to remember his way back somewhere following any journey requiring more than two turns.

I feel like Sweetie’s doing an okay job working out her new space, but I still feel more than a little disoriented in mine. Part of me wants to walk the entire 15 acres every day, just to reinforce the idea that I am actually “living” on it all.

But another part of me knows I might get lost!

The Year of the Horse

Saw the other day how this year is the “Year of the Horse” according to the Chinese zodiac. I guess technically the Year of the Horse doesn’t begin until the end of January with the Chinese New Year, but given the fact that Vera and I have just moved to a new farm, we were already going to be considering this the year of the horse regardless of what the calendar said.

I say that because our primary reason for moving was to have a place where Vera could keep her horses. She has two currently, and while we haven’t any plans at present to get any more or to board others’ horses, the barn does have four stalls and we have enough acreage to handle a couple more should we decide to go that route.

Vera has ridden horses her entire life. Her parents got her a pony when she was four, and she’s pretty much always had at least one horse except for a brief period during college. I’ve written here many times before about how Vera rides dressage. She competes fairly frequently and we’ve had many occasions to discuss similarities between her sport and poker, such as the discipline each requires as well as how both combine skill and luck.

Like all animals -- humans, too -- horses can be difficult at times. They’ll get “spooky” now and then, and occasionally act up in other ways. And of course for those who ride dressage there’s an ongoing challenge to improve communication between horse and rider that can test the patience of the most level-headed among us.

But more often than not horses are tranquil, peaceful creatures that exude a kind of calming influence (in my experience). As herd animals they are quite social, too. In fact, I’m sure we’ll probably never have only one horse here if we can help it, as horses don’t very much like being alone.

I really had very little contact with horses until I met Vera. She’s managed to get me on a horse a few times over the years, but I’ve never become a rider and I’m not sure I ever will. But I do very much like being around horses. I know we’re in for a ton of work once we finally move her horses over in a week-and-a-half, but I’m sincerely looking forward to them being here with us and getting into the routine of helping care for them.

Maybe I’ll even be persuaded to climb in the saddle again here before too long. They’re so big, though!