Aussie-struck

Starting to follow the Aussie Millions here, mostly via the PokerNews updates, as they’re covering all 24 of the events. The PokerStars blog guys will be doing their thing as well starting with the Main Event, and with Jason Somerville also streaming over Twitch there will be no shortage of updates from down under.

The Aussie Millions always coincides with the Australian Open, which like all of the majors in tennis gets a lot of coverage also on the teevee. We get a half-dozen channels all devoted to showing every match on every court, which makes it pretty easy to follow the two-week long men’s and women’s tournaments.

Of course, the time difference between here in the Eastern time zone and Melbourne affects things when it comes to following either the poker or the tennis from afar. It’s a 16-hour difference, meaning when I watch a match tonight it’ll be happening Friday morning, or a little later when I follow the coverage from the Crown they will already be into the afternoon tomorrow.

I think about all the people I was just with in Nassau a little over a week ago, and how at this moment we are now just about 10,000 miles apart yet completely in touch with one another, exchanging emails and text messages and able to talk at an instant over Skype or WhatsApp or in many other ways just as if we were in neighboring hotel rooms.

Hard not to be a little awestruck by it all, even if we now take all of this ease of communication and travel for granted.

Photo: “Location of Australia,” Ssolbergj. CC BY-SA 3.0.