By Scott: Saturday evening we got home from the Grand Old House and Katie went upstairs to scrapbook while I turned on the computer to see how my Horns were doing in the Regional baseball tournament against Boston College. They were tied in the bottom of the seventh so I logged into the streaming video site and settled in to watch the last two innings. Little did I know that the game would go 25 innings, the longest of any college baseball game ever. The Horns were actually the visiting team since it was a tournament game even though it was happening in Austin. It ended shortly after 1 a.m. some 4 1/2 hours after I started watching with the Horns winning 3-2. It included a stretch at one point where a Texas relief pitcher appropriately named Austin Wood pitched 12 and 1/3 innings of hit less ball and 13 innings of scoreless ball overall. When the Horns finally scored in the top of the 25th and then held on in the bottom of the inning, I had to quietly celebrate so as not to wake up the neighborhood. The Horns followed that up Sunday night with an amazing come from behind win by scoring 8 runs in the ninth inning that ended with a walk off grand slam. 14-10 over Army. The games are all being streamed on video and with only a few outages I was able to watch the full games Friday and Sunday and of course 18 plus innings of the marathon game Saturday night/Sunday morning. On to the Super Regional against the school I used to live next to TCU from Fort Worth this weekend and I will have to find a way to watch while working the comprehensive exams.
I also participated in an online poker tournament on Friday evening with some 3006 participants. It was all for play money though the winner got a free entry to some on line tournament for real money. We all started with 2000 play chips. The early stages were a free for all with people going all in just for the heck of it everywhere and in the first ten minutes over 500 people were eliminated. By the first hour over half the field was gone and by the one and a half hour mark we were down to about 500 players. I stayed alive for close to five hours and with only 300 players left actually had the biggest chip stack. In the end finished in 12th just shy of the final table. I don't get to play as often as I did before being married, in fact this was my first real tournament action in several months. I wanted to get a little practice time in before we go on our cruise as there is a poker tournament that happens on the ship one night that I want to play in. I was happy with my play, though I made a couple of foolish bluffs that wasted chips. Overall I laid down hands when I knew I was beat and played conservative early while all the idiots played foolish going all in on anything. I lost on two hands where I made trips and the other player made a full house on the river. He went all in and I thought I had him beat so I called, it was one of the few mistaken reads I had all night. Then I went out on a hand where I was short stacked and so I went all in with an ace and got called by someone elses king and they flopped a king. If you have to go out that is the way to do it, making the right play and just getting out drawn. There was obviously some luck involved but I never made a huge call or all in where I didn't have the better hand and the numbers played in my favor until the end. If hadn't made some foolish bluffs and gotten called down who knows what might have happened.
