Nat Arem's Blog

Kovalchuk gets 17-year deal from Devils

Yes, you read that right. 17 years. That is like a light murder sentence, not a hockey contract.

I’d just like to get the word out that I removed a bunch of links on my sidebar. I took down links for the following:

1) Inactive blogs. No point in linking to a blog that hasn’t had a meaningful post in months.
2) People who have stopped linking to me.

I left everyone else. If you have a good poker blog that is not on blogspot.com or wordpress.com and you want to swap links, feel free to get in touch at natarem@gmail.com. I can’t guarantee that I’ll agree to a swap with everyone but I have plenty of room on the sidebar and not a ton of blogs there.

First, congrats to all of the members of the November Nine. As far as I can tell, four PocketFiver’s made it to the November final table: JRD312 (John Dolan), PBJaxx (Jason Senti), $JMONEY$ (John Racener) and subiime (Joseph Cheong). Oddly enough I met Jason Senti in person just as the main event was starting. I was meeting with the guy who runs BlueFirePoker and Jason happened to be there as well. The three of us talked for a little while and I have to say that Jason is one of the nicer poker players I’ve met. I’m really happy for him and I hope he can come back from being the short stack.

So I’m really just recovering from a really tiring June and July. I went on a family trip to a few national parks (Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon) in late June. We went with a company called Backroads which leads active group trips all over the world and the focus of our trip was hiking and biking. We made up four of about twenty people in the group so it was a pretty big group. This wasn’t our first Backroads trip: back in 2006 I went to the Canadian rockies with my family and Backroads. And my family has done a bunch of other trips with them. So we’re obviously happy with the job they do. It’s really nice because they organize and book everything and they make it easy to just focus on the hiking, biking and sightseeing. Everything else is taken care of.

Our trip started out in St George, UT where we met up with the guides and the rest of the group. We then drove up to Zion National Park which looks like this:

We did our first hike in the afternoon in a river canyon called “The Narrows”. It mostly consisted of walking up a river that ranged from ankle depth to above waist depth. At certain points the current was somewhat strong so they gave us a walking stick to help stabilize. Here’s a picture of me walking in the narrows:

It was a great hike because Zion is quite hot in late June and the water was the perfect thing to keep you cool. We went a few miles up and back but it was slow going because of the water and slippery rocks. I would recommend it although for me it was one of the not-so-exciting hikes on the trip.

For me, the best hike was the next one: Angel’s Landing. It’s a very well-known hike both in Zion and throughout the National Parks system. It is one of the deadliest trails in all of the US National Parks but it also offers some amazing views. Not to mention a nice sense of accomplishment at the top. So I decided to go up it. Here’s a view on the way up:

You can see the road below snaking through the Canyon. I’m not sure of the elevation at this point but I believe it was about 800 feet down to the valley floor. And it was a sheer drop off of the edge.

This kind of gives you an idea of what the last part of the hike was like. It was “chain assisted” with no guardrail and a very very long fall down. The goal was to get to the top of the hill you see in this picture:

And it was 800 feet down on one side, 1200 feet down on the other. The natural land bridge to get over to the summit was not wide at all and the rock was a bit sandy which made it kind of slippery at points. Here’s a shot looking back across the land bridge:

That picture is a little deceiving because it’s hard to tell what is part of the land bridge and what is part of the opposing cliff wall. The land bridge is actually hundreds of feet away from the cliff wall to the left until, towards the back, it starts to come together a bit more. If you look really closely you can see some specks on the cliff — those are people making their way to the top of Angel’s Landing.

And here I am, at the top.

In total, it’s about a 1.5-2 hour hike from the road to the top. I would recommend a lot of water if you do this hike and even more when it’s hot out. But you certainly don’t need to be an experienced hiker to make it to the top (I never hike anywhere, unless walking from a Vegas casino self-park counts). One of the cool things about this hike is that you can leave Vegas in the morning, get to Zion, do the hike and be back in Vegas that night (shaniac did this exact thing a few weeks ago). It’s a long day but it’s a fun way to do an awesome hike.

After Zion (we did some more stuff there, including some biking, but no point going over every little thing), we headed to the Grand Canyon. This was my first time seeing the Grand Canyon from the ground so I was pretty excited. I’d seen it from planes at least five times but that really isn’t the same. Here’s a shot I took from the front of the van on the road. The van in front of us is the other Backroads vehicle with the bikes on top:

The total ride was about 3.5 hours but we broke it up with a lunch stop so it went pretty quickly. We did a short intro hike, saw the Canyon and then the next day actually hiked a bit into the Canyon. It is a full day process to get to the bottom (and obviously to get back out too) so we only went really a small fraction in. We used the North Kaibab trail (the only trail on the North Rim into the Canyon) and we went about two miles out of a total of fourteen to reach the Colorado river. But two miles in and two miles out managed to occupy a good portion of the morning. Here’s a picture of myself and my mom at the lowest point we made it to:

The hike back up from there was kind of rough given the heat and all but I enjoyed the challenge. I want to go back and do a rim-to-rim hike (usually about three days if you aren’t rushing) so now I just need to find some people to go with. I’d do it with a group but I don’t want to be the only person that I know in the group. Unfortunately most poker players consider walking around the Amazon room to be a lot of exercise so I probably need to find hiking people from a different area of my social network. We’ll see how that goes.

The next day we did another hike, this time along the rim. Here’s a picture of me about a foot away from a 3000 foot drop. I know it looks far in the pic but I really did not have any interest in getting any closer when I was out on the ledge.

And after our Grand Canyon tour, we headed back up to Utah to see Bryce Canyon. I’d heard amazing things about Bryce so I was expecting some awesome stuff. It didn’t disappoint. It was formed by some process involving erosion, stronger/weaker rocks, etc. I didn’t really pay much attention to the how. But the place was awesome. It is made up of a bunch of rock towers called Hoodoos. Hundreds or thousands of them. Here’s one of the funnier looking ones:

As you might imagine, that hoodoo is frequently compared to ET. The park itself looks like this:

There are just tons of hoodoos and various ridges carved away by erosion over a very long period of time. At one point, this was part of a sea that divided what is now the United States and I guess this is the eroded former sea floor (or at least that’s how it was explained to me).

Lastly, this is the path that I took back out of Bryce Canyon when I was finishing up my hike in the Canyon. A lot of switchbacks at high elevation leads to a ton of out of breath people. I passed a ton of people who were huffing and puffing pretty hard on their way up. CrossFit actually prepared me pretty well for the hiking and biking. I was never strained, sore or in trouble at any point during the whole trip.

Anyway, after a bike ride the following day, we went back to St George and I drove back to Vegas. It was a great trip and even though I only gave you the brief highlights I highly recommend checking out all three parks if you ever have a chance.

The PocketFives party trip report is next.

I can’t believe this is real but I just took this picture a few minutes ago. This is from SportsCenter’s coverage of the British Open going on now.

I’ve been ridiculously busy lately with a trip to Utah/Arizona, WSOP stuff, going back to Philly for the weekend, etc. I have a bunch of trip reports to type up and now I should actually have the time to do it. I don’t have any trips planned for awhile although I expect one or two might pop up. I just don’t have anything booked right now.

For a short trip report, yesterday was yellowsub’s birthday (happy 24) so I spent part of the day hanging out at sub’s house for the last time. He is moving out of his sick mansion today. Ozzy was over there with us as well. We basically just sat around at the pool, drank champagne and relaxed. Then, after a shower, we went to the Hard Rock to have dinner at Nobu. My business partner Mike and his wife Michele joined us, along with a number of other poker players. The CCR ended up being interesting. There were something like 11 cards in it (I bought out because I get much cheaper stuff at Nobu than those guys). Mike and sub both had two cards in the mix because of their wife and girlfriend. Mike and sub are both pretty convinced that they are very unlucky at flipping. As we went through, everyone was getting their cards back except for Mike. Finally it was down to three cards: Mike’s two cards and this guy named Tom. Tom is a british poker player who was in the sub mansion for the summer and the bill was actually a bit more than he’s comfortable gambling for. And while Mike definitely has the money to stomach the loss, he rarely CCRs and he was sweating the bill pretty hard. I’m pretty sure this was the biggest bill he’s ever CCRed for. So Mike’s card gets picked with three left and they’re down to heads up. Then it’s my turn to pick the last card and after sub separates the cards under the table into each hand, I do the ever-tricky “right hand… [pause] does NOT pay”. Mike’s second card was in sub’s right hand. So after getting his two cards to last into the final three, Mike sucked out to not pay the bill. He was, to say the least, relieved.

So after that we went to get some ice cream. It only took us four tries to find an open place but we ended up at the Coldstone by Sunset Station. Here’s a picture of sub at the Coldstone:

After that we went back to the mansion, hung out in the hot tub for a bit and then I went home. Fun day.

And like I said above, some trip reports coming soon, I think.

I’m on my way home to Philadelphia for the weekend. I’m going to a wedding tomorrow and I have a few other things I want to do on the east coast. As I type this, I’m sitting on a USAirways plane (yea I know, just wait…) using the inflight internet to post. Originally I was scheduled to fly on Continental through Houston. I usually prefer to fly on Continental or on some other airline on which I have elite status in order to get free upgrades to first class. I was scheduled to be in first on both my Vegas-Houston and Houston-Philly flights but that changed pretty quickly when I got to the airport this morning. This is a long blog about traveling so skip this if you don’t like these stories.

So anyway, I checked in smoothly, got to the gate (it was at the D gates, which means you have to take the monorail shuttle thing) and I was just standing around when I noticed an oddly painted 747 taking off around 10:25 AM local time. Then I remembered that Obama was at CityCenter last night (more coming on that later) and I put two and two together and realized that I’d just seen Air Force One take off. Pretty cool to see that. I’d love to somehow ride on it with the president someday but I doubt that’s possible so I’ll probably never realize that particular dream.

A few minutes after Obama took off the gate attendant got on the PA and announced our 11:15 AM flight was delayed until 1:30 PM. Uh oh. That didn’t leave me with much time to make my connection which was, formerly, a pretty leisurely 3 hour stopover in Houston. Since I had a few hours to kill, I walked down to the Continental Presidents Club (their airport lounge thing) and sat around for a bit. Then the flight got delayed until 2 PM which put my estimated arrival at 7:03 PM and my Philly flight was taking off at 7:05 PM. That probably wasn’t going to work out.

I was curious what was going on so I checked Continental’s website and found out that our plane was coming from Cleveland but it was diverted to Phoenix because they shut down Vegas area airspace for Obama. So the plane had to go land in Phoenix, sit there for awhile, then get back in the air and continue on to Vegas. Hence the multiple hour delay when there weren’t any weather issues.

I went to the front desk at the Presidents Club and asked about my options for moving my flight. I obviously knew that I wasn’t going to get upgraded again because by that point they had processed all of the OnePass Elite members into first class seats. But I was hoping to find an alternative route that would get me to Houston on time. Luckily enough there was a 12:45 PM flight to Houston which was scheduled to leave on time because the plane had come in after Obama had already cleared the airspace around McCarran. So the attendant put me on that flight and there was an aisle exit row seat so I was still fine. That was going to get me into Houston around 70 minutes before my connection so I was in good shape. I headed down to the gate, got on the plane on time and I had a ton of legroom (see pic) so I was okay with it. After all, I was still in first on the second flight and this seat wasn’t too bad (according to the Continental website, no one was sitting next to me).

Anyway, the entire plane boards and the flight attendant gets on the PA and says there is a mechanical problem which is going to delay the plane 15 minutes. Still not a big deal. 15 minutes comes and goes and I’m starting to wonder about my connection. They pulled everyone on international connections off of the plane and a few minutes later they pulled everyone with connections off of the plane. At this point I knew I wasn’t going to be on that plane because it was like 1:30 and with the whole plane getting off, there was no way to get to Houston in time. The gate was obviously a madhouse with tons of people crowding the desk hoping to get their connection fixed. This was despite repeated announcements that they were going down a list of connections and that they would call people city by city as they worked their way through the list. A few minutes later they called Philadelphia and I tried to make my way through the crowd. When I got to the front some guy was like “hey man there’s a line here!” to which the gate attendant said something like “no there isn’t sir, you should be sitting down unless you’re going to Philadelphia”. Shot down. So she put me on a USAirways flight to Philadelphia and she was like “okay go to the C gates and show them this slip” (I was at D). I didn’t know any better so I was just like, okay, and ran off. I didn’t have much time until the flight and I didn’t have a seat yet.

So I took the monorail back and went out of the secure area. I walked to the C security area and the guy told me I was in the wrong area, USAirways uses mainly A and B gates. So then I walked over to the A/B security area and they told me that the slip the Continental lady had given me wasn’t good enough to get past security. So then I went back to the ticketing area and got put in a middle seat. I was going to skip the trip if I needed to fly across the country in the middle in between two randoms. No interest in that whatsoever. So then I got my seat switched (after complaining) and they had an exit row aisle! I don’t know why they wouldn’t have just put me on that to being with because I’m Star Alliance gold and USAir is part of the Star Alliance. Anyway, armed with my actual boarding pass, I went through security and to the gate and finally got on a functioning/on-time plane to get to Philadelphia. So, yea, that’s today’s travel story. In the end, I’m actually getting in to Philly 1.5 hours earlier than I would have with my original schedule so I guess I kind of ran good in this spot despite a bunch of hassle.

Getting back to Vegas stuff, I went out to CityCenter for the first time last night. Obama was there too but I never noticed anything except seeing people walk around with Harry Reid t-shirts. The place is so big, the president can be there and you would never notice the difference. I’d never had much interest in going but a bunch of people were going to dinner at Jean George at Aria so I decide to go along. Sub was there with his family, Kyle Ray, Richard Brodie and his girlfriend Diane, Crazy Mike (MrGatorade on 2p2), etc. I like sub’s family and I knew I was going out of town for the weekend so I was going to dinner pretty much regardless of the restaurant. Steakhouses aren’t my thing but I survived by getting the salmon (not that great imo) with black truffle mashed potatoes (amazingly good, I love truffles). The company was great though so I enjoyed the meal a lot. Obviously sub lost the CCR flip although I bought out because I didn’t drink and I don’t flip unless I’m relatively close to be neutral EV. After that I went over to the Palms and talked for awhile with snowbank (the guy who runs bluefirepoker) and his friend pbjaxx. Both are cool guys so it was nice to meet them.

And now I’m on the plane, going to watch some TV now. Have a nice weekend everyone.