The Week That Was June 21 – 28

It hasn’t been an especially good time to be a celebrity recently. Wacko Jacko and Farrah Fawcett almost back to back and then Billy Mays. Fortunately none of them had to suffer the indignity that David Carradine did though I’m not sure anybody would have been surprised if they had found Jackson tied up.

Last week here on Bill’s Poker Blog two posts you might to check out are:

Help Me Help Me and Why Sponsored Players Cost You Money

Over on Poker Job Search there were a ton of new jobs posted. Here’s a sample:

Poker PR and Pro Management Executive
C++ Software Developer – Poker experience
Poker Product Manager
Competitor Intelligence Analyst
Poker Program Manager

You can check out all of the poker job listings here.

I’ve also put up a lot of new articles on Rakeback Report that are worth of read:

5 Tips On Becoming A Rakeback Poker Pro
PartyPoker Rakeback
Cake Poker 110% First Time Deposit Bonus!
How Multi-Tabling Can Improve Your Rakeback Poker Profits
Figuring Out How Much you Need to Make a Living Playing Poker
Knowing When it’s the Right Time to Move up in Limits
What Changes to My Game do I Need to Make to Play 6-Max?
Bankroll Management
Tips on Multi-Tabling Without Lowering your Win Rate

I had a bunch of pictures sitting around on my camera that I finally got around to uploading. Here’s one from the hotel room I stayed in while in Cambodia. Pretty much blew my entire weekend (click to enlarge).

What we normally call the summer months in the US and Europe is the wet season in South East Asia. It hasn’t rained all that much since I’ve been here but when it does rain it R-A-I-N-S!!! I don’t care if you do stand underneath Rihanna’s umbrella, ella, ella you’re screwed if you get caught out when the rain comes. It’s almost as if the sky is angry and it’s pouring everything it has out onto the earth.

Here’s some shots I took from my living room balcony. The first is of a normal night. It’s a little blurry because it’s a night shot and I wasn’t using a tripod but you can see how brightly lit the buildings are. The building on the left is the CPN, then to the right of that is a halo thing at the top of Central World, and farther to the right you see the Amari Watergate hotel and behind that the Baiyoke Sky Hotel which is the tallest building in Bangkok . . . which I would assume makes it the tallest building in Thailand as I’m unaware of anyplace else in Thailand having a taller building.

Now if you look at the second photo taken on a night when the skies opened their wrath you can barely make out any of the buildings that are clearly visible in the first photo. CPN is hard to make out. You can barely see Central World’s halo. The Amari is just a silhouette . Baiyoke is completely hidden. Keep in mind that that Central World halo is only two blocks from me. It’s barely a five minute walk.

The rain typically doesn’t last long. The night of that photo it might have been a half hour. But so much rain comes in such a short period of time that the streets flood over until they can unload their burden into the sewers and drainage ditches.

Unfortunately (for me), the night of that photo I didn’t have the luxury of waiting as I had dinner plans at 9pm over at a restaurant near Victory Monument. I had to hoof it to the end of the block to Ratchadamri sky train station while the streets were still flooded over. It’s probably less than a two minute walk to the station but I only made it half way before I felt that cool, moist feeling of my socks getting soaked. Yech!

I rounded out the week meeting up with my friends Stu, Fred, and Phong and a few of their friends. We went to Dream World which is like a cheap knock-off of Disneyland.

As you can see, even in Thailand it’s wise to fear The Hammer.

But like all good amusement parks they have so many damn rules that it sort of ruins things. I mean, what could possibly go wrong letting drunken people on a high-speed roller coaster?