Change of Direction

For some reason I got very distracted from blogging and also eventually got reasonably distracted from poker.

I made a decent profit from poker in 2010, enough to get me into 5 figures and even managed to scrape into the Irish Poker Rankings final at the end of the year. For those that aren't familiar with it, the IPR final is effectively a free-roll for the top performing tournament players in the country.

In 2010 I had joined a golf course, got myself a handicap & began the process of getting addicted to golf. The course I joined was cheap enough & suited due to a few of my work colleagues having already joined there. Learning the game was exciting, having something to do in between shifts to help me sleep was very welcome, however getting all aspects of the game to come together so I could get my handicap down became 'Mission Impossible'.

I finished the year with the handicap I started with, 36. This bothered me as I felt I was/could be much better. It appeared my main problem was I couldn't last 18 holes, which is a problem as that's the globally acknowledged standard length of a game of golf.

My swing, whilst producing the goods at set intervals, appeared to have a variance issue only a poker player could empathize with. I was able to identify 2 key weaknesses, my 2nd shot (fairway wood etc) & my putting. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the fresh air, the exercise, the social element - however, there was something soul destroying about hitting a decent drive & topping the ball 2 or 3 times to completely reverse the benefits of being able to hit the ball a decent distance off the tee. My putting was another area requiring some serious improvement. Reading greens was never that much of a problem to me, getting the ball to stop within 4 feet of the hole at one point seemed nearly impossible. All things considered, whilst I felt like I was improving, I needed to nail some consistency & quick.

In September we went on a short golf trip to Spain which I was really looking forward to. I decided to invest in a new putter, an Odyssey Blade, to try spur on that end of things. Whilst my putting wasn't perfect, it was dramatically better than it had been, so finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Shortly after we came home from Spain the weather took a turn for the worse so we didn't really get playing any regular golf after that. We had decided weeks, if not months, prior to that we weren't going to renew our membership at that course. A serious lack of ethics by the course management, incompetent green-keeping that needed 4-5 months to pole fork greens & the lack of 'club' atmosphere meant we would need to find a new club for the following year & preferably a club we could stick with for many years to come.