Casino poker, first time ever

So, the 4-on 4-off schedule that I've been on for the past two months at work is actually turning out to be quite nice. Among other things, having four straight days off is just a hell of a boon to my sanity. The only hard part is the fact that it's two stretches of fronts, then backs, then fronts, etc. On my first transition to this schedule I worked 7 straight days of backs, the transitioned immediately to four straight fronts, then had four days off, then went right back to backs. By the time I was done with that I didn't have any idea which damn way was up.

In any case, yesterday, on a total impulse, I decided to hop into the car and make the 2.5 hour drive down to Shreveport, which houses the nearest cluster of quality casinos. Seeing as how it seems to be the only casino in Shreveport that has a decent poker room, I chose the Horseshoe to make my play, and brought with me $600 in cash, as well as an overnight bag (including this computer), in case I decided to stay the night.

Believe it or not, with all of the gambling that I have done with our home poker game and online, this was the first time I'd ever set foot in a casino. I've been reading and hearing about people doing it for years, so I knew more or less what to expect, but regardless, this was the first time I'd gotten around to it myself.

So, I had skipped out on my meal, and stayed up late the previous night so as to ease the transition to backs, and had to stop by the bank before taking off at around 2:30. I arrive in Shreveport at around 5:00, and after finding a parking spot, getting a feel for the casino layout, and grabbing some dinner at a buffet (overpriced @$20, but it was at least decent food), I made my play.

There was a $1-2NL game going as well as a $4-8 limit, but there was a 6 person waiting list for both, and the next lowest stake was $2-5NL and $10-20 limit, as well as a $70+R tournament, all of which are somewhat above my comfort zone (truthfully $1-2NL is a bit above my comfort zone as well, but not by so much). I'd brought $600 in cash with me, and lucked out as they had recently opened a new $1-2NL table and I was able to get a seat immediately to a table that quickly filled up.

I didn't find that I was overly intimidated, as I saw immediately that there were players at the table that had absolutely no idea whatsoever what the hell they were doing. That's always a good sign. I decided to buy in for the max, $200, thinking that if I busted, I would probably reload for just $100. I sat down in seat 5.

When I sat down, the very first hand I saw involved an all-in. A player I will refer to here as Fat Bastard, a 400-pounder who had already accumulated about $100 in profit, was in seat 10, and had the button this hand. There were three limpers, and Fat Bastard raised to $10. A youngish-guy about my age in Seat 1, who I will refer to as "Young Buck" smooth-called from the small blind, and a Hot College Chick reraised from the big blind up to $40. It was folded back to Fat Bastard, who called, at which point Young Buck reraised for $108 more, all-in. I almost blurted out, "Wow, there's aces", but stopped myself when I saw Fat Bastard pondering a call. He didn't ponder for very long, and made the call with TT. Of course Young Buck showed aces, and a ten came on the flop. Young Buck was livid. He seemed to know what he was doing, I would later determine, despite the bizarre way in which he played this particular hand (smooth-calling a button raise with 4 other people in the pot with AA? Not Done!). Two hands later, after Young Buck had reloaded for $200 and then immediately lost a substantial pot to Hot College Chick, he wound up all-in with a player on my left, in seat 6, who I would eventually start thinking of as Sprint Service Center (an enormous calling station). Young Buck had AK, Sprint Service Center had AQ. The flop came with a Q and Young Buck did not improve. To his credit, Young Buck immediately reloaded for $200 and managed to avoid tilty play, though he was understandably complaining.

About ten hands in, I had done nothing but fold, I was dealt Js Jh and the dude on my right, an Asian gentleman in his mid-forties who would have been a dead ringer for Pat Morita circa Karate Kid 1 if Pat Morita had been fifty pounds heavier, made it $10 to go from the button in the face of a bunch of limpers. I opted not to reraise from the small blind, as I was a bit gunshy and Fat Pat Morita seemed to know which way was up. So I called, and it wound up turning into a 7-way pot. The flop came 25A, I checked, and folded when Sprint Service Center (a 40ish white dude who was clearly the biggest sucker at the table, an absolute calling station), bet out for $40 and Fat Pat Morita made the call. Fat Pat Morita called Sprint Service Center down with AT and won a nice pot.

The very next hand, from the button, I was dealt the exact same hand! Js Jh, identical right down to the same two suits. There were 4 limpers, including Young Buck and Fat Pat Morita. This time I raised, making it $15 to go. Sprint Service Center called from the big blind, as did all the limpers, making it a $90 pot pre-flop. I'm totally not used to this, so I'm sweating the flop severely.

It seems favorable but potentially dangerous, 79T rainbow. I wasn't overly concerned about a straight, but two pair was a real possibility. It was checked all the way around to me, and I bet out $80, standard operating procedure, protecting my vulnerable overpair. Sprint Service Center immediately check-raised me all-in, another $50 that I felt compelled to call on general principle when it was folded around to me. Sprint Service Center surprised me by showing 8To, a truly bizarre call from the small blind in the face of a big raise from the button, but as a substatial favorite, I didn't particularly mind. The turn gave a K, and the river a Q, giving me a better straight, and Sprint Service Center started talking as if I'd sucked out on him, "I can't believe you made the better straight!" I looked at him a bit quizzically, saying, "Um, I was kind of ahead the whole way there, but whatever." The hand seemed to upset him visibly, which struck me as strange, because someone that played as poorly as he did should quickly become accustomed to losing big pots.

That was an enormous score for me, and when I dragged a pot a few hands later when I limped from middle position with QTs (following 2 other limpers) and caught a flop of 7TT, and later won a pot with TT where I made the 3rd nut flush on the turn and called $10 and $15 microbets down from a player that had the 7-high flush, I realized that I had already more than doubled up. Couldn't have asked for a better start.

Seat 2, which had been empty, filled up with an Asian guy that looked like a photoshop morph between Johnny Chan and John Cho (a good actor who is likely to be tragically stereotyped for life as the Asian MILF guy from the American Pie movies, and/or Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle). Johnny Cho seemed to know what he was doing, and wasn't needlessly calling off his chips.

The next hand I played was QKs from under-the-gun, making it $10 to go. Once again, 5 people called me (I started to get insecure, asking Fat Pat Morita if my play was so bad that people were that anxious to see flops with me). The flop came 8KA, giving me 2nd pair and a good kicker. I bet out $40, two-thirds the pot, hoping I could represent a big ace and drag it down. Everyone folded except Johnny Cho, who I felt would be a player I might be able to push off. The turn bricked, a deuce, and I fired out $50. Johnny Cho thought about it for a while, talking at me, asking, "What are you wondering here, is my AQ good, is my AJ good?" He called, and unfortunately I felt like I wasn't in very good control of my posture, and probably seemed a little deflated by the call (which I certainly was). I had thought he might not call a big bet on the river, but I couldn't bring myself to fire that final bullet, since I would have had to bet at least $100 to make it seem like a serious value bet, and I felt like he was reading me well enough to sniff the bluff out anyway. I checked, Johnny Cho checked, and I showed my KQ. He had AT.

That setback past, I quickly flopped a set wih 77 on a 7KA board and got most of the money I had lost back from Fat Pat Morita, who had AQ and paid off a decent bet, before leaving with a substantial win (at least +$500), and being replaced by an annoying dude who had a habit of commenting on the action while it was taking place, and who liked to call out people's hands and was almost always wrong, who I will call the Know-it-All-Know-Nothing, or KIAKN for short. I was back over $400 when the biggest hand of the night happened.

With the requisite 3 limpers, followed by a raise to $10 from KIAKN on the button, I looked down from the small blind to see 9d 9c. I called, as did only one of the limpers, a player who was the only one to be there for my entire 6-hour session, who I would later learn to be the Rock of Gibraltar, in Seat 9. He was tighter than most in his pre-flop selection, though he would take opportunities to see a cheap flop when he could, but he would only engage post-flop when he had a very strong hand, he never made continutation bets, and he did fairly well over the course of the night. This information, as it turned out, would have been quite valuable in this particular hand, but I had none of it at the time; I don't think that Rock of Gibraltar had yet to show down a hand all night, though he had won a few, and was slightly up.

In any case, the flop came 8d 9c Qd, giving me middle set, putting a possible straight on the board, and a potential diamond flush draw.

I happened to be looking at KIAKN when the flop came, and I could tell that he was just itching to bet, so I decided a check-raise with my set was in order. Rock of Gibraltar checked as well, and KIAKN immediately and confidently fired out $25.

I announced my raise fairly quickly, and called the bet, before counting out what I felt to be the appropriate raise, an additional $50, with the intent of tying KIAKN to the hand and pot committing him if he had a strong-but-drawing-almost-dead hand like AQ, which I felt was a very strong possibility. I had my eyes on KIAKN when I noticed that Rock of Gibraltar was taking an inordinate amount of time to fold. Eventually I glanced in his direction to see him counting out chips. Wha? Visions of TJ were floating through my head, and I started wondering if I could possibly get away from the hand if he pushed me all in, but then, Rock of Gibraltar just called!

He was sitting on what looked to be about $150 behind that call, and suddenly, all of my interest in KIAKN vanished; I barely noticed when he folded. The first word to come to mind was "bizarre". I tried to come up with two cards I could be holding in the Rock of Gibraltar's spot where I would simply call that bet, and I couldn't do it. Maybe -- MAYBE -- Td Jd, for the made straight with the flush draw, but even that is very dicy considering that I've just announced obscene strength, which could mean any number of things, of which a set is an obvious possibility. What does he do on the turn if the board pairs? Assuming he had TJ, which of course was my immediate thought, the only other thought I had was that he assumed I also had TJ as well, and was hoping that KIAKN would make an overcall, giving us a larger overall pot to chop, particularly if he was freerolling with the Td Jd. Regardless, I think this was a mistake.

In any case, the turn bricked, a deuce, and I checked. Rock of Gibraltar immediately went all-in for $148. And I went deep into the tank.

First step was to calculate the amount of money in the pot. Around $30 pre-flop (the folded limpers' chips were by now in the rake), another $175 on the flop, for just over $200. $150 more for the bet I had to call, being offered $350 by the pot. I called that 2.3:1 pot odds, close enough for government work. I would need to win this pot 30% of the time for the call to be profitable.

If he did in fact have TJ, I would have 10 outs with one card to come, with 44 left in the deck, which I knew off the top of my head put me as a 3.5:1 dog, a 22% chance of catching the card I needed. For the sake of my brain, I simplified this down to 20%, meaning that, 80% of the time I would lose $150, 20% of the time I would win $350. That's -$120 + $70, for an equity of $-50, a clear fold.

But, the cards were, sadly, not face up, so I had to evaluate if there were hands other than TJ that made sense. Certainly QQ, the only other hand I'm behind, made no sense; he would have raised it pre-flop, and barring that, would have limp-reraised it when it was raised behind him. I put that at 0%, meaning any other hand he could have, I was ranging from a large to overwhelming favorite against.

Of all the other possibilities, 88 made the most sense. The preflop limp-call makes sense, and the call on the flop becomes a mealy-mouthed "I don't know where I'm at, but I'm way too strong to fold here" play, which is of course bad, but ruling out bad play is not always (or in fact usually) correct. The shove on the turn is a direct result of my showing weakness by checking. Against 88 I was essentially 100% equity, meaning positive $350. I then went through the calculation to determine where the break-even point was regarding how sure I had to be that he had TJ before the call becomes profitable.

My first stab was 80%; if 80% of the time I lose $50, that's -$40, and 20% of the time I win $350, that's $70, giving me +$30 equity. Re-running the calculation at 90% gave -$10, putting the breakeven point at something like 87.5%.

Then experience comes into play. I think to myself, if I play this hand 5 times, does he turn over TJ all 5 times? Or does one of those 5 times reveal 88? I decided that it was almost dead freakin' even. The guy wasn't giving off anything I could pass off as a cold tell; maybe if I knew him, I would have known (and indeed, I did pick up a tell or two from him as the night went on), but I was running basically blind, and wasn't putting much stock in physical tells. He was giving me a bit of a death stare, but staying very still. It seemed to be some kind of rehearsed posture for big pots. I didn't really feel like I gleaned any useful information from him.

What pushed me over the edge into calling was that I also considered that there was some chance (not a great one) that he was on some sort of semi-bluff with a hand like Ad Td, or that he had a massive draw like 6d 7d. This was unlikely, maybe 5%, but that's 5% where I'm a big favorite, and provides at least a small equity push in my favor. I said "This hand is just a tiny bit too strong to get rid of" and made the call, after almost 5 minutes of thinking (the other players at the table were very respectful).

He turned over Ts Jh, and the river bricked, a king, as a $500 pot, the biggest I've ever been involved in, was pushed over to the Rock of Gibraltar.

That said, I'm convinced that the call was necessary, although it's important to point out that if my hand had been 88 instead of 99, it would have been a clear fold, and I'm very convinced that I would have made it.

Amazingly, that loss put me exactly back where I started, an even $200. That was somehow encouraging; I felt as though I had just pushed the reset button on my old Nintendo, and could start the Ninja Gaiden level again, with the only difference being, this time, I had more information.

The next big pot I was involved in was another pocket pair, this time 77. I was back up to $280 or so after several successive wins of smallish pots, and feeling comfortable again. Fat Bastard open-raised for $10 and got the requisite 3 callers. I called from the button, and the flop came 2h 7h Qc. Fat Bastard bet $20 and everyone folded. I raised to $80 and he called, almost beating me into the pot. The turn bricked, a 3d, and he checked. I saw that I had him covered with just over $200, and that there was almost $200 in the pot. I felt very strongly that he was on a heart draw, possibly with overs with a hand like Ah Kh, or with top pair like Ah Qh or Kh Qh, but remembering that it was Fat Bastard that had so erroneously called Young Buck's huge pre-flop raise with TT (and proceeding to suck out), and as a result felt he would have enormous trouble getting rid of any strong hand. I shoved all-in, a slight overbet of the pot, but I think it was correct. I did my best to give Caro tells out, particularly a hand over the mouth, staring at the pot, and breating more rapidly than was natural, and it wasn't all acting; despite the fact that he hadn't insta-called, meaning that I was a massive favorite, my pulse was racing, and I could feel my corroted artery thumping in my neck. I did my best to look nervous without overdoing it, but Fat Bastard wasn't really paying any attention to me. Eventually he folded Ah Qh face-up, and obviously if I thought he was capable of that laydown I would have bet less; I was surprised. Young Buck correctly called out my hand at that point ("you had pocket sevens, didn't you?") and to that I decided to show. It wasn't THAT impressive a read - there were only a few hands I could have realistically had there - but still, props to the guy.

In this time, Sprint Service Center had left, stuck over $400, and been replaced with Old Fart, an even bigger calling station fish who quickly dumped $200 and left, to be replaced with Sistah, a tiny, middle-aged black woman who immediatelly ordered a Hennessey, straight up. I salivated, and not because the drink smelled good. The seat on my left was full of the Sucker, all night. I looked for an opportunity to swap over to seat 7, but never got it.

Johnny Cho was replaced with Jesus Bling, a large black dude who sported a silver necklace that had a large Jesus face medallion on it, and Hot College Chick gave way to Mos Def, a wiry black guy that was a dead ringer for the rapper/actor. Jesus Bling was wild, a talkative player with a touch of maniac in him, while Mos Def was tight/solid. Seat 8, who had been a nondescript rock, was replaced with Frat Boy, a cocky, stupid, aggressive player with a fondness for dumping chips that might as well have been wearing an alpha-beta-zeta sweatshirt and matching baseball cap. Young Buck eventually left and was replaced with World Series Sam, a 60ish guy decked out in WSOP apparrel.

A won pot here and there left me steadily accumulating chips, and as most of the pots I won were $60 or more, seeing as how almost every pot was raised and 6-handed, the blinds didn't mean much. I settled into a comfortable tight-aggressive style and had a wonderful table image. At the start of the night I felt like a complete newbie, by the end of it I was very comfortable.

That being said, the play was easy because I caught a frozen wave of cards; every hand was 93 offsuit, J2 offsuit, A3 suited with a raise and reraise in front of me, 57 suited from the big blind, checking my option as the flop came AK9. I got away with a few continuation bluffs, taking pots that nobody seemed interested in, but didn't press my luck too far. I busted Jesus Bling at least twice, as he kept reloading for $100 and began dumping off chips.

Meanwhile, to my left, Sistah was chatting it up with me, almost whispering in my ear, and sucking down Hennesseys very quickly. She had had 4 or 5 when I could tell that the alcohol had hit her like a Mack truck. Her speech became slurred, and she got loud.

And then she went crazy, frustrated at a pot that didn't go her way, and started announcing that she was going all-in blind, every hand. And she did, pushing her remaining $100 in for two hands in a row, before eventually World Series Sam called her with Q9 (he had some gamble in him) and busted her. She got up and left, making quite a scene. "I don't need this!" she was shouting. "I make my money! Sistah's got a job! Go ahead! Bust me out of a black woman's $400! Sistah's got a job! I make my money!" It was completely out of nowhere, and drew heads in the whole room, even taking attention off of a $10,000 pot at another table.

This was arond 11:00, and I was sitting comfortably at over $400 in front of me. That said, I had decided that I was going to drive back home that night, and I felt my attention beginning to waver. The superfish seemed to be gone, and while I felt like I had an edge over the table, it wasn't as big as I had been, and I finally played to my blinds and left at around midnight, up $244 after a six hour session, not overly shabby. Subtract $40 in gas money and additional cash spent on my meal, and that's still a good session, particularly for my first time ever playing a live cash game.

I drove home cautiously and arrived at around 3:00, stopping for gas and a snack. I collapsed in bed at around 4:30, feeling good about my impromptu adventure.

Joys in home ownership

So, there are quite a few aspects of owning your own home that they don't exactly cover in the brochure, that when the past few months have had you thinking "Jesus, equity isn't worth this", you feel obligated to share.

First and foremost. I come home from Christmas/New Year's break, sans my lost Driver's license (thanking my lucky stars that I even made it home at all, since they were just about to not let me through the Houston airport), when I find in my mailbox a water bill for $500. Past the "holy shit", I'm thinking, "this isn't right; there's got to be a mistake. But then I see that while I was on the plane, someone from the city left me a message, saying that my water meter was abnormally high and that the ground in front of my house was damp, even when it hadn't been raining. Well, shit. That's not good. By the time I made it home it was too late to call anyone to do anything about it, so armed with my trusty crescent wrench, I head out to the meter so as not to exacerbate the problem. The water shut off, I take my final night's piss in the bushes in my backyard (thankfully fenced in with a privacy fence), and go to bed.

The next day I call a plumber, but he can't make it in until the day after, so I am forced to wait. I was of course unable to take a shower with my water off, and went into work smelling a little rank. The next day, nice and early in the morning, the plumber arrives and within a couple of hours, diagnoses and fixes the leak, which was in the connector that hooks the pvc coming out of the meter into the copper going into my house. Of course. As any electrical engineer can tell you, it's always the damn connectors that fail. That adventure set me back $210, but I was happy to pay, as the ease with which this dude had sniffed out my leak was truly impressive

So. Everything seems fine, I take my shower and go into work for the afternoon, coming back and not noticing anything amiss until it's time for bed, I go to get a last glass of water, and in the area that hooks my kitchen to my garage, I notice that there's some standing water. Shit! I immediately look around to begin diagnosing the problem.

The short hall between my kitchen and my garage has a pantry on the left. This pantry shares its right-hand wall with the garage, and its back wall with the alcove off of my garage that houses my furnace and water heater. And it appears to be the pantry that has flooded. Oh, shit. I know what happened here. Sure enough, I open the door to examine my water heater, and it's leaking. A pretty serious leak, from the top. I had known for a while that my water heater was starting to fail, but procrastinated a bit too much. My working hypothesis (unfortunately impossible to test) is that when the leak in my main waterpipe was fixed, the requisite increase in pressure was what led the water heater to fail. And of course, if the water heater breaks, there's a drain that's supposed to capture the leaked water and deposit it outside the house, to prevent flooding, but that wasn't working either, at least not 100%, because there was a hole rusted through the pan that the water heater was sitting in.

So, it was too late to do anything about it, and I knew that you were supposed to be able to turn your water heater off for an occasion just as this. One of the pipes leading into the water heater had a valve on it, sure enough, but operating this valve seemed to do exactly nothing to fix the leak. I figured the valve must be shot, but then decided to go turn on a hot water faucet in my house with the valve shut. No hot water came out, though cold water came out just fine. Hmm. Going back to the water heater, I put my hand on the two pipes and noticed that the pipe with the valve on it was warm, while the other was icy cold. Crap! The shut-off valve was on my hot water pipe! Fat lot of good that does me. Thus, armed once again with my trusty crescent wrench, I turned off the water at my meter. You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to do that, but I managed to manage.

The next day I called the same plumber I called before, but he was busy for several days and said that he really pretty much specialized in foundation leaks anyway, so he referred me to another plumber, who I called and described the problem to. He agreed that my water heater was shot ("Yea, dat suckah's shawt!") but expressed perplexion when I told him of my scenario with the water valves ("Yah valve is on yah hawt wahter pipe? Dat ain't right!") Nevertheless, he agreed to come in the next day, and install a new water heater for me, which he would provide. I had him quote a price, and he said that it would be just over $400 for the new heater and installation, which seemed reasonable. He came in the next day and got everything installed. He did a very good job - it turned out that the valve wasn't on the wrong pipe per se, just that my wall was plumbed backwards, with the cold water pipe coming in off the wall in the spot where the hot water pipe usually is, and vice versa. This meant that my water heater had been siphoning hot water off of the *bottom* of my water heater, which is not how it's supposed to work, since pulling the hot water off the top is more energy-efficient (since hot water, like hot air, rises). Who knows how much in unnecessary electricity that cost me over the past couple of years?

I gladly payed the $420 that it turned out to be, and realized with some horror that I had spent well over $1000 , all on plumbing-related expenses, in the course of a week. Luckily, not long after was my split-with-2nd in the $5+R PLO tournament, which netted me over $900. Great, I though, I just paid for my plumbing.

Flash forward to last night. All had been right in the world of my plumbing until I'm going to take my last piss before bed at around 11:30. I notice, then, with some horror, that my bathtub is maybe a third-full of brownish-yellow "water". Oh, you have got to be kidding me! What the fuck is this? I go to my master bathroom and see that my garden tub also has water in it, and that even the shower in there has some standing water. Shit! Oh, that's just nasty. Suddenly every low-standing area in my house with a sewer drain has backed up with sewage. Although I have essentially no sense of smell, and can tell from my eyes and my taste buds that the smell must be just totally pungent. I open up every window that I can, turn on every ceiling fan in the house, and resolve to take care of the problem tomorrow.

Flash forward to this morning. I wake up and immediately go to check on my tubs. But before I can even make it to the bathroom, I step on what feels like wet, squishy carpet. Oh, you are KIDDING me! After the immediate panicking, and realizing that, no, it's not all over the house, just in the area around my master bathroom, I finally get to checking the tubs, which are now empty. So I figure that some time during the night, whatever was plugging up my main sewer pipe (which is what it had to have been; everything I put down a drain or flushed down the toilet was thus getting backed up into my lowest-altitude drains to an equalizing pressure) got itself cleared up, but that my garden tub and regular tub drained considerably faster than my shower, due to the increased volume of water there. Because my shower has an entrance that's low to the ground, it must have spilled over and left my carpet now squishy with sewage water.

So now, I'm taking a break from the midst of a fairly massive clean-up job. I bought a little handheld carpet cleaner for the time being (although I'm thinking I may have to eventually bring in the bigger artillery for this one, as well as a nice 14" floor-level high-speed fan to help dry things. I have every back window to my house open, every fan on, with the hopes of airing the place out, and I'm only hoping that the carpet, after I'm done cleaning it out, isn't left with an ever-present piss smell. The handheld did some of it, but I'm thinking I need to give it the shampoo before I'm through.

I took the morning off work and my boss called me before I called him, because I'm supposed to be on shifts. He didn't seem too pleased as it sounded like he needed me, so I told him I'd be in for the afternoon. Right now I'm listening to my new fan attempt to blow-dry my carpet, while a bunch of my clothes, which had been lying on the floor in the offending area and thusly became piss-stained, to get out of the dryer.

I take some solace in the fact that most of the water plugged up in my system had to have been actual water, from my shower that morning, from the dishwasher, and that, not to be too crude, it was yellowish and not brownish. Whatever was fouling up the water had to have been very dilute, and thus my efforts to clean it up should hopefully prove successful.

But still, they don't tell you about having to deal with piss-stained carpet when they give you the brochures advocating all the benefits of home ownership.

My Life's Obsession, Part 6: Jenni

Unlike many of the people in my past, I know the exact circumstances under which I met Jenni. It's weird, how that has become a theme in my life - how my closest friends aren't really people I have *met* per se, so much as people that have simply been around. But Jenni - Jenni was in the band, a Clarinet player on the other side of the terraced band room who for most of the year remained faceless. She'd been living in Switzerland for the past four years - her father was a very high-up patent lawyer who had been transferred there for a time - but had returned home for her High School years. I knew that there was someone in the band for whom that description fit, but couldn't have given you a face or a name.

We met on the bus on the way back home from State Festival, a three hour ride that I specifically remember was punctuated by an intense desire for me to go to the bathroom. Usually on such long bus trips I, along with friends Schoop and Fitz (Senior, a very passive personality, basically into whatever the people around him were into, perpetual third chair trombone), and one other recruit would start up a game of Euchre. In this case our fourth was Lisa, who most of us knew only as the second half of the couple we called only by NateLisa; she and her boyfriend, Nate, were the school's quintessential geek coupling, joined at the hip (and the lip) more often than not, with the rare exception that occurred via the fact that she was in the band and he was not. Nate was a friend of Schoop's, and so she tolerated the likes of Schoop, Fitz, and myself, and on this particular bus ride, declared that her friend Jenni would be sitting with us, and that she wanted to learn how to play.

Euchre, once you get past the goofy Bauer rules, is not a difficult game in the least, and Jenni picked up on it right away. Now that I think on it, that might have been one of the first few things that attracted me to her - the intelligence that shone in the ease with which she picked up a card game. Before the end of the trip she was playing in Lisa's place, and advising her on strategy, and since I was Lisa's partner for the trip's majority, led to a number of high-fives and camraderie as we more than held our own against Schoop (who was an expert at the game) and Fitz (who wasn't generally bad, but who was far too passive at taking the lead). I was in rare form on the trip, and was helped in that, for it was not at all difficult to be in rare form around Schoop and Fitz. Not to disparage them, but neither one of the two is a gifted improvisational orator (they are fine with pre-prepared material), and as such, the trip offered ample opportunities for me to say the same thing that they had just said, and make it sound interesting.

It worked. By the end of the trip, Jenni was giving me looks - the kind that said, without room for error in translation, "I really wish I wasn't sitting next to Lisa, here." I think even Schoop and Fitz, the perpetual clods, picked up on it. Ladies and gentlemen, there was chemistry in the air.

Prom was upcoming, and I didn't have a date as yet. I mentioned this offhand, on the bus, and Jenni immediately prompted that she had taken a baby-sitting job over Prom weekend. That was, in a weird sort of way, encouraging and disheartening at the same time. Disheartening for the obvious reason - since it was an obvious signal for "don't ask, I won't be able to go" - but encouraging, in a way, since it meant that one way or another, she was thinking along those lines. The text of the statement was a warning, but the tone of it was disappointed; it said "Don't ask, because I'll be forced to say no and I don't want to be put in a position where I have to reject you".

The specifics of that exchange also benefitted me in another way; it spared me the anxiety of having to ask someone out straight-up while giving her a clear incentive to make the first move, were she interested. She later picked up on this directly; we were on the same page from the beginning. "I'd sent you a signal that would naturally keep you away", she later explained, to my agreement. "I had to be forward."

Forward she was. Not a week later she ambushed me after band rehearsal, saying that a group of friends were going out to a movie that weekend, "And I was wondering if you wanted to go with me."

The juxtaposition of the fact that it was a group of friends going out, but that the question had been phrased with the "with me" at the end of it, was certainly not lost on me. No room for misinterpretation. I accepted, knowing full well that this was a date.

Which in turn led to an awkward conversation the next day, where I had to explain to her that I couldn't go after all. I had a previous commitment - I was playing with the local semi-professional orchestra as a performance gimmick on their part where they took in the best of the high school band members and let them join into the 1812 Overture - that couldn't be cancelled.

The disappointment on her face was obvious, but she said I could make it up to her by giving her a ride home. To that I agreed (I had a car, she did not), and when I was prepared to drop her off (her home was gorgeous - unlike with Brac's house, I could see right away that her folks had Money), she invited me in.

Not much happened in that first adventure into her house (I was nervous as all hell - never in my life had a girl invited me in to their house without there being a clear picture of where we stood); we had a snack and a nice conversation, and I met her younger sister Alison (a precocious seventh grader who I would grow quite fond of over the coming years), who snickered immediately, before heading out the door just in time to meet her mother (who worked at a menial job to keep herself busy) - she shot me a strange look.

She asked me for a ride the next day as well, and again invited me in. Things got a bit more serious this time, with a tickle-fight that ended in a kiss - her first, as it turned out, though I didn't learn that until quite a bit later. There was no Serious Discussion as to where things stood in that regard - I suppose that neither one of us had any illusions that we were not an item at that point - but on the next day, a Friday as it turned out, when my foray into her house turned into one long makeout session, Alison crashed in on us and pretended like it was an accident. "You know," Alison said to Jenni, "Mom hasn't even figured out that he's your new BOYfriend" (the stressing of the first syllable of that word is inevitable in pre-teens, I think, and my memory of it is alarmingly distinct). Jenni and I shot each other a look, each thinking the same thing. How had we managed to get things so out of order? But it worked, and before either one of us really knew what was happening, we were arm-in-arm at school, putting on public displays of affection, going to movies, renting movies to watch in the basement of her house, more often than not using it as an excuse to cuddle up and make out.

It's weird how I remember that time. There's a powerful element to the wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which deals with a long relationship since gone sour. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it invents a procedure whereby someone can have an entire person erased from their memory, more often than not in the form of, erasing an old girlfriend or boyfriend from your memory. The main character, Joel, as played by Jim Carrey, is erasing his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) after their relationship has gone sour (with the added complication that she has already erased him). Much of the movie consists of Joel's reminiscence of their relationship as he goes backwards in time, the memories deleting themselves after he relives them. The first memories, of the end of the relationship, are all bad; their fights, her flaws, their colossal argument that led to her leaving. The next are of the discontent and quiet unease that led to that point. It takes a while to get back to the good memories, but once he gets there, he realizes that he doesn't want the procedure done any more. "Just let me keep this memory", he pleads in a voice-over. "Just this one." The juxtaposition with the fighting throughout the rest of the movie is shocking.

I say this because I'm experiencing something similar as I write this. Given what I now know of my relationship with Jenni, and how it ended, and all the pain it caused, I have a weird temptation to cast everything that happened in the worst possible light. But that wouldn't be honest. The fact of the matter is, the remainder of that school year, and the summer that followed, was one of the best periods of my life.

Jenni wasn't the only factor in that, though she was a large part. As we started the first flush of our relationship, meeting her friends provided a startling coincidence: one of her best friends from elementary school, who she had hooked back up with (following her four-year stint in Switzerland), was a girl named Kelly, who was dating a guy that Jenni had also become friends with - a guy named Nick, who I had actually been friends with way back in elementary school myself. He had gone to a different Junior High, and then to the High School across town, and we had lost touch, but for a while we had actually been pretty close. The four of us got along very well, and spent much of the summer in each other's company, going to dinner, going to movies, just hanging out.

Things seemed to be coming together. My parents had been High School sweethearts, and my older brother was at college with his High School sweetheart, who he was obviously on track to marry. All of my grandparents had married their High School sweethearts. And here I was, about to graduate High School, and I met a girl with whom I shared the most serious relationship of my life to date. It might seem silly, but that was a hell of a psychological weight off my shoulders: I had found The One; I could relax now.

Things went quickly with Jenni. The progression to physical intimacy in particular was alarmingly fast; she went from having never kissed a boy to having her first sexual partner within a matter of months. She was my first as well, and far be it from me to be crude and spill out all the gory details, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it because - well - that was a very big part of what I remember. The first kisses in her basement - the first tentative gropings in the front seat of my 1968 Mercury comet - her mom walking in on us, hearing the footsteps on the stairs as we frantically put our shirts back on, kicked her bra underneath the sofa, grabbed the blanket, and pulled it over the two of us to make believe we had just been snuggling as we watched whatever movie we had rented.

The emotional intimacy came even more quickly than the physical. I had said "I love you" to previous girlfriends and thought that I had meant it, but now I realize that with Jenni, I meant it for the first time in truth. We talked about the future, almost from the beginning. We talked about her plans, how I would fit into them, my plans, how she fit into those. We talked about my going off to college in just a few months, and promised each other that we would find a way to work it out. My brother was two years ahead of his girlfriend, and they had managed through the years where he was off at school - why couldn't we as well?

The scariest part of these conversations is that they didn't scare me.

I remember the Fourth of July, Kelly and Nick and Jenni and I finding a secluded spot, away from the crowds, where we could bask in the perfect summer breeze and have a view of the fireworks; trips to the movie theater several times a week, finding excuses to call and be in each other's presence at odd hours of the morning, teaching her little sister Alison how to do algebra. I remember that her basement flooded, and that I impressed the hell out of her father by giving him advice on how to save the computer, which had been on the basement floor but wasn't turned on (wash everything out with clean water, wait a few days for everything to air dry, fire it up!) I remember curling up with her on the couch while Nick and Kelly shared the loveseat as we watched through Braveheart, and roundabout the battle of Falkirk her hand seeking mine out and guiding it down into her already-unzipped pants, as I whispered her name into her ear in shock, and she whispered back, "They're completely oblivious; they'll never notice." I remember Nick stopping by with a movie that "You absolutely have to watch, it's fucking hilarious", and it turning out to be Kevin Smith's "Clerks" - if you want an idea of how momentous a moment that was in my life, consider that my three computers are named Dante, Brodie, and Azrael.

Forgive my indulgence throughout this, as these aren't the sort of memories I come up with that often, when thinking about Jenni.

Of course, video games were far from completely absent during that time. Jenni was an enormous part of my life, but she still wasn't 100% of it, and when I wasn't with her, chances were very good that I was in the middle of a Warcraft 2 game on Kali, teaming up with MadDawg to rip the crap out of some unsuspecting newbies or gearing up for an epic match with another top-tier team. My webpage fell a bit by the wayside during this time - it was lucky to get more than a brief update every couple of weeks - but there were only so many hours in a day.

Eventually, of course, it came to an end. My freshman year at Michigan Tech will be covered in a later chapter, suffice to say that Jenni and I were still going out, calling and emailing on a regular basis, and spending time with one another in my infrequent trips home. I took her to her Prom that year, but as the summer came, we could tell that the time apart was fading. we were fighting more often than not, and spent about four consecutive weeks apart, as I went with my parents on a family vacation, and she spent the following two weeks at a journalism camp. That was the summer of the Ultima Online beta, and, sad to say, I probably spent more time with my character in the game than I did with her. We were still ostensibly going out by the time I went back to school for my Sophomore year, but it was clear by then that she had no intention of following me to Michigan Tech, that she wanted to go to the University of Michigan and pursue a journalism career, either majoring in Journalism or History, neither of which Tech offered. When I came home for my first trimester break, her first act was to call me up and say that she didn't think we should see each other any more. She began dating another guy, in her class, with a haste that was extremely undue, and I haven't had any direct contact with her since.

So, this section leaves me, and perhaps you, with some questions. For one, why the hell do I go into so much detail about one particular relationship in a series of discussions about my lifetime obsession with video games? I'm not sure I can say, except that the story doesn't feel right without this part of it told. I think that, for the time that we went out, and in particular, the last part of that Senior year and the summer to follow, Jenni represented to me what video games would become for the next few years; something that I enjoyed beyond any reasonable breaking point, a personification of the philosophy that I was passively assuming: that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. People talk about addiction to video games as a bad thing, but when they talk about an addiction to a relationship, it's usually said with a smile, as though it were perfectly healthy. Of course the analogy isn't perfect, and I would never try to claim that a relationship with a girl and a relationship with a video game are the same thing, or that they should be approached in the same way; instead, I think, I merely feel the need to accent that Jenni made me feel much the same way that video games made me feel; anxious for me to wake up and reaquaint myself with them, eager to see what happened next. In the year to come, Warcraft II would become my replacement for Jenni, and in a weird sort of way, almost seemed an acceptable substitute. And I think I can safely say that if it hadn't been for that one relationship, and the way it ended up, my perception of video games would be very different. I had allowed Jenni to consume me, and so video games took on that role for years to come. I cannot explain the latter without explaining the effect that this girl had over me.

Company of Heroes

Wow, how did I not know about this game? What an RTS. The graphics are the best I've seen, and the interactivity of the environment is truly something to behold. I'm trying to get a feel for the single player campaign before trying to set my foot into multiplayer, but I can tell that multiplayer is something I'm going to want to do quite a bit of with this game...

Insomnia

Going from backs to fronts is always an adventure. I was scheduled to work through Thursday night, but got the night off because the machine I was supposed to be working on is on a scheduled down with no electrical work. I could have gone to sleep at about 2, but felt obligated to stay up as I was technically on call. I play a little poker and some Counterstrike. Before I know it it's 9am and I'm tired as hell. I decided to stay awake as long as I possibly can before taking a nap, then hopefully getting a good night's sleep. I finally crash out at around noon, for about two hours. Perfect.

Then I hop on and play some FFXI, finally getting around to working on some COP missions with the linkshell. That's done at 12:30 and I'm not at all tired. So I play some poker, and that lasts until around 3. I still can't sleep. So I write out my latest "Life's addiction" chapter (much of which I had jotted down on paper while at work), taking me to, well, about now. Problem 1 is that I'm wide awake, problem 2 is that I know that around 10:00 I'm going to crash, and be completely back on a backs schedule. Time for try #2. At least I have until Tuesday morning to turn around.

My Life's Addiction, Part 5: High School

The transition from Junior High to High School brought with it, among other things, more money to play with. My paper routes had served me for years, but I was getting a little old for that sort of thing, and, at the ripe old age of 15, I found the perfect replacement: refereeing hockey games. My paper routes had earned me maybe $100-200 a month; on the rink, I could easily pull in $300 in a single weekend if I took enough games. Though it was a significant time commitment, it only lasted for a few months out of the year, and because I've always been more of a saver than a spender (says the guy that's typing this up on a $4000 laptop, I know, but still, it's true), so the money lasted quite nicely, keeping me in games.

The first major purchase to be made with my new incomes was a Pentium 90, which at the time was about 4 steps down from top-of-the-line, and which functioned as a more-than-adequate replacement for my aging 386. I also picked up a Super Nintendo, though my usage of that was far less prolific; Final Fantasy VI (which I knew as Final Fantasy III at the time) and Super Metroid were about my only two real time-wasters to emerge from that particular console.

That said, I didn't use the computer for much at first, either. My Sophomore year was anything but All About the Games; as the 9th grade had tailed to a close I had found myself in a relationship for the first time, with a girl named Tracy, with whom I had very little in common, except for a desire to be with someone. There wasn't much real attraction, and the relationship was pretty much a lackluster affair, never so bad as to be described as a disaster, but not nearly worthy of the 9 months that it actually lasted.

When we broke up (finally, after weeks of barely speaking; neither one of us really had the guts to take that final step), she was almost immediately replaced with Cindi, who was nice, and attractive, and who I shared many a wonderful conversation with, but who was also as hardcore an evangelical Christian that I have ever met. She actually had subscriptions to Christian-themed girl magazines (laid out much like Seventeen or any one of those other primary-color teen girl rags, but with very different content), where on the covers were quizzes along the lines of "Are you dating a Godly guy?" Of course, she wasn't, and I was very open about that fact from the beginning. I was well on my way to full-fledged antireligious atheism, and while the difference wasn't really a problem for me, it definitely was for her. She liked me, her parents liked me, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly when she dumped me out of the blue. In so doing, she admitted that it was a decision based 100% on religion, and that while her parents loved me, there was "someone else" that didn't approve of the relationship, by which I knew she meant her Youth Group leader. That left a bitter taste, and has, to a degree, helped to shape my feelings regarding organized religion (though I suppose I should stress that there are many, many, many other factors that shape my current stance).

The relationship with Cindi ended towards the end of my Sophomore year, just as I was turning 16 and acquired my Driver's License. By then, my friendship with Brac had fairly well deteriorated, and I went without a girlfriend for some time. Much of that summer was spent hanging around with Schoop, who I knew from the band, and who was into all kinds of different board games. We spent a great deal of time playing classics like Axis & Allies (generally roping together three more people), Talisman, Risk, Stratego, and good old-fashioned Chess (unlike Brac, I could usually rip Schoop apart; unlike me, he was highly frustrated by constantly losing).

Around this time came my first exposure to the Internet. My brother had been really into BBS's, or "Bulletin Board Systems", computers that people had set up that essentially functioned as servers where people could dial in over the modem, post messages on primitive message boards, and play asychronously multiplayer games. I only dabbled, and then, only in games, but my dealings with them got me comfortable with modems, and that led to an easy and early transition to the Internet through a local ISP offered through the newspaper.

When it came to the Net, for a great while I was more of an observer than a participant, my activities more or less limited to searching for game demos to download and occasionally participating in IRC. I could foresee, as most people could, that the Internet was likely to get much better, but at the time, the thought of online gaming was more or less a fantasy. The games I was playing, "multiplayer" meant you had someone next to you on the couch, with a controller in hand. It wasn't until midway through my Junior Year that that perception started to change, through a simple conversation with my friend Matt.

Matt was an acquaintence more than a friend, actually; we knew each other through the band, and had been sitting next to one another for an hour each day for the past five years. He was the perpetual first chair trombone, and I was the perpetual second; even in our Sophomore years, we had out-tested all the Juniors and Seniors for the coveted first two spots (a fact one of the seniors actually got quite bitter about). I was always good - I've long taken pride in my musical ability - but Matt made me look like a bloody rookie. He was out of this world, easily the best musician in the school (and we had two violin players from the orchestra go on to major in Violin Performance at the University of Michigan). Where I could play pretty much any sequence of notes you could throw at me with accuracy, Matt used that accuracy as a mere starting point, and on his first read through a difficult piece could infuse with flair. His talent was freakish. He had perfect natural pitch, could tell you if your tuning slide was a millimeter out with no reference, and if anyone in the band, on any instrument, had a solo but was absent from class that day, Matt could fill in perfectly, after hearing it done correctly only once. It was really something to behold. When it came to music, I looked up to Matt a great deal, but we had never really interacted outside of the band.

He did know me well enough to know that I was into computer games, though, of course, and that led to the simple conversation that probably changed me life forever. At the end of the Advanced Algebra & Trig class that we shared (like most people as talented as he was at Music, he was equally good at Math), he let me know that he had gotten a new computer that week, and he was looking to try out the modem. I said, sure, I could probably work that out. He asked if I had Doom, and I said yes, I did, and so we exchanged numbers and set up a multiplayer game later that night.

That must have been a Friday, because I remember that we set up a co-op game and ripped through a good chunk of the campaign that night, then when we finished a certain level, turned on each other and started fragging the crap out of one another. It was more fun than I could have possibly guessed. He felt the same, and we played again the next day, and the next, ripping through the entirety of the single player campaign as a team and then setting up maps to go head-to-head. From that point on, we were addicted; it was blindingly clear that this little hobby wasn't going anywhere any time soon.

With Brac, video games had been the glue that sustained our friendship; with Matt, video games were the friendship; outside of band, we essentially never interacted unless video games were a part of it. And our friendship, in this fashion, would extend long into College, despite our going to different schools.

Junior Year turned into Senior Year, Doom turned into Doom 2, and a host of other games, mostly demos downloaded from the net, or cd-cracked games that one of the two of us would pick up and spread to the other. That's pretty much what we spent the summer doing (though I did do more than my share of hanging out with Schoop, and other friends I had made through Schoop).

By the time Senior Year rolled around in truth, somehow I found my social standing somewhat - different - than I was used to. I was used to being an outsider, a loner, someone that people didn't generally interact with unless they had a specific reason. For some reason I can't quite peg, that changed in the 12th grade. It wasn't that I was no longer a geek - I was probably spending more time playing video games than ever before - it was perhaps more along the lines of, being a geek was almost a new sort of cool by then, or at least, the qualities that had been seen as geekish and antisocial in the past were now almost kind of cool. Where I had previously been seen as abrasive, I was now seen as aggressive, and aggressive was kind of a good thing. I had a good time my Senior Year. I dated casually, for the first time in my life. I made friends with people I never thought I would ever be friends with (and who, against all odds, turned out to be kind of cool): members of the football team, cheerleaders, the prom king and queen. Altogether, it was a mighty fine time.

And all the while, I was playing video games with Matt, anything that supported a modem connection. We scoured the Internet; we'd try anything once. We convinced our parents to spring for second phone lines in our houses (the phone company was just starting to pick up on this trend, and it was only an extra $5 a month at the time), and that bumped up our playtime considerably.

One of the games we came across in our searches was a real-time strategy game by a then-unknown company named "Blizzard Entertainment" called "Warcraft: Orcs and Humans". I was familiar with the RTS genre - I had played Westwood Studio's Dune 2 to completion with all three houses, and thought that it was a fantastic way to approach a game, and always remembered thinking that it would be a great way to approach from a fantasy perspective. Warcraft fulfilled this possibility nicely, and actually turned out to be a very fun game (though, in retrospect, it was deeply flawed in a few ways, most of them balance-related). At the time, though, Matt and I were enamored with the thought of a game where the object was to build up an army and beat the crap out of another human being on the other end of the line.

We saw the game's brilliance from the start, and became aware, over the Internet, that a sequel was forthcoming, one that would dwarf the original in both scope and polish. To say the very least, we were stoked; we scoured Blizzard's web site, and the various fan sites, for details; we downloaded video clips and designer diaries (before such things were commonplace, as they are today), and on December 9, 1995, we were the first two souls in our town to grab a copy, that Saturday morning, in a trip to the local mall and the electronics boutique as it opened.

The game was everything we thought it would be and more. Matt and I rushed through the single-player campaigns quickly, just to get a feel for the units we could build, and hopped into head-to-head matches over the modem almost immediately. I still remember the early stabs at unique strategy; the merits of orcs vs humans, of archers vs grunts, of offense vs defense, of hyper-aggression vs defense and counterattack. While the debates over these sorts of questions were to last for years, one thing was not debatable: we had found our new obsession.

Matt and I were both competitive people - when we played, we played to win, and when we lost, we would look back at the game in our memory to see where we had gone wrong, and what the other person had done right. We were surprisingly evenly matched, with styles to match our personalities. I was methodical, precise, efficient. Matt was creative, a gifted improv artist; he played the game like he ripped through a trombone solo, always looking for a unique way out of a passage. Were my build orders to meet up with his tactical skill, we realized, we would be nigh unto unstoppable.

That led to speculation concerning playing over the Internet as a team. We knew it was possible. Though War2 offered no intrinsic TCP/IP compatibility (games didn't do that back then), Matt, in his scouring of the Internet for Warcraft II related material, had come across a program called Kali, which was supposed to take advantage of a game's ability to support a local IPX network and convert your TCP/IP Internet connection to the sort needed for IPX. You could download the software for free and play for 15 minutes at a time at no charge; registration was $10 for unlimited playtime. This seemed fair, and when we downloaded the software to give it a try, it worked.

When you registered Kali, you were given a serial number, which was simply an increasing number; as time would go on, low serial numbers were a sign of prestige. Because Matt registered before Christmas break, as he wasn't going anywhere and felt he needed something to do, his serial was in the 1800's. I waited for a time, to the point where mine was 3975. In time, anything below 5 digits would be seen as incredible prestige; I actually had people offer me up to $50 for my serial number, and I actually declined them. Matt chose "MadDawg" for his online alias, after an impromptu nickname given to him for someone that was introducing him in a brass quintet that year, while I chose "Shaf", a monosyllabic shortening of my last name.

And so MadDawg and Shaf joined forces, at the Kali server that seemed to have the biggest community built up (Kali Central). Going 2 on 2 against random opponents, we quickly realized that we were heads and shoulders above the majority of the opposition. It didn't even seem like we were that good, rather, our opponents merely seemed to be that bad. They never worked together, they rarely attacked, the simply seemed to build up their towns, playing Sim City, waiting to die. For nigh unto a month, MadDawg and I went undefeated. It was candy from a baby. After a time, we felt invincible, and cocky as hell.

That was when Shlonglor and Warpmaster stepped into our random game.

You don't know these names, most likely, but we certainly did, and if there was a Warcraft II equivalent of Michael Jordan stepping into your pick-up game, this was it. Shlonglor was royalty. He ran the most popular - practically the only - Warcraft II fansite on the net, which generated literally thousands of hits per day. He updated it almost constantly, several times a day, and MadDawg and myself had both gained a lot from reading his strategy guide (interestingly, that strategy guide has been preserved and is available here). He was a college student, and Warp was one of his roommates (Gotcha was the other, also a well-known name and very good player).

We resolved ourselves not to be intimidated, and to bring our A game, to see how good we really were. For a time, the game seemed very even. We fended off an early attack and launched a marginally successful counter, but as we were being repelled, the lag demon struck and the game slowed down to unplayability. This was an aberration - our ISP was generally very good, and Shlonglor and Warp were known to have a broadband connection - but when it hit, it hit bad. Shlonglor and Warp said that it was too bad and said they were going to quit, and we agreed. That agreement, it later turned out, was one of the things that warmed us to them; usually when the lag got bad, for some reason people got pissy. We wound up having a nice conversation with them that ended with Shlonglor saying that the two of us were too good to be launching random 2on2's at Kali Central, and that if we fixed our connection, we should join them on another server; at the time it was Starlink, though it rotated between there, Axxis, and a couple others. And just like that, we were in.

It had been a little surprising to hop onto Kali and find that it already had a bit of a community, but it was even more surprising to learn that that community had already formed a bit of an elite aristocracy. That ruling class revolved largely around Shlonglor, whose web page had made him famous, and whose skills backed up his rather big mouth. He reveled in the attention, but not in a simplistic way. Our nights became spent largely in arranging matches, discussing strategy, and just shooting the shit. MadDawg and I learned that these players were generally about on a level with us, which was reassuring, because we knew that these guys were the best. It's strange to think that when I was 17, I was considered to be one of the best in the world at something.

Now, the sample size was extremely small, and in the years to come, particularly once Starcraft came out and absolutely exploded in popularity, I faded down to mediocrity and never really distinguished myself. What made us the best wasn't really any innate skill, it was what today would be considered very basic. We strove to be efficient. We strove to be aggressive. And we knew that War2 was, at its core, a game of economics, where the one side that out-produced the other almost always wound up on top. Back then, that simply knowledge was enough to place you among the elite.

Shlonglor's strategy page was the epicenter of that school of thought, and yet, at the same time, even then I could see that it was rather amateurishly written and that Shlonglor's thoughts weren't always coherent. I was just learning HTML at the time, and as my ISP offered 5MB of storage space for you to set up a web site, should you so desire, I decided to do just that. Soon "Shaf's Warcraft II page" was born, with the idea that it would be a bit of a counterpoint to Shlonglor's; emphasizing the same sorts of strategy, but with better writing and a different take. I was sure to give credit where it was due, and was careful not to plagiarize, but I knew that I could create good content, and I feel that I did.

Most Warcraft II fansites offered the same sort of cookie cutter material; basic info on the game, system requirements, cheat codes, maybe an overview of the single player campaigns and, if you were lucky, even a walkthrough. What separated mine and Shlonglor's pages from the rest is that ours were the first (and, then, the only) pages to focus almost exclusively on multiplayer. My single player section was very short; it essentially said "do NOT rely on the strategies that you use to beat the computer to work on another human". The core of both of our sites were the strategy guides that we produced.

For that reason, Shlonglor, who generally eschewed links to other sites on his page (as he was innundated with such requests), actually gave mine a link. Overnight, my page exploded in popularity, and generated on average about 10 emails a day. It was getting hundreds of hits, most of them getting to the strategy section, and suddenly, people started recognizing me. It was a strange phenomenon, but I decided I liked it. Maintaining my own Warcraft II page had given me a place of prestige. I resolved to update my page as often as I could. And then I met Jenni.

Geek watch

I am currently playing FFXII on my PS2...

...while looking for party in FFXI on my laptop.

I have crossed a threshold in gaming geekhoood