Archive for July, 2005

The Drama of Weddings

Jul 20

Posted by rograndom in Journal, Korea | Comments off

Sunghee’s brother in Korea is almost 30, her father is almost 60. These are important numbers if the son is not married yet. There has been a huge push this year for him to get married and it’s been a pretty wild ride.

His profession is as a twe kwon do teacher. In the same building is a young woman who teaches piano. They have a student exchange program that works out well as the parents of the childern in the classes can get two classes in one place. They get engaged and start to rush a wedding for September, before Sunghee’s brother turns 30. This catches Sunghee totally by surprise as the original plan was to have the wedding in May 2006 so Sunghee could actually go.

Wrinkle 1: Sunghee’s brother has to move the twe kwon do school to a larger building due to the larger class sizes. Another twe kwon do school moves into the old space and the new twe kwon do teacher tells the young girl that he knows Sunghee’s brother, and that the pictures of Sunghee and CJ in his wallet are aren’t really his sister and nephew but of his wife and son.

Wedding is called off, bride and groom hate each other.

All is quiet for a couple of months until last night when Sunghee’s mother calls and says the wedding is back on for early September. And the girl’s family did feel bad about Sunghee not being able to make it, but now their son, the bride’s brother, is in Japan and cannot come back in time so it’s even because no siblings are coming. I don’t quite understand this logic, neither does Sunghee, but she thinks it’s because she’s been here too long. :)

Atlantic City 2005 (#2)

Jul 6

Posted by rograndom in Journal, Poker | Comments off

So I get a call that The Showboat is opening a poker room in the New House of Blues section of the casino, but they’d like to give the dealers some experience before the official launch. Would I like to come down and play for a couple of days and give them some feedback? “Well, are you going to stake me?”, I asked. “No. But we’ll give you some rooms.” “Alright then.”

We headed down on Friday night and stayed at Harrah’s on the Marina. The hotel rooms there are quite nice and very modern with dark wood floors. The new room is nice and the dealers are capable. Now onto the Showboat. First off, the tables: They’re red felt. $5 chips are red. The backs of one of the decks is red. Red is not a good color for the table. There’s also some logos for the WSOP on there with four aces on it (Including a BLACK Ace of Diamonds) which I would keep including in the board cards (“Oh! I flopped a ace! oh wait, that’s the logo”). They also have those deck shufflers which I was told cost $11,000 each. I was there within five hours of the room opening and they would break down once an hour or so. The dealers are very very green. Very nervous and some of them don’t even know how to make proper change let along control the table. I actually had to take in a couple of sessions at the Trop to make sure I didn’t end up killing one of the dealers.

The play was very soft though. Normally there was one fixed game (3/6, 4/8, 5/10) going on and one NL game (1/2). I stuck to the limit game. I’m assuming that these people also got called in, but some of them could’ve just wandered off the street, either way, I want to thank the Showboat for putting them on my table and letting me take their money.

And then onto the rest of the trip. Sunghee ended up with a nasty sunburn on her back on Sunday while I was splashing around in the ocean. We actually went to the hospital for some burn cream on Monday before we headed home.

On Sunday night we also ate at Carmine’s at the Trop. So so good. The Chicken Parm was amazing.