Day 1 in Costa Rica

Thursday, 19th November, 2009.

I woke up after the best sleep I’d had in months with no idea of what the time was, and sunlight streaming in through the window behind my head. Craning my neck around and looking out through the gap where the blind wasn’t fully pulled down over the window, I was greeted by a view that I could happily wake up to every morning. A handful of puffy white clouds did their best to stay out of each other’s way across a vibrant blue sky. I couldn’t see the sun yet from my current position, but it was already high enough for the waves to be catching its glare as they broke onto the beach that came up to about 10 feet away from my window. It was time to get up and explore!

I was struck by how surprisingly cool it was this morning compared to the heat of the previous evening. Maybe I was just travel weary last night and somehow more sensitive to temperature changes as a result, or maybe somehow during my sleep I had magically managed to acclimatise to the new environment. “What a miraculous thing the human body is” I thought as I made my way out of the guest house to greet this wonderful, Costa Rican morning. As I opened the door the tropical outdoor air poured into the room and immediately sent the temperature soaring. Feeling somewhat stupid, I mentally went back through the log file of my recent thoughts and did a find and replace on “human body”, substituting “air conditioning” in its place. It really was warm out here – of course they have AC indoors in a place like this. Remembering back to the previous night, I knew about this even then but had somehow failed to recall this upon first waking. I’ve spent my life in a country where domestic AC pretty much doesn’t exist, nor is it required, so I completely forgot about its existence until I stepped out into (what I hoped was) the morning air and realised that without it, I would have woken up in a pool of sweat and about 5lbs lighter.

Oh man, what a difference a day makes. It was Thursday morning now, and the last time I woke up (on Tuesday), I was greeted by a bitterly cold and howling wind, accompanied occasionally by a lashing rain. Now, today, I was already regretting my packing regime. Thinking back to the contents of my suitcase – 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of trainers, and some factor 15(!!!) sun cream, I had to laugh at myself for just how ill prepared I was for this climate. 35 consecutive British Novembers probably go some way toward forgiving me for this oversight, but that’s just making excuses. I found myself thinking back to that old Sting song “Englishman in New York” and re-writing the lyrics to suit the occasion:

I don’t wear flip flops I wear shoes my dear
I wear a sweater when outside
There are no shorts or suncream within easy reach
I’m an Englishman on the beach

Taking a walk out onto the beach itself, I finally got to survey my surroundings in full daylight. The house was a modern-looking terracotta coloured affair which was one of a small handful of individual designs situated directly on the beachfront. There was a pool and decking area next to the guesthouse, which were both located to the front of the main building. After that, only a short stretch of palm-tree-strewn, well maintained grass separated the house from the unspoilt beauty of the beach itself. The sand was darker than I would have imagined, which in photographs can sometimes come off as dull, but to see it in the flesh there was nothing dull about the place whatsoever.

A few paces down from the house was the complex’s communal pool/bar/lounging area, and the whole place was enveloped in an easy calm. In fact, excepting the unfamiliar noises of the local wildlife, the only signs of life around right now were 1 or 2 surfers out catching what must have been some early morning waves. The sun was about halfway up in the sky by this point, which led me to guess that it was sometime around 10-11am. Arriving back at the house after my very short stroll, I bumped into Mike (reef) who informed me it was 8:30. Having spoken to Mike online a fair amount while organising the trip, it was really nice to finally sit down and get to talk to him face to face. We sat around by the pool and saw the morning in for a while, generally chatting and getting to know each other as the world woke up around us. I found out that the days in Costa Rica, being so close to the equator, are largely the same the whole year round – the sun comes up some time around 5:30 and sets at roughly the same time each evening. In short order the maid arrived to begin her daily routine around the house, and not long after that other people started to emerge from various rooms. Matt (facestealer) materialised out of somewhere and offered us some breakfast. Yes please sir, I’m ravenous (you do great eggs btw).

A week earlier, on the 11th November, Matt had undertaken a personal challenge, and cashed out all but $100 from his Pokerstars account, with a view to seeing how much he could run it up to in the space of a month. At the time of writing he is up to somewhere around $4k, but when I first got there he had been getting spanked around by variance at the microlimit MTT SNGs, and after his 1st 1000 games or so was not too far away from where he first started. Rather than being a slur on his abilities as a poker player (because he’s great and definitely knows exactly what he’s doing) this just reinforced how brutal variance can be even when you have a huge edge in a particular game. You can follow his progress in his blog over on spacegravypoker.com, but to get back on track with the story, not long after breakfast he went to resume his challenge while Reef and I headed for our first session together.

Before going into the session I should probably describe the layout of the house at this point. As you walk through the front door you enter a large open plan living area with high-vaulted ceilings, which contains the kitchen, a dining table (used for grinding and not eating ldo), and an area for kicking back and watching tv or w/e. Immediately to the left of the entrance as you come in is a spiral staircase that leads to a mezzanine “office” area which was in the process of having the finishing touches put to it when I arrived. By the time I left it was replete with custom made tables, 3 pcs with 27 inch monitors, and comfortable seating for 4 or 5 players. While technically speaking, the front of the house was where the main entrance was, I tended to view it as the rear of the building, because the actual back of the house was where the main outdoor area and the beach was. So from this point on, if I say back of the house I mean the front, and vice verse. So, at the “back” of the house there were also 3 bedrooms – one master bedroom which essentially was its own wing, with separate private bathroom and wall length windows looking out toward the “front” of the house. Being the Spacegravy poker training centre I’m sure it’s pretty obvious whose room this was – that’s right: this was Reef’s room. There were 2 further bedrooms (both with en suite wet rooms/showers), and these were occupied by Matt and Bruce. If you stepped out onto the decking area – accessed through the kitchen at the front of the house – you could get round to the guesthouse, which was a 2 floor building separate from the main house and boasting the best views of the beach – it also caught the most morning sunlight which is great if you’re an early bird and probably -EV if you’re a night owl, because nothing short of lead curtains could prevent that Costa Rican sun from infiltrating every corner of the room once it had set its mind to it. Grayson lived on the top floor of this, and I was staying on the ground floor (where Demo would usually sleep if he wasn’t now trying to sleep on the sofa with 3 people and a maid all bustling around him – ahh demerz!). Finally, around by the pool at the front of the house was a staircase that led up to a roof terrace, which was great at night time when the stars were out, and apparently had offered a fantastic view of the meteor storm that had taken place the night before I arrived. As it turned out, it was also particularly useful on those occasions when you came home drunk and decided that what you really needed right about now was a good old climb on the roof (most of the time, the only monkeys in the area were housed on the roof of the house next door, but occasionally one would escape, disguise itself as Facestealer, and run riot on the rooftops of Casa Spacegravy).

Anyway, with that description out of the way, and confident I can now refer to different parts of the house in a way that makes some kind of sense to someone who’s never been there, on with the story:

So Matt had set up on the downstairs table to carry on grinding for his challenge, while me and Reef go up to the office to start my first session. I’ve grabbed my laptop as it had all my stuff on it and just plugged it straight into one of the office’s displays. Being a busto degen before coming out here I only had like $380 in my account. I’d hardly played over November through fear of running bad and busting my micro-roll and therefore turning up in Costa Rica with an empty account, so I knew we were probably going to start on the $6.50’s, which we did. It was explained to me that the ultimate goal was to get me playing the $12 45 and 180 mans, eventually moving to the $38s, because that’s where they felt the best money making potential was, providing you played them correctly ldo, but for now I think the main plan was just to get an idea of where my current game at the 9 mans stood. I was relieved to discover, as I had hoped, that there weren’t a huge number of issues with my early game. To be honest if I’d been getting this part completely wrong then I would have been really surprised, and I was anticipating that the edge these guys had in the games came from their push/fold skills when blinds got high and stacks got shallow. I’d already made the executive decision before undertaking this TR that I wasn’t going to post any actual strat that they taught me during my time there, which, while possibly disappointing for you guys, I feel is only fair on Grayson and the rest of the house. After all, this is their business, and for me to just give away their secrets for free in a public post would be pretty unfair. So while I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail about the advice I was given, suffice to say that, as expected, the deeper we got into the games, the more Mike started to highlight to me spots where I should be shoving wider or tighter – what my ranges should be under certain conditions, and how and when I should be reshoving or calling steals.

Thanks to this advice and a little rungood, I started off really well and managed to run the account up to about $600 over a couple of sets. By this time the rest of the house were all back from their morning swims/surfs (tough life) and were grinding themselves. Still set up next to Mike, I continued to run sets while he did the same, and when unsure of a spot I’d check with him before proceeding. I’d noticed that absolutely nobody in the house used Table Ninja or Holdem Manager/PT. It’s just sick how they could get the results they were getting without a HUD, and how they could 20+ table with no software to help them out. I start to make big mistakes if I load up more than say 12 tables, and that’s with the help of TN, so I don’t know wtf these guys had in their milk when they were babies, but I definitely wanted some. Because I had them set up and running, I thought I’d show some of the guy a few things TN and HEM can do, and I think at least a couple of them were pretty impressed. I know that Mike is now running a HUD and that the guys generally really like the tourney registering and BB display features of TN, so hopefully in some small way I left them with something that could give their own games a small extra edge.

In between grinding I’d often slip outside to take in the day and grab a quick cigarette. I pretty soon had myself my first Costa Rican smoking buddy in Demo. When you have a nasty habit it’s always nice to feel like you aren’t the only pariah, so maybe it was partly because of this that we seemed to hit it off pretty quickly and easily. Then again, it was probably just because Demo is an all-round good guy who it is probably impossible not to get along with. It was weird how at home I felt already and we were only halfway through day 1. Everybody was just incredibly chilled out and cool. They have all known each other for the longest time and go back years with each other, so it may have been potentially weird for someone completely strange just to turn up and be around them, but this wasn’t the case at all. I didn’t feel like the outsider one bit. Being the odd Euro, I was rolling cigarettes from a pouch of tobacco and some papers rather than pulling a cigarette from a pack, and it wasn’t long before I had Demo doing the same. I even ended up with Matt and Mike asking me to roll them one of my weird little cigarettes. It’s fair to say that I probably sealed my reputation as the nicotine pusher out there pretty quickly. You teach me how to crush SNGs and in return I’ll show you how to roll your own – fair trade imo (especially for Bruce and Grayson who don’t smoke).

Around 5:30, as anticipated, the sun set over the pacific. As I was in the middle of a set at the time I missed it. Disappointed that I’d not stepped out to witness this, I made a mental note to not be playing this time tomorrow so I could witness this first hand. What I wasn’t expecting was how soon it got dark after that. Within 20 minutes of the sun dropping below the horizon it was pitch black outside. The light always fades much more gradually than that where I come from, so by the time it was 6pm it felt like it was 9. Just an hour previously it had still been a full blown day out there, and now it was deadest night. It was time to eat.

Perhaps due to a lack of ingredients in the house, perhaps due to not being bothered to cook, or perhaps just due to wanting to show me a good time, it was decided that we would go into Jaco for dinner. Jaco is the nearest proper town to Hermosa Palms, roughly 7 kilometers away. Jaco itself has quite a reputation as a tourist hotspot, and the local economy seemed to be set up to cater to the legions of travellers and surfers who would descend on it during high season to take advantage of the incredible surfing that the region offered. I was also to discover that it enjoyed a roaring trade in prostitution, which was legal in Costa Rica. I was warned to watch out for any girls in high heels, as apparently this was the portable equivalent of a red light in a bedroom. As they had not been out there for long and had yet to sort out there own transport, this meant a taxi every time we wanted to go into town. The ride from Hermosa Palms to Jaco was about 5,000 Colones which apparently is roughly $10, which is roughly £6. I had a ton of fun with my 3 way currency conversions during my time out there. So it was that myself, Grayson, Bruce, Demo, Matt and Mike jumped into a taxi and headed out to eat.

I can’t remember the name of the restaurant we went to, but it was a comfortable, semi-outdoor affair in downtown Jaco. The bulk of the town itself all seemed to be based on one street which ran for about a mile and a half from end to end – dominated by bars, restaurants, gift shops, and the occasional supermarket or strip club. Reminders of the corporate West were kept to a refreshing minimum, although I do remember seeing a KFC and a Subway during my time there. Fortunately however, where we were sat now was squarely local and hopefully authentic. The waiter came to take our order and we started with a round of drinks and some nachos. Grayson ordered a round of Pilsen (the local beer), and because I had decided in advance that I wanted to stay sober on this trip in order to try and absorb as much as possible in my time there, I changed my order to a Coke. Let’s see how long this push for sobriety lasts Gazillion – I give you 24 hours before you crack personally. For the main course I wanted to start things off with something nice and local, and order some rice and chicken dish. I can’t remember what it was called, but it may well have just been called “rice and chicken”. One thing you discover pretty quickly about Costa Rica is that most of the locals speak pretty good English, but this didn’t stop Grayson from practising his Spanish at every given opportunity. “Que?”……”Que?”…….”Que?”. My hat’s off to you Spacegravy – your accent was perfect! During the course of the meal a local peddlar appraoched us trying to sell us what was, apparently, the national instrument of Costa Rica, which effectively looked like a pig-shaped noseflute. He signalled his approach by serenading us with a badly out of tune version of “smoke on the water”. Credit where credit’s due – he had his sales patter down and after 5 minutes of animated demonstrations and introductions around the table he had managed to clean a couple of the guys out to the tune of about $17 for two of these “hand made” trinkets. Pura vida amigo. Suckers!

When it came time to settle the bill they all played credit card roulette for it. They absolutely would not let me pay a thing toward the meal. This generosity was a pattern that was to repeat itself again and again over the course of the week. Once again I have to stress how much these guys went out of their way to show me a good time during my stay. Everything was taken care of. If they ever come over to Europe I can only hope to be half the host to them as they were to me. Iirc Spacegravy lost the first CC roulette and picked up the tab. Matt has apparently won every time since they’d moved out there, and his rungood off the tables was to continue for the duration of my trip. He might have been getting soulcrushed at the microlimits, but he was the Darvin Moon of credit card roulette.

On the way back to the house we stopped off at a local supermarket to pick up a few supplies. I think it was called “MasXMetro” or something like that (correct me if I’m wrong guys). After that it was back home in another cab for a chilled out evening that involved a little bit of grinding, a bunch of hanging around the pool, and generally enjoying the balmy tranquility of life by the ocean.

Having woken up early I was ready to crash by about midnight. Tomorrow was to be my first session with Spacegravy and I wanted to be alert for it, so I did the sensible thing and went to bed, hoping that Spacegravy was going to follow suit shortly after. Important note: as gay as this sounds, and as much as Suzzer will want it to signal the start of tales of man-love in the tropics, it was purely because he knew how to work the air-con. Trying to sleep without it was going to be a tall order. Sorry Suzzer………..

Travelling and Arriving

Part 1a

Away from the Grey

Wednesday, 18th November, 2009. 3:30am GMT

I’m stood at the bus station in Plymouth (UK) with a rucksack on my back and a suitcase by my side. Plymouth bus station is kinda weird in that it has 2 nightclubs in it, outside one of which I’ve bumped into an old friend who’s out in the bitter winter weather promoting a night of his which is taking place over the coming weekend. As we stand around chit-chatting while I wait for my bus to show I can’t help but think that this is the last familiar face I’m going to see for the next 8 days, and from this point on every single person I interact with is going to be completely new to me. Instantly there was something really liberating about that – a whole week without idle banter with people to whom you’ve said the same things 1000 times before. A whole week where every conversation I have will be with somebody I’ve never previously spoken to – somebody with totally different points of reference to my own. I liked that. As much as I loved the guy I was chatting with, I jut wanted to cut the conversation short and get on with getting away.

By this time I’d been awake for about 5 hours – I’d been deliberately shifting my bodyclock around a few days prior to the trip, so that by last night (Tuesday) I’d fallen asleep at 4pm and woken up at 10pm, giving me enough time to get all my shit together, and ensuring that if I were to fail to sleep during the journey I’d be exhausted by the time I finally arrived at Camp Spacegravy. I was set to get there for around midnight on the following day which meant, due to Costa Rica being 6 hours behind my current time zone, that my total travel time from now was going to be in the region of 27 hours.

So there I am – stood in a freezing cold bus station about to embark on phase 1 of the longest journey I will have undertaken in my life to date. Those who have been following this will already know that I’ve never flown before, which is kinda weird in this day and age for someone of my mileage (a near-jurassic 35). I’ve barely even left the country before, and if you choose to discount the 5 day school trip to northern France when I was 11 then I’ve actually never properly been “abroad” in my life. To think I was about to pop my travelling cherry with a 13,000 mile round trip seemed to be at least semi-retarded. Why oh why didn’t I break myself in nice and gently with a weekend jaunt over to Paris, or a cheeky flight to Rome? Was I moving up too quickly and playing outside of my roll taking on such an epic trip as my first? Well, there’s no turning back now, so let’s just hope to run good 1 time…

As the bus rolls into the station around 3:45am I go through one final panic procedure – passport? Check. Laptop? Check. International power adapter for laptop? Check. Camera? Check. Plane tickets? Check. Money? Check (ish – does $80 + £60 count??). Fortunately, due to the ridiculous departure time, the bus is far from crowded and is gratifyingly clean and modern, so I get to sprawl out across 2 seats as we roll out of the station bound for London Heathrow airport. A fully loaded iPod and some noise isolating headphones (or IEMs to any audio nerds out there) do their best to alleviate the boredom of the proceeding 4.5hrs of the unchanging, monotone landscape that is your typical British motorway journey, and 6 albums later the squat, grey concrete bulk of Heathrow looms out of the early morning mist. As an ambassador to the UK Heathrow does an appaling job – one of the ugliest, sprawling quick-pour patchwork monstrosities of badly conceived 1960’s planning I’ve ever come across.

Apparently (according to the smugly jolly announcement from our bus driver upon arrival) it’s cited as the world’s most hated airport, and I don’t find it hard to appreciate why. The one thing I’ll say in its favour is that the complex itself is so devoid of aesthetic appeal and has so little to commend it that any desire one may have already had to get the hell out of this country is magnified 100x once you submit to the dirty embrace of this nasty fucking airport.

I was sort of worried that, being a total noob, I was due for an epic fail when it came to checking in. Fortunately, the whole process was pretty obvious, quick and painless, even though it did feel kinda weird to go through airport security procedures for the first time. Standing around with my shoes and belt in a tray and carrying my toiletries in a see-through bag for the world to inspect was a fairly bizarre experience, made even more ridiculous by the sight of scores of other people from all walks of life doing exactly the same thing – businessmen in suits, dreadlocked hippies in tie dye, the blue rinse brigade in track suits and hearing aids, and nervous-looking muslims fully expecting to be “randomly selected” for a full body cavity search at any given moment. If I’d ever felt curious to know what it was like to feel “processed” before, then I need no longer worry as that is now one experience I am fully familiar with.

Once through security I found myself with 2 hours to kill before my flight and desperately in need of a cigarette. Being the silly, naive, handsome little fool that I am I’d thought to myself earlier “well, I’ll just get all this check in and security business out of the way first, then I’ll smoke myself into oblivion before the flight as it’ll be the last chance I get for about 18 hours or so – they’re bound to have some sort of semi-outdoor smoking area around here somewhere.” Lol. Get a brain moran! I went up to one of the airport officials to ask about the existence of such an area, and she informed me (through several layers of foundation and half a gallon of perfume) that I was welcome to go out on the runway and smoke myself silly, but I might have to keep an eye out for passing traffic. Oh, withering sarcasm, how I’m going to miss you over the coming week. % won at showdown vs airport villains = 0.

So, all hopes of a last minute nicotine fix having been firmly dashed upon the unmoving rocks of overly-cosmeticised airport officialdom, I set to exploring the fascinating new world of Heathrow Terminal 4’s international departures lounge. In almost no time at all I started to experience the strangest sense of deja-vu as I ambled along – didn’t I just pass that duty-free shop a moment ago? I’m pretty sure that Starbucks looks familiar. Oh look, there’s that bookshop again. Every now and then there’d be some outfit trying to sell you Gucci underpants or Moschino hand luggage, but by and large walking down the concourse of Terminal 4 was like taking the Groundhog Day ride at Disneyworld.

Eventually, after passing my 14th Dan Brown window display, I found what I was looking for – an electronic goods store. See, I’d borrowed my brother’s camera 2 nights ago, but as he’d just moved into a new place a lot of his stuff was still all boxed up in the basement, and try as he might (bless him) he couldn’t find the charger for the now-flat battery in his camera. There’s no way I was going half way round the world to one of the most highly regarded beaches on the Pacific coast of Central America, surrounded by mountains and all sorts of strange and exotic wildlife without at least firing off a few snapshots as keepsakes. Besides, 2p2 is a tough crowd, and they’d never forgive me if I didn’t provide pics with my TR, so there was only one thing for it – I’d have to pick up a universal battery charger at the airport.

I walked into the store with a huge flashing “sucker” sign plastered across my forehead and headed straight for the photographic section. The moment my feet stopped moving a slick looking salesman with greased back hair and a name badge that read “Sanjay (87/68/inf)” materialised out of nowhere, sporting the kind of smile that said “I hate you”.

“How can I help you today Sir?”

“Well, I have this camera here, and the battery is dead, so I…”

“So what you’ll needing then is a new battery. No problem. We have just want you want right here. That’ll be £45. Do you want to pay by cash, credit card, or blood?”

“Um, well actually I was thinking more about getting a char….”

“Ahh so what you’ll be wanting then in which case sir is our universal international battery charger that comes complete with an international power adapter. That’ll be just £60 to you. Now if you’ll just give me your direct debit details so we can randomly remove funds from your bank account twice a month for the rest of your life….”

“Well, ah, actually I already have the international adapter thing so really all I need is the charger please.”

“I see. And you bought that from us did you sir?”

“Um no, sorry. I got it somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else. Well sir, we strongly recommend our own international adapters to go with any goods we sell. I can do that for you today at just £15. Would you like the 5 year protection plan to go with that for £349.99?”

“Actually, I honestly think I’ll be fine with the adapter I already have. If it’s not too much trouble can I just get the charger by itself please?”

“This is most unprecedented sir. Obviously we can’t be held responsible if your current adapter turns out to be faulty and explodes on the plane burning you and 300 other people to a crisp and leaving your relatives with nothing to bury when they finally scrape you off the ocean floor. But, the customer is always right I suppose. DEEPAK, CAN YOU GRAB A CRAPTEL XV694a FROM THE BACK ROOM FOR THIS GENTLEMAN? NO INTERNATIONAL ADAPTER”

“Sorry, did you say *no* international adapter?”

“THAT’S WHAT THE GENTLEMAN WANTS”

“Did you tell him about the risk of death by horrific burning?”

“YES, THE GENTLEMAN IS ADAMANT”

“This is most unprecedented.”

“QUITE. I HAVE ALREADY EXPLAINED THIS TO THE GENTLEMAN. HE SEEMS HAPPY TO RISK THE LIVES OF HIS FELLOW PASSENGERS. IF YOU SEE REPORTS OF A PLANE EXPLODING OVER THE ATLANTIC ON THE NEWS TONIGHT, AT LEAST YOU’LL KNOW WHOSE FAULT IT IS. PLEASE FETCH THE CHARGER FOR THE GENTLEMAN. If you’d like to accompany me to the desk sir then we can clean you out and have you on your way in no time”

And so I exit the store £50 lighter and sporting a brand new piece of shit hunk of plastic that will in time prove itself to be utterly worthless and ineffective. Fuck you Dixons, and fuck you Sanjay.

The ordeal left me with just enough time to nip over to news kiosk #37 and pick up a bottle of water and a couple of packets of gum before the announcement came over the PA that Continental Flight 5 for George Bush Houston International Airport was now boarding at Gate 3. Gate 3 was a little over 4 miles away at the other end of the concourse, so I quickly gathered my belongings together and set off at a mad dash. My mad dash was hampered somewhat by the waddling of a surly Texan couple with matching 76″ waists, his and hers walking sticks, and ankles that could feed a family of 4 for a month occupying the breadth of the concourse, loudly professing to each other how they couldn’t wait to get home to Dallas and to see the back of this crummy little country. My polite “excuse me”‘s as I tried to squeeze past these not-so-happy campers were met with a look of steely derision from 2 identical pairs of eyes set 8 inches back in the recesses of two of the fleshiest faces I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I caught a whiff of them as I somehow managed to slip past them – a tantalising waft of ranch dressing and barbecue sauce. And ass. Oh God, pleeeeease let me be seated next to this wonderful couple for a full 11 hours.

I lucked out and rolled up to the line just as my row number was being called. I handed over my boarding pass and passport for inspection, and was then ushered down the gangway for me to set foot on an airplane for the first time ever. At the entrance to the Boeing 777-200 I was greeted by an orange, gum chewing lady in her late 30’s dressed in Continental Airways attire. I presented her with my boarding pass and said “Hi”. She masticated her “howdy’s” back at me and pointed me toward the back of the plane. I remember getting this weird feeling of claustrophobia as I crossed the threshold into the plane and caught sight of what seemed like hundreds of people and thousands of pieces of hand luggage all trying to cram themselves into somewhere that looked like it was designed to seat 10. Mike (reef2287), had booked my tickets for me, and had really thoughtfully requested a window seat for me, which I’d very much wanted given that it was my first time up above the clouds, and I’d ended up being assigned seat 27a, which was at the rear of the wing and allowed you a view of the ground if you craned your head backward somewhat. I found my seat, discovered there was no more overhead storage space, so squeezed into my designated spot with my rucksack down between my legs. It was a bit of a tight fit, but at least I had a view, and even better – I’d passed Mr & Mrs Texas further up the plane as they were trying to squeeze themselves into their first class seats, filling the aisle with buttcrack as they did so.

After another 10 minutes or so of people bustling around, jostling for storage space and trying to negotiate seat swaps, it was announced that the doors to the plane were being sealed. There was a fairly terrifying sense of finality that accompanied those words, as it was then that it struck me that this pressure-sealed tin tube was, like it or not, going to be my home for the next 11 hours. Half of me was freaked out by this thought, and the other half was completely giddy – this is 100% happening. Right now. No more talking about it, no more “one day”. It was now an absolute given that I was about to be ferried away to faraway lands, and the next time that I set foot on solid ground it would be on an entirely different continent half way around the world. That is, assuming my international power adapter didn’t blow up mid flight and send us all plummeting to our horrifically painful deaths somewhere over the Atlantic. Why didn’t I listen to Sanjay???

Before I knew it the floor had started to vibrate and we were moving. Drama! OK, so we were only taxiing out onto the runway at about 15mph, but cut me some slack – I’m a noob, remember? The plane apparently had joined a queue of other planes all waiting in line for access to the main runway so they could take off, and from where we were I had a full view of all the planes aheads of us accelerating along that strip of tarmac and eventually lifting off and heading to the skies. 1, 2, 3, 4….. still no exploding engines. I was trying to figure out if that was good or bad – good because it was reassuring to see these hunks of metal not randomly bursting into flames, or bad because the fact that they *didn’t* burst into massive fireballs infinitesimally increased my own plane’s chances of being the next news headline. As I was thinking this, we had managed to find ourselves at the top of the runway, and it was now our turn to depart. It was then that the plane’s engines properly kicked in for the first time. At almost the exact same moment my sphincter handed me its resignation, effective immediately. Holy shit, I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t know what I was expecting to be honest, but the sheer force of the engines springing to life was a huge “oh crap” moment. Fortunately, the “do not evacuate your bowels in public” light came on at that precise moment, so I was spared any potentially humiliating body fails.

The take off was a mixture of pure exhilaration and abject terror. Eyes firmly glued to the window, I said my goodbyes to England, and couldn’t help but think that Heathrow looked like a lot less of a shithole the smaller it got……

Part 1b

Life in a Tin Tube

It was a foggy morning, so we were in cloud cover in seconds. As we climbed up and away, the view outside was little more than a wing surrounded by mist. Satisfied that there wasn’t going to be much to see out there for a while, I settled back into my chair to enjoy the sensation of having not erupted into flames. Initial panic/excitement over, I got on with the task of accustoming myself to what was to be my home for the next half a day. I started to get used to the weird noises of the plane (they NEVER make this much noise in the movies), and generally prepared myself for being a good passenger for the duration of the trip.

It was then that my head exploded.

I’ve never had a migraine before, and I’ve never had a headache which has made me make audible sounds of distress, nor had I ever read anywhere about air travel being painful (unless you count blowing up in a huge fireball), so I was completely unprepared for what was about to happen. It’s hard to describe because it wasn’t like a normal headache, but if you’ve ever seen those plasma ball things – you know, those glass balls that you place your hands on and weird electric sparks dance around inside them – then that’s the only way I can describe what was going on in my head. It was like random jolts of indescribably intense, sharp, tearing pain striking at different points in and around my skull. I couldn’t figure out if it was blood vessels bursting, if I was having some sort of aneurism, or even if I’d been walking around with a brain tumour that was just waiting for an altitude shift for in order for it to rupture and wreak havoc on me. Whatever it was, it was fucking painful and scary. Thinking there was a good chance it was altitude and pressure related, and thinking back to some advice I’d been given before setting off to take some aspirin in order to thin the blood, my first request of the orange gum lady as she made her preliminary round of the cabin was for some aspirin and some water. To her credit, as I was visibly in a huge amount of pain and distress, she responded swiftly and mercifully to my request, and in only 25 short minutes of fearful agony she returned with a small sachet of medication and half a cup of water. Let it never be said that the Continental cabin crew don’t go above and beyond to ensure that your every insignificant whim is catered to.

After about another 30 minutes or so, and to my overwhelming relief, the pain began to subside very rapidly, and within another 5 minutes it had all but vanished. Happy that I wasn’t about to die from Randomly Exploding Brain Syndrome any more, I got stuck into some serious hospitality and AVOD abuse. I avoided drinking any alcohol because a) I’d just dropped a bunch of aspirin, and b) each alcoholic drink was $5 (or if you had UK currency they’d happily serve you a drink for just £4, which is about $6.50. Naturally this is only fair and our own fault for using such stupid money). However, if those fuckers thought that they were going to have a single drop of orange juice left on the plane by the time we touched down in Texas, they had another thing coming. I was gonna crush that drink by the half-canfull for as long as they kept pouring it.

We’d broken through the clouds by this point and the view outside the window was now one of crystal blue skies set over a landscape of pristine white cloud. It looked absolutely beautiful. I got bored of it in about 2 minutes and decided to see if they had Airport ’77 as one of the in-flight movies. Disappointed that my search was fruitless I channel surfed until lunch was served.

The next few hours were dull and uneventful (which I ought to be thankful for) – no bad turbulence, no shortage of orange juice, no cries of “Allah Akbar” coming from the front of the plane. I’d bought a couple of books with me, an iPod, a laptop loaded with TV shows, movies, poker videos and ebooks, a copy of Rosetta Stone Spanish, and there was also the in-flight entertainment, but for some reason I couldn’t be bothered with any of it. For the most part I just sat back with my eyes closed, occasionally checking the AVOD system for updates as to which part of the world we were currently flying over.

The route the plane was taking was to skirt over the southern coast of Greenland, down through the eastern side of Canada, and then over into Michigan and through the midwest down into Texas. As we got close to the Canadian/US border the clouds began to clear outside, and I looked down upon foreign soil for the first time. We were approaching the great lakes, and large bodies of water had begun to punctuate the surrounding (seemingly unspoiled from this altitude) terrain. As the inflight computer map indicated that we were just about over lake Michigan, an altogether bigger body of water to all the others that had come before it appeared below me. I remember thinking “wow, that’s a pretty big lake”. I was still thinking “wow, that’s a pretty big lake” as a gargantuan coastline that I couldn’t see the end of drifted into view. That “big lake” that I’d been naively looking at was a puddle next to what was rapidly expanding below me. Lake fucking Mothership. I was completely stunned. I checked the flight details again on the computer – we were definitely inland and this was not the ocean. This was indeed a lake for crying out loud. At this point in time we were cruising at an altitude of 38,000 feet at a speed of 550mph. At that height and at that speed it still took a full 15 minutes before the opposing coastline came into view. I knew the great lakes were supposed to be big, but I had no concept that something could be that ridiculously huge and not be an ocean. I had to totally re-evaluate my sense of scale for the rest of the trip, as it was becoming incredibly clear that what I was now flying over was an order of magnitude larger than the cookie crumb of a rock I’ve spent my life on.

Part 1c

Houston, we don’t have a problem, do we?….

After the culture shock of lake Michigan, the rolling patchwork landscape of the midwest was much easier to get my head around. Sure, it was big and vast, but that’s what landmasses are supposed to be, right? I mean, America is so ridiculously huge, especially for someone coming from a country where you could pretty much drive from end to end in a matter of hours, but it’s still easier to digest the concept of a huge area being full of fields or mountains or cities, and not full of lakes that are almost the size of my entire country. After while, I stopped paying attention to it until we began our descent into Houston. The cabin crew came round with immigration and customs forms for us to fill in, and I finally got the opportunity to confirm in writing that I didn’t have any communicable diseases, any physical or mental disorders, wasn’t trafficking viruses or cultures, and had never been convicted of a criminal offense in the US.

I dutifully filled out all the paperwork, and turned my eye to the window again, as we were rapidly descending and in clear site of Houston. Catching a glimpse of the nearest highway/freeway to the airport, I couldn’t help but notice that every single vehicle on the roads was an SUV.

Touchdown was marginally petrifying but otherwise uneventful, as I was an old hand at this flying business by now. What I wasn’t so experienced in, however, was entry to the US. Off the plane and into the airport, following the signs to immigration (actually, just following everybody else), I was instantly struck by how new and pristine this airport was compared to the sinkhole I was in 12 hours ago. Everything was spotless and efficient. Occasionally a robotic woman came on over the PA to issue some standard warning about terror status being set to orange and to be on the lookout for anything resembling Osama Bin Laden, delivered in a politely formal way but with undertones to her voice that said “and if you don’t it’s straight to Guantanamo for you, you fucking camel jockey”.

Having successfully followed a bunch of other travel weary people over to immigration, I got in line and waited for another round of processing. I ended up striking up a conversation with a friendly official who must have picked up on my accent when I asked him if I was in the right line, and he proceeded to regale me with his stories of the time he spent a week in England. Liverpool to be precise. “Man, those guys are rough, and they sure do drink a lot”. You hit the nail on the head son. Eat it, Liverpool!

Eventually it was my turn to be seen, and I went up past the bulletproof glass and armed guards to the guy who was to process my entry into the US. He took my passport and other documents, tapped a few keys into a computer and then said

“right four fingers on the scanner please sir”.

“Excuse me?”

He looked up from what he was doing and stared me in the eye. When he spoke again, it was more slowly and deliberate than before.

“Please place your right four fingers on the scanner in front of you”

Seriously? You’re going to take my fingerprints?? Really???

“Right thumb”

“Left four fingers”

“Left thumb”

“Now look into the iris scanner for me”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING????????

After being “databased” I had a couple of hours to kill before my connecting flight to Costa Rica. Once again, I used this time to explore the charms of yet another international departures lounge. While largely following the same format as the one in the UK, this one was altogether larger, brighter, cleaner and airier. I decided to ruin myself by eating something I’d never had the chance to eat before, so I found a Wendy’s and decided to order the biggest burger they had. After looking at the menu and realising their biggest burger had about 6lbs of meat in it, I adjusted my goals somewhat and settled for a double bacon cheeseburger thing which was about 1/4 of the size of the behemoth octuple burger pictured next to it. Even settling for the midrange menu item that I did, I could practically hear my colon groaning in protest after I was about halfway through it. I got about 3/4 of the way through and gave up. Hauling myself out of my seat, I waddled toward the gate my flight departed from, my stomach issuing some disturblingly loud gurgling noises with every heavy footstep. I’ll be ready for you next time, Wendy. Oh yes, I’ll be ready……..

The flight out of Houston took off just as the sun was setting over Texas. The plane was a smaller affair this time, but somehow felt more comfortable. Also, the cabin crew (Continental, again) on the Latin American leg of the journey seemed much warmer and friendlier than those on the transatlantic flight. Only 3hrs 45mins long, this flight was going to be a breeze compared to the one I’d just done.

Part 1d

“Hello, my name is Dorothy, and I’m certainly not in fucking Kansas any more…”

The heat hit me the moment I got off the plane.

No, I don’t mean outside, or even in the airport. I mean literally the second I stepped foot off the plane in San Jose, Costa Rica. The wall of heat, even this late at night, was totally beyond anything I was expecting. Hint – next time somebody tells you that you’re heading to a tropical country, expect it to be hot when you get there! Immigration and baggage collection was painless, although the second I left the airport I realised I’d left my iPod on the plane. dfjkdgsfgjkagdsjksafgjkdsgkjsdghafsjkgh!!

Oh well, who cares? I’m practically there. I was starting to get really excited now. I’d been up for well over 30 hours by this point, but the novelty of stepping foot out of an airport to a whole new country in a whole new continent for the first time in my life was enough to brush away any tiredness I may have felt. Stumbling out into the hustle and bustle of the San Jose night, I was greeted by a line of Costa Rican drivers all trying to welcome me into their taxis. At the end of this line though was the most beautiful sight I’d seen all day – an a4 sheet of paper with my name printed on it. A friendly smile broke out on the face of the driver as I made eye contact with him and motioned towards him. His smile was nothing like Sanjay’s.

“Hola. Lo siento, mi Español es muy mal. ¿Hablas Ingles?”

“Don’t worry about that man, I speak English pretty good. You want to go to Playa Hermosa, right?”

Flippin’ sweet!

Once again I have to thank Mike (reef2287) for being totally on it and booking a cab to collect me from the airport. I’d been travelling for a long time, and negotiating a 90 minute trip in a strange land where I could have easily been scammed/driven up into the mountains and force fed cocaine and shipped on the first flight out to Florida wasn’t an enticing prospect, so the sight of my name and a friendly face was whatever the visual equivalent of “music to my ears” was.

The driver was great. On the way down to Playa Hermosa he filled me in on the geography of the country, asked me if I wanted to stop to grab anything to eat, or to get a beer, or maybe a bottle of water. He explained where we were in the country as we went up one mountain then down another, through a small town here and past a tiny village there. Everything I may have heard about the warmth and friendliness of the Costa Rican people prior to this trip was confirmed in an instant by this guy. I’d had another weird head explosion on landing in Costa Rica and noticing that I kept rubbing my head, he fished into his bag and pulled out some aspirin for me, which I took (and woke up the next day with all my organs – bonus!) and he generally just did what he could to make me feel welcome in his country. How often would a British taxi driver do that to a visiting Central American? I’ll take the under.

Finally we roll up to Hermosa Palms, which is where I was headed. As we pass through the front gate we leave behind the darkness of the Costa Rican night and enter a gently lit private “village”, full of palm trees and beautiful houses. Even the smell of the air was different to anything I’d experienced before. The cab pulls up at a house where the front door is already open. I jump out of the taxi and the driver goes to fetch my bags from the back of the cab as I walk up to the door to check I’m in the right place. There’s a bunch of guys inside sat at laptops with Pokerstars tables clearly visible from where I was stood. I’m pretty sure this is the place (ya think?). Sensing someone at the door, the guy at the nearest computer turns round and sees me. He immediately gets up and comes over to shake my hand, and, smiling, welcomes me to Costa Rica.

“Hi, I’m Grayson by the way”

“Mike.”

Michael (reef) runs out to pay the driver and help me with the bags(thanks man!), and after I’ve thanked the driver myself I turn back into the house and get introduced to all the guys. There was Grayson (Spacegravy), Mike, Matt (facestealer), Bruce and Demo. The last two I wasn’t aware of before arriving, but both of them were instantly super warm and welcoming. I was offered food, showers, a tour of the house, and then they took me out into the garden where I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time – gently rolling in along the beach under a sky with a million stars in it. All worries I may have had at the back of my head about anything completely evaporated within 2 minutes of arriving. First impressions were hugely positive and everybody went out of their way to be incredibly welcoming. It was gone midnight at this point, and I was absolutely shattered. Demo had given up his room for me for the duration of my stay, and had consigned himself to the sofa, which I will be forever grateful for, so after a half hour or so of hanging around, chatting with the guys, and generally soaking up the fact that I was finally here, I headed off to bed, ready to start bright eyed and bushy tailed the next day……

Pre-flight checklist: verbal and actual diarrhea

Warning: as my first, introductory entry on this blog, this post is going to be ponderous and rambling, and full of unnecessarily long sentences (I will also unapologetically abuse italicised, bracketed remarks up to the eyeballs). If my verbosity drives you nuts while trying to read this, then please accept my semi-sincere apologies and don’t worry – I’ll try to keep successive posts brief, on topic, and concise to the point of being terse. But for now, allow me my inane waffle…..

Well folks, in a little less than 23 hours from now I will physically disconnect from Terra Firma for the first time in my 35.6 years on this planet, as Continental Airlines flight 5 departs from Heathrow to Houston on the first leg of my first ever air trip. My destination? Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica. I just looked it up online – the distance between London (Heathrow) and Jaco (the nearest town in CR) is 5470 miles, or 8802Km. Add to that the 200 miles or so that I have to travel to get to the airport in the first place and we’re looking at a grand total of nearly 5700 miles. Total travel time – 27 hours. That means that for the next day and a bit I will be travelling 211 miles every hour, from which I can extract that after just 2 hours I will officially be the furthest away from home that I’ve ever been, by quite a large margin. When I put it in those terms, it makes me feel like I’ve lived an incredibly sheltered life. How the hell have I gotten to nearly middle age and never set foot on a plane? How can I be the sage, fascinating, worldly-wise fellow that I so obviously am without straying so much as 400 miles from where I live? It’s clearly time to stop reading about the rest of the world and start seeing a bit of it, and it just so happens that the first bit of “out there” that I’m going to see is a very sexy looking house right on the doorstep of one of the best surfing beaches on the Central American Pacific coast. Too bad I don’t surf then. Or swim. Is there anything that I have done?

For those that don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself and clue you in a little to what all this is about. Hi! My name’s Mike Quayle. I post on twoplustwo.com under the screen name of Gazillion. Don’t ask me why I chose the name Gazillion as there’s no rhyme or reason to it (if you must know I was in a hurry to create an account on the forum and I had to pick a user name. I settled for the first unique looking word that fell into my peripheral vision, which happened to be on another webpage I was browsing at the time. Deep, I know. Actually I regret the choice of name in hindsight, because now that I’m a regular on the forum, all the other regs commonly refer to me as Gaz, which feels somewhat strange given that my name isn’t Gary or Gareth. Gaz somehow seems……. retarded). Anyway, recently this alter-ego of mine came into some good fortune. In order to explain this good fortune, I’m going to have to use the word phenom for the first time in living memory:

Online poker phenom Grayson Physioc (otherwise known as Spacegravy) has recently taken it upon himself to set up shop in Costa Rica. After winning gazillions (yeah, I said it) of dollars playing poker online, he has decided to share his knowledge with the poker playing public, and as such is opening the doors of his newly-acquired beach house to eager students of the game who, in exchange for what mortal people would consider an inordinate amount of money (but in reality is actually rather reasonable considering what’s on offer), will get drip-fed into their brains the super-secret Spacegravy formula for crushing low-to-mid stakes SitNGos. Seriously, a week of one-on-one time with one of the best players in his field custom tailoring his coaching specifically to your needs in order to help you improve and progress to games that were previously beyond your abilities is an offer that I’m sure a whole lot of people are going to be very sorely tempted by. Were that not enough, he’s brought along a couple of friends to help him, and speaking in strictly poker terms, both of them are sickos – the first is Michael “reef2287” Grasewicz, and the second is Matt “facestealer” Volosovich. That’s a lot of weird-ass last names under one roof, and it’s only going to get weirder when I arrive. While I have never met any of these people before in my life, it is comforting to know that when we’re finally face-to-face less than 2 days from now, we’ll already be on common ground by virtue of the fact that all of us have last names that at least one person per week is guaranteed to mispronounce or misspell. Anyway, to get back on point, take a trip on over to Sharkscope and see for yourself what these guys are capable of. Both collectively and individually, it is clear that they know precisely what they’re doing when it comes to poker.

So what do I have to do with all this and where do I fit into the story? Well, upon announcing the opening of his new training centre, Grayson decided it would be both a nice thing to do and good publicity to offer a free week of one-on-one (or three-on-one) training to one person. Not only would these fine fellows be giving up a week of their valuable time at no cost, but they would also be flying that person out to Costa Rica to join them. That’s right – flight, accommodation and training – all 100% gratis. Such an awesome thing to do – show me one other poker tuition company that comes anywhere close to offering something like this and I’ll take my hat off to you (exposing my rapidly receding hairline in the process). There was obviously massive interest in this offer when he made the announcement on 2p2, and he encouraged anybody who wanted to be in with a chance to send him an email outlining why they would want to be the “chosen one”  and how they could benefit from the coaching. Eagle-eyed forum hound that I am, this thread went completely unnoticed by me until I received a PM from fellow STTf (Single Table Tournament forum for those not in-the-know) regular Suzzer99 pointing me in the right direction. Suzzer, to this day I still owe you a huge THANK YOU for clueing me in to this ❤  After reading Grayson’s post, and recognising an opportunity-of-a-lifetime when I see one, I whipped up an application email and sent it off to him, along with around 350 other people. Somehow, I ended up being the luckbox that got chosen.

Fast forward in time a little bit to present, and I’m sat in my room with shit strewn everywhere, trying to figure out what/how to pack, making sure I don’t forget something stupidly important like my laptop or my Pokerstars login details or my passport, and slowly and steadily starting to freak out about the fact that I have the mother of all journies ahead of me (for me, at least) starting in 12 hours time. Notwithstanding the pre-trip panic and the fact that contrary to expectations, I am actually starting to get somewhat nervous about the idea of the plane flight, I’m really looking forward to getting there and meeting the guys in person. Michael (reef2287) is the one I’ve had the most contact with so far, as he’s organised the flights and the taxi from the airport to their place once I arrive. I’ve got to take this opportunity to thank him for his professionalism in handling all of this on my behalf. As an example, about 3 weeks ago I went to bed and woke up the next morning to find my inbox containing a membership to Travelocity and confirmation of the flights that he had gone ahead and booked while I slept. Unreal. I’ve spoken to Grayson very briefly and I’m really hyped about meeting him obviously. I think he’s going to be at the LAPT for the first couple of days after I get there, so I’ll be in Michael and Matt’s capable hands until then. Matt (facestealer) and I haven’t really formally introduced ourselves to each other yet, although we did say a brief “hai!” to each other in the chatbox while we were railing Michael the other night in the Stars $10+1R (he took 3rd place for a shade over $7k – go Reef!). I’ve read bits of Matt’s blog over on Spacegravypoker.com and he seems like a really cool and friendly guy, so I’m getting really excited to meet him too, especially after seeing how much he crushes the games he plays.

The part I’m not particularly looking forward to right now is the travel. It’s my first ever time in a plane so I *really* want to get a window seat so that I can look down on the world as it passes by below, or to see the other side of the clouds. Continental allow you to check in online 24hrs before the flight, and the moment it turned 11:40 this morning I was online checking in and trying to secure a window seat, which I managed to do, but then instead of emailing me a boarding pass to print off they emailed me to say that I need to check-in in person tomorrow so that the staff can verify my documents (no idea why!) – so I hope to God that all the window seats haven’t been taken by that point, as that would just be a huge disappointment. Please please please don’t put me in the middle seat of the middle row between two fatasses and directly in front of a screaming kid who keeps kicking the back of my chair for 11 hours, and behind the snorer who reclines his chair into me the instant we have taken off. That would really suck. I’m stressing out just thinking about these possible branches on the future reality tree – I just want to touch down in Costa Rica and for it all to be over bar the Taxi ride to the house.

27 hours of travel with no sleep will get me to their place at around midnight local time, which, while meaning that I’m going to be a total zombie who will inevitably give a really bad account of himself as a consequence when first meeting the guys, also means that I ought to get to sleep fairly easily and wake up the next day with zero jetlag – or that’s the theory anyway. It remains to be seen how it will all pan out in reality, but I shall be sure to keep you updated here, so check back.

For now though, I have to get back to preparing to leave, so until next time, run hotter than the sun and have fun!

Cheers!