Thursday night I have ultimate, and for the first time in the last few weeks I got to feel good about a game I participated in. We annihilated the other team 15-1, but I felt we still played pretty well. The fact that I played a good game was far more satisfying than the lopsided victory.
But the real game last night was Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. I tuned in at the beginning of the third period after I got home from ultimate. Calgary quickly took a penalty and even more quickly Tampa scored before I even saw what the score was. Fortunately Calgary had been up 2-1, so it was only a tying goal. And that tie held up for all of the hard fought third period. And it held up for the first 14:40 of the first overtime until a lidless Jarome Iginla (he’d lost his helmet in a scrum around the net) took a blistering shot on net which Khabibulin managed to save. But the goalie couldn’t prevent Oleg Saprykin from jamming in the rebound for the win. Hockey doesn’t get much better than this. I’m hoping that Calgary can manage to finish the series off on Saturday night in front of a very deserving home-town crowd.
Unfortunately, the poker I was playing while watching the game did not go so well. I was playing 3 tables of 25PL and was running poorly. After dropping a quick 30 bucks on a few bad plays, I tightened up but got burned by a few unfortunate rivers and some tricky plays by my opponents (damn slow-played pocket kings). Fortunately, if the draws had gone the way odds dictated they should have then I know I would have been up, if only a few dollars. At least I was able to take the $80 loss completely in stride and didn’t lose a wink of sleep thinking about it. I’m getting better at this “one long session” thing.