Lover of trading, tacos, 3D/AR/VR, cryptos, and most things Japanese

Two years ago today, an old friend reconnected with me on Facebook. I was going to school in Pueblo at the time, had just returned to Facebook after an extended absence, and we started chatting off and on during my breaks from class. Soon, we were chatting every day. We shared movie quotes, challenges, questions, stories, and laughter – day after day after day. We became besties. We connected on so many levels it quickly became a running joke that we shared the same mind: We.Are.The.Same.

Who knew back then what would transpire during the following two years? Neither of us dreamt that things would develop as they did, that we would continue growing closer and closer, become such integral parts of each other’s lives, and eventually a couple. We have been there for each other through some of the greatest challenges life could throw at us, rooting and supporting one another as we each found our own way through those difficult times. From the beginning, we spoke with #nofilter and shared our vulnerabilities, dreams, and our beasts.

I have seen you blossom during this time – growing, changing, recovering, healing, celebrating, embracing, and learning to trust anew. I knew you had it in you, and it fills me with joy to see you actualizing your potential. You never were one to back away from a challenge. Your caring, passion, persistence, tenacity, and willingness to do what needs to be done resonates with my soul.

Thank you, Christine. I appreciate you more than I could ever say. You truly are an exceptional woman and I am so grateful that you choose to share so much of yourself with me. You have brought not only new hope to my life, but new perspectives and new challenges. You cracked the code – you noodled, and puzzled, and queried, and figured out how to slip through my defenses and access the core of my being. Nobody has done that before. Nobody. You didn’t run away, instead you found a way to nestle your heart up right next to mine. We are connected in body, mind, and heart. You accept and love me for who I am, just as I accept and love you for who you are. Te amo…

What will the future bring for us edge dancers? I don’t know. What I do know is that I intend to spend as much of it with you as I can, my love.

Yours,
Bobby

Helen Mildred Kittle was born in Middletown, Ohio, on January 19, 1914, the youngest of three children. Her father was a mid-level manager at American Rolling Mill Co. in Ohio.

Helen and her two brothers were raised in Ohio until 1925, when her father moved the family to Berkeley, CA where he went to work for California Culvert Co. which had been acquired by American Rolling Mill.

She attended Garfield Junior High School and Berkeley High before joining her brothers at U.C. Berkeley. She graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor’s degree in French. Helen and more than a dozen of her classmates (all women) formed the “Thirty-Five Club,” meeting (with husbands) at a different home on the first Sunday of each month for dinner. This was to continue for more than fifty years. Helen was always drawn to interior decorating, trying unsuccessfully to land a job in San Francisco with one of the well-known stores upon graduation from college. Many of her friends would consult with her before remodeling.

Helen married a young attorney, James Clayton Orr, on April 9, 1937. They raised three children, Richard, David and Kathleen, in the East Bay…primarily Oakland and later, Piedmont.

When her oldest child went to college in 1958, Helen returned to U.C. Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor’s degree, then a Master’s degree in psychology.

Helen and Clayton divorced in 1966 and she moved to the Washington DC area, where she would live for the next 32 years. She initially worked as a school psychologist in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Later, she entered the doctoral program at The Catholic University of America, earning a Ph.D. in psychology in 1976. She set up practices in both “The District” and Bowie, Maryland, continuing to practice until age 84 when she moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts to live closer to family.

During her many years in Washington, she was an active member of the Women’s National Democratic Club. On a weekly basis, many of the prominent Democrats from Congress and the Administration (when it was Democratic) would give talks at the club. On two occasions Helen went to The White House for lunch with first ladies – first with Rosalynn Carter and later with Hillary Clinton. She loved being immersed in the activities of Washington, from embassy dinners to museums to informal get-togethers at Watergate South, where she lived. Her neighbors included Robert and Elizabeth Dole, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Casper Weinberger, Howard Baker, and Monica Lewinsky. Helen was an avid bridge player into her eighties, playing several times a week.

She was also a world traveler, visiting Russia, Turkey, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and China on a number of occasions. On one notable trip she visited the People’s Republic of China in 1972 with the International Congress of Psychology – at a time before China had opened to visits from the West. She traveled to Europe often, sometimes with her grandchildren, and at age 79 took a cruise around the world.

Helen has three grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She returned to her beloved California in 2004 with her son, Richard.

After a stellar start to my play chip career at FullTiltPoker.NET, where in a few days I ran my initial 1,000 chips up to 100,000, lost them back down to 10,000, ran them back up to 100,000, and then went broke, I’ve been struggling. In addition to getting cold decked, where I’ve sat for hours without many playable hands, I have literally never seen so many two- and three-outers hit before in my life. An “out” is a card that’s left in the deck that can help your hand. For example, if I have a pair of aces and my opponent has a pair of kings, my opponent must catch one of the two remaining kings in the deck to beat me. Hence, he has a two-outer. They kept hitting. These soul crushing suckouts are the reason my chip stack has been so wildly variant.

After going bust, I’ve had a bitch of a time building up a stack again. It seems like every low limit table I play at is filled with noobs who go all-in with any two cards and hit them. At one point I got so frustrated with getting beaten this way that I actually started playing bad hands for all my chips thinking that they had to win. 😉 I also tried waiting until there were several all-ins ahead of me and just calling, hoping to get lucky, and triple up or better – just so I could go play at the next higher limit table where, presumably, there’d be fewer shenanigans and more serious play. That strategy didn’t work either.

So for now I’ve defaulted to the way many poker players get started building their bankrolls: I play 10/20 Limit games now. Limit games are different than No Limit games in that you can only raise one bet at a time, rather than put more or all of your chips on the line at any one time. There’s a lot less of a rush to be had playing limit, it’s a slower game, and much more mathematical in it’s play. The best hand always wins, and more often than not, the best possible hand is shown. It’s a game of odds: when it costs you one bet to possibly win 20 bets, you have the right odds to make that bet because there’s hand in poker that’s worse than a 16:1 dog. Now, if you’re drawing to one card and one card only, on the river, you only have a 2.5% chance of getting that card. But if you need say, any of the four remaining sixes in the deck, you have nearly a 10% chance of getting it on the river. That means one time out of ten you’ll hit it. If the pot is laying you 10 bets to call one bet, it’s mathematically the correct play to make that bet, despite the long odds. It only has to pay out one time out of ten to be the mathematically correct play.

So I’ve been grinding it out at the limit tables. I’ve doubled my initial 1,000 to just over 2,200, and am less bitter about losing to suckouts because they’re a lot easier to read in limit hold ’em – and they only cost me one more bet. I’m working on my reads, which are pretty spot-on, despite not being able to see the players behind the cards. Limit is easy that way. Limit is also known as “No Fold ‘Em Hold ‘Em” because so many times people call down to the river card. It’s easy to spot trips when they’ve just smooth called, the board pairs, and they suddenly raise. It’s easy to spot a flush when they hit. Limit hold ’em becomes a dance of sorts, trying to play your cards properly, yet still throw off your opponents. I have purposefully fired three barrel bluffs, knowing I was going to get called down and lose, just to put that little question in my opponents’ heads: Does he have it this time? Or is it another bluff? And so the music plays on and we dance our little dance…

I will keep playing 10/20 Limit until I have made between five and ten thousand, then I’ll move back to the 25/50 No Limit tables and hope my luck has changed and that my time at the Limit tables has reinforced some of the studying I’m doing away from the tables. After all, I want to play the game as skillfully as I can and not need to rely on luck to win.