Double Trouble with Prim and Harrier - Poker, Sports, Cooking, Gardening, Mixed Drinks and more

Kolbászos Tojáspörkölt (Suprise Menu)

Okay, this week´s surprise menu should start with the letter "K". I had no idea and was looking for recipes, maybe from my home country? Then I found this one: Kolbászos Tojáspörkölt - which doesn´t even have a proper English translation. Could be maybe translated as "egg stew with sausage". I didn´t know this one - or didn´t remember it? It´s a recipe I either don´t know or don´t remember from childhood. Decided to try it. It´s a really simple dish, you just need onions, Hungarian spicy sausage, eggs, powdered sweet pepper and tomato sauce. I followed this recipe.

Was pretty sceptical at first, to me this dish sounded a bit Banhauser :f_biggrin::f_ugly: Egg stew? Eggs with tomatoes and pepper? Well, let´s try it. And there it is:

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You can serve it with bread, noodles, rice, bulgur or you can add it as topping to another kind of stew. I ate it with noodles, because we have some left-over ones.

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Troll´s verdict: Suprisingly good!! And as a REAL Hungarian I of course added some extra spice and some extra heat! :f_biggrin::f_ugly: Still got some dried chili. Looking forward to cooking this recipe with own grown tomatoes, pepper and HOT STUFF! I think this recipe is going to be a GREAT candidate for the Bhut Jolokia or the Carolina Reaper.

Looking good, Prim. My own entry is coming up next.

Kung Pao chicken was the dish I selected for our menu that starts with K. I was using this recipe for reference.

We start with the marinade for the chicken, consisting of soy sauce, cornstarch, sherry and a little oil.

Let the chicken marinade in it, for at least 10 minutes.

We will also prepare a proper sauce. Soy sauce, sherry and cornstarch are once again among the ingredients, and also chicken broth, balsamic vinegar, hoisin sauce and a small amount of sugar.

With all that out of the way, we can start cooking the marinated chicken, until it is almost fully cooked, at which point we will set it aside.

We add some oil to the same pan again, and start frying some green and red bell peppers, two cloves of pressed garlic, four dried chilis and a bit of ginger.

Then we add the sauce...

...the chicken...

...and finally some spring onions, roasted peanuts and sesame seeds.

Now all that's left to do is to serve it with some rice.

It was really good, and quite spicy too. I think this recipe is a keeper.

As PokerStrategy.com's resident mixologist, I would like to get your help naming a cocktail made of orange juice and ginger ale in equal proportion, with added rye whisky.

The OJ and ginger mix is called in our household "Clean Only"[1] , and we had some left over after our last gathering of the clan. I added some rye and the result is totally drinkable.

Name suggestion?

[1] The name is a result of a slight confusion. We used to get 20 litre pails of laundry detergent, and when they were empty, we used them for other purposes — like changing the oil in the truck, holding dirty diapers etc. One we had labelled "Clean Only" and only used it for things that had to be clean — like pickiing herring for example. One day, we took the "Clean Only" bucket to a party filled with OJ and ginger ale (we had a bunch of strawberries floating in it that time). Later in the evening, somebody asked Mrs Vorpal, "Have you tried the Clean Only? It is really good!"
The name stuck.

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
As PokerStrategy.com's resident mixologist, I would like to get your help naming a cocktail made of orange juice and ginger ale in equal proportion, with added rye whisky.

The OJ and ginger mix is called in our household "Clean Only", and we had some left over after our last gathering of the clan. I added some rye and the result is totally drinkable.

Name suggestion?

The ingredients are similar to the Horse's Neck, which consists of ginger ale, cognac and bitters, with the cognac sometimes being replaced by bourbon. So we could stick with the horse theme and call it the Horse's Mane, or the Ponytail. Alternatively, we can keep the neck part instead and call it maybe the Moose's Neck, since it uses Canadian whiskey as its base spirit.

We could also just have fun with the starting letters of the ingredients, and call it the Ogre, for example (adapted from OGR). Another possibility could be the Rogue (adapted from ROG), which could then also serve as a reference to going rogue with the leftover ingredients.

Not sure who ordered these ........

....but someone wants even MORE beans. I guess, it´s Morton. :f_biggrin::f_ugly:

Going to sow them on Monday.

While we're on the subject, we have a related poker challenge to unveil:

The grindette will do a classic "Zero to Hero" challenge on PartyPoker. She cashed out her funds earlier today, barring $0.15 which couldn't be withdrawn, and will try to build up a brand new bankroll from nothing. Well, from 15 cents, technically.

Bowser Jr and Baby Peach will be her mascots for Hold'em and PLO, respectively, for the simple reason that she took a liking to those characters at around the time she started playing those games more often. That's also why we will call it a "Koopa Freeroll" challenge, though it's really just a standard "grinding it up from nothing" attempt. Once Prim has secured her first tickets or freeroll winnings, those funds are fair game to be used for the challenge, obviously.

With Primrose mostly just having time for poker on weekends these days, it seemed like a good way to add a bit of extra challenge to the limited amount of tournaments that she is currently able to play. And the way I understand it, she should be right in the middle of her first PLO freeroll as we speak. We wish her the best of luck, of course.

A little late session ...

..but a great start for my little freeroll fun challenge on PartyPoker. As we don´t have tennis practice on Friday evening anymore (was only during the winter season), Fridays are now also perfect days for weekend poker fun! Baby Peach started with the 7 p.m. Free to play which is PLO. Already in one of the first hands she could make a great double up:

Later on she found another cool full house which got payed:

Also her acies held up:

Even twice.

Baby Peach made her way into the prices, where she, unfortunately got card-dead. Nevertheless, she could take a 0,11 $ satty ticket.

Bowser jr. on the other hand, had a rough start. The first Free to play in Holdem was just a total brick and also the 0,2 $ ticket he used up ended with an emergency all in with AT, running into KK. But his spirit did not wayne, and he tried his luck in the 9 p.m. Free to play (Holdem), where he also had a great start:

and even had a str8-flush:

and could also win a pot with 73s

Bowser jr. not only made it into the prices but eventually could take home a 3.30 $ satty ticket!! :appl::profit:

Yaaaaaaaay!

Looks like Primrose had a nice start in her new challenge.

Poker is still going through a rough stretch for me at the moment, and it is especially OFC that has me worried. Drawmaha is a mixed bag. After some promising results earlier, I have both lost and gained some stacks in my latest sessions.

This hand in particular stood out to me tonight. Unfortunately, I was relatively deep stacked too.

I picked up a flush on my second draw, and so did one of my opponents. I already had concerns about my flush not being good enough, but I figured on the flop that I may have some Omaha potential because my cards paired up with all three flop cards - note that if we assume that our opponent has a better flush, a two pair would be the best possible made Omaha hand for them on this flop, as it is impossible for them to have a pair in their hole cards.

It didn't quite work out, as my opponent turned out to have the same two pair on the flop and improved to a better one by the river, while our other opponent just dominated the Omaha pot. Costly hand with those deep stacks, I wonder if I should have played it safer, but I don't think so. It is quite possible that you need to have higher standards for your flushes in Drawmaha compared to regular 5CD, but let's consider it a cooler and move on.

I returned to that table after a short break and recouped most of my losses from that hand, and also finished 2nd in a 12-Game freeroll, so we even got a mini-profit for the night.

Mussgo-session :f_biggrin::f_ugly:

Looked at my tickets that I had won on Party and found out that two of them were URGENT MUSSGO! They would have expired today, so had to use them up. Furthermore, Baby Peach was hitting the tables in the PLO Free to play and of course Bowser jr. got pretty much challenged in Holdem. We can report a success from both fronts. Baby Peach won a nice 1.10 $ ticket for a PLO satty in the 3 p.m. Free to play. Decided not to let her play the 7 p.m PLO Free to play though, prices were unattractive But Baby Peach can report lovely highlights from her PLO tournament:

doubling up with acies:

even more acies

and a lovely straight:

Bowser jr. had to work hard today. We played the 4 p.m Free to play, the 5 p.m Free to play and used up our 0,22 $ tickets for another round of satties. While Bowser jr. got unlucky in the first one with JJ < ATo and busted from the 4 p.m. and 5. p.m Free to play with JJ as well (gotta "love" JJ! ), he succeeded in the other Mussgo-0,22 $ satty and got us another 1,65 $ tournament ticket. Yaaay! ♠_love: We also played the Big Quarter Freeroll phase 1 and got to the Big Quarter Final, where you can win 11 $ tournament tickets. The beginning went well and we could build up our stack quickly but the long session took a toll on us - we got tired! And after a longer phase without decent hands, ATs appeared just lovely! Pretty! And there it was: a TERRIBLE all-in call! :facepalm::rage: - we looked right into AK. Nevertheless, again successful play by Bowser jr.

Doubling up with AK

Quads QQQQ:

Bluff catch:

Full House:

And a loosing session in the garden .... :facepalm::rage:

This WAS my Hokkaido pumpkin!!

How the heck did those beasts get in there??!!

It is nice that Primrose is getting back into poker with her new freeroll challenge. For me, things are not looking so good right now. You may have noticed that I didn't update over the weekend. Well, better get to it, so we can discuss where things may be heading.

Those are last week's OFC stats, also shown below in USD. Pretty terrible, but you may also notice that it was only played on two days.

The breakdown by stakes won't show us much either, except for some mini profits at lower stakes in a short session one day.

At least Bitcoin did well:

Why the low volume? You may think that I wouldn't be too motivated to play with those results, but if I remember correctly, I was trying to get a game going on most, if not all days. The real problem is the traffic. This is what the lobby looked like on a Saturday evening, which you would think would be great grinding times:

Nobody there... just nobody at all, all evening long. And when someone does show up (which they didn't that day), chances are that they may leave the table after a lucky round early on.

Drawmaha was supposed to fill the gaps, and while I am still in profit overall, my last few sessions suggested that I shouldn't expect any long-term profits in there either, at least if I am going beyond the lowest available stakes. And it's not like the traffic is much better there either, you are once again sitting alone at the tables for the most part.

If you have to wait for your game to start for two hours, only to play for 10 minutes and feel bad about your results until the afternoon the next day, possibly not even getting a chance to do better until days later, you may do well to ask yourself if all of this is still worth it. Well, that is indeed something to be discussed, in my next post...

First of all, let's see if there are any time frames when I should be avoiding the tables. Here are this year's weekday stats for OFC so far:

I am surprised that Wednesdays were not doing more poorly, but the bad Thursday results are not surprising. Still, nothing that makes me want to exclude anything. Let's look at the times of the day instead:

This is a bit more interesting. Excluding the slots where I only have one or two games as a sample, the 23:00-23:59 games are among the worst. This is not all that surprising, given that is shortly before I would hit the bed on a workday. Not only are those not very good times to play, but poor results may also hamper my mood even leading into the next morning if this is effectively the last thing I do on that day.

That final point alone is reason enough for me to try to wrap up all of my games before 11 PM. If there are no games before that, then so be it.

Regarding poor traffic, I believe my only choice to get around this would be MTTs on Pokerstars. I will avoid SNGs over there, they have the same problem with bad traffic and bad expected results. But what to play over there?

I had a look at the schedule, and for the most part, it seems to be like the schedule I discussed on the old blog last year once. Back then, I thought the $2.20 PLO8 might be a good option, but I no longer think so. I considered satellites into mixed games tournaments, but those tend to start too early, at around 6 to 7 PM, which are not good grinding times for me.

Badugi really seems to be the only good option for me... but that one is now too late for me on most weekdays. It is an option for the weekend, Saturdays at least... but playing only one or maybe two games per week is just not worth it, even if I could get back to my old 100% ROI grind in those games. I was hoping that there were more suitable games around those times so I could set up a weekend MTT grind... but no, seems like it's only Badugi.

Long story short, what are my options? I'd say it is either to try to make OFC work somehow after all, possibly aided by one or two weekly Badugis, or to forget about it and find a way to cram those Badugi MTTs into my standard workday schedule again.

Bleak situation, but... we are not out yet.

Guys... I think we are done with OFC. I found a great opponent tonight, on slightly higher stakes, he kept playing, made very bad moves all night long... and also kept getting rewarded for them all night long. In the end, I was µBTC 337 down, bringing our overall loss to around µBTC 437. This can't be recovered. Maybe we will see a revival later this year, but for now, we are done.

Let's see if I can find time for some Pokerstars stuff...

OFC - Final Stats

2024

By Stakes

Long-Term

Too bad about that OFC disaster. I had high hopes after the good results in there last year. Well, that's poker, and that's life. Sometimes things just don't go the way you planned them.

I am down, but not out. Badugi will be coming back, like in the good old days. I originally wanted to play my first few tournaments during the week, but it looks like I will have to wait until the weekend after all, which is not a big problem.

The sports and exercise schedule is continuing as planned, though it is getting hard to keep up at times. Not a long time left until the "Trollympics" now. In a few weeks, we should see whether or not my hard work will pay off. Or did I end up overexercising and doing more harm than good?

Also, who do you guys think would win in a 50 meter swimming race between the two of us? Primrose or me? We may find out in a few days...

Let's not forget about this week's "Surprise Menu" either. Our motto will be...

Oh... would have been a good fit for last week too. Luckily, I had another recipe saved up, which I may try at this occasion.

We were supposed to cook an Asian dish. I did Kung Pao last week, now it was time for another takeout classic, adapted from this recipe for General Tso's Chicken.

I probably should have used more cornstarch for my roughly 400 grams of chicken, or I should have applied it in badges... but it will have to do now.

We cook the chicken in a pan...

...and while we are doing that, we prepare the sauce, which involves water, cornstarch, sugar, rice vinegar, hoisin sauce and soy sauce.

Remove the chicken from the pan when it is just about done cooking, then add some more oil and some garlic, ginger and chili flakes.

Add the sauce we prepared...

...and then the chicken, and toss it with the sauce. I also added some sesame seeds again.

Serve it with rice, and we are done.

Nice one, though I think I preferred last week's version, if nothing else for the extra veggies.

That was the breakfast we made yesterday, when Primrose was visiting. Bacon and egg sandwiches, an attempt at Eggs Benedict, and a stack of pancakes that can be seen in the background. Cooking together with Prim was just as it has always been - a little stressful, but very fun. Just like when we are playing Overcooked together.

Since we have plenty of sporting plans for this summer, we also went swimming later on, this time going to a pool I haven't been to before.

Originally posted by Harrier88
who do you guys think would win in a 50 meter swimming race between the two of us? Primrose or me?
We got our answer yesterday, and as expected, it was the much more experienced Primrose who came in first. The interesting part was not who finished first, however, but our times, because it was supposed to be a practice run for our "Shark Quest", that I introduced a month ago. 50 seconds are the time to beat for 50 meters of front crawl swimming. Did we do it?

Well, the thing is... I originally wanted to ask someone from the pool's staff to keep our time, but since Prim carried a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function, I figured it was more convenient to use that one. Primrose timed us at about 51 seconds for her and 54 seconds for me, which got me thinking... Prim should be able to shave off that second to get below the time we need to beat, especially with a good dive in, but four seconds in my case? That's a lot in such a short distance. Should I even bother? This may be one badge I won't be able to get...

Then Prim went for another round alone, this time finishing with an almost identical time to me in my first run, and then she was like "whoopsie, I read the time wrong before! It was 44 seconds for me and 47 seconds for you!" She already ducked for cover at that point...

How on earth do you mistake a 7 for a 4, and a 4 for a 5? And how do you mistake both digits in 44 for entirely different wrong numbers? I have no idea, and that made me a little skeptical about any of our times too... but for now, I will assume that they are accurate, which would put us on pace. I originally wanted to practice our backstroke swimming too, where we need to finish 50 meters in less than a minute, but by that time, some kiddies' swimming class started in the pool and we were getting a little crammed.

Oh, and when we were done swimming and I tried to open our shared locker, I first went for locker #4 instead of the #5 that we had, obviously leading to Primrose rubbing it back into my face: "Yeah, how do you mistake a 4 for a 5, Harrier??"

Further sporting challenges on dry land. I had to make some changes to the plan, partially because Primrose was visiting yesterday, but also because I started to notice some minor pain in my right knee after Tuesday's run, which also came back to haunt me in Wednesday's tennis practice. I decided that I should take it a little slower for a few days, so I brought Saturday's rest day forward and instead introduced a short 2 Miles run today. I still intend to go for the big 7-8 Miles run tomorrow, the toughest one in the plan.

It means dropping some miles overall, but that's okay. The important thing is to make it through without any injuries, and achieve some good results in the runs that matter next month. Besides, I'm doing plenty of other things on the side, you simply hit your limits at one point.

Weekly Best: 80 reps

Last Sunday, that is. It's an improvement, but after trying to advance in the plan, I once again noticed that it was getting a little too tough. That's what I get for jumping the gun and diving in at a later point...

I still think it was lack of discipline with my breaks between sets that did me in. From now on, I will stick to my allotted one minute of rest in-between, and if I can't make it, then that's how it is - time to repeat the week, or try again later. I will also start a new plan from scratch, using my PB of 80 reps as a starting point. My max rep tests will be done on Mondays, as the plan suggests. It will look like this:

Note that there is a possibility that I complete my goal of 100 reps before the end of the program. In this case, all the better. But let's get there first. I already made it through Week 1.

As for the plank, I practiced it every now and then this week, but rarely if ever got above 2:30 minutes. With plenty of other sporting challenges to focus on and me still not being near my target, I figured it's time to let things go in there for the time being. I may get back to it later, with a more dedicated "grind" once there are fewer distractions, but first, let's deal with the other things.

REAL Overcooked! Live!

Well I guess yesterday, we played a pretty authentic "Overcooked" session live! While we were cooking, we listened to the music of the REAL Overcooked game

and the cooking itself was pretty much like in the game. The meals were almost authentic, except for the Eggs Benny which are from "Cook Serve Delicious". The chaos was perfect and Harrier indeed had to go and get some ingredients from downstairs :mdr:. And even though Harrier has a dish washing machine, I decided to do the dishes manually, just to give it a REAL Overcooked feeling.

And as for swimming: Well, swimming is acutally my big forte! It comes naturally to me. On the other hand, I suck at long distance running.

So: And how do I read a 4 for a 5? Well. The thing is: From swimming I wear just some cheap one-day-contacts and I´m not only short-sighted, but also far-sighted (well...age ... ). Those cheap contacts (if I loose them, no prob!) only correct the short-sight but NOT the far-sight. The multi-focal lenses which corrects both, are expensive as heck!!! Wouldn´t wear them for swimming! This is why I had trouble reading the small numbers on my watch. :f_ugly::f_ugly::f_ugly::f_ugly:

Originally posted by Primrose6789
and the cooking itself was pretty much like in the game. The meals were almost authentic, except for the Eggs Benny which are from "Cook Serve Delicious". The chaos was perfect and Harrier indeed had to go and get some ingredients from downstairs :mdr:. And even though Harrier has a dish washing machine, I decided to do the dishes manually, just to give it a REAL Overcooked feeling.
Obviously, we knew about all of those dishes before we encountered them in any of those games, but Primrose has always wanted to recreate some of the menus from Overcooked together with me in a similarly "stressful" environment, which is also why I put on that music in the background.

The bacon and egg sandwiches are actually inspired by a breakfast item at McDonald's. I still like to make them every now and then. Our pancakes recipe can be found here, it's pretty good. Eggs Benny was a bit of a challenge, because neither of us has a lot of experience making poached eggs...

Originally posted by Primrose6789
So: And how do I read a 4 for a 5? Well. The thing is: From swimming I wear just some cheap one-day-contacts and I´m not only short-sighted, but also far-sighted (well...age ... ). Those cheap contacts (if I loose them, no prob!) only correct the short-sight but NOT the far-sight. The multi-focal lenses which corrects both, are expensive as heck!!! Wouldn´t wear them for swimming! This is why I had trouble reading the small numbers on my watch. :f_ugly::f_ugly::f_ugly::f_ugly:

I'm still a little baffled how you can mix those numbers up... I mean, I could understand reading sixes as fives or something like that, but not reading fives as fours. Oh well...

Meanwhile, I was wearing no contacts at all, instead relying on my optical goggles once I got into the water. As a result, I completely missed a sign saying that the door to the showers must not be opened manually, but with the help of a button instead. I did wonder why it gave so much resistance... but I just forced it open anyway. It still seems to work fine.