Tag Archives: milehicon

I am not a poker pro, but I am a writer

By lytspeed Posted in Conventions, Geek, Poker 1 Reply

I played in the Inaugural PokerStars Blogger Championship Sunday, and I sucked. I finished in 1193rd place out of 1473. By comparison, Wil Wheaton finished 328th! (Congrats, Wil!)

The long and short of it is that I got impatient. The hand that killed me was a hand on which I should never have bet hard (AQ that turned into a pair of queens) and I got beat by a straight (AK with QJ on the flop and a 10 on the turn.) If you know anything about No Limit Hold-Em, you will know that I should have folded after the flop, rather than raising based on my paired queen. Oh well.

However, I had a blast at MileHiCon 37, both Saturday and Sunday. The panel discussions I participated in were fun, I met some cool people (both fans and participants), and hopefully I made some good impressions. I look forward to participating in the convention next year, assuming they ask me back.

My apologies for the lapse in domain name registration over the last few days. One of the disadvantages of being unemployed is that things like domain name registrations, no matter how crucial they are to supporting a budding writing career, are less important than things like mortgages and car payments.

MileHiCon 37

By lytspeed Posted in Conventions, Non-Fiction Leave a reply

In my e-mail box today were a couple of documents from the MileHiCon planning committee. I’ve been selected to participate in a couple of panel discussions on Saturday and Sunday, which sounds really cool.

As much as I’ve always enjoyed science fiction and fantasy, and have always wanted to go to MileHiCon, I have never been able to attend. In recent years, that has been because it was held on the same weekend as the manager meetings for my former company. This year, that’s not a problem, and I’ve been selected to actually participate, not just attend. That’s pretty cool!

I’m not sure it’s okay for me to list the panel topics or other panel members yet, so I won’t do that. But I can say that I will be on panels with a couple of Guests of Honor, as well as a couple of local authors. I guess I qualify as a local author now too, since I’m publishing regularly in ComputorEdge. Cool, eh?

Since one of the panels on which I’m supposed to participate runs in the early afternoon, it looks like I will have to sit out the first part of my PokerStars blogger tournament, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

The last convention I participated in was the World Horror Convention 2000, for which I played guitar in the opening ceremonies. Before that, I have to go back all the way to 1987, when I helped organize a science fiction literature conference at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually gone to a con as a fan; I’ve always attended as either an organizer or participant in one of the events. Of course, that doesn’t mean my inner fanboy doesn’t get a chance to come out. 🙂