You've all been there. You look at your hole cards and see two lovely black aces. Your brain immediately starts plotting how to win a nice pot. You're in the hijack seat and it's folded around to you. You make a standard raise as you don't want to chase everybody out. And see the cutoff, the button and both blinds call you. Ok this is gonna take some work.
Then the flop comes out. A J 9 with the ace and 9 of hearts. Lovely. You're certainly ahead, you flopped top set, but there's a lot of bad things that could happen from here. If someone played Q10 - and someone is always playing Q 10 it seems - how do you get rid of him? Not to mention J9, 10-8 suited or even two crap hearts. It's checked to you and you decide you're not gonna let someone draw to the heart flush for cheap. You put out a healthy bet. Only to see the button plus both blinds still call you. And it keeps getting worse. Turn is a Q of clubs. Small blind puts out a pot sized bet, big blind raises him and you're sitting there wondering how it could have all gone so wrong. It's like that scene in the Tom Cruise/Paul Newman movie, "The Color of Money". Cruise is purposefully - against his will - dumping a game to Grady Seasons and the whole time Seasons is keeping up a running commentary making it hurt that much more.
That is basically how I'm feeling right now. Thursday I'm looking at the weather charts and the projected hurricane path. While the Tampa/St Pete area is within the cone of possibilities, all of the models are projecting Irma to pass either just east of the state of Florida or right along the east coast. Over here on the west coast, we'll see some wind and rain but nothing too bad.
Thursday night and Friday morning, the path keeps adjusting west. From off the east coast to up the east coast to hitting the south end of the state and traveling up the middle of the state. Now we're talking about true hurricane winds and rain here in the Tampa Bay area. Still as long as it stays east of us, it won't be too bad. Plus going over 200 miles all overland would take a lot of force from a Category 4 hurricane. It probably wouldn't be more than a Category 2 by the time it reaches here.
So imagine my dismay when I looked at the latest computer models tonight. And see most of the models tracking right up the west coast and right through Tampa Bay. It just keeps getting worse and worse. I almost fear what I'll see tomorrow morning when I look at the weather. Oh great, my phone just went off. A Hurricane Warning has been issued for my area. Lovely.
My biggest fear is the hurricane stays west of the state before turning into Tampa Bay. If it does that and stays over water in the warm Gulf of Mexico, it could easily become a category 5 storm again. And I don't want to contemplate what a Cat 5 hurricane would do to this area. The last time a major hurricane hit the Tampa Bay area was 1921 and that was only a Category 3. Do you know how much this area, especially along the beaches, has been built up over the past 100 years? A category 5 direct hit here would be absolutely devastating.
Hopefully I'll wake up in the morning and find the storm is already turning and all my worrying is for nothing. Or it starts to break up. We'll see what happens. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. It'll probably fall somewhere in between. After all this depressing talk, I will at least leave you all with something nice to look at. Too bad she isn't doing the weather here.
You're going to have a hurricane and a tornado soon but you won't care
Well off to bed folks. Stay lucky out there.
1 comment:
Is it too late to evacuate? Good luck.
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