Blog of Sal

A few years back I got bored and created a 10 minute edit of my favourite film, ROUNDERS. I didn't publish it for fear of copyright infringement and later just forgot about it. In any case, it is here (for now) for your viewing pleasure!  My editing process was to first create a logical 30 minute version, keeping as many of the important plot driving elements, best moments, and best lines as possible. Next I just kinda spliced away with feckless abandon until I had something that felt right and was exactly 10 minutes long. The full film is available  here on Amazon Prime .     D espite minor inconsistencies with technical poker aspects and maybe a few unnecessary eccentricities, the movie holds up very well as a depiction of what poker was like in the 1990s (the film was released in 1998). I would have some natural sense of this having cut my own poker chops in the Montreal underground in the early 2000s, a time when poker was receiving a small bump in popularity tha

post first published  in my poker posts on Quora O ne of my poker stories stands out. It was back in 2004, the year after everyman Chris Moneymaker pocketed $2.5 million winning the World Series of Poker Main Event, forever changing the culture of the game in the process. By winning a cheap online satellite tournament (these events are common and equate to a qualifying event), Moneymaker secured his seat in the $10,000 No Limit Hold’em 2003 WSOP Main Event for the bargain price of $25. This proved once and for all that anybody can win big at poker. Moneymaker in 2003 Over the course of the next year, poker rose from obscurity to hit the mainstream. Every casino opened a card room. And the rooms in the pre-existing meccas of poker, like Bellagio in Las Vegas, were full of people from all walks of life, including even Hollywood elites.  I’d been hired by the Casino de Montreal to deal Blackjack a few years before these events, an amazing opportunity for me at the time. After worki

I'm only making a recommendation today because I have a very high level of conviction. The last time I got like this was when I was recommending everyone buy Bitcoin in 2013. I put my skin in the game then and am doing so again now. My pick is the iShares S&P/TSX Composite High Dividend Index ETF (ticker XEI) at the current price of $13.08 CAD.  With the coronavirus scare the S&P/TSX composite (OSPTX) dropped by 34% from the all time high, but XEI has fallen 45%. The reason for the XEI index performing much worse than broader markets is due to crashing oil prices. For context, XEG, the iShares ETF that tracks Canadian energy stocks, is down over 70%. Meanwhile the Canadian dollar has been massacred, dropping 10% against the USD. Because of this "triple whammy" of coronavirus plus collapsing oil plus a plunging Canadian dollar, we have a situation where even XEI, a diversified Canadian ETF which represents the Canadian economy as a whole quite well

I raced the New Balance Chilly Half Marathon last weekend in Burlington. It was my first half and it went well. In 2017 when I started running again I was 230 lbs and very out of shape. By Spring 2018 I managed a couple of performances I'm proud of at the Around The Bay 30k (2:26) and the Sulphur Springs 50km trail ultra (5:40). But I lost motivation afterwards. Aside from stresses associated with having had another kid (this  little cutey ), I'd say the main culprit for my lack of motivation was intermittent fasting, which I did for 9 months (no calories for 16 hours a day, 5 days a week). Ironically, I was doing this as a way to drop weight in order to get faster. But the experiment instead left me lacking energy and motivation. I learned a lot but definitely wouldn't recommend endurance athletes do any fasting. Eventually I started jogging (and eating like a normal human) again and by the end of 2019 I'd built my mileage up to 60km per week (90-95% easy

With the coming of a new year I've been thinking on my 2020 running goals. I want to be consistent and also do a bit more running with my 6 year old, Sam. He drew this for me recently:  It's me in the woods with running clothes on And so I've adopted a running mantra: run easy and stay the course . It prompts me to keep moving while reenforcing how true progress takes time. The endurance app company  Strava  sent out a marketing email recently which said January 19th is "Quitter’s Day", the date when the most aspiring athletes break their New Year's resolutions. C'mon guys! Can't we do better than that?! When you haven't been working out you get an intense surge of positive energy when you first start. Then you see dramatic improvement very quickly. This probably leads to people misinterpreting their real fitness level and taking their training too seriously too fast. "Hey if I can improve by 20% in just two weeks, imagi

T he  Bruce Trail  is 1400kms of maintained trail that winds the Niagara Escarpment connecting the southern deciduous with the northern mixed forests of Ontario, Canada. The Escarpment itself is a  UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve . This international designation doesn't legislatively protect the area, but it assists local efforts like those of the  Bruce Trail Conservancy  (BTC). The BTC is a non-profit with 10,000 members which aims to officially protect 900kms of trail (and 500kms of side trails) connecting the Niagara River to the tip of the Bruce Peninsula. My family's hobby is hiking and looking for new species of mushrooms. Here are a few photos of our forays on the Bruce in 2019: Ricky (neighbour) unidentified - slime mold? Fascinating carved logs near our house young summer oyster mushrooms Mycena Earthstar and slug spider was bigger than it looks Something special I hadn't seen before. It's a deciduous tree and a conifer living in magical synergy. This may be a