Although he proved victorious 3-2 on the last occasion, I finally hit my straps on this one and crushed his soul fairly easy before both of us, along with Kirsty, decided to make our way to the Premium Factory Outlets for some retail therapy.

My plan was to buy a few pairs of shoes and a nice jacket, but failed miserably at the shoes while finding two half-decent jackets at Calvin Klein. I decided to hold off on the purchases until after the series as Heath was the only one to buy anything as we all returned home; and me to the Hard Rock.

With it being Chad’s last night in Las Vegas, we decided that we should go and hit the strip and do some gambling and drinking.

Our first stop was at Casino Royale to play some $3 Craps and drink some fruity margaritas. This was bad choice numero uno . . . not for the margaritas, but for the choice of playing Craps as we both lost; mine hitting the wallet a little heavier for three bills!

What!?! How could you lose $300 on $3 Craps you may be asking . . . well the reason is I was playing it more like $30 Craps than $3 and the fact that the luck of the dice wasn’t rolling our way didn’t help either. While Chad tried to run up his last few dollars, I found my way to a $1 Roulette table where I was betting at a minimum $60 a hand. Only buying in for $100, it lasted me a dozen spins or so before I punted it off and we made our way to O’Shaes to play the midnight $45 tournament.

It was a turbo structure with only a 2,000-starting bank, and after check-raising all in with top pair in the third level and getting snapped off with a flush draw, I was out before Chad when he spiked another club on the river. I dumped another $100 on Craps there, before Chad bite the dust and we made our way back to the Hard Rock.

Chad decided to call it a night as he had an early flight the next day, but I decided to kick on and play some $1-2 NLH in the poker room.

I chipped up quickly when a guy limp-shoved over my three-bet (raise to $7, then to $18) with deuces and I called off his $104 with Queens as the board blanked out.

A few orbits later I made it $7 to go with A♠ Q♠ and found three callers before firing out $16 on a A♦ 10♠ 2♥ flop. It was called round before the big blind led for $60 when the turn landed the 2♠ with only me calling before the 5♥ on the river went check, check. He tabled his Q♣ 10♦ and I collected the pot to move to $428 before chipping up to $486 after cracking Queens with King-Jack when I flopped two-pair.

The switch was then flicked as I proceeded to lose every hand thereafter. I was two-outered twice, and rivered three-times by the same guy in virtual back-to-back-to-back hands before losing my last $85 in a straddle pot with Queens against the straddler’s Aces to finish down a buy-in at the Hard Rock and $900 overall for the day!

I wish I had worked today!

I went and checked out the pool before decided to head to the Strip in search for a prepaid phone as well as checking out if anything had changed over the past twelve months.

Since it was only 9am and the sun wasn’t beating down hard I decided to walk the combined three miles up to Planet Hollywood and then down the Strip to Fashion Show Mall where I happened to stumble upon a free wifi connection. I obviously spent the next hour on Facebook reading up on all that’s been happening over the past two days I’ve been without internet access.

All Facebook’d out I found a mobile store where they tried to sell me a prepaid phone with just $10 credit for $100 . . . plzzz mate I told them and headed to the food court to grab some Subway – which amazingly – is half the price it is back home.

I made my way across the road to a Walgreens and bought some essentials as well as a $35 prepaid phone that featured $30 of credit and 300 minutes before returning to the Hard Rock.

Greg Lewis – who I worked the 2008 WSOP with – had just checked in and we caught up before Dave King came over to pick us up for a BBQ at GG’s house.

The boys were cooking after losing a bet so I decided to play some cash on PokerStars (with a little bit of success) before twelve of us enjoyed a great BBQ while watching Phoenix own souls as the USA soccer team lose to a country that isn’t even in the World Cup this year!

Being all poker degenerates we decided to play a cheap $10 sit-n-go that soon turned into a twelve-handed turbo then a $10 rebuy!

Once Kristy wrapped it up, we all turned in for the night with a long day of Beer Pong planned for tomorrow.

Well two and a half months later I made my mind up.

While wondering round in town at Bay City Plaza (yes Geelong does have a shopping centre) I saw that EB Games had a promotion where you could trade in any Wii console and receive a new PlayStation 3 and FIFA 2010 for just $299. With no hits on EBAY for the Wii and the fact that you can pretty much get one for $300 I decided that it was worth it since a new PlayStation 3 was still around the $500 mark.

Then before I left I decided to buy some new sunglasses. I know we’re approaching winter, but there is a chance I could be heading to Thailand for a month or two and hopefully Las Vegas for my fourth WSOP, so they’ll definitely come in handy.

The funniest thing that related to theses purchases happened on Facebook after I updated my status.

Tim Duckworth after making a whopping $12.11 online this morning, I decided to splurge and bought new sunglasses and a PS3 . . . oh the life of a low-limit balla!!!

Comment from Kerry Stead: Definitely -EV purchases. Now you will be distracted by the PS3 & feel obligated to leave the house to wear the sunglasses. Crushing Thursday mornings now means only +$8!

My Dad’s computer broke down the other day and he decided to head to Harvey Norman to Flexirent one. For some reason they gave him a free Wii – and since he knew I wanted one – he also bought me FIFA 2010 so that I would have something to play on it.

Problem you may say with a definite undertone of sarcasm.

Well, yes, because recently I’ve decided that I’d rather get a PlayStation 3 instead of a Wii after spending many hours at my friends and cousins house playing it.

However, I’ve also been looking at some new sunglasses – something similar to the BVLGARI ones below – and therefore have the dilemma of either trading the Wii in at Myer and getting the sunglasses or going to an EB Games or JB HiFi and exchange the Wii for a PlayStation 3.

Tough decision.

Help needed . . . NOW!!!

Although I’m still – and always will be – a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter, recent times have seen me switch codes to soccer, or football depending where you live.

This is mainly due to my mates and fellow indoor teammates James and Mat who are huge soccer fanatics and Manchester United fans. Now having them sweat matches as they loyally support the Red Devils, made me get thinking that maybe I should support a team since I tend to follow the sport more regularly nowadays.

When I was younger I use to like Liverpool because Harry Kewell (since he was Australian and all) played for them, but due to him moving to Galatasaray at the same time my interest in the game began to increase, it doesn’t seem appropriate to support them.

There are a lot of players that I enjoying watching in the English Premier League, and picking a team was really difficult, but when Lucas Neill signed with Everton to join fellow Australian Tim Cahill, I found it completely appropriate to latch on and support Everton. Throw in the fact that their star player is Australian and also named Tim, and that my dad lived near their home ground when he was a kid and that their major sponsor is a Thailand beer company . . . did I really need any other reasons to support them?

I may only know a handful of players, and may even get some names wrong (thanks to James for the corrections), but I enjoy watching a team that I can now say I support and consequently can get passionate about.

However saying you support a team is one thing, but wearing their colours proud is another!

Consequently I jumped online the other day and had a look around the Everton Online Store. After spending the good part of half an hour looking at every item for sale, I decided to grab just two items.

Firstly a blue Everton Training Vest to slum around when the weather heats up or use for heading down to the beach or cricket training and secondly a black Everton Training Top to wear on a casual basis. Expecting them to arrive in another week or two, I was pleasantly surprised this morning to see a package on my desk containing two wonderful gifts!

Although they may not be the most highly sought after gear for Everton supporters, I feel that I’ll get the most wear out of these two items . . . and anyway . . . I’m still a noob supporter, because who knows what we’ll see in the future . . . maybe a personalised DUCKWORTH #10 will soon be on order!

With a new one rather pricey, I have decided to sit tight on making a rash purchase, but when I stumbled across the website Bid Rivals, I thought I might be able to grab a bargain!

Wrong.

Flicking over the numerous pages on ongoing auctions I found a Canon EOS 50D with lens available, and began some research on the camera. With a retail price of around $2,500, the chance to grab this high-quality camera locked my attention to the site, and how exactly it works.

Basically each product listed on the site is placed in an auction-type sale where people can bid on the product, and if you are the person with the highest bid when the time expires then it’s all yours. However, when the timer is in the last 15 seconds, if someone else places a higher bid then the timer re-sets another 15 seconds and so forth. Each bid raises the price of the product by only 2 cents, but each bid costs the bidder 80 cents . . . that’s obviously the catch.

They also have a function called a Bid Agent where you can list the maximum amount of bids and price you are willing to spend on the auction, and even if you are not online, the Bid Agent will bid for you once the timer ticks down to 4 seconds if you aren’t the highest bidder.

Now getting back to the camera in question.

Previous auctions of the $2,500 Canon EOS 50D had sold for just over $100 and I therefore bought a bundle of bids to hope I could grab a bargain when everyone else had spent too much.

Waking up this morning I logged on to the site to find the camera at just over $105 with five Bid Agent’s battling it out against each other. There of course was no point bidding now as I would be just wasting my valuable collection of bids and therefore decided to just monitor the auction very closely. My plan was to wait until there were only two bidders’ left and then switch all my attention to the auction knowing that each bid was costing the Bid Agent’s 80 cents a click, and that no one in their right mind would be putting aside 3,000-odd bids for this camera.

I waited and waited and waited until it was time to go to cricket training and decided to set my Bid Agent up with the current price at around $135.

After running around rolling the arm over and hitting some balls round the nets I expected that there would be a message on my screen basically

“Congratulations! You out-smarted all the other Bid Agents and are now the proud owner of a bargain fully sick $2,500 camera for just the price of $145.12!”

Once again. Wrong.

The auction was unbelievable still going with new bidder’s clicking away 80 cents at a time!

Once the auction was finally over – 43 hours and 14 minutes after it started – and lintonfarm was the proud owner of a new Canon EOS 50D DSLR camera after wagering 1,554 bids for a final price of $242.80, I decided to take a closer look at the whole auction.

242.80 / 0.02 = 12,140 bids x 0.80 = $9,712 + $242.80 = $9,954.80 – $2,500 = $7,454.80 profit for Bid Rivals

No doubt Bid Rivals made a killing of us fools . . . but what makes it worse is that the same Canon EOS 50D sold for $18.40 and $110.08 over the next two days!

Kirsty Brew and Lynn Gilmartin in action

Playing her first tournament, Lynn managed to make it all the way to just two places from the final table – and she detailed it all on her PokerNews blog.

Kirsty however made the final table with a medium stack to make it two from three at making final tables in ladies events. Unfortunately she would be first to go when her over aggressive approach holding J♦ 9♦ was no match against Queens.

Unlike some other places around the world, the shops in Macau close around 10pm, and with tonight being the last night that we would finish early, Kirsty and I decided to make our way to Xin Ma Lou to shop away!

We had been there the night before, but neither of us purchased anything.

With eyes only searching for shoes, I found this pair of Gola’s for HK$400 or AU$70ish, and am so happy I bought them – with their bright red and ballaness gold . . . easily the best pair of shoes I’ve bought in years! Oh, they’re comfy too!

Everyone picked up something here and there before we ventured to the Miracle Mile Shopping Centre at Planet Hollywood. I found a pair of new shoes and not much else as we decided that enough shopping was had for the day.

Straight over to Harrahs we went to join in the Wednesday night $4-8 HORSE game, while Brendan returned home as Eric joined us.

Donnie continued to run bad (or play bad . . . I’m not convinced he is playing bad as this is like the fourth session where he has lost in HORSE) while Mat went broke and hit the roulette table to recover his buy in and then some.

Eric finished down, while I only managed a profit of $90 after being close to $140 up at one point.

We departed early and joined the rest of the crew at RoadRunners to neck a few beers and play some pool.