Nervous? You bet

I've been really nervous all weekend. My heart's been pounding away and I don't know why. Yesterday my stomach was in knots all day and I had to put on my relaxation CD before going to bed. I guess tensions might have been heightened this weekend because I've been doing things that could be construed as gambling, but I like to think they were small beer as far as gambling goes.

Yesterday I had a go at a badugi freeroll tournament (freeroll - doesn't cost anything, so can't be gambling, right) on PokerStars. I came 115th out of around 5500 players. The top 64 made the next round which had real moolah up for grabs, so while I was a bit bummed I didn't make it through, I really enjoyed the three-and-a-half-hour battle. That's after I got abuse hurled at me in the first five minutes and almost got eliminated; thankfully I survived and got moved to another table. It never ceases to amaze me how some people act online - they develop an alter ego, making them unaccountable for anything they might do or say. Or maybe their virtual personality is their real, bigoted personality which they have to suppress in their offline lives, hence why they're attracted to the internet in the first place. Whatever the reason, I don't get it. Anyway, the badugi was fun and it was clearly not gambling. I realise now I'm better at badugi than hold 'em. With hold 'em the only information you get about your opponents is their betting patterns - in a freeroll I can use those to deduce that they have precisely two cards. With badugi they also get to draw cards - I seem to be able to use that extra information to my advantage.

I've also be playing around on iPredict, where you can bet, I mean invest, in political and economic events. They even have a swine-flu-related stock. At the moment I'm a bit more exposed to the official cash rate (OCR) than I'd like, but hey we're all exposed to the OCR one way or another. And I can't see any mention of the words "bet", "gamble" or "wager" anywhere on the iPredict site, so I've got nothing to worry about on that score.

This afternoon I went to that auction in Birkenhead. If we're in a housing market slump, I saw no evidence of it today. People came in their droves. The auction itself must have lasted twenty minutes as the price rose above anything I could possibly afford, then above the reserve price, then above the vendors' champagne-cork-popping price. It was four-way action, reminding me of those occasional hands you get in a poker tournament when four players are raising, re-raising and going all in. A lot of the bidders seemed to have "advisors" - I was a bit confused about that - but it was certainly a useful experience for me. From what I see on TV, where some properties struggle to get a bid at all, I imagine this will be the exception rather than the rule.

Unfortunately a lot of my weekend has been a distraction from what I really need to be doing, which is figuring out what I want to do with my life. In my current job it's clear I'm going nowhere at ninety miles an hour.