Alpha Core

Here’s me playing “River Flows in You” (composed by Yiruma) on my Casio PX-830 digital piano. I hope you like it!

High quality audio track of this video is available for download at SoundCloud. Read more

Last weekends fantastic weather was more than enough reason for us to spend a day at the Elbe River in Hamburg. We took the subway to ‘Landungsbrücken‘ and changed there into a ferry boat to get to our final destination. In Hamburg you just need to have a normal subway ticket to be able to use the ferry boats for free (not to be mixed up with harbor tour boats!). Our original plan was to go for a walk at the Elbe beach, but as Tom hadn’t seen the famous Hamburg Beach Clubs before, we decided to check some of those out. Beach Clubs are something really popular in Hamburg, which explains why we have at least seven of them. We visited ‘Hamburg del mar‘, ‘Lago Bay‘ and ‘Hamburg City Beach Club‘, but in other areas of Hamburg you can also find ‘Strand Pauli‘, ‘Central Park‘, ‘Strandkai‘ and ‘Veritas Beach‘. All of them have something special to offer, so everybody could find one he or she likes. To get a proper first impression Tom and me spent some time in the three neighboring Clubs and we can’t even say, which is the one to be recommended most.

Since almost a year ago, we’ve seen an enormous increase in popularity of the game poker, the Texas hold’ em variant to be more specific. I think it was around the time that the latest Bond movie (Casino Royale) was shown in theaters that I started to take some interest in the game. Sure, in high school we played some draw poker, but no game was ever as much fun as a regular hold ‘em one, simply for the reason that there’s a lot more interaction in this variant. The main reason for this are the ‘community cards’, a set of (eventually) five cards lying in the middle of the table that are shared by all players. Just two cards, called the ‘pocket cards’, are being dealt to every player at the beginning of every hand. These two cards are the only ones that can give you an edge over your fellow player. The community cards add a lot to the game and they offer a feeling of interaction. The game isn’t just about your hand and your luck drawing some cards anymore.

Update (October, 7th): NBC airs a great daily show called Poker After Dark and puts all episodes online for free. Watching the series is a good way to learn more about poker and to get to know some of the successful players out there. It’s really exciting and fun to watch! There are also some nice shows on Joost that are highly entertaining, e.g. the WPT (World Poker Tour) finals. Read more