Gettin Beat Like A Smoka Fool...
...cuz it's Friday. And if it's Friday, it must be another Friday post. This is almost becoming a Cheating At Solitaire tradition. Well, except for last Friday I suppose. But then, breaking tradition is also a Cheating At Solitaire tradition.
The last week has been something of a blur, with little time for poker and even less time for writing. Last weekend we finally opened The Mansion up for a housewarming party, which served double-duty as it was less than a week after
my roommate Meg's birthday. It was a reasonably small and quiet affair, nothing like the kind of party I've been hoping for considering the size of the new place, but hopefully "housewarming" means we're just warming the house up for a bigger party. Of course, nothing got broken, nothing got stolen, and the whole thing was virtually messless, so I can't really complain. I spent most of my evening making sure that everyone was imbibing spirits at an appropriate rate. Especially
Big Red, who was matching my Cherry Bombs (mmmm, RedBull and Three Olives) drink for drink all night. Apparently I was somewhat too effective in the case of
my wife, who ended up praying at the porcelain altar for a few hours before reappearing briefly in her PJs. Apparently she couldn't even hold down water the next morning. I need to quit making her drink all the extra shots that no one else wants.
This week was Anniversary Week at the Mansion as well. Today is the roommates', so congrats to Chris and Meg on five years of putting up with each other. That's two years longer than I could have put up with my wife. Of course, that's mostly because three years (and a couple days) ago, Alice and I capped off three months of wading through Catholic red tape by kneeling in front of a senile priest in front of dozens of our closest friends and hundreds of her unremembered kin. For me, there are three Golden Moments that stand out from that day. First was my father-in-law-to-be and his favorite priest asking me if we could cut the music short and get straight to the ceremony. (My answer, to the strains of "A Tear For Eddie": "I had to take three months of classes to satisfy your requirements. You need to listen to three more minutes of Ween to satisfy mine.") Second was the glowing happiness on my wife's face when The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" started up and we realized that not only were we now married, but we could also finally get out of the church. The third is the image of Alice walking across Tower Grove Park (where we were having all the traditional photo crap done) in her wedding white so she could ask the Harley riders convention if one of them would let her sit on his hog in her dress for a picture. It's a great shot of her, I'll have to see if I can dig it up and post it.
Approximately twelve hours after that moment, we woke up hung over, under-rested, and late for our flight to Florida, prompting our first fight as a married couple. The good times have not stopped since. The third anniversary is apparently the Leather Anniversary. For those of you wishing to purchase us gifts, Alice requests restraints, a corset, or a riding crop. For my safety, it's probably best to get her the corset.
This weekend I have yet another excuse to keep myself inebri-wired, as I'll be across the river staying in a Holiday Inn with about 2500 assorted geeks, freaks, and
Vampire Lust Bunnies. I've been going to
Archon since I was a 16-year-old virgin with a Dr. Who fetish (I had it bad for
Nyssa). These days, I can mostly do without the whole SF-fandom scene, but Archon remains a tradition amongst a good portion of my friends. Even if I don't feel the need to wear a rubber forehead or a
17-foot-long scarf (anymore), it's still a great excuse to go party at a hotel, and there's comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you cannot be the
most ridiculous-
looking person at the
party.
As for the obligatory poker content, we will be running the 160 Zillion Dollar Challenge (Special Con Edition) Saturday afternoon in the game room (at least until they kick us out and we have to finish up in the room). I'd like to get some pics and a brief report posted from the con, but I'm not sure how realistic that is.
And, since it will almost certainly be October before I post again, I should probably post an end-of-month recap. So, to be brief: September sucked for poker. Not as bad as August, in that I didn't drop 100+ BB or anything. In fact, I believe that I stayed just about even for the month, building back a bit of the bankroll with some bonuses but otherwise hanging even. However, the month sucked in that I didn't play nearly as many hands as I'd have liked, and those that I did play I didn't play well. I'm okay with my preflop game, but I've been making lots of rookie mistakes post-flop that I simply can't afford. I probably need to spend a few hours with
PokerTracker analysing my results before I determine exactly what changes I need to make, but I suspect that I'm calling down too often with TPTK and not dropping pocket pairs fast enough.
In our next episode: Goal-setting for October, possibly some soul-searching on the subject of bonus whoring, and (maybe, finally) the long-awaited Big Announcement. Unless something more interesting comes up before I have a chance to write about that stuff. But really, what are the odds of that happening?
Blogger Tourney - Titan Poker
Well, due to circumstances beyond my control, my plans tonight evaporated at about the same time I remembered that there would be a blogger tournament tonight. Thus deprived of excuses, I feel obligated to donate my money to the assembled forces of bloggerdom. I know that I'm unlikely to be recognized or notable in any way, and my low-limit grinding has left my poker skillz somewhat less than mad. Still, that should leave me with plenty of time and attention to experiment with live-blogging a tournament. My prior attempts at this have failed miserably, but what the hell, I'll try it again.
07:22pm Wow, that was fast. Seven minutes for the first comment spam to show up.
07:33pm Two more spams. I'm going to spend more time deleting spam than posting or playing the tournament.
07:53pm First problem encountered with Titan software: it doesn't seem to like my second monitor. Not sure how annoying that's likely to be. How do people live-blog things without drowning in comment spam?
08:01pm And we're off. Looks like I got
the birthday boy himself at my table, along with
BG and ScottMcM from
DeadMoneyInc. I just raised on the button with AKo. BB and a limper called, but I whiffed the flop and folded to a 1/2 pot size bet. Did I mention that I suck at NL?
08:07pm Six minutes of phone answering. My roommates are headed back here to eat takeout with guests. This may not last as long as I thought it would.
08:15pm I suck suck suck at NL poker these days. I'm making a damned fool out of myself. Still in L1 and I'm already below 1000. I fold to everything, and everybody knows it.
08:16pm Then they give me a walk when I min-raise with AJo in MP.
08:19pm Raced BG with AKo vs his 99 and won. I feel bad taking half his stack, he's one of my favorite bloggers. I tell everyone that I'm bad enough that I'm willing to race on L2, but I think they all know that.
08:25pm I drop The Hammer on PAIGOW. In the CO, I raise to 80 and he calls from the BB. Flop is K74, he checks, I bet half the pot and he mucks. Says he had me dominated pre-flop, I'm guessing A2?
08:31pm JJ under the gun, and I get to play with PAIGOW again. Board comes K high, he bets the pot and I call because I'm just not feeling the love. Board pairs threes on the turn, he bets about 2/3 the pot and now I'm sure. I push and he folds. I tell him it wasn't The Hammer this time, but he seems unamused. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut.
08:38pm The obligatory "what cusswords work in this software" conversation. Meanwhile, I fold sailboats in EP because I'm scared of these guys. The BB gets a walk. This game might be easier if I actually peek at my cards occasionally.
08:42pm Gifted my BB to Pauly, who raised from the SB. Holy crap, someone I'm 6th in chips. That won't last. But apparently I outlasted BadBlood. Score one for Saint Lousy,
Chilly.
09:16pm My first blogger-ate-my-homework experience. I'll try to backfill later.
Wow, live-blogging is hard. My hat is off to
anyone who does this on a regular basis. Between blogging, chat, and roommates I almost had a nervous breakdown. It's tomorrow now, so no minute-by-minute breakdown is even possible, and I'll be lucky if I even remember half of what happened accurately.
I built my stack about to about 3500 by the first break, mostly because the deck hit me in the face. Then, just as I was beginning to trust it, the deck stabbed me in the back. I lost almost half my stack getting it all in with AKs v ATo on an A34 board when a ten spikes the river.
The first break is where things started going to hell. My roommates had planned on going out to dinner with a friend from out of town, but the restaurant they were going to was closed, so they ended up bringing takeout back with them. At about the same time, my wife got home from work. I tried to become invisible and keep focused, but after getting in a fight with blogger I decided I'd drop the live-blogging and concentrate on playing/ignoring people.
Let's see, what else happened? I worked my stack back up to about 4500 with a well-timed bluff, a couple of steals, and JJ vs NittanyLions420's TT. EasyFeltch busted out on a bluff which he insisted "could ONLY have been AA" (even though he had JJ). The button failed to fold his KK, which was "a total beginner mistake." CJ continued to emphasize the lesson, which made it easier for me to lay down the cowboys when I caught them three times in a row. Once I even gave the BB a walk when I had KK in the SB, because I knew a raise could only have meant aces, and I didn't want to face
that.
This is where things start to get fuzzy. My roommates' friend is this incredibly cool girl from Columbus. She's sort of a hippie-punk-lesbian, and every time she comes in town she brings more than she can smoke while she's staying with family and wants us to help her thin her stash before she drives back to Ohio. Of course, my roommates have turned into complete wusses since back when she used to hang out with them, so being the good co-host I am I feel obligated to try to keep up with her. Just out of hospitality, you understand. It doesn't help that I have a well-known weakness for denying the requests of cute girls.
At about the same time, someone (I wish I could remember who) takes almost everything I have left when the flush hits the river to beat my turned top two. I settle into deperation mode, smoking and folding while waiting for some cards. I'm in last place, hovering around 6xBB for many orbits. The table goes down to 7-handed, then 6, and I manage to steal a few times to hang on to last place for several orbits. Eventually I double up when I flop quad 9s, but I'm still in last place.
Then, the fateful end. My concentration is beginning to wander, and I've been completely cold-decked for the last 25 hands or so, when I pick up 33 in the BB. MP raises, the button and I call, and we're three handed to a flop with a 3 and some other crap that I hardly see. I check, MP pushes, button folds and I call. I caught him on a complete bluff, nothing but a gutshot draw, but the J nails me on the river and I'm out in 15th.
Overall, I'm very happy with my play. I got lucky once and unlucky a few more times, but I managed to hang on into the top 25%, and many of these players (especially the bloggers) have far more tournament experienced than myself. I also managed to sound like a 13 year old fanboy in front of some of my favorite bloggers, which was a little embarrassing but hopefully means I can avoid that if I ever actually meet them. And I managed to get high with a cute HPL from Columbus. Overall, not a bad evening.
In Quick And Out Quick
You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. Please; I may take all events into consideration; no, no. And it is no; a boy has never wept...nor dashed a thousand kin... did you hear me? Now leave it or take it. No, I might be in the playing for I know.
-Dutch Schultz
I'm gonna have to cowboy this joint, because I'm supposed to be out of here in 15 minutes and I'll be damned if I stay at work one minute longer than is absolutely necessary. Really, I wouldn't even be posting anything if I hadn't done such a good job of ignoring my poor little blog all week. Plenty to write about - so much to say, so much to say, so much to say - but no time to write it. I was trying desperately to catch up on my blog
reading all week, and I was almost there last night. I was going to finish up this morning while working, and then spend the afternoon writing. Then
Rojo puked on me, serving up a dozen or so copies of each post that had been added to anything on my lists in the last 24 hours or so. Sigh.
Poker is going well. I've almost erased last month's $1000 slide, and with a little luck I'll be able to give the 3/6 tables another shot before October comes around. Part of the reason I've been ignoring my implicit obligation to post here is that I've been hoovering bets on the 2/4's at Full Tilt every night.
Another part of the reason is that I just started Ed Miller's
Small Stakes Hold'em. I can already tell that it will cause the stillbirth of at least a dozen strategy posts I've thought about. What's the point in trying, when Ed said it best?
And then there's the downer reason. The Mansion got burgled (isn't that a great verb?) twice this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, both times while we were all at work. Can you believe that? It could have been worse, they never left the first floor so mostly what they got was our back-up electronics and such, but what a pain in the ass. The first time was just annoying, but the second time made me feel stupid, like semi-bluffing the same calling station when you know he won't fold. Of course, there really wasn't anything that could have been done that we didn't do, but that hardly changes how it makes me feel.
Mostly, I just hope that all my stuff is still there when I get home.
Okay, that's it, time to cruise. Hopefully I'll get to write more this weekend. I've got a long story about the long-promised Big Announcement that I need to spend some time telling. One way or another, soon (but not soon enough) I'll have more time to dedicate to writing.
Fixing A Hole
So I fixed the place up a bit, hope you like it. I'm calling it my Blue Period. Obviously it still needs some work, at least if you're the sort that's bothered by the weird border widths beneath the title banner, but I'm not entirely unhappy with it. Which doesn't mean its not subject to change at a moment's notice.
I got the first tangible, real-world benefit out of this blog tonight.
Chilly sent me an email inviting me to play in a home game. Unfortunately I was unable to attend due to the no-douchebag rule, as tonight was unfortunately my monthly Douchebag Night. Instead I spent the evening playing with my blog template and pissing off my wife. I'm pretty sure I should have avoided her on Douchebag Night as well.
It's late. I think it must be bedtime.
The Story of the Hurricane
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a 10-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell.
That’s the story of the hurricane...
-Bob Dylan
Obviously Bob was talking about a different "Hurricane," and a different brand of injustice, but I haven't been able to get it out of my mind all week.
The programmer I share an office with is married to a woman from New Orleans. Let's just say his in-laws (parents as well as an aunt, no less) are with him for an extended stay. And his wife is pregnant, so she's freaking out just a little bit anyway. I thought this sounded like as close to Hell On Earth as I'd personally want to get, until I started reading
The Interdictor.
I've heard downtown New Orleans compared to Baghdad, but to me it sounds more like
Escape From New York.
This post in particular makes me think that someone had better contact Snake Plissken to go in after
Fats Domino. A brief quote from a phone interview The Interdictor had with "Bigfoot", a bar owner and DJ from New Orleans:
Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.
The next time the US government says they're sending aid to some foreign country during a time of crisis, remember
this bit:
For three days, [Army Corps of Engineers] officials had lamented the difficulty of gaining access to the canal, but yesterday a local contractor, Boh Bros. Construction Co., apparently drove to the mouth of the canal and started placing a set of steel sheet pilings to isolate the canal from the lake. This job was finished yesterday afternoon.
And remember Boh Bros. next time you have some construction you need done in Louisiana. Talk about great marketing... "Boh Bros. Construction: We Saved The City. No, Really."
So yeah... what a mess. In the What-Can-Ya-Do department... well, not much. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to drive down and get all Mad Max on the bad guys' asses. But I guess if N'awlins can take this kind of hit, my bankroll can as well.
PokerStars is running a 20% bonus ($120 max) through Sept 8, and four charity tournments with buy-ins of $5, $20, $50, and $100 September 12-16. The
origin story is over on Wil Wheaton's blog, and Otis will keep you up to date on the
PokerStars blog. PokerStars is matching all contributions, so if you're not playing poker online (or there) currently, this might be a good excuse to start. They're definitely one of the best sites around, and I got my start playing the .05/.10 limit hold'em games there. I just caught word from Bill Rini's blog that
FullTilt will be doing
a similar tournament tonight, so if you're in a hurry to donate you can hit that one as well.
And if poker isn't your thing, a group of FOAF's that call themselves
The Zombie Squad are pulling together
their own donation. No corporate matching here, but their site lists some good answers to the question "Why should I donate through ZS?":
- Pooling our donations together will hopefully allow us to give a larger gift as a group than we would as individuals.
- If you donate $15 or more we will send you a cool gift to show our appreciation. We're mailing out a special edition black military style Dog Tags with a ZS logo on one side and "Zombie Squad Relief Drive - Hurricane Katrina 2005" on the back.
- You will get your name (or whatever name you choose) listed on this website as a donor to this fundraiser.
- If you are on our disaster preparation forum you will get an image under your name showing that you are a donor.
- You will get 50% off Zombie Con 2006 if you donate $100.00 or more.
- We have ZERO adminstrative costs for this fund drive unlike a lot of fundraising organizations out there. Every cent we raise here will go directly to relief charities. All of our staff are volunteers.
And the most important reason:
Guess that's about it for now. Hmm... three entries in three days. Soon, people may think I actually write a blog or something.
Looks Like We Made It
A month or so back, I caught
a G-Rob post at Up For Poker trashing my hometown and its poker bloggers. Now, trashing my home town I have no problem with; over the years, I have variously referred to this place as St. Lousy, The Black Hole of the Midwest, and Humidity City, so I'm not stranger to that. But if you start trashing my town's poker bloggers, then I start getting... well, surprised, mostly. I didn't know my town
had any poker bloggers. Well, other than me, and given the quality and quantity of my output, not to mention the state of my bankroll, I'm not sure that I qualify in either respect.
It didn't take long for me to peg
Chilly at IDSN as the leader of this
ragtag band of
locals, at least in terms of blogging. He even had a blogroll just for poker bloggers who were "Born, Lived, or Imprisoned in the'Lou". (Wow, there's just no grammatical way to include that in a sentence, is there?) "Obviously," I thought to myself, "I needed to get myself on that."
Now a less sophisticated (or less procrastinatory) blogger might have just dropped him a comment or an email or something, saying, "Hey, look, I'm trapped in the same hole you are!" But not me. "Too easy," I think to myself. So I bided my time. I read the blogs, I studied every move they made, and I honed my skills. I waited patiently until the moment that I had written something worth reading. I figured that if I was going to have guests, I probably ought to clean the place up a little bit... or at least buy a chair.
Then I blew it all for a
Peanut Butter, Bacon and Egg sandwich.
Almost immediately, Chilly dropped a few nice comments on me (despite the obvious lack of interesting content), forcing me to edit yesterday's post to reflect the additional reader I had acquired. He added me to the blogroll too, and even
pimped my rideblog. And now, thanks to Chilly, I have officially acquired my first comment spam.
I don't know if anyone but Chilly,
Scurvy and
Joule_e are reading this, but it no longer matters. As far as I'm concerned, once you get comment spam, you are officially a blogger.
Anyway, if you followed Chilly's link expecting this to be more interested (or appetizing) than his recipes... well, sorry, but there's some things with which I am ill-equipped to compete. If you're looking for interesting posts on NL strategy, get back to his blog for a
nice piece that builds on
Phil Gordon's player levels. And if you're looking for fiberglass car kits... well, sorry, but just because I was excited by my comment spam doesn't mean I didn't delete it.
