Blogging move?

I'll be doing a lot of blogging over at http://www.thunderkeller.com/blog/RayBlog.php for a while, just an FYI.

Mmmm beer

I had a crappy night last night. It started when we knew we had to get tires for the car. One had a slow leak, and another was low on treads. I dropped the wife and daughter off at the mall while my son and I waited in line at sears to get tires because my wife had a $200 gift card for there.

It took them, no lies, 41 minutes to get to me in line. It was ridiculous. In that time, my wife got my daughters ears pierced, picked out some earrings, and was getting pretty bored, as was my son who was stuck in line with me. We finally drop off the car and walk to the mall to eat dinner while waiting for them to do the tires. We decide on BJ's Brewery, and they have a 15 minute wait so we head in to Atomic Comic, but nothing there really grabs me per se.

When we finally sit, I get to order a beer. Its the first beer I've had in a long time. The first real beer. I mean, you see me order a Heiniken or three every week at Pub Poker, but even that's not real beer. The BJ's Belgian was pure heaven, and it reminded me why I was an alcoholic, and sure enough, I forced myself to stop before that beer was even done, or I'd just be tempted to order another, and another and another.

When everyone was done, I was getting ready to head back to Sears to pick up the car when my wife reveals that she forgot the Sears gift card. Doh! That was annoying.

I pay in cash ($200!), we get home, and the wife passes out. I sit down to play some poker and find a pretty juicy table where a maniac appears drunk and is just firing off with anything. In addition I sit down to watch the Dan N vs Dreamclown HU match. Honestly, I am not a good enough HU player to say who I thought was better but it was fun to watch.

Meanwhile, the maniac continues to bet and call into my premium hands and rivers me out of two HUGE pots, and I lose a couple of small one's as well for an overall craptastic night. In general this has been a pretty bad poker week for me, but I am not sure its my play versus just a bad run, so I'm trying to stay positive...

See you all tonight for pub poker....

Short and Sweet

I have a longer blog on Keller's site, but for some reason, permissions are messing up on me so no one can see it, so I'll link to it later. For now...

http://www.thunderkeller.com goes live today, go see it, have fun, post stuff in the forums, etc. Support your local poker player.

Clean Up

I cleaned up some of the blog links today, and removed people that had not posted in two weeks or longer. I figure stale links are no fun.

I got the new laptop last night.. The screen was damaged on it. I'm pretty pissed off. Returning it today for a new one. My wife paid the extra $300 for the extended warranty, DOH. Apparently she did not understand what a fool deal that is. :(

That's about it. I'm tired, I'm cranky, I'm annoyed, and not really in the x-mas spirit. I'll work on that.

Oh and I am installing Civ Four tonight on a computer is anyone wants to kick my ass. I suck at these games.

Banks! Banks! Banks!

No, this has nothing to do with the blog by Dan N, and nothing to do with financial institutions, although I am having my problems with them right now...

No, I am talking about this. If you have not seen it yet, and you are one of my friends, contact me immediately and we will plan a showing. It is colossally good.

If you did see it, you will get this next part.

I am dropping off the kids today at their Kindercare, and since it's before 7am, the classes have not really split yet, so all of the kids are in the twos room, where my daughter normally resides. As I walk in, I see one of the older girls, probably seven or so, sitting in front of a play table with three figures, each one roughly six inches tall and nine inches wide: two cows and a bull.

I waited eagerly for her to pull out an Indian and a Cowboy, strap on a harmonica, and re-enact Steven Banks "My way, high way, try way, fly way, buy way," but alas, it never happened.

Off to buy a new portable today. Whee?

What's the right answer here?

So, Poker Office just released version 2.0, which has started a big fight here.

I can see where these people are coming from. I only bought Poker Office three weeks ago, so I know I was ready to be pissed as hell until I found out I was one of the lucky people who would get a free upgrade.

But what's the right call for the Poker Office people in this policy? I am leaning towards the idea that they should give free upgrades to anyone who has purchased it in the past three months, not the past three weeks. That sounds fair to me, but it's hard to say for sure because of one important fact: the primary upgrades provided by the new Poker Office are not the primary upgrades people have been requesting.

Look, I agree the new features in Poker Office 2.0 are sweet! The mucked cards thing is cool, the new graphs are cool, in general its a great new product. But it's lacking the one thing I see people clamoring for again and again on the forums: live tracker support for more sites.

I realize this is difficult to do, but its hard for Poker Office to take the stance of charging people because "development on the product is expensive" when they're not putting the development in the direction that most people are requesting. I would like to see the users vote with their pocket books and say 'Ok, we'll pay the $45 upgrade fee... WHEN there is support for Poker Room, Full Tilt, and Ultimate Bet in Poker Office." What scares me however, is that Poker Office may not really be listening and may instead just go "Well, no one is buying our product, I guess we better stop supporting it."

Poker Office, you have a fantastic product. You could probably take over the market from Poker Tracker if you just supported more sites, and you had better customer support. Both of these things are not hard to accomplish (although admittedly supporting more sites is probably annoyingly tedious).

Get a move on. I want to see you succeed.

X-mas Present for myself?

Personalized Plate Search For Arizona
Search Result For "ysscky" Matches Found: 0
Issued Plate Page:
No matches found

Order now?

Fixing things

This morning I dropped off my laptop at Fry's. I have the extended warranty, so hopefully they will fix it or I will return it and get a new one. yay. :/

Last night I went to go talk to Keller at a Starbucks by his house while he signed the pictures we need to send out for his fans. He had to sign 50, then we got to talking about poker. He thinks I play a little too tight, but is also encouraging me to move up in levels, so he can't think I am that bad. A funny story came out of this when I was mentioning bankroll issues. Keller mentioned that my wife had said I could play with the money I have on Ultimate Bet right now (roughly $5,000), and I said that yes, she did say that, but the first time I booked a $500 loss she would freak out.

With a completely straight face, he looked at me and said "Is $500 a lot of money?"

Maybe not to you, but to the rest of us, yes $500 is a chunk of change. Its not earth shatteringly horrible, but its bad enough to feel the pain when it flies out the window. I just found it amusing to hear that question, right after we had just gotten done talking about how poker can desensitize you to money.

That's about all I got for today. Have a good day everyone.

Not a lot

This weekend included a PTQ down in Tucson held in the largest room I have ever held a tournament in. We could have run the PTQ in the middle, had a football game one side, and a ultimate Frisbee tournament on the other (just for Seth of course). The convention people were extremely nice, friendly and helpful. A little too friendly in that they explained to me that the room they gave me had recently caught fire. That seemed a little scary. But the PTQ went with out a hitch, except for one flame shoe guy skipping out on paying me. I'm gonna get that guy.

Sunday I spent a lot of time with my Fujitsu and their online support, which was good and bad. I went through five different people in Fujitsu support, including one guy I would like to see fired for simply going idle on my three times in a row. The final result was they could not figure out why my laptop keeps losing connection to my wireless network. I was disappointed that at one point the guy responded with 'why don't you just plug it in to an Ethernet cable?'

Uh, BECAUSE I BOUGHT A FRICKING WIRELESS ROUTER AND LAPTOP SO I COULD BE WIRELESS. DUH! That's like saying "we know we gave you a plane with no landing gear, but you can just land in the water and be ok, right?"

I'm going to bring it to Fry's and see what they say since I have the extended warranty. I hope to heck I don't need to have it replaced... If anyone is a wireless expert and can take some time to look at it, praises be to you.

I played a little poker last night, and booked a nice winning session at $2/$4, which is great since I rarely see a $2/$4 game on FCP I think is not a total rock garden. My night was made all the better by, in 273 hands, seeing pocket Aces three times, pocket kings once, and pocket queens twice. That tends to help a little bit. In, any case, it puts me at the following:

Account Real Money Free Money
Cashier Account 16.86 USD 200.98 USD
Poker Account 210.36 USD 0.00 USD

So I am up a whopping $10, and have cleared $16.86 out of $200.98 of my bonus. I honestly think I am stuck on FCP for at least a month to clear this effing bonus. Whee...

Entertainment

While driving in this morning, I saw a sign for El Rancho, a Mexican market in Chandler. But they had some cool flags over the spiffy new sign which hung slightly over the sign, making it look like it said "El Kancho" instead. If you don't get that, go read this.

Yesterday I heard Pat Boone doing Enter Sandman, by Metallica. Wow. I can not decide if that is the funniest, or scariest thing I have heard in my life.

I have my poker tracker stats in from FCP finally, and boy are they depressing. I'll post some more if I have time, but the short version is "I played tighter like I was supposed to, and in return I have lost a lot more than ever before."

Bah.

Well, I was caught up

Poker Account (USD) 166.66 USD 0.00 USD
Cashier Account (USD) 11.36 USD 206.48 USD

$34 down last night two tabling $1/$2 after Ninja. I got home at 9:30 or so, wife went to be around 10:00, I played until around midnight. I would swear it was rigged. Every time I bluffed I got called. Every time I had a monster it was folded, unless someone stayed in to crack me off later on in the hand. My typical hand last night looked like this:

I am in the big blind with AA, it is folded to the SB who calls. I raise. He calls. Flop comes QhJd8d. He bets, I raise, he reraises, I cap, he calls.
Flop 6C, he bets I call, River 2S, he bets I call. He turns over J8 offsuit.

So not only did I not get anyone in the pot with me for value for my pocket aces. But the one guy who did stay in broke me off with j8 offsuit when he flopped bottom two pair. The tables I played at had saw flop % of 29% and 34$, so it's not like they were super tight either. They just hated me.

I'm also cranky because I went around the back to take out my trash today, and lo and behold, there was a fedex box out back by my trash that the fed ex guy must have thrown over the gate since no one was home. Of course, he left nothing on the door, so I didn't know, so theoretically my new laptop power supply has been sitting in my back yard for a couple days now. With the sprinklers on.

If it's waterlogged, I am going to be so pissed off.

Caught Up

Poker Account (USD) 200.06 USD

Heh. Well, I started with $200, so I am "back to even," not counting the promotional money, which I am leaving in the Cashier's Account.

Cashier Account (USD) 8.79 USD 209.05 USD

That means I have cleared $8.79 of $209.05 possible. I think this means I am technically behind still a little bit, because I cashed my first dollar or two to my poker account before I decided that was a bad idea, as it made it hard for me to judge my progress, but close enough.

I've been playing a lot tho, but mainly at $1/$2. It looks like its going to take forever to clear this bonus at $1/$2. Technically, my Neteller account has the bankroll to play $5/$10, but I honestly don't feel comfortable doing it right now. I'm still having trouble with the $2/$4 tables some times, especially on FCP, where they appear to be rock gardens. I would love to play more $2/$4 to clear faster, but I am trying incredibly hard to practice game selection, and the $1/$2 games are way juicier, seeming to have a 30-35% saw flop percentage, where the $2/$4 tables have 22-27% saw flop.

I two tabled last night, bought in for $50 each table. I ended on table one with $29 (-10.5BB), and table two with $106 (+28BB). Table one was my typical FCP table where hand after hand got cracked, and strangely enough, table two was the opposite, where hand after hand stood up. My KJ offsuit ended with a board of 68JKJ with people calling me all the way down. It was that kind of good night on that table. If I can log a few more of those, I'll be back into happy profit land on FCP, not counting the bonus.

Tonight is the wife's birthday, so Dinner at Ninja. Unlikely that poker will occur tonight, so enjoy this poker blog, you are not going to see one tomorrow. :)

Busy Night

Last night was:

4:45 PM Leave Work
5:00 Pick up Wife
5:30 Pick up Kids
6:30 Get home. Let out dogs. Let wife clean puppy mess. Move shipping product into car
6:45 Go to UPS store. Ship out Product to Wotc. Ship out Invoice.
7:00 Go to Staples. Buy Envelopes and backings for picture mailing
7:15 McDonalds for Kids dinner
7:30 Wal-Mart to buy a ton of xmas gifts
8:15 Home, put kids to bed
8:30 Log in to FCP and one table while wrapping gifts
11:30 Finish wrapping gifts, log out of FCP a whole $3 richer. Go to sleep.
12:00 Get back up because my daughter needs a drink
1:00 Get back up because my daughter just wet her pants
2:00 Get back up because my daughter "needs mommy!" who lets her in the bed with us. No sleep for the rest of the night because whenever my daughter gets in bed with us, she takes over the whole bed, and I get pushed off, kicked, etc.

So, uh, I am tired.

Two funny stories from Poker. First, I got dealt pocket aces twice in a row, and both times they held up. Second, on a big blind of 68 in an unraised pot, the flop came a rainbow 579. Yeah, I got paid off by pocket kings who didn't raise preflop. Idiot. Despite those great pots, I ended up barely ahead because my trend of huge hands getting cracked continued for the other three hours of play last night. Sigh....

Have a good one all.

Pokerish Weekend

This weekend had a lot of activity in it, and a lot of poker intermingled. I'll try to just give a chronological walk through and see if any fun stories pop up.

Friday night started with me logging into FCP and seeing Daniel N. announce a private tournament on Full Contact Poker's poker room. The evening was actually open for me, so I jumped on, deposited money via Neteller, and was up and running in no time. It was No Limit Turbo, which basically means I had zero chance. I am bad enough at a regular speed no limit tournament. Still it was fun, and Dan was out even before me, which was pretty funny. I was a total donkey however, not good representation to FCP of me having any skills whatsoever.

After that I played a quick 1/2 session and was down $50 in a heartbeat. I shall include now the rant that will go on during this whole weekend:

Full Contact Poker hates me. During this weekend I have gotten nine sets, eight of which lost, two of them to set over set situations, the rest where someone got a straight or flush. Two full houses lost to four of a kind. Only two of my premium hands stood up all weekend that I can remember (AKo got me a full house which DID hold up, and AJs got me the nut flush on the turn). So it was a horrible run of getting tons of great cards, but none of them holding up, which was a recipe for disaster. Overall I am down about 20 Big Bets on FCP. Its not a horrible amount, but the site is just frustrating me to no end.

Saturday we went shopping, and I picked up a nice necklace and earring set for the wife as a bday present while we were separated. I rarely buy her anything truly expensive for gifts, so thought it was about time. It was way above budget, but I'm going to have to count on my Neteller card to carry me through January anyways.. :)

Then we went to her X-mas party, which is never too thrilling to me. But she had a great time between showing off her jewelry, which I gave her to go with her formal dress, and dancing the night away. I got to see Jill, who I used to work with at my previous job. Hadn't seen her in two years, but she was her same self and fun to hang out with, although it looks like age is starting to finally catch up with her, as she is not the young curvaceous hottie she used to be in my memory banks.

Sunday was more shopping, and I'm now done with everyone except my grandfather, who I can not figure out anything for. Bah. Then we went to my wife's birthday party at her father's house, which was much more tranquil than expected, as half the people did not show for differing reasons, mainly various illnesses. Ah well. This will also serve as a reminder to everyone that I am NOT pub pokering Wednesday, as that is the wife's actual birthday. Maybe we'll do Ninja and invite a couple of people.. lemme ask her..

That's about it for the weekend. Today I am back into work mode, for normal work and for Keller's site, trying to plan shirts and other promo material for the launch. Wheeeee.

Have a good day all!

Mother Fucker

PRE-FLOP
suitd4life folds, wildonexx bets $2, paro75 bets $3, JOE2532 folds, RayPowers bets $4, teflonman folds, Trapper_Jon folds, biggorille folds, pedroo folds, wildonexx calls $2, paro75 calls $1.

FLOP [board cards AH,AD,AS ]
wildonexx bets $1, paro75 bets $2, RayPowers calls $2, wildonexx folds.

TURN [board cards AH,AD,AS,4H ]
paro75 bets $2, RayPowers calls $2.

RIVER [board cards AH,AD,AS,4H,9S ]
paro75 bets $2, RayPowers calls $2.

SHOWDOWN
paro75 shows [ AC,QC ]
RayPowers mucks cards [ JS,JD ]

Bah.

Yay and Boo for my computer

I got my Poker Tracker License yesterday in record time. Boy they responded fast when I sent them the ID, good job Poker Tracker guys! I needed the quick response too because when I got home I had a nasty surprise. We normally leave the portables on top of the puppy's kennel, because it acts like an end table for the couch as well. The puppy had been feeling frisky and apparently got hold of BOTH of the portable's AC adapter cables through the kennel and chewed through both of them, while they were plugged in. How he is not dead I do not know. How I personally did not kill him I also do not know.

So, with only 2 hrs of battery life to work on, I emailed the product id, got back the registration code, inputted it, imported my crypto logic hands as best I could (they errored out twice), tried to move them to poker office, failed three times, gave up, printed stats from poker tracker to a spreadsheet, and mailed the spreadsheets to my yahoo account so I could look at them after the portable died. Wheee.

I am not sure why the Crypto hands that successfully ported to poker tracker won't then import into poker office, but I guess I need to resign myself to just not having them work for me in Poker office, which really sucks.

I made a thread on Full Contact Poker about my initial stats runs if you want to look at it here.

That's about it for now. Don't expect much more poker talk until my portable battery replacement comes in...

Pub Poker and Poker Tracker

Wheeee.

So last night I was super donkey. I got pocket queens in the third hand and raised from to 500 with the blinds at 50/100 and got two callers! The flop comes A47 with two spades and of course I am beat, but for some reason I keep at it and lose half my chips right off the bat.

I make a bad call with KJ offsuit on a preflop raise and the flop comes K4K, and a few bets later I am back to even, then I make a couple more bad calls preflop, and then make a raise of 500 into a big stack with KQ offsuit, he raises 1500 more and I push all in. He flips over aces and the board does not provide me with a miracle.

Honestly, I played the whole night horrible and I just wasn't in the mood, not sure why, especially since I can't do it next week because we're going out for the wife's bday. Ah well.

My poker tracker e-mail came in this morning, and I can not describe how much I'd rather be at home working on that than doing real work. Unfortunately, the e-mail is a "send me your product ID email" so I still don't have a license yet, and likely won't get one until tomorrow. Bleh.

Not much else to say. Gonna spend some time today working on Keller's site. Fun Fun. If you want to see what's going on with his site in more depth visit here

See ya.

Woot for PSO

I got my points and ordered my Poker Tracker license just now. Yay!

Ok so...

Poker Office does not import Caribbean Sun Hand Histories
Poker Tracker does import Caribbean Sun Hand Histories.
Poker Office does import Poker tracker Hand Histories.

I think I see a solution to my problem.

Blog or BLARG?

Last night was good times. The tree got up in record time, and the kids had a blast decorating it. In fact they had such a good time that they got mad when we were all done, because they wanted to keep going. It was cute.

I got Poker Office switched to MYSQL 4.1 and then did an import only to realize that I have just about nothing to import right now because I have so few party poker hands on that computer, and most of my other play is on sites that Poker Office does not support: Caribbean Sun and World Poker Exchange. Bleh. Anyone know of a way to translate Caribbean Sun hand histories into a format that Poker Office will read?

I had to laugh about a glitch in poker office. It tells me I am a losing player.

I know that doesn't sound like a glitch, but here's what it does. On hands where I get disconnected, and reconnect, it loses track of the hand, and takes out the bets I put in with out ever registering if I won the hand or not. I showed as a $9 loser last night, even though I bought into a table with $25 and left the same table with $32 last night when I jumped on a $0.50/$1 table just to gain some history and play with the program. Most of that loss was when my pocket queens turned into a full house and someone bet and called my raises the whole way. But on the river, I got disconnected, barely reconnected in time to do the final raise and win the pot, but Poker Office didn't pick up the win. Doh. Definitely a problem for me with how often I get disconnected. I need to work on getting the wireless router downstairs I think.

This morning I stopped off for gas on the way into work, and picked up a chicken sandwich and apple juice from my local quick trip. I'm back on some medicines for my allergies, and one a days to try to just feel healthier. Those one a days wreck havoc with my stomach though, and I always feel sick after taking them. Today I played it safe. I ate half my sandwich, then took it, then ate the other half, packing the vitamin in food to help keep it down.

Ah, if only it had worked, but no, in the middle of the freeway, merging from the 60 to the 101, my stomach suddenly told me that nothing was staying down today, and I grabbed the chicken sandwich wrapper just in time to throw up right into it a gushy apple juice with food in it mixture. Panicking while trying to drive at the same time, I am looking for some place to dump the gooey concoction as it begins to drop out of the wrapper onto my hand, when I spy the apple juice bottle. Alas it does not fit in the apple juice bottle, and I am forced to grab a handful of tissues from the tissue box to absorb the gook before it goes all over the car.

All while driving about 65 down the freeway. Whee.

I finally find a bag and dump everything in there, and wipe my arm and pantsleg down as best I can with extra tissues, but not an enjoyable time at all. I still feel sick. Bleh.

See you all at poker tonight. Hopefully I won't puke on you.

Please Hold

Ok, so this rant is much better told in person, but I feel the need to vent.

My wife called me a couple of days ago, because she noticed that 38,000 of our rewards points were expiring, and could I call to see if we can get them back at least long enough to redeem them..

Here is where my rant begins. Why, oh why, do companies feel the need to interject messages in the hold music to let you know that, well, you are still on hold? Here is how my first call to Wells Fargo went...

"Thank you for calling, someone will be with you shortly" *Hold Music*

At this point I do what any normal person would do. I put the phone back on the hook, with it on speaker, and go about my work. A couple of minutes later..

"Thank you for.." I scramble to the phone hit the speaker button and pick up the receiver to put it to my ear to start talking.

"...calling wells Fargo, please hold for the next available representative." *Hold Music*

I grumble, put speaker phone back on and put the phone back on the hook, and get back to concentrating on work.

"Wells Fargo.." Once again I snatch up the receiver and hit the speaker phone button at the same time. I mildly crack myself in the head with the receiver, but no biggie. Finally I will get to talk to someone.

".. is currently experiencing a high volume of call traffic. Thank you for holding." *Hold Music*

Mother fucker! I hit speaker phone and slam down the receiver. Back to work again...

"Your.." Phone Grab, Speaker phone button press.

"call is important to us! Please stay on the line, and we'll be right with you!" *Hold Music*

I hate you guys! I hate you! Death! I hate you! Look, I know I am on hold! I am not that dumb. You don't need to keep reminding me that I am on hold. Leave on your pathetic hold music so I can blank it out and get back to doing work. Every time a voice comes on the line, it redirects my attention to the phone when I could be concentrating on other things at work. HOLD MESSAGES WASTE MY TIME AND ANNOY ME! To make it worse, some places, like this one, have MULTIPLE HOLD MESSAGES THAT CHANGE, so its not like I can hear it once and then learn my lesson and blank out future occurrences of that message. No, the message changes every time so I have to redirect my attention to it every time.

Whomever thought of this idea needs to be forced to bungee off a 30 story building with the bungee cord attached to a very special sexual part of theirs.

I'm getting a Christmas Tree tonight, can you tell I'm in the holiday spirit?

Cleared Caribbean

YAYAYA! I cleared my Caribbean Sun Poker bonus/promotion.

This is off the top of my head, so may not be 100% accurate.

Buy in: $100
Total when promotion is done: $116
Promotion Bonus $50
Total cash out: $176 (which I think is wrong, I think I actually currently have $194 in my account, so my math is off somewhere)
PSO Bonus: Free Poker Tracker - YES!!

I know, its not a huge deal, and my profit was pretty small, BUT IT WAS A PROFIT! Yay! I'm happy because I did it mainly at the $2/$4 tables, which were on the average super tight with a players in hand percentage range of 27-30%.

I truly hate the site. The interface is pretty bad, but worst of all is the random lag on the site. I have lost several hands due to random disconnects or lag outs. And its not my net connection, as I will swap over to a browser every time it happens, and more often than not, I can access other web pages just fine while I am supposedly having "connection problems" to Caribbean.

I'm trying to decide now if I leave money in Caribbean, or cash it all out for the next promotion. I'm leaning towards taking it all out for now. Right now its all about bankroll building, and that requires I focus on one site and promotion at a time. When I have a better bankroll I want to spread out my money amongst many sites so that I have a much better game selection range, but right now, I think I need to keep it focused.

Girard, I read your blog and feel your pain. I had a similar issue while grinding out my Caribbean promotion. Had a guy who stayed in with any two suited cards who rivered a flush on me twice. I smiled, and got most of it back when he followed my pocket aces to the end and didn't catch. He's still up on me, but he's on my buddy list now. :P

Speaking of which, does anyone find it weird that poker sites have buddy and friend lists, but not "fish lists?"

Other funny story for the night. I have pocket 7's in the big blind, folded to the button who limps, sb calls. I raise thinking I have the best hand here and want to just take it now. Call, call. Flop comes 68A. Sb bets, I call, button calls. Turn comes 10. I want to take it down right here. I don't think SB has an ace, and if so, has a bad kicker. I represented strength preflop, and want to force it. I check, Button checks, SB bets, I check raise. Button folds. SB thinks for a long long time, and calls. Bleh. I think I am right in that he has A/trash tho, but that still beats me! The river, however, is the lovely lovely 7, giving me a set. He checks, I bet, he calls. I type in the chat box. 'Sorry I rivered you.'

He asks 'Did you think you were ahead in that hand?'

Me 'Nope, was trying to push you off, and it almost worked. Hence why I said sorry I rivered you. :) You looked ready to fold when I check raised tho.'

No comment from him. :)

I like this kind of advertisement because it makes me look like a maniac to the table, which normally gets me more action. I had a similar hand where I open raised from middle/late position with A7suited. It was a tight table and half the time a preflop raise took the pot, so I figured it was worth a shot. By the turn I had the nut flush, and a caller followed me all the way down, yay!

I am sure I will get shit for hands like that, but honestly, they don't happen often, and I like the advertising value of these hands to the truly good players. I want them to give me action because they think I am playing with less than premium hands, and I am VERY cognizant of who I am in a hand with to determine my post flop play.

That's all I got for now, have a good one all.

Whiny

I'm not gonna sugar coat it, this is me being whiny. Nothing yesterday was completely out of line by the wife or anyone else. I was just tired and cranky and I'm whining here because I can.

It all started on the way home. I was tired and wanted to relax. Wife had errands that needed to be run. The plan was to pick up the kids. She brings them to swim class, while I run to pick up xmas pictures for her then do some xmas shopping. Then she decided she needed to go shopping for a dress for a party this weekend, so she wanted to go shopping now. So she talked the kids into not going to swim class, because they could go visit santa instead. So the plan became that we would all go home, let out the dogs, then run to the mall to see Santa and pick up the pictures, then split up for some shopping. When we get home, the puppy of course pees everywhere, and I get ready to go, but the wife has determined that, for some unknown reason, we need to put up more x-mas lights RIGHT NOW. This wastes a good 20 more minutes of time that we could have made it to the mall, and rushes us since we're not sure if Santa is done at 7pm or 8pm.

Traffic sucks, and I hit a couple of bad construction zones, and my daughter decides she has to go to the potty three miles before the mall RIGHT NOW, so we pull off into an arby's. Then one mile before the mall, my son decides he has to go, but screw it, we just floor it to the mall. I rush in with my son, and my wife follows with the daughter. We meet at the picture place, and the line is huge, so its now my job to take the kids to go see Santa while she stands in line.

Santa's area is pretty cool, with music buttons and giant train set for the kids, but Santa himself looked slightly inebriated and just not that good, yet still had a huge line. I talked the kids out of line, and we just waved to Santa and played in his play land area for a bit, which included a snow blowing foam machine which they loved. We stayed there for a couple of minutes, then went back to the wife, who was having issues because the pictures were messed up, so she was arguing her way up the management chain to get satisfaction. Since she was due to be a while longer, I left with the kids again, and we headed to santa's again for more playing, then I wanted to try to get some shopping done somehow, so I brought the kids to buy cookies to keep them occupied, and then headed out to do shopping. As soon as we hit the first store, however..

Daddy, I need to go potty again NOW!

All the way back to the wife, which is where the potty was, only for it to be a false alarm. As we finish potty time, the wife finishes with the pictures and it has been an HOUR later, and we both say screw it, and just head home for the night.

So it was tiring, and unproductive, what a joy.

Odds of hands, and the usual dry side pot argument

Last night was great times. Attendees at Pub Poker included Mike, Brad, Ben, Girard, myself, and an old friend Matt and his friend Damian. Lots of catching up occurred, some drinking, and some poker.

I wore my new Poker Stars shirt, but resisted doing my full on joke mode. I had Advanced HoldEm in my car, and my plan was to sit down at my first table with my shirt, and my HoldEm book, get my first two cards, look at them, pick up the book, look up starting hands, then look at the table and go "are you guys a tight or loose table?"

I thought it was funny, but I didn't think anyone else at the table would have thought so, so I decided against it.

My big losses for the night went as follows.

My set loses to a rivered gut shot straight who put all of his money in on the flop.

My AJ loses to J4 when he puts all of his money in on a flop of J83, and of course a turn 4 gives him two pair.

My A10 is pwned by KQ. Not that bad, but it was my finisher, so I thought I'd mention it.

I am getting a bit downtrodden on pub poker because, well, I am unlucky, and even getting my money in as the favorite every time is nice and all, but if you keep getting sucked out on to get knocked out, its irrelevant. This is another one of those reasons why I like Limit so much better. Losing like 5 BB is nowhere near as bad as losing my entire stack on a suck out.

Ah well.

There's a guy that plays at Pub Poker that we are sure we know each other, but we couldn't remember from where. Last night we figured out that he used to come to my store when it was still open. He was the victim of my latest tirade about betting into a dry side pot.

He is in the big blind. Blinds are 400-800. Early position limper calls, next guy goes all in for 4000 or so. Late position guy calls the all in, putting HIM all in (for only like 2400). Big Blind calls. Early position limper calls.

Flop comes 457 rainbow. There are two all in pots, and no side pot for the two people left with stacks. The Big Blind bets 2000, and the early position player folds. The big blind then turns over Q6 for an open ended straight draw.

Now, first of all, I'm pretty sure I don't call with Q6 in that position, even with money in the pot. I am pretty sure it was offsuit too, but honestly, I don't remember. Second, I can not for the life of me understand why he bets there. He is drawing to the near nuts, but right now he has nothing, so by thinning the players, he is improving the odds that one of the all ins doubles up. His reason when we started talking about it was that he "doesn't understand the whole unspoken rule of checking it down, and he wanted to get more money out of the other guy."

Look, if you know the check it down "unspoken rule," then you should know that you won't get any more money out of the other guy! If you bet, he will either expect you to have a good hand and fold, or will have you beat and will come over the top of you. He's not going to 'call you down' on a draw with two all ins in the main pot and a totally dry side pot.

His next reason when I shot down that one was that "I had over half of my chips in the pot and I wanted to thin the field a bit to make my odds better."

Perhaps this is logical, but it begs the question as to why he called half his chips with Q6 to begin with, with two all in's ahead of him. At what point do you not expect your Q6 to be dominated by at least one of the other three players in this monster pot? So it's a case of a bad play to start with leading to a (self) justified bad play afterwards.

*shrug* I just don't get it.