Not Rich Yet

Don't play when not in the mood...

2009-07-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

I did some drafting, then felt like I should play some as I wanted to keep playing continuously so I stayed in the right mode. But my head wasn't into it and so I played badly. And then I ran badly... and then the game got shorthanded and I thought "well, I'm horrible at short handed, so this is a chance to practice, and this entire session is a wash anyways."

Yeah that was smart.

Short version, down roughly $100 last night. A good lesson learned to not play when I am not in the right mindset to play. I never "have to" play, and I should not act like I do.

Poker tracker what?

2009-07-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest, I played very little the past two days. Magic Online has a new beta up for Magic2010 which I am invited to, so I am drafting like mad to try to break the thing and have some fun. I did play some last night though, putting $100 down on a $2/$4 table, and playing, honestly, boring tight poker (15% VP$IP!) and ending up $11.

However poker tracker says I am down $7.75 for that session. I have no idea why. I even downloaded the hand histories from UB again and re-imported them. Same thing. Wish I knew what was wrong there.

Entertainingly, I show myself as currently up $153 and.. I just traded $150 to a forum friend to get them started up here so.. I'm back to even. :P

I only had one hand that was annoying in the session, so I'm posting it to 2+2, and will link it here. I think that might be a better way to make my blog more educational as well.

Just an update.

2009-07-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

Monday was boringly simple play. Not a lot though. So instead I shall post my two favorite hands from my BJJ play:

Hand one: Thank you for folding for 18 more cents in a $30 pot.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4497188

Hand two: Worst tarp evar!

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4493930

Weekend Play

2009-07-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the weekend, the Bad Beat Jackpot hit over $200,000 so I braved the jackpot tables to see if I could get a piece of the jackpot. Even if I got the split for being at the same level, it was probably going to be worth the amount I would lose in EV by playing those tables.

Turns out I didn't need to worry much as I destroyed the tables for a couple of buy ins while I played. I also saw some hilariously bad playing, specifically related to people playing short. I saw a guy at a .5/1 table fold a $3.50 pot for 5 cents more. I also saw a guy fold a $40 pot for 18 cents more. I'm pretty sure I may call both of those with any two cards.

No bad beat jackpot for me though, it's still running today. I did make Contender though, which is something in the UB player rewards program, no idea what it is. I'll have to look at it later..

Last night I had a horrible night, so am staying home sick. I loaded up one table to nut peddle while lay here half dead and am getting crushed, down one buy in. I guess at least I have some buffer space from yesterday. :P

Make up!

2009-07-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

So after my horrendous run on Wednesday, I did end up playing some more at lower stakes to blow off steam, and making back some money. I then did an honest review of every hand I played to see objectively if I played bad, or if I ran bad.

I do a lot of hand by hand analysis, which may bore some people to tears, but I think it's really the best way to learn how to improve your play if you have the objectivity to look back at a hand and go "Wow, that was a donk move, what was I thinking?" I also post threads on 2+2 like this one to try to get opinions from people on where I am making mistakes or if I am lost in a hand.

Honestly, it was a little of both. I definitely ran bad, but I could have had a significantly less impacted loss if I also had not screwed up some other hands were I tried to run over the table with lesser holdings. In general, there's a lot of calling stations in $2/$4, so I need to be less bluffy and play tighter. Right now my VP$IP is 21.94. I'd like to knock it down to 19% or so, and basically just stop getting tricky. Very boring solid TAG play looks like it has a just fine shot at $2/$4 and I need to remember that.

But to objectively look at things, I am currently running .9bb/100 over 556 hands at $2/$4, and overall at all limits running 2.03bb/100. However, due to rake and a horrible session when I jumped up to $3/$6, I am currently down $62. At the end of the month I'll be able to better see how things look when I get my first rakeback payment.

I'm going to try to play a lot this weekend to hit Contender is UB's RAI$E system. The regular benefits don't matter much, I just thought it would be a fun goal. And maybe if I don't care about the points I'll cash them out. Contender looks easily doable every month even with as little as I play, so maybe this will be a good way to get some extra value out of the site.

Last night I played in the Small Stakes Limit Shenanigans 8 game event. Its HORSE + some, and is fun because it switches up so much. I felt pretty good in it, with Stud H/L and Limit Hold'em being my weakest games, Limit Hold'Em because it was shorthanded, and I suck at shorthanded. Nonetheless I think I did fine until blinds got up and I got caught bluffing on a Limit Hold'em Hand, than ran horrible in Razz, a good example being raising with A25, and then seeing the next two cards be King, King. By the time Stud H/L hit, I needed to find a way to double up, but it didn't happen and down I went. Oh well, was great fun anyways. :) Then I played some normal 2/4 for a while.

Yesterday was "break even poker" land so I don't have any real exciting hands. I'll leave you with this one because I have no idea why I was never raised in this hand. Villain.. pretty passive. It wasn't even a bad beat really, and I have no call to complain, as in the BB I ended up with A4 again and flopped trips, so this was.. pre-karmic? :)

Absolute/UB Cereus Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed) - Absolute/UB Cereus Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Preflop: Hero is SB with A, 4
5 folds, CO calls $2, 1 fold, Hero calls $1, BB checks

Flop: ($6) 2, A, 3 (3 players)
Hero bets $2, 1 fold, CO calls $2

Turn: ($10) 6 (2 players)
Hero bets $4, CO calls $4

River: ($18) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $4, CO calls $4

Total pot: $26 | Rake: $1.25

Results:
Hero had A, 4 (two pair, Aces and fours).
CO had 2, 2 (three of a kind, twos).
Outcome: CO won $49.50

One comment on my night..

2009-07-15T20:11:00.001-07:00

IT'S NOT FUCKING MUBS IF THEY SOMEHOW HAVE THE GOODS EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME!

*ahem*

I may perhaps have "run bad" tonight. I'll post more when I'm less... sensitive.

Killing my "leeway"

2009-07-14T21:58:00.001-07:00

Twas a bad night, with me dropping a buy in almost immediately to remove that leeway I had bragged about just yesterday. In general I loved my table, it had a 40% Saw Flop, so, undaunted, I fastened my seat belt and got ready for the ride. This was the final result:

Table 1 - -40.8bb/100
Table 2 - 8.89bb/100
Table 3 - 23.39bb/100

I still dropped $51, or essentially half a buy in, but considering the roller coaster ride that was going on, it could have been a lot worse or a lot better. I would have kept playing at that table a lot longer, but was getting tired.

I shall leave you with this hand, which I was lost in so badly. :(

Absolute/UB Cereus Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed) - Absolute/UB Cereus Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Preflop: Hero is Button with 5, 5
1 fold, UTG+1 calls $2, 2 folds, MP3 calls $2, 1 fold, Hero calls $2, SB calls $1, BB bets $4, UTG+1 calls $2, MP3 calls $2, Hero calls $2, SB calls $2

Flop: ($20) 3, 4, 8 (5 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks, MP3 bets $2, Hero raises to $4, 1 fold, BB calls $4, 1 fold, MP3 calls $2

Turn: ($32) 3 (3 players)
BB checks, MP3 bets $4, Hero calls $4, BB calls $4

River: ($44) A (3 players)
BB checks, MP3 bets $4, Hero folds, 1 fold

Total pot: $44 | Rake: $2

Results:
MP3 didn't show
Outcome: MP3 won $42

One Monster gives me some breathing room..

2009-07-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

Not a bad night, but mostly because of one monster hand at the end.

Still feeling pretty confident about my game at UB, and before the monster hand came up, I had dug out of my negative hole, and was enjoying the slow grind that was limit poker. I had a nice long, but cool conversation with Thomas today where we discussed how he plays nowadays, and my desire to beat $2/$4 limit. He is nicely concerned that I will simply never be able to beat the rake there long term. I wish I had a solution to that, but I don't. All I can do is try and avoid the bad beat jackpot tables every chance I get.

Unfortunately, right now the jackpot tables are the looser tables. So I have to try to play them and hope I can beat the double rake. So far, I am successful, but I'm still very cautious about the long term prospects. Here's my stats for tonight:

Table 1 - 8.13bb/100
Table 2 - 26.08bb/100
Table 3 - -11.14bb/100
Table 4 - 183.59bb/100 (rofl gg massive pot of doom on a table that died shortly after)
Table 5 - 5bb/100

Obviously the fact that I play short sessions really makes these numbers look skewed. Currently right now overall I am running 12.41bb/100 which is "hotter than the sun," but it's still so few hands that one monster like this one is what takes it to the tipping point:

Absolute/UB Cereus Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed) - Absolute/UB Cereus Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 9, 9
Hero bets $4, 1 fold, MP1 calls $4, MP2 calls $4, MP3 calls $2, CO raises to $6, Button raises to $8, 1 fold, BB calls $6, Hero calls $4, MP1 calls $4, MP2 calls $4, MP3 calls $4, CO calls $2

Flop: ($55) J, 4, 9 (7 players)
BB checks, Hero checks, MP1 bets $2, MP2 calls $2, 1 fold, CO calls $2, Button raises to $4, BB calls $4, Hero calls $4, MP1 calls $2, MP2 calls $2, CO calls $2

Turn: ($79) 5 (6 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $4, MP1 raises to $8, MP2 calls $8, 1 fold, Button calls $8, BB calls $8, Hero raises to $12, MP1 calls $4, MP2 calls $4, Button calls $4, BB calls $4

River: ($139) 6 (5 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $4, MP1 calls $4, 1 fold, Button calls $4, BB calls $4

Total pot: $155 | Rake: $3.50

Results:
Button didn't show
BB didn't show
Hero had 9, 9 (three of a kind, nines).
MP1 didn't show

By the way, I am not sure I played this well. Probably going to post it on 2+2. On the flop I wanted to see who would keep betting for me. On the turn, since it stopped so quickly on the flop, I wasn't willing to risk missing any big bets, so out I came firing, and wasn't willing to let up with anything less than a turn cap, which I would take to me "crap, someone had pocket jacks."

If you take out that monster I am making a much more reasonable 2.8bb/100.

Still, I'm very thankful for this hand. It gives me some nice variance leeway to keep learning the tables here.

Rest of the weekend

2009-07-13T12:26:00.001-07:00

Some quick stats on up to my current weekend sessions. Just about every session was pretty short. It's still hard to find quality time to get in multiple hours of pokering. This was a mix of 2/4, 1/2, and even one .5/1 out of boredom.

7/11
Table 1 - 4.84bb/100
Table 2 - 20.22bb/100
Table 3 - -10.83bb/100
Table 4 - -60.40bb/100 (OW!)
Net: -$52.75

7/12
Table 1 - 6.1bb/100
Table 2 - 32.93bb/100
Net: +$21.60

7/13
Table 1 - 8.13bb/100
Net: +$6.50

So, I'm still at a loss, mostly due to some atrocious pain on table 4 where everyone had a monster every time. I think my W$SD% was 0. Yep I just checked, it was. Pocket Aces lost, AK lost, KQ lost, pocket 6's lost. Oh well, it happens.

And my obligatory "bad beat" hand. I knew the table well, and knew I could early limp and go set mining... It all worked so well....

Absolute/UB Cereus Hold'em, $2.00 BB (9 handed) - Absolute/UB Cereus Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Button ($111
SB ($26.50)
BB ($51.25)
Hero (UTG) ($81.35)
UTG+1 ($93)
MP1 ($17.25)
MP2 ($52.50)
MP3 ($25.25)
CO ($83.50)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 6, 6
Hero calls $1, UTG+1 calls $1, MP1 calls $1, MP2 calls $1, 4 folds, BB checks

Flop: ($5.50) A, J, 6 (5 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $1, 1 fold, MP1 raises to $2, 2 folds, Hero raises to $3, MP1 calls $1

Turn: ($11.50) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $2, MP1 calls $2

River: ($15.50) 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 bets $2, Hero calls $2

Total pot: $19.50 | Rake: $1.25

Results:
Hero mucked 6, 6 (three of a kind, sixes).
MP1 had 5, A (flush, Ace high).
Outcome: MP1 won $36.50

Such is life. :P

Honestly, right now I feel like I am playing fine, and only had one hand I looked at said "WTF was I thinking there?" I'm going to stay at 2/4 for a while I think and see what happens when I ride out the variance machine for a while...

First night on UB

2009-07-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Only single tables a 2/4 table. Had a super fish on it raising/playing almost anything. Table had a 40% Saw Flop percentage as a full ring table! Woot! Bad side, it was a jackpot table. :(

I started really cold though, not getting any good hands, but playing a couple speculative hands with good pot odds, but kept missing, and was $15.00 down fairly soon. No big deal, but not getting a hand while so much money was being tossed around was getting frustrating.

I ended up a little bit after a few hands, so I'll take it, but it was a horribly unexciting start to my Ultimate Bet run.

Starting all over again in poker

2009-07-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

So, I've been playing a lot on Full Tilt and a little on Pokerstars, but mostly.. Full Tilt. Recently however, I have run into rake back issues, namely my rake back provider going AFK for month's at a time, so I asked Full Tilt to allow me to change rake back providers and they said "no."

I don't really blame them for saying no, but at the same time, it did mean I wouldn't play there any more. So, after some checking around for existing deals that I had still going, I settled on Ultimate Bet, so since I did, i might as well pimp them and say click here for a Rake back deal.

Through a fortuitous happenstance, I had a friend who needed money on Full Tilt, and had money on Ultimate Bet. So, one quick transfer exchange later, and poof, I had $1,300 on Ultimate Bet.

The first thing I did was start to check out the site. To quote my 2+2 post to save typing:

So, I moved my money off of Full Tilt to UB. My rake back situation could not be solved through support, so I am abandoning Full tilt. Why UB? Because I figure no self respecting 2+2'er (and thus theoretically good player) would frequent UB, so the players left playing, at my micro small stakes must be true fishies. And I play low enough to not think someone is super user-ing me for my like $50.

But, logging on just now, I noticed that tons of people play the jackpot tables, which have a horrible rake for my stake. This is scarily bad. Not sure what I can do there. I may not be able to overcome the jackpot rake. So sad.

Second, there is 0 $1/$2 limit tables going on right now, yet like 15 0.50/1.00 tables. What a weird anomaly, it looks like there is very little 2/4 and 3/6 action going on as well.

This leaves me to .50/1.00 or.... Omaha or NL maybe? Bleck. I dunno, maybe I'll just grind the hell out of .50/1 and see if I can overcome the jackpot rake. The games do look horribly soft.

So, my next step was to start data mining tables. I'm a big fan of data mining, even at low/microstakes. Any extra information is good information. So to that end I ended up with the Script for UB Data Mining.

It doesn't have a table selector which is bad news for me, but it's better than nothing. While I was at work today, it grabbed about 2,000 hands at .5/1, 1/2, and 2/4. Poker Tracker 2 would not upload them though, but that was quickly solved when I tried to upload them as AP hands instead of UB hands. Weird, but who cares?

Next was setting this blog up again. Wheee. Ok, that's done. I tried to rename it to like 50 different names, all taken. Was very depressing. :(

Finally, I need goals. What am I going to play? How much do I want to earn? How many hands should I play?

Well, I'm copping out on this one for now. I'm going to spend the first week dipping my foot in the pool so to speak. I'll play a few hands when the tables look good, and hopefully in a week I'll get a good feel for if I belong in the 2/4 game.. or lower right now.

If you made it this far, wow, that's dedication. Thanks for reading. Hopefully in the future I'll have some entertaining hands and situations to chat about. This was the big set up, now to start the real action.

Play like my four yeard old...

2007-03-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

So, last night my son said "I want to play with you," and who's going turn down a four year old who wants attention. I offered to play War with him and then my four year old son said those immortal words: "I want to play poker with you!"

Very well!

I got some poker chips and a stack of cards and we came up with the following "poker strategy" that a four year old could handle...

Preflop:
If he has a "good card" (A, K, Q, J), he bets one chip.
If he has two "good cards" he bets two chips.
If his cards "match" (any pocket pair) he bets two chips
If his cards are the same suit, bet one chip.

Flop, Turn, River:
If you "match" the board (pair up), bet one chip, unless you pair the highest card, in which case you bet two chips.
If you have four of the same suit, bet one chip.
If you have five of the same suit, bet two chips.
Otherwise, check. If your opponent bets, and you have a pocket pair that beats any of the cards on the board, call down, otherwise fold.

For a four year old, not too bad. Think I should put him at the play money heads up tables and see how he does?

... say what?

2007-03-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Had a very weird dream last night I thought I'd blog just for curiosity's sake.

I am travelling with the wife and kids. We are a post apocalyptic world, but the whole place is not in ruins. The governments are in ruins, its sparsely populated, and there is concerns about radiation and plagues. We have to walk, there are no vehicles. There are no more houses. Sometime before the economy/governments fell, population had gotten so large that EVERY PLACE was like a giant apartment complex. Everywhere I was in the dream was these large four or five story buildings with multiple apartments.

We're walking along, looking at one of those buildings to our right, when who should I see running towards us but several armed police men. Well, this wasn't Good this meant that one of the buildings was overrun with terrorists/gangsters of some sort, and a gun fight was going to start at any minute. I yell for the kids and wife to scatter to a safe place and I see then run off safely as I hid in a corner by a nearby building as a firefight erupts. I have a prime location to see the whole thing as I'm hiding in this cubby hole area, but have lost track of the wife and kids.

At this point they disappear from the dream entirely. My brain just pushes them out of the storyline, as I never learn if they are killed, end up ok, or what. They just "vanish" from the story.

And now, a bad ascii picture of how things are set up.

1 333333333
1c
1 2x2222222
1

1, 2, 3, = buildings.
x = me
c = cops

From my cubbyhole, I see a terrorist pop out from three stories up on the building across from me (building 3 from the diagram), and start gunning down the cops. I yell to them where he is and the turn and return fire. He shoots at me, but can not get to me in my cubbyhole. Another cop sneaks in by me in the cubby hole area and winks at me mischievously as the gunfight continues.

Then like a movie, there's a cut to an older me, and the entire first season was a memory. It's years later, and I'm now a grizzled veteran of gunfights, but not actually a cop. I'm more like a vigilante who goes from building to building, cleaning out the terrorist/gangsters to try to help make the world a safer place. I'm one of the best, pretty much tied with another guy, but we don't necessarily trust each other. Its late in the afternoon, and I'm trying to figure out where to stay for the night. A building sits in front of me, but if I wanted to stay there safely, I'd have to go through the entire building, and I am too tired to want to do that, but don't have much in the way of options.

I head in, and on the third floor I run into the other guy who is supposed to be the best of the vigilantes. He agrees that we should stick together for now, and the idea comes up of us actually retiring together. No, this is not a gay dream. No man love occurs. Its one of those "if we retire together we'll both be safer, and we'll be able to keep an eye on each other so one can not back stab the other" kind of thing.

I agree, but I dislike the idea of it being just the two of us. I head out to look around and realize that there was a third guy, who was better than both of us and a legend, until he went slightly loonie and cut off his own hands somehow and replaced them with these blade/pincher type things, and, wouldn't you know it, as dreams work, he lives in the basement of this very building!

I head down to the basement to talk to him, and realize he's at the other end of this long building, and the basement hallway, quickly turns into a darkened crawlspace about halfway through. As I'm crawling through it, a mouse climbs up my arm and I jump and freak out. If it's an infected mouse I could get the plague! I shake it off then climb back out to the stairway where the main entrance is to try to think of another way down there since I don't really relish the idea of catching the plague.

When there thinking, I run into two more mice, except, well, these mice look like Rufus from Kim Possible:

These mice "attack" by basically bounding at me, then letting their body go limp. They don't appear to actually try to bite me, but if I don't stop them, I know I will get the plague, so every time one jumps, I catch it by reaching under and catching it by the belly and putting it back down. They keep doing this though, so I can't exactly think of another way to go find crazy legend vigilante guy, or, for that matter even get up the steps and safely away from the plague mice.

That's when my alarm goes off.

No, I don't know what I ate right before I went to bed.

Ray

Blogging move?

2005-12-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-27T07:17:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

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!

2005-12-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-12-21T07:36:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-12-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

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

Order now?

Fixing things

2005-12-20T07:50:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-09T07:13:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-12-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-01T07:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Things I learned today..

2005-11-30T08:21:00.000-08:00

And its not even 9:30am yet!

1. Conjunctivitis is Pink Eye
2. No matter how long you leave the puppy out, he will still come inside, and crap on your carpet.
3. My WHOIS domain info is wrong.
4. Del Taco Breakfast foods give me the runs.
5. My office will always be the stopping point for people to come chat.

Ok, nothing earth shattering, but still, an educaitonal morning thus far.

Yesterday, I was home sick, and did some pokering while recovering. I went on a nightmarishly horrible cold decking. I started at $2/4 with $64 (yeah I know its low to join that game, but it's all I have on Carribean Sun, where I am tryign to clear a bonus), when a bad run of cards kicks me down to $52. I jump down to $1/$2 to ride it out. I lose all the way down to $39 left. I jump down to $0.50/$1.00 to ride out the monster cold decking I am receiving. I end at $54. About as good as I could have hoped for, I guess. Heh.

Tonight is Pub Poker. Yay!

Thanksgiving

2005-11-28T08:37:00.000-08:00

How can I not win a $5 No Limit Tourney in my house on thanksgiving weekend against my wife, sister-in-law, her husband, my wife's mom, and her boyfriend?

I dunno, but I went out in third place. I went all in on a scary board of Ah6d7d, and got called by A4 offsuit. So much for bluffing. :)

I was shortstacked the entire tournament when twice I bet heavy on a set only to be called down by someone who rivered a flush. Both times I had priced them out of the pot, but they stuck it out. Long term, that play works for me, but luck was not on my side that night. I also lost a bunch when my flush got beat by a full house. Second Best Hand Syndrome sucks.

That was the only poker I played all weekend. I spent most of the weekend when I was not running a pro tour qualifier playing the free ticket drafts on Magic Online. End of the weekend put my at even on packs, up about 60 points in ranking, and some good rares to sell for tickets to keep up my drafting habit. It was fun times.

Sorry for the long weekend and short blog, but I don't have a lot to talk about right now. See ya soon.

Comment Responses

2005-11-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

First, Happy thanksgiving all. :)

I was glad to see so much discussion about my 100 hands in Comments, so I decided to respond to the responses somewhat here. I have three windows open now of this one, the original blog, and if the comments, and will respond as I can.

Regarding the pocket Jacks hand from T-Pup. I think the pot is too big for me to fold. There's 11BB in the pot when that turn reraise hits and I think he must have the queen, but technically I only have to right 9% of the time to make calling down at that point the right play, and I don't think I could discount him having AK more than that 9%. That's why I called down instead of folding.

Regarding Ax suited and Kx suited. Ax suited has the added benefit that you can often win when an Ace hits, even with your bad kicker in these games, lord knows why. I submit exhibit A from that history:

RayPowers balance $53.75, bet $4, collected $15.25, net +$11.25 [ 4c Ac ] [ a pair of aces -- Ac,Ad,Ks,9d,5h ]

The disadvantage of Kx suited in this world (at these stakes) is that the hidden Ace for the nut flush will always be played to the bitter end, so now you are in a position where your flush must be exactly a three card flush from the board, or you are still screwed. If the board flops JsTs2s and you have Ks4s, the guy with As is calling you down the whole way. In short I don't advocate the Kx suited at these stakes where there are too many chasers. I do agree with the niceness of being able to get away from Kx suited more than Ax suited.

Regarding me playing tight. Mike, this is purely a playstyle. I play super tight aggressive, normally. There's a couple hands in there where you saw me abandon TAG play, but aside from the first one, where I did it to gain information, I don't think its the wrong way to play because at these stakes, people pay you off with your great hands. Fishing a lot in this field is the schooling mentality of "everyone is fishing so I should too because I have odds" to me is very scary because when everyone is fishing, you have to be fishing FOR THE NUTS (like the Ax vs Kx suited argument above) otherwise you may make a fished for hand only to find yourself losing to a higher fished for hand. You play much more LAG than I do, and I don't think either is right or wrong, its just how we play.

I do have a brief argument for you on fishing in limit vs no limit, however. I think fishing at a passive table like this is INFINITELY better in No Limit vs limit. The implied odds of getting more money out of a made fishing hand in No Limit is MUCH higher than the... one bet you get out of fishing on a limit table. I'm not sure where you were going with that comparison, but I admit I did not get it. (This is the comment you made that throws me off, for reference: "In a limit game, you get paid off a lot making draws to the nut hand (or nearly nut hand) rather than finding a leading flop and trying to hammer people.")

Regarding brain farts from Ogma. This is a problem I have and its a HUGE leak. The problem comes down to the fact that I simply never am able to focus on poker 100%. I have a two year old and a three year old. I have a new puppy. While I was doing that game I was also downloading media to Keller's new web site (coming soon!) and downloading all of our home movies off of the digital tapes. I think if I could ever focus entirely on what I was doing, I do great, but with lack of focus, I have mini "matusow blow ups" that cost me a ton of profit. Dan mentioned as well that those hands read like "good play, good play, good play, give some guy $3 for no reason." If I can get to the point that I can either a) be able to focus on playing only, or b) be able to not have huge brain farts when I am unable to spend 100% of my brain power on poker, then I would do a lot better. I shudder to go back over those hands and count "bets given away for no reason." I bet it would drive me to depression.

Regarding preflop raising, I think I only flat called with a small pocket pair or Ax suited. Every other time I raised or reraised preflop. I am a big believer in flop equity. I think I even raised once with Ax suited because I thought the limper before me was weak.

Regarding the hand with the second 2 hitting when I had pocket sixes. I think the bet on the board pairing is not a bad plan. After all, I bet the scary over card/flush draw card, why not bet the 2? My reasoning really falls under the fact that he had already raised me once, and I felt committed to call down there at that point. Now, let's ignore that I probably shouldn't have called down, because in retrospect, I shouldn't have. If my intention is to call down, then I don't want to put an extra bet in on the turn if he raises me to call down. If your intention is to fold ot his raise on the turn, it's fine. If your intention is to still call down, then you basically can't bet the river unless a six hits... Which I guess doesn't matter as the bets equal out. Ok, I'll concede betting the turn is fine.

Wow, that was good for a whole post. :)

Congrats to Bits for winning the Pub Poker on Wednesday night. I'll be pokering up more this weekend. Maybe I'll do another hand analysis early next week.

100 hands

2005-11-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

I decided to post my last 100 hands for critiquing, including me beating myself up a bunch, but everyone else can feel free to join in.

Ok, some preface to this.

1) I started at $25. At the time of these last 100 hands, my start is $59.50, and I end at $52.25, a loss of 7 Big Bets. My overall run for the night at this one table however, was plus 27 big bets.
2) Debbyl and IAMMACHOMIKE are both madly Loose Passive calling stations. Miamivisc is Loose Aggressive. Overall, play was poor (including mine as we will see).

Here we go!

***** Hand History for Game 3080164021 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:29:10 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
Bloo6T posts big blind (0.50)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 9h, 8s ]
IAMMACHOMIKE raises (1) to 1
RayPowers folds.
*** Uh yeah, a roaring start to this hand analysis!

***** Hand History for Game 3080172347 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:30:30 EST 2005
Bloo6T posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
MasterFrost posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 8s, Ks ]
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** Yeah, that’s right baby! Early position raise! Seriously, of all the bad plays I will describe, this is not as much one as you would believe. Three new people had joined the table, and I wanted to see how tight they were against an early aggressor. I was prepared to lose two big bets on this hand to gain a lot of information. Is this a leak? I guess theoretically yes.
Patty_Poker folds.
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (1)
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4d, 6d, Qs ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** Honestly, this is what I want to see here. Who will cave and who will call me down. It was even better that Cyber_dude and Masterfrost were two of the new guys, so my information play worked well.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
MasterFrost folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7s ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Still pushing
Cyber_Dude folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 5d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE bets (1)
RayPowers: well thats scary but i have to call
RayPowers calls (1)
*** That was hilarious, I river a straight with my bad hand, but there’s a flush on the board. Honestly, knowing IAMMACHOMIKE, I put him on a pair. But no reason to push harder on what was just an experiment hand anyways.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $9.25 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 4d 6d Qs 7s 5d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE balance $34.50, lost $3.50 [ 6c 3c ] [ a straight, three to seven -- 7s,6c,5d,4d,3c ]
RayPowers balance $65.25, bet $3.50, collected $9.25, net +$5.75 [ 8s Ks ] [ a straight, four to eight -- 8s,7s,6d,5d,4d ]
RayPowers: whew
*** The absolute best thing about this hand was it should have immediately labeled me as a maniac to the rest of the table. Open raising and pushing with K8s :P

***** Hand History for Game 3080178641 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:31:31 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ah, Kd ]
Patty_Poker folds.
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
Bloo6T raises (1) to 1
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1.50
Cyber_Dude calls (1)
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 8c, Qd, 3s ]
RayPowers checks.
*** Mistake number 1, I should have bet out here. The problem really was that I just showed that stupid maniac hand, and thought my bet would not be respected enough to push a fold. Or am I thinking wrong and I should have bet thinking I may actually still have the best hand? Missed Bet Count: 1
Cyber_Dude checks.
Bloo6T bets (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7c ]
RayPowers checks.
Cyber_Dude checks.
Bloo6T bets (1)
RayPowers folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
*** Not much value in calling there I think, I have already given up the lead.

***** Hand History for Game 3080188532 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:33:07 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
Melissa72 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Js, Ks ]
Cyber_Dude folds.
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers raises (0.75) to 1
Melissa72 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Jh, Qc, 9s ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7s ]
RayPowers bets (1)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 9d ]
RayPowers bets (1)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $7 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ Jh Qc 9s 7s 9d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE balance $34.25, bet $3.50, collected $3.50, net +$0 [ Jc Kc ] [ two pairs, jacks and nines -- Kc,Jc,Jh,9s,9d ]
RayPowers balance $63.25, bet $3.50, collected $3.50, net +$0 [ Js Ks ] [ two pairs, jacks and nines -- Ks,Js,Jh,9s,9d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE: so funny
RayPowers: indeedy
*** Not a lot to say there. Preflop raise I feel was warranted based on no one open raising and no aggression. The flop and turn offered me a lot of outs, so I kept on the pressure.

***** Hand History for Game 3080193144 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:33:51 EST 2005
Melissa72 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
dmiller25 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6c, 4s ]
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 checks.
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** I am not a big fan of 64 offsuit.

***** Hand History for Game 3080199658 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:34:54 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
McBeard posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Tc, 2s ]
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 raises (1) to 1
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
RayPowers folds.
*** Nor am I a fan of T2 offsuit.

***** Hand History for Game 3080205466 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:35:51 EST 2005
McBeard posts small blind (0.25)
MasterFrost posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ah, 8h ]
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** I am a fan of Ax suited in this environment, where you often get paid off for your flushes.
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Ad, Kh, Jc ]
MasterFrost checks.
MYBABY555 checks.
IAMMACHOMIKE bets (0.50)
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** I think I really need to see if I am outkicked right here, and this is the best way to do it. (Or if someone has QT.)
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 calls (1)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
*** Probably not outkicked.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 2c ]
MYBABY555 checks.
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Not outkicked, fire fire fire!
MYBABY555 calls (1)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 2s ]
MYBABY555 checks.
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers checks.
*** I should have bet this. Not like this was a scare card with the way the hand was going. Missed bet, right here. Missed Bet Count: 2
** Summary **
Main Pot: $7.75 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ Ad Kh Jc 2c 2s ]
MYBABY555 balance $20.50, lost $2.50 [ Ts Tc ] [ two pairs, tens and twos -- Ad,Ts,Tc,2c,2s ]
IAMMACHOMIKE balance $38.25, lost $2.50 [ Kc Qs ] [ two pairs, kings and twos -- Ad,Kc,Kh,2c,2s ]
RayPowers balance $68.50, bet $2.50, collected $7.75, net +$5.25 [ Ah 8h ] [ two pairs, aces and twos -- Ah,Ad,Kh,2c,2s ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080211464 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:36:48 EST 2005
MasterFrost posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qc, Ts ]
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** QTo mid position seems too crap to open raise with, and not good to limp in with. Anyone think otherwise?

***** Hand History for Game 3080217227 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:37:45 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
dmiller25 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5c, 5d ]
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** This seems loose, but I am almost guaranteed to get enough callers to make the set odds worthwhile.
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
McBeard raises (1) to 1
*** Until that bastard did that. :P
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 calls (0.75)
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** In for a penny… I think I should have folded this.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Kc, 2s, Tc ]
MYBABY555 checks.
dmiller25 bets (0.50)
Bloo6T folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Yeah, I trust that flop about zero.

***** Hand History for Game 3080229127 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:39:40 EST 2005
dmiller25 posts small blind (0.25)
Bloo6T posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jd, 6d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Oh, there are the bad cards! I was wondering where they went.

***** Hand History for Game 3080231316 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:40:02 EST 2005
Bloo6T posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7d, 6h ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Yummy! Not.

***** Hand History for Game 3080237077 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:41:00 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qc, Jd ]
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers checks.
*** Does anyone raise here? Two limpers including the small blind. Likely my QJo is bets hand?
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 5c, 4s, Qs ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** Well, I definitely bet here.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.25 | Rake: $0
Board: [ 5c 4s Qs ]
RayPowers balance $68.75, bet $1, collected $2.25, net +$1.25

***** Hand History for Game 3080240999 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:41:39 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 9c, 7h ]
Melissa72 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 calls (1)
dmiller25 calls (1)
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Who attacks my blind like that guy?

***** Hand History for Game 3080247155 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:42:40 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jh, 8d ]
McBeard folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Well, I played a lot of hands. Obviously it’s time for me to take a break.

***** Hand History for Game 3080254087 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:43:51 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
MasterFrost posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4d, Jh ]
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** /me goes to get chips and a soda…

***** Hand History for Game 3080260067 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:44:51 EST 2005
MasterFrost posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
Silvergreen5 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qh, Jd ]
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** I think this is a bad call. If they were suited sure, but they are not. I am likely dominated.
debbyl folds.
Silvergreen5 checks.
Cyber_Dude folds.
MasterFrost raises (0.75) to 1
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** And this is an even worse call.
Silvergreen5 folds.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4s, Kh, Kd ]
MasterFrost bets (0.25)
MasterFrost is all-In.
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T raises (0.75) to 0.75
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.75)
RayPowers folds.
*** And this is me running like a scared little girl, which I should have done preflop

***** Hand History for Game 3080269162 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:46:23 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
dmiller25 posts big blind (0.50)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3c, As ]
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Axs ok in this world. Axo not so good in this world.

***** Hand History for Game 3080277009 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:47:43 EST 2005
dmiller25 posts small blind (0.25)
Bloo6T posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2d, 4h ]
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Monstarrrrrrr!

***** Hand History for Game 3080281601 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:48:29 EST 2005
Bloo6T posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 8d, Jd ]
RayPowers folds.
*** I honestly think that jacks are magnets to trash cards. I swear Jack x o, hereby known as Jack Shit, is the hand I see most.

***** Hand History for Game 3080287657 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:49:30 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Kh, 3s ]
debbyl folds.
Silvergreen5 calls (0.50)
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
MasterFrost calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.25)
RayPowers checks.
*** Uh yeah, might as well see a flop for free.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 7h, Js, 6d ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** I figured I should try to win the pot right there.
Silvergreen5 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
MasterFrost folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Qs ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** At this point, my stupidity monitor should have kicked in. I KNOW he will call all the way down with near nothing. But his near nothing beats my nothing. I should have checked this down. Bad player, Ray, No cookie.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ Jh ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $7.50 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 7h Js 6d Qs Jh ]
IAMMACHOMIKE balance $34.12, bet $3, collected $7.50, net +$4.50 [ 3h 7c ] [ two pairs, jacks and sevens -- Qs,Js,Jh,7c,7h ]
RayPowers balance $64.50, lost $3 [ Kh 3s ] [ a pair of jacks -- Kh,Qs,Js,Jh,7h ]
RayPowers: nice call =)
IAMMACHOMIKE: lucky me
*** These people only make you money if you play against them correctly, then they are your gold mine. I did not play against them correctly. I was nice about it tho. 

***** Hand History for Game 3080294753 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:50:40 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2c, Qc ]
Silvergreen5 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers calls (0.25)
*** I should have raised here. Missed Bet count: 3
debbyl checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 2h, 8c, 5s ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** See comments above on this hand. Its an exact replay of my stupidity. There’s nothing more to see here, move along, move along.
debbyl calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 3c ]
RayPowers bets (1)
debbyl calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ Jd ]
RayPowers bets (1)
debbyl calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $5.50 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 2h 8c 5s 3c Jd ]
RayPowers balance $61.50, lost $3 [ 2c Qc ] [ a pair of twos -- Qc,Jd,8c,2c,2h ]
debbyl balance $20.50, bet $3, collected $5.50, net +$2.50 [ 9s 5c ] [ a pair of fives -- Jd,9s,8c,5c,5s ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080299891 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:51:33 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
Silvergreen5 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4d, 6c ]
Cyber_Dude folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
MasterFrost calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** And then, I got my brain back.. for a little while.

***** Hand History for Game 3080305952 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:52:33 EST 2005
Silvergreen5 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6h, Ks ]
LasVegasDi calls (0.50)
MasterFrost folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Bad hands go a long way to helping you chill after tilting like a moron for two hands in a row.

***** Hand History for Game 3080310837 *****
MasterFrost has left the table.
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:53:23 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, 8s ]
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Suited connector, middle position.. I like the call here.
debbyl calls (0.50)
Silvergreen5 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.25)
LasVegasDi checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 5h, Ad, Ks ]
Cyber_Dude checks.
LasVegasDi checks.
MYBABY555 bets (0.50)
dmiller25 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** And I knew when to run like hell.

***** Hand History for Game 3080321771 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:55:13 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2s, 5s ]
MYBABY555 folds.
dmiller25 calls (0.50)
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Monstarrrr!

***** Hand History for Game 3080329917 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:56:36 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jd, 4s ]
dmiller25 folds.
Bloo6T folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Look! Its Jack Shit!

***** Hand History for Game 3080336377 *****
dmiller25 has left the table.
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:57:41 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 4 is the button
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ks, 5s ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Now that I know the table, there will be no more Kxs shenanigans like there were in that first hand.

***** Hand History for Game 3080340946 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:58:27 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, Kh ]
debbyl folds.
Silvergreen5 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.25)
RayPowers checks.
*** I feel the mellowness.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 8s, 4s, 9h ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers checks.
** I have Mike in, and Cyber_Dude, both which seem to follow a hand all the way to the end. I also have Miamivsic, who is aggressive enough to raise here. I don’t even try to steal the pot.
Cyber_Dude checks.
LasVegasDi checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** No brainer.

***** Hand History for Game 3080349102 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Tue Nov 22 23:59:47 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
MacBain_2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ad, 2d ]
Silvergreen5 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (1.25) to 1.50
*** I have no idea what my reasoning behind this raise was. Let’s assume it was a misclick, ok?
debbyl calls (1)
miamivisc raises (1) to 2
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Have to call here, though.
debbyl calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 3s, 3h, 7h ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** I can not picture what he could have that I would not be way behind on.

***** Hand History for Game 3080353868 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:00:35 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 9 is the button
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
Silvergreen5 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6c, 8s ]
Cyber_Dude folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Good, I needed a break. After all, I just raised with A2s.

***** Hand History for Game 3080356869 *****
RayPowers: hes ona rush ladies and gents
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:01:05 EST 2005
Silvergreen5 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5d, 6h ]
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Hey, its past midnight. Maybe that explains the raise back there.

***** Hand History for Game 3080363409 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:02:11 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6h, 9d ]
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** It’s Sixty Nine Dude! (Insert Wild Stallions air guitar solo here)

***** Hand History for Game 3080370184 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:03:20 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, Kd ]
MYBABY555 folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Anyone got any clever names for K7?

***** Hand History for Game 3080376697 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:04:26 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 9s, Kd ]
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Or K9 for that matter? Oh wait, heh. K9. Canine! HAHAHAHA! (Can you tell its past midnight?

***** Hand History for Game 3080385158 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:05:52 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
numadude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jh, 2h ]
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** GG Jack Shit!

***** Hand History for Game 3080394204 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:07:24 EST 2005
numadude posts small blind (0.25)
MacBain_2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qs, 9s ]
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Tempting… But no.

***** Hand History for Game 3080399906 *****
Silvergreen5 has left the table.
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:08:23 EST 2005
MacBain_2 posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3c, 8c ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Tempting… oh wait, not even tempting..

***** Hand History for Game 3080406411 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:09:31 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 7 is the button
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ad, 3h ]
debbyl folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (0.50) to 1
*** There I go with that ridiculous raise button again! WTF? Its not that close to “check” on Party Poker.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Qs, Qd, 7c ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** Might as well maintain the lead?
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 6s ]
*** See above.
RayPowers bets (1)
Cyber_Dude calls (1)
miamivisc calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ Tc ]
*** See above. Oh no wait, I gave it up at the end. At least that’s one bet saved. Should have saved 2.5.
RayPowers checks.
Cyber_Dude checks.
miamivisc checks.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $7.25 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ Qs Qd 7c 6s Tc ]
Cyber_Dude balance $31.25, bet $2.50, collected $7.25, net +$4.75 [ Ac Ah ] [ two pairs, aces and queens -- Ac,Ah,Qs,Qd,Tc ]
miamivisc balance $33, lost $2.50 [ Kd 3c ] [ a pair of queens -- Kd,Qs,Qd,Tc,7c ]
RayPowers balance $56, lost $2.50 [ Ad 3h ] [ a pair of queens -- Ad,Qs,Qd,Tc,7c ]
*** Yes, that’s right, pocket aces just called down, including checking the river. Thank you pocket aces. All in all, let’s pretend that hand never happened.

***** Hand History for Game 3080410977 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:10:17 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2c, Jc ]
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Jack Shit FTW!

***** Hand History for Game 3080416466 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:11:14 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
BombDog2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3h, 6d ]
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Oh look, a rerun of West Wing is on.

***** Hand History for Game 3080425222 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:12:48 EST 2005
BombDog2 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ah, 5d ]
LasVegasDi raises (1) to 1
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Oh, it’s the one where Leo goes to Cuba after the rumor is circulating that Castro is dead. It’s a good one, but seen it many times before.

***** Hand History for Game 3080430229 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:13:41 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2s, 8s ]
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** But, but they were sooooooooooooted!

***** Hand History for Game 3080438665 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:15:11 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4h, Qs ]
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Queen Shit does not have the same ring to it that Jack Shit does.

***** Hand History for Game 3080445708 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:16:27 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5h, 7c ]
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Oh look, the puppy peed on the floor.

***** Hand History for Game 3080450337 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:17:16 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 4 is the button
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
numadude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5s, Qh ]
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Queen Sh… no, it really doesn’t work.

***** Hand History for Game 3080456623 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:18:25 EST 2005
numadude posts small blind (0.25)
MacBain_2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ad, Ks ]
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** Holy found a hand batman!
debbyl calls (1)
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (1)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (1)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4c, 6s, Kh ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** Holy hit a flop batman!
debbyl calls (0.50)
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 9c ]
RayPowers bets (1)
debbyl folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
miamivisc folds.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $7.25 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 4c 6s Kh 9c ]
RayPowers balance $60.50, bet $2.50, collected $7.25, net +$4.75

***** Hand History for Game 3080462094 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:19:24 EST 2005
MacBain_2 posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4h, Kc ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Love them eight gapers.

***** Hand History for Game 3080465989 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:20:06 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ah, Td ]
RayPowers: wowzer
debbyl calls (0.50)
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers checks.
*** Should I raise here? I really am unsure. I will be out of position for the rest of the hand…
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Tc, 6h, 7d ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** I HAVE to bet here. 89 will raise me, and I am likely ahead of everything else.
debbyl calls (0.50)
Cyber_Dude folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 5s ]
*** Do I really put someone on 34 or 48? No.
RayPowers bets (1)
debbyl calls (1)
miamivisc calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 9d ]
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Well, now any 8 beats me, which is slightly scary.
debbyl raises (2) to 2
*** Make that VERY scary, but I have to call here.
miamivisc folds.
RayPowers calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $10.25 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ Tc 6h 7d 5s 9d ]
RayPowers balance $56.50, lost $4 [ Ah Td ] [ a pair of tens -- Ah,Td,Tc,9d,7d ]
debbyl balance $34.12, bet $4, collected $10.25, net +$6.25 [ 9h 9c ] [ three of a kind, nines -- Tc,9h,9c,9d,7d ]
RayPowers: bad river, no cookie!
*** I don’t think I could have done anything differently here. I just got rivered. It happens.

***** Hand History for Game 3080471814 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:21:07 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3c, 6d ]
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 raises (1) to 1
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Always good to get a bad hand after a bad beat.

***** Hand History for Game 3080477079 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:22:05 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
BombDog2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, 8h ]
Cyber_Dude folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Ok, this is my super bad call for the night. I have no idea what this call was about. What did I expect my 78o to do here?
debbyl calls (0.25)
BombDog2 checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Ac, 9c, Ks ]
debbyl checks.
BombDog2 checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Well, duh. I actually was so happy to see that flop as it drove me right out of the hand before I got (more)stupid.

***** Hand History for Game 3080481455 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:22:52 EST 2005
BombDog2 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Kc, 7s ]
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** /me hums the Jeopardy Theme Song

***** Hand History for Game 3080487988 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:24:03 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 1 is the button
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4h, Qd ]
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** This hand looks familiar…

***** Hand History for Game 3080491807 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:24:44 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2s, 3d ]
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Monstarrrrrr!

***** Hand History for Game 3080499268 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:26:06 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
numadude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4s, 5d ]
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Bigger MONSTARRRRR!

***** Hand History for Game 3080503441 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:26:52 EST 2005
numadude posts small blind (0.25)
MacBain_2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5d, Ad ]
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** Not sure what this aggressiveness was about here. I just hate open calling.
debbyl folds.
BombDog2 raises (1.50) to 1.50
Cyber_Dude folds.
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** No one else in the pot means my flush odds are the sux, but I want to see a flop at least.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 2d, Qc, Js ]
RayPowers checks.
BombDog2 bets (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Comments on this call? I wanted to pay to see the next card for my back door nut flush draw. Good or no?
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7c ]
RayPowers checks.
BombDog2 bets (1)
RayPowers folds.
*** No nut flush for me, run run run.

***** Hand History for Game 3080507650 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:27:39 EST 2005
MacBain_2 posts small blind (0.25)
IAMMACHOMIKE posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qd, 4s ]
RayPowers folds.
*** This hand looks REALLY familiar.

***** Hand History for Game 3080512854 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:28:37 EST 2005
IAMMACHOMIKE posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 8h, 5s ]
debbyl calls (0.50)
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude folds.
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.25)
RayPowers checks.
*** POWER!
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Js, 7d, As ]
IAMMACHOMIKE checks.
RayPowers checks.
*** I got no dukes.
debbyl checks.
numadude bets (0.50)
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** I fold with my no dukes.

***** Hand History for Game 3080518001 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:29:33 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6s, Ks ]
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers raises (0.75) to 1
*** Cyber_dude played so many hands they I was just automatically discarding him having a good hand, so acted like he didn’t exist and raised against the big blind.
debbyl calls (0.50)
Cyber_Dude calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 2h, 9d, Js ]
RayPowers checks.
*** But I wasn’t that hungry to keep throwing bets out there. I had learned my lesson about debbyl following me to the river.
debbyl checks.
Cyber_Dude checks.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7d ]
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Or maybe not. Bad bet! Bad!
debbyl folds.
Cyber_Dude calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ Qh ]
RayPowers bets (1)
*** I put him on Ax at this point and figure he missed, so tried to take down the pot. I think this one was ok, because once I bet the turn I was committed to bet the river. The real answer I think was I shouldn’t have bet the turn or the river.
Cyber_Dude folds.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $5.50 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 2h 9d Js 7d Qh ]
RayPowers balance $55.75, bet $3, collected $5.50, net +$2.50

***** Hand History for Game 3080522050 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:30:18 EST 2005
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ac, 5h ]
Cyber_Dude folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Lost my Wheaties.

***** Hand History for Game 3080529074 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:31:36 EST 2005
BombDog2 posts small blind (0.25)
Cyber_Dude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5d, 7s ]
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
IAMMACHOMIKE folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Bleh.

***** Hand History for Game 3080535224 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:32:42 EST 2005
Cyber_Dude posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7c, 2d ]
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** GG Worst hand in poker!

***** Hand History for Game 3080543256 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:34:10 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ah, Qs ]
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky checks.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** Seems like a good plan to open raise here.
debbyl folds.
BombDog2 folds.
Cyber_Dude raises (1.50) to 1.50
miamivisc calls (1.25)
MYBABY555 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Given the hands the two players in the pot are likely to have, I should have capped this. Missed Bet Count: 4
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 5s, 2h, Th ]
miamivisc bets (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** I dunno. Raise here? Missed Bet Count: 5
Cyber_Dude raises (1) to 1
Cyber_Dude is all-In.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Missed Bet Count: 6
Creating Main Pot with $8 with Cyber_Dude
** Dealing Turn ** : [ As ]
miamivisc checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
miamivisc folds.
** Dealing River ** : [ 2s ]
** Summary **
Main Pot: $8 | Side Pot 1: $1 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 5s 2h Th As 2s ]
Cyber_Dude balance $0, lost $2.50 [ 3h 3c ] [ two pairs, threes and twos -- As,3h,3c,2h,2s ]
RayPowers balance $61.25, bet $3.50, collected $9, net +$5.50 [ Ah Qs ] [ two pairs, aces and twos -- Ah,As,Qs,2h,2s ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080549509 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:35:17 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
numadude posts big blind (0.50)
LasVegasDi posts big blind + dead (0.75)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jh, 3s ]
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Jack Shit! I missed you!

***** Hand History for Game 3080556682 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:36:36 EST 2005
numadude posts small blind (0.25)
MacBain_2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jd, Jc ]
cbloszinsky raises (1) to 1
RayPowers raises (1.50) to 1.50
** Yummy
debbyl folds.
BombDog2 folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky raises (1) to 2
RayPowers calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Ts, Ks, Jh ]
cbloszinsky bets (0.50)
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
cbloszinsky raises (1) to 1.50
RayPowers raises (1) to 2
*** Yummier!
cbloszinsky calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Ah ]
cbloszinsky bets (1)
RayPowers raises (2) to 2
cbloszinsky raises (2) to 3
*** God dammit he must have a queen. Motherfucker.
RayPowers calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 2h ]
cbloszinsky bets (1)
RayPowers calls (1)
*** Gotta call down just in case.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $16 | Rake: $0.75
Board: [ Ts Ks Jh Ah 2h ]
cbloszinsky balance $32.50, bet $8, collected $16, net +$8 [ Qc Ad ] [ a straight, ten to ace -- Ad,Ks,Qc,Jh,Ts ]
RayPowers balance $53.25, lost $8 [ Jd Jc ] [ three of a kind, jacks -- Ah,Ks,Jd,Jc,Jh ]
*** Ouchie, ouchie, ouchie, ouchie, ouchie. Could I have played this differently? Looking for input here. I think not, but I want feedback.

***** Hand History for Game 3080561498 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:37:29 EST 2005
MacBain_2 posts small blind (0.25)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6h, 5h ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Still in shock, I fold suited connectors. In first position, obviously I should have. I just think its funny that I did not notice they were suited when I folded them.

***** Hand History for Game 3080566015 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:38:19 EST 2005
cbloszinsky posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6d, Js ]
debbyl calls (0.50)
BombDog2 folds.
LasVegasDi calls (0.50)
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers checks.
*** I get to play Jack Shit!
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 5c, 5s, 4d ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** That flop had to miss everyone right?
debbyl calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Tc ]
RayPowers checks.
*** Why bet? She will just call.
debbyl checks.
** Dealing River ** : [ Qh ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl bets (1)
*** I do not foresee my jack high winning this.
RayPowers folds.

***** Hand History for Game 3080569900 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:39:03 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6s, 6d ]
BombDog2 folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.25)
*** Is this a missed bet? I don’t think so, but I’m curious how people feel about pocket 6s in the small blind with only one limper.
debbyl checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 2d, 3s, Ts ]
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** I like my over the middle pair
debbyl calls (0.50)
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
*** Well, I did.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
debbyl calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 2h ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl checks.
miamivisc bets (1)
*** I think I should have folded here. I don’t see what he can have that I am not way behind against.
RayPowers calls (1)
debbyl folds.
** Dealing River ** : [ Qs ]
RayPowers bets (1)
*** I tried to bet the scary flush board and the over card. Didn’t work.
miamivisc raises (2) to 2
RayPowers calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $10 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 2d 3s Ts 2h Qs ]
miamivisc balance $50.25, bet $4.50, collected $10, net +$5.50 [ Ks 2s ] [ a flush, king high -- Ks,Qs,Ts,3s,2s ]
RayPowers balance $47.75, lost $4.50 [ 6s 6d ] [ two pairs, sixes and twos -- Qs,6s,6d,2d,2h ]
*** This hand was horrible. This is the kind of hand that destroys an hours worth of profits.

***** Hand History for Game 3080574481 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:39:54 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
BombDog2 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4h, 3c ]
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky raises (1) to 1
RayPowers folds.
*** Monstarrr!

***** Hand History for Game 3080580382 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:40:59 EST 2005
BombDog2 posts small blind (0.25)
FTIP16 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jc, 9h ]
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** ??? Feeling my Wheaties apparently. This was a bad call.
debbyl calls (0.50)
BombDog2 raises (0.75) to 1
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
numadude calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** As was this. I was determined to get out if I had a bad flop.
debbyl calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 8d, 7d, 2s ]
BombDog2 checks.
miamivisc checks.
numadude checks.
RayPowers checks.
*** Well, if they want to give me a free card to my gutshot….
debbyl checks.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Jd ]
BombDog2 checks.
miamivisc checks.
numadude bets (1)
RayPowers raises (2) to 2
*** I don’t think he has the flush or a jack. I think he is betting the scare card. I decide to test him to see.
debbyl folds.
BombDog2 calls (2)
miamivisc folds.
numadude folds.
** Dealing River ** : [ Kd ]
BombDog2 bets (1)
*** *insert Jay and Silent Bob Strike back Fuck song here* I think I should have folded to the one bet. I think I win this less than 10% of the time.
RayPowers calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $11.75 | Rake: $0.75
Board: [ 8d 7d 2s Jd Kd ]
BombDog2 balance $22.25, bet $4, collected $11.75, net +$7.75 [ Ad Ks ] [ a flush, ace high -- Ad,Kd,Jd,8d,7d ]
RayPowers balance $43.75, lost $4 [ Jc 9h ] [ a pair of jacks -- Kd,Jc,Jd,9h,8d ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080588293 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:42:29 EST 2005
FTIP16 posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6h, 5c ]
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky raises (1.50) to 1.50
RayPowers folds.
*** I like it that the poker gods deal me a shit hand every time I play a hand wrong.

***** Hand History for Game 3080593129 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:43:23 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Ad, 6h ]
MYBABY555 folds.
numadude calls (0.50)
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Ax unsuited, still not good.

***** Hand History for Game 3080596901 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:44:06 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6s, 7h ]
numadude folds.
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Sixty Seven Dude! No, that’s not right..

***** Hand History for Game 3080601145 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:44:54 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
numadude posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5h, 2d ]
MacBain_2 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Monstarrr!!

***** Hand History for Game 3080605737 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:45:47 EST 2005
numadude posts small blind (0.25)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2c, Td ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Doyle Brunson, I will never be the man you are and play this crap.

***** Hand History for Game 3080610275 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:46:38 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3d, Th ]
BombDog2 calls (0.50)
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.25)
*** But I’ll play something almost just as bad in the small blind!
debbyl checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Ah, Qh, 3s ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl checks.
BombDog2 bets (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Thank you lord, once again, for providing me with a flop that I can get away from easily. For a moment of amusement, I will paste the results of this hand:
Board: [ Ah Qh 3s 8s 4c ]
BombDog2 balance $24.25, bet $3, collected $6.50, net +$3.50 [ Ts Qs ] [ a pair of queens -- Ah,Qs,Qh,Ts,8s ]
miamivisc balance $41.50, lost $3 [ Js 3c ] [ a pair of threes -- Ah,Qh,Js,3c,3s ]
Yeah, that’s right, he called down with J3 offsuit. And you all wonder why I so often say “I don’t think he has it.”

***** Hand History for Game 3080615898 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:47:43 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
FTIP16 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, 6c ]
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** Huh? I am going to claim unconciousness for this entire hand. I honestly do not remember the travesty that was this hand. No further comments because I seriously have no idea what happened here. I don’t even remember it.
debbyl folds.
FTIP16 calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 8s, 2d, 4c ]
FTIP16 checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 6h ]
miamivisc bets (1)
RayPowers raises (2) to 2
miamivisc calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 4h ]
miamivisc bets (1)
RayPowers calls (1)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $10.75 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 8s 2d 4c 6h 4h ]
miamivisc balance $47.25, bet $5, collected $10.75, net +$5.75 [ Qc 6d ] [ two pairs, sixes and fours with queen kicker -- Qc,6d,6h,4c,4h ]
RayPowers balance $38.25, lost $5 [ 7s 6c ] [ two pairs, sixes and fours -- 8s,6c,6h,4c,4h ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080621342 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:48:46 EST 2005
FTIP16 posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6c, 9h ]
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
** Must have woken back up here.

***** Hand History for Game 3080626967 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:49:51 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
sueblunu posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, As ]
MYBABY555 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Ax suited, trying for the flush. Notice I have not yet hit a flush. I have not yet even come close to hitting the flush. But I am undaunted. I press forward.
debbyl folds.
sueblunu checks.
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi calls (0.25)
miamivisc checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4h, Jh, 8h ]
LasVegasDi checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** I got daunted somewhere in there.

***** Hand History for Game 3080630100 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:50:25 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qd, Qs ]
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers raises (1) to 1
*** This seems nice.
debbyl calls (1)
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi calls (1)
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 9s, 7s, 5c ]
MYBABY555 checks.
RayPowers checks.
*** LasVegasDi was a habitual positional better. I was shooting for the check raise. I missed. Missed Bet Count: 7
debbyl checks.
LasVegasDi checks.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 4d ]
MYBABY555 checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Not gonna let that happen again.
debbyl calls (1)
LasVegasDi folds.
MYBABY555 calls (1)
** Dealing River ** : [ 9c ]
MYBABY555 checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
debbyl calls (1)
*** She better not have a nine again.
MYBABY555 folds.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $8.75 | Rake: $0.50
Board: [ 9s 7s 5c 4d 9c ]
RayPowers balance $43.50, bet $3, collected $8.75, net +$5.75 [ Qd Qs ] [ two pairs, queens and nines -- Qd,Qs,9s,9c,7s ]
debbyl balance $37.37, lost $3 [ Qc 7c ] [ two pairs, nines and sevens -- Qc,9s,9c,7c,7s ]

***** Hand History for Game 3080637139 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:51:46 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
mom55 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 5d, 6c ]
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** bleh.

***** Hand History for Game 3080641382 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:52:35 EST 2005
mom55 posts small blind (0.25)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qs, 6h ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Bleh.

***** Hand History for Game 3080646890 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:53:39 EST 2005
Table Table 75417 (Real Money) -- Seat 7 is the button
cbloszinsky posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Td, 5c ]
debbyl calls (0.50)
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers checks.
*** .. Sure.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 6h, Ts, Jd ]
RayPowers checks.
*** Missed Bet count: 8 I should have bet this, I think. Opinions? Debbyl and miamivisc were both likely to call.
debbyl checks.
miamivisc checks.
mom55 checks.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ As ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl checks.
miamivisc bets (1)
mom55 folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** I doubt I would have pushed out miamivisc anyways, so .. crap.

***** Hand History for Game 3080650748 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:54:24 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6c, 3d ]
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.25)
*** Half a small bet to see the flop, mise well.
debbyl checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Kc, 9d, Jh ]
RayPowers checks.
debbyl checks.
LasVegasDi checks.
miamivisc bets (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Oh well.

***** Hand History for Game 3080657934 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:55:47 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
sueblunu posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6s, As ]
FTIP16 calls (0.50)
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 calls (1)
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky raises (1.50) to 1.50
RayPowers folds.
*** Honestly, not worth calling 3 bets cold to chase a nut flush.

***** Hand History for Game 3080664858 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:57:07 EST 2005
sueblunu posts small blind (0.25)
FTIP16 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2d, 4s ]
LasVegasDi calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Monnnn.. I’m tired of saying that.

***** Hand History for Game 3080671515 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:58:24 EST 2005
FTIP16 posts small blind (0.25)
LasVegasDi posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6s, 9h ]
miamivisc calls (0.50)
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** I do hereby dub this hand: Bill and Ted.

***** Hand History for Game 3080676391 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 00:59:21 EST 2005
LasVegasDi posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2h, Ts ]
MYBABY555 folds.
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** Curse you Doyle! Curse you!

***** Hand History for Game 3080680981 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:00:15 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Tc, 7d ]
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** *sigh*

***** Hand History for Game 3080686834 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:01:24 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
Master7253 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4c, Ac ]
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** I still believe one day I will make a flush. Not sure when tho.
debbyl raises (1) to 1
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
LasVegasDi folds.
miamivisc calls (1)
MYBABY555 raises (1.25) to 1.50
Master7253 folds.
mom55 calls (1)
RayPowers calls (1)
*** Almost exact odds for the flush draw.
debbyl calls (0.50)
miamivisc calls (0.50)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 9d, Ks, Ad ]
MYBABY555 checks.
mom55 checks.
RayPowers bets (0.50)
*** This is my standard bet/raise to see if I am outkicked. I don’t see how I can’t NOT be outkicked with the action the way it went, but maybe two of them had pocket pairs.
debbyl calls (0.50)
miamivisc folds.
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
mom55 calls (0.50)
*** Well, that was not enlightening. I think my ace is actually good tho. Weird.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 3d ]
MYBABY555 checks.
mom55 checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** I refuse to be daunted by the third diamond!
debbyl calls (1)
MYBABY555 calls (1)
mom55 calls (1)
*** Fuckin bunch of calling stations!
** Dealing River ** : [ 5h ]
MYBABY555 checks.
mom55 checks.
RayPowers bets (1)
*** Oh look not a straight draw hit too, but honestly, who stayed in with 24. Must bet!
debbyl calls (1)
MYBABY555 folds.
mom55 folds.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $15.25 | Rake: $0.75
Board: [ 9d Ks Ad 3d 5h ]
RayPowers balance $53.75, bet $4, collected $15.25, net +$11.25 [ 4c Ac ] [ a pair of aces -- Ac,Ad,Ks,9d,5h ]
debbyl balance $29.12, lost $4 [ Qd Qs ] [ a pair of queens -- Ad,Ks,Qd,Qs,9d ]
RayPowers: wow how the heck did i win that one

***** Hand History for Game 3080694645 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:02:57 EST 2005
Master7253 posts small blind (0.25)
mom55 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 7s, Th ]
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** That helped ye ole chipstack, time to sit back some.

***** Hand History for Game 3080698199 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:03:38 EST 2005
mom55 posts small blind (0.25)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Js, 8h ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Jack Shit strikes again.

***** Hand History for Game 3080703984 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:04:48 EST 2005
cbloszinsky posts small blind (0.25)
RayPowers posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 2d, Th ]
debbyl folds.
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
Master7253 folds.
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky raises (0.75) to 1
RayPowers folds.
** What’s this Doyle crapI keep seeing?

***** Hand History for Game 3080709259 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:05:52 EST 2005
RayPowers posts small blind (0.25)
debbyl posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Qd, 5c ]
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
Master7253 calls (0.50)
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers calls (0.25)
debbyl raises (0.50) to 1
miamivisc calls (0.50)
Master7253 calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** So much for a cheap flop with total crap.

***** Hand History for Game 3080714471 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:06:54 EST 2005
debbyl posts small blind (0.25)
sueblunu posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 6c, 2d ]
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc raises (1) to 1
MYBABY555 folds.
Master7253 calls (1)
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** monster.

***** Hand History for Game 3080719344 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:07:52 EST 2005
sueblunu posts small blind (0.25)
FTIP16 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3h, 5c ]
miamivisc calls (0.50)
MYBABY555 calls (0.50)
Master7253 folds.
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** .retsnom

***** Hand History for Game 3080723107 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:08:38 EST 2005
FTIP16 posts small blind (0.25)
miamivisc posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jh, 5d ]
MYBABY555 folds.
Master7253 calls (0.50)
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** .tihs kcaJ

***** Hand History for Game 3080727439 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:09:31 EST 2005
miamivisc posts small blind (0.25)
MYBABY555 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 3d, Ad ]
Master7253 calls (0.50)
mom55 folds.
cbloszinsky calls (0.50)
RayPowers calls (0.50)
*** Could this be the one? The flush of desire?!?!?
debbyl calls (0.50)
sueblunu folds.
FTIP16 folds.
miamivisc calls (0.25)
MYBABY555 checks.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 2s, Th, Js ]
miamivisc bets (0.50)
MYBABY555 folds.
Master7253 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky calls (0.50)
RayPowers folds.
*** Nope, sure can’t.

***** Hand History for Game 3080735354 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:11:08 EST 2005
MYBABY555 posts small blind (0.25)
Master7253 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 4s, Kc ]
mom55 calls (0.50)
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** King four is such an unlikely pairing. I mean, why would the King hang out with a four. Maybe the four shines his shoes or something.

***** Hand History for Game 3080741569 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:12:26 EST 2005
Master7253 posts small blind (0.25)
mom55 posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ Jh, Tc ]
cbloszinsky folds.
RayPowers folds.
*** JTs is my favorite hand. JTo is.. not worth it in this position.

***** Hand History for Game 3080744389 *****
0.50/1 Texas Hold'em Game Table (Limit) - Wed Nov 23 01:13:01 EST 2005
mom55 posts small blind (0.25)
cbloszinsky posts big blind (0.50)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to RayPowers [ 8h, 4h ]
RayPowers folds.
*** Ending on a high note baby!

Well that’s it. I wonder how many people went all the way through this. If so, please don’t leave all that time wasted! Comment on my donkeyness and places where you don’t agree with what I did so I can learn!

Captain Placeholder

2005-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Bah.

I have 100 hands to review, which I want to spread out amongst FCP and here.

FCP Forums are down. Hand Converter is down.

More to come when FCP is up and I find a new hand converter. The short version is that it was a good night last night. I ended up 27 Big Bets.

Con

2005-11-22T07:56:00.000-08:00

So, last weekend was Gen Con So Cal. Adam, Ben, Jay and I headed out Thursday to begin helping run the greatest of all geekness, a con. Jay insisted on driving his car, which has good space, but Jay drives slow. It's a coinflip to me if not having to drive at all is better or worse than arriving a half hour later. Not counting the multiple times we drove in circles because the MapQuest directions did not take into account some truly amazing road construction in California.

Checking in went smoothly, and the original setup was nothing strange. They had no power for us, no sound system. On the bright side we did have a BAC (Big ass Clock) for a change of pace. The worst part is that, this time, the board games were at the far side of the convention hall, and the TCG's at the other side. So I was destined to spend the weekend walking back and forth a half mile at a time.

Speaking of which, I really disliked the layout this year. Here is my bad map representation of the hall.

---- ----
SSSS UUUU S = Sign In
AAAA UUUU A = Artists
WWWW UUUU W = Wizard's TCGs (Trading Card Games)
WWWW TTTT U = Upper Deck
RRRR TTTT T = Other TCGS
RRRR
EEEE OOOO O = Other Stuff, Kids Play etc
EEEE OOMM M = Miniatures
EEEE BBMM E = Exhibitors
EEEE BBMM B = Board Games
--------- R = Role Playing

The building was a big square, so this looks weird, but it's good enough to explain my issues. The first thing to understand is the target audience is a gamer, and the primary purpose of the con is to sell product for the exhibitors. You do this primarily through them PLAYING games, or trying them out, and then buying, which is why most exhibitor booths are highly directed towards demos.

Now, first, we should decide what is a destination location for these events. This is a retail term for places that people will actively hunt out. For a con like this, the obvious destination locations are the Artists, the Exhibitors, and the Wizards and UDE TCG areas. People don't happen upon Magic: The gathering as they are walking by, look at at it, and decide to sit down for a tournament. Someone in my TCG area came there because they know Magic and they came there to play. For UDE its even more simple in that they run Invite based events there. Half the people in UDE's area were personally invited there.

So theoretically those sections should go to the back of the con area. People will find them because they are looking for them, and it would be nice to make them walk through some of the less popular areas on the off chance that they seem something new they would like, especially if it's visually appealing.

Enter, board games and miniatures. Both game groups are MUCH more visually appealing than TCG's, and more likely to 'catch someone's eye' as they are walking by. While I agree that the artist area and the UDE section was visually appealing to someone walking in, it's not like they are going to draw people into Gen Con because Gen Con itself is a destination location. Not only that, but you can't get in to see the UDE area and the Artist area without buying a ticket, so it does not act correctly as an external visual draw.

If I were doing the layout, I would have done it like this:

---- ----
SSSS OOOO S = Sign In
RRBB OOTT A = Artists
RRBB MMTT W = Wizard's TCGs (Trading Card Games)
RRRR MMTT U = Upper Deck
WWWW MMTT T = Other TCGS
WWWW
EEEE AAAA O = Other Stuff, Kids Play etc
EEEE UUUU M = Miniatures
EEEE UUUU E = Exhibitors
EEEE UUUU B = Board Games
--------- R = Role Playing

So, as soon as you sign up you see some fun interesting things to your immediate left in the O section with the Gamer's Olympics and Paint a figure and such, and the kids play area is right there for easy drop off. Then as you walk down the hall you see board games on the right and minis on the left, both visually attractive areas, and they can set out games for people to look at, making it a second demo station (in addition to the exhibition area) as well as a gaming area. However, since those areas are slightly low attendance wise, right behind them we have the TCG's and the Role playing Games. The Role Playing especially is always heavily populated, and rather loud, so you get a feeling for a popular gaming atmosphere from the people and noise, as well as the visual attractiveness of the "cool looking games."

Further back you run into the Wizard's TCG on the side right as it the rest of the flow moves off to the next big visual aspect of the con, the artists and the exhibitor hall. Putting UDE in the back corner does take away from the stunning visuals of their area a little bit, but I think the visuals are more for the media than walk bys, and honestly, they will get plenty of walk by traffic being right next to the exhibit hall.

Yeah, I know I am anal about this sort of thing.

Some highlights for the weekend:

1) On the way down I asked everyone to bet me money that at some point during the weekend Tim Shields would come out of nowhere and invite me to dinner, and I was willing to make this bet not even knowing if Tim was attending. No one took the bet, which was good for them since Tim wasted no time and ran into me as we were checking into the hotel to invite me to a Scotch tasting Saturday night. Not quite dinner, but close enough.

2) Saturday morning we (being my staff) got accused of not showing up to run an event we were supposed to. Turns out the event was not even ours, but I did send staff down to run it in a pinch. So we went from the 'idiots who don't know their own schedule' to the 'super nice guys always willing to help out in a pinch' in the span of a half hour or so as the mistake was discovered.

3) Matt Tabak wins for best stories of the weekend. I can not relate the stories, but they have to do with a giant conspiracy theory in which he Disqualified someone in the top eight of the Versus Pro Circuit which coincidently got one of his friends into the top eight. Obviously just a funny coincidence, but great conspiracy theory fodder.

4) My favorite "I crack myself up" moment of the weekend came with the following exchange: (Jay) Don't be counting in French or anything, you Canadian. (Ben) Hey, I can count to one hundred in French. (Jay) What comes after one hundred in french? (Me) "I surrender"

5) I jumped into a booster draft as I was getting off shift (in so much as I actually stayed in shifts) to fill it up since the poor people were waiting for forever. I smashed them. I forgot how bad the average booster drafter is. I even played horribly. It was great fun though.

That's about it for highlights from the weekend. Last night we got a new puppy, so no sleep for me, but he is very cute. The best part is that the original puppy owners/breeders named them colors to keep track of who was who (by the color of their collar or something). We got "blue." To make it easy for the puppy, we named him Bluebeard the Pirate on his papers, matching the theme that our other dog is named Captain Simon of the high seas. My three year old son, however, disagrees with our naming, and has decreed that the puppy must be named "Blueberry Juice."

No really, he came up with that on his own, and won't let it go. Fortunately we can just all call him Blue and everyone is happy...

Gonna play some poker tonight I hope, so some interesting fun coming in that respect as the next two evenings should be poker filled activities...

Have a good one all.

(edit to fix the font on the floorplan layouts so they were readable)

Oif

2005-11-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

Look, I'm too tired to post anything today.

I swear, cool updates to come after I get some sleep.

Different stakes..

2005-11-16T10:51:00.000-08:00

I headed down to Keller's last night to work on some stuff. We got his office rearranged, some data for his new web site coming down the pike, talked some about staking and such, and fixed his computers. I also, in the midst of the night, joked about a poker lesson, and he decided to sit me down at a couple of online tables to see how I played.

Two $30/$60 tables and a $100/$200 table.

A little higher than my normal stakes. He asked if I would be nervous playing for those stakes, and I replied that since it wasn't my money, no. I wonder if that made him feel better or worse about the idea.

The $30/$60 table was tight. Super tight. Two to three people to the flop tight. And Aggressive. Super Aggressive. Never an unraised pot preflop aggressive. I had talked to Thomas about how I thought my weakness was in how to play smaller pairs and middle suited connectors and he told me 'Don't worry, at this table you will never have the odds to play those hands.' He was right.

By contrast, the $100/$200 table was super loose aggressive. More people in preflop, still a lot of raising. Post flop the table was more passive, but still pretty loose. All in all, I lost a couple hundred on the $30/$60 table, and won a couple thousand on the $100/$200, all in a span of about 20 minutes before we moved on to other things.

Pretty fun and exciting. I didn't really get to learn a lot, though. Most of the hands we played were really straight forward. "You have pocket Aces, raising is good." or "You have 9/2 offsuit, folding is good." We had a couple hands that I would have played differently where he check called down a hand I would have check folded on the turn, and then for a similar hand check folded the turn same way I would have, and I didn't get to ask him why he called down for one and not the other, as the pot sizes were similar. I look forward to doing this some more tho, as I think it can really help to plug up my game if he can help me out more this way. We shall see.

Tomorrow I am off to Gen Con So Cal! Expect little to no updates for the next few days, sorry. Hope to see some of you there.

No Content

2005-11-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

I have two friends, one a lawyer, one a lawyer in training. Both have blogs. Both talk a lot more than I do. It's like they always have something to say, something to discuss, something to impress up on you, something to convince you of.

I admit I don't. It's not what I use my blog for. I have no desire to convince you of anything. I have nothing so important that I feel the need to impress it upon you in the simple storytelling device.

Because that's all my blog really is; a storytelling device. It's here for me to relate to you a tale or two about my life, and maybe share a few emotions. It's a way for me to share my life with friends I don't get to see as often as I would like, and let them know what is going on and how I am feeling. To me, it's not a medium for discussion, or a method to convince some one of an interesting new idea I have. I'm not saying it's wrong for people to use it as such, it's just not something I do, and I find it interesting that people use their blogs for such different purposes.

I'm off half of tomorrow while my house gets worked on for some warranty work, then Thursday I am off to Gen Con So Cal. My wife has been having issues with her hormone medication, so hopefully she will not go crazy and destroy the house and children while I am gone. I did not get to play Poker last night, but did find out how to get my hand histories off of Caribbean, so will start doing some posting of those soon for those of you looking for poker content. I will not be at Pub Poker this Wednesday because I want to visit with the family some before I leave to So Cal.

And that's all I got for today. No deep message. Just a quick update. Hopefully, for my readers, that's enough.

So, how did that PTQ go?

2005-11-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

Well, let's review....

Friday afternoon I get a call, the product shipped for the San Diego PTQ had an incorrect address on it. Miki calls the carrier to try to get a correction, no deal. Then he calls back (at my request) to see if they will let him pick it up, and they say the driver will call him.

My nightmare PTQ that was moved at the last minute, ends up having 45 people. I needed 63 to break even. San Diego was worse. They had 44, and the driver never called so the product did not show up. I asked him to just buy some boxes off of the local vendor and use those.

But the local vendor did not show up either. Apparently not only was the vendor sick, but he had forgotten about it to begin with. Yay. So they had no vendor AND no product. Good lord. Any San Diego players that may be reading this. I apologize. :(

Honestly, life in "hard" mode sucks. I also had some big losing poker sessions this weekend, and will get some hand histories to start posting tomorrow here and on FCP.

Friday started with a great session ending up about 10BB on $2/$4. Saturday I donked it up and ended up DOWN 10BB on $2/$4. Sunday I decided to go back to being a super rock, but even when catching action on my monster hands, I suffered three nightmare suckouts (with them catching a 2, 3, and 3 outer respectively) than ended me another 10BB down in $2/4 AND 10BB down in $1/$2.

This does not bode well for Caribbean sun, as now I am basically down to $45 bucks in there, and have a ways to go to fill my promotion. Bleh. I really think I played well on Sunday, and super rock seems to be the way to go at those tables right now, but I can't afford to ride a negative variance much further on this site and come out profitable.

I'm reading State of Fear right now, and its interesting to see how much the push is to show Global Warming as basically a myth. Its hard to pull the fact from fiction novels sometimes, even with references, but I give the author some huge kudos for forcing a change of perception in American culture about this sort of thing.

Gen Con So Cal coming up this weekend. Wheee. Let's hope that goes well...

Misc.

2005-11-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

Supposedly Alyssa Milano has herpes according to a gossip/radio show I heard. These destroys so many fantasies of mine its not even funny. :(

NAU is officially the site to never again deal with, screwing up my PTQ this weekend by requesting an insurance addition that no insurance company would ever agree to.

New on the list of top ten sucky things for more reasons that I can count: Having the three year old walk in on you and the wife during that "special time."

Eating one a day vitamins, makes me throw up. I've tried three times now with different variations of eating and drinking before and after taking it. Nope, I always throw up.

I am likely to have to cash out a lot of my Poker bankroll to pay for x-mas this year, as I just had a horrible money week between the NAU thing and a $900 car repair bill.

I'm just pretty pissed about this week, that's all there is to it.

More better things to come... I hope.

The power(?) of AQ

2005-11-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

Well, as most of you know, I have a disturbing trend of whining about never getting a hand to play. That streak is officially broken for last night. While I never got a pocket pair above 99's, I got four pocket pairs, K-10 three times, AK twice, JT (suited) twice, and AQ FIVE times. Three times my pocket pairs hit sets, and the third pocket pair was 22, which I was able to safely pitch on a flop of AKQ. Anyone thing I was ahead there? :P

Notice I only mentioned suited for the JT. While "good hands" were slapping me in the face all night, very few times were they suited, so they rarely became premium hands. Still, in an aggressive style in Pub Poker, these hands can make and break you. Last night they did both for me. Here's a few highlights.

In middle position I picked up J/10 suited and limped in to see a flop. As with all Pub Poker tables, it was lose, and I was virtually guaranteed to have odds to be in the pot, even though I was only the second one in. On a flop of 10-10-K I fired away with trips and a backdoor flush draw. I got three callers on a 2/3 sized pot bet! Wowzer! On a turn of 6 of my suit I know had a flush draw and still the trips, and I fired again, called, then raised, then called! With no preflop raisers, I didn't put anyone on pocket kings, and certainly didn't put anyone on pocket 6's staying in on the flop bet. If I am facing another ten, I have to pray I have them outkicked, but what I am hoping is that I'm facing King x. After thinking it over, and being worried about someone having a higher flush draw than me, I push all in trying to knock out the draws. Fold, Call, Call. I am the biggest stack, so even if I lose this, I still have some left over, but not much.

I turn over my J/10. Next guy turns over K-10 for a flopped full house, OUCH! Last lady, a new player, turns over J/Q for an open ended straight draw. We're both drawing dead. The turn is another spade, giving me a flush, but it's irrelevant, and suddenly I am short stacked. Not deathly so, but under 10 Big Blinds.

This begins my saga of AQ. I had already had AQ once in the event, and it just won me the blinds on a preflop raise. Now that I was shortstacked, it was time to make a move, and I got into a raising war with me all in preflop. He turned over K-10 offsuit, and I was pretty happy to flip over my AQ.

Until the flop hit of K-10-6. Who doesn't get the crappy sinking feeling in their chest at this point? Thankfully, on the river, my miracle jack comes up for the suck out straight to beat his two pair. Shortly after that, my pocket 6's hit a set and I doubled up again to go from bottom to top chipstack.

One table move later and I had pocket 9's, and they hit a set and I virtually doubled up again, when two diamonds and a straight draw on the board kept people in to try to hit their draws. Finally, I pushed all in and pushed out the draws, and beat the one person who was already all in.

Then AQ found me again, and another betting war ensued. Before we go any further, let me highlight that I KNOW AQ offsuit is not the best hand out there, or anywhere near close. I was on a rush of cards and really trying to be a maniac to shake off some of my more rockish tendencies, and a free pub poker place is a good place to do that. Although it may seem ridiculous, I picked spots against players where I was sure my AQ was good when I took a stand for it.

For this betting war, one guy ended up all in, and I and another player were down to being short stacked preflop with so much in the pot. The board blanked horribly, and we checked down a board of 88694. I flipped over my AQ, the other guy flipped over J5 offsuit (er????) and the all in guy flipped over A9 to triple up with his two pair.

With only 3K left and the blinds at 500/1000, with the blinds going up next hand, I pushed all in in early position to try to buy the blinds to survive for an orbit to pick up a hand. I got called by A5 offsuit of all things, which beat my 35 offsuit. Soundly. I honestly thought I could have just picked up the blinds there. The two blinds were cautious players, and there were two short stacks just biding their time for a hand. I didn't see anyone calling me without a premium hand, but I was wrong, and just like that I was out, with only two tables left. Ah well.

The lesson for the night was that I was obviously over attached to AQ, and although I did always put my money in with the best hand, more often than not my edge was small for such big pots with the hand. There wasn't a lot of strategy to talk about aside from that last night, sorry. I made a couple good laydowns, but not much to say there. Overall I had a good night, it just didn't happen for me.

As a funny side note, the Card Player just came out with my article in it, and has just hit the web at the following url: Pub Poker

Someone at the poker league read the article last night, and when he was done, said "Hey, the poker kid you're talking about is my friend I think!" I was aghast that I would have bashed one of his friends, but when described his friend, I told him that I don't think it was him. But later on that night, I was sitting at the table with his friend, and I might be wrong. His friend might indeed by the poker kid I described. I'll have to look again next week.

Have a good one all.

Choose wisely

2005-11-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

Last night, while waiting for hours to log on to World of Warcraft, I played some poker online.

Not my night. First, I sit down at an Omaha table, pot limit. I have crap for hands, but am trying to ride it out. Finally, with the nut low, I push all in on a reraise to scoop up at least half of the pot and be back in the black.

Except uh, apparently I was not at Omaha eight or better table, I was at an Omaha table.

One rebuy later I was playing at the correct table, but still not getting anywhere, and ended up down a good amount when I jumped from Ultimate bet to Caribbean Poker. I have money there for a pokersource online special, but I hate the place. Nonetheless I wanted to try to work it out there. I lost more there too before giving it up. In four full orbits, my most playable hand was 9s7s. Ouch.

Blizzard, learn how your effing servers work. I honestly do not know how you can run such a bad system and not be sued in a class action law suit. And don't tell me I don't know the complexity of the system. I work for a company that does credit card transactions over the internet for hundreds of web sites. Trust me when I say my login and authentication server system is "slightly better" than yours.

Heading to Thomas's tonight to work on some computer stuff. He got an e-mail out of the blue from Heff today! Woah, that's a weird blast from the past. Wonder what will come of that. Also, am heading to Leigh's birthday dinner, which should be fun.

That's all I got for right now. Have fun all.

Pass to the RED Shirts!

2005-11-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

Pretty hyper weekend for me. Tons went on, so I thought I'd try to do a bit of a recap here.

Friday after work we went to Brandi's house to play some Magic with her, her fiance, and her dad. At least that was the plan. We showed up on time at 7pm. Her dad and mom and brother showed up around 9:30pm. I played some with her fiance and we went about even, had some fun, then headed home because we had a long day ahead.

Saturday I drove out to Mana Werx to run a Grand Prix Trial. Wow is that a drive. Took me 1 hr 10 minutes to get there. Their store has no sign on it, which was pretty annoying to try to find, because the building also did not have an address on it. I got lucky and hit it on the first try tho. The event itself had 14 players, which is pretty much perfect for me. 14 players meant I lost the minimum amount of money for the event, but it also got over in the shortest period of time, which meant I had time to go home and get changed for the mixed game Saturday night!

I changed and headed there a bit early. I had some of my dad's famous goulash, which I love, and my wife, her sister, my dad and I hung out waiting for people to start showing at 7pm. At 7:15, we started playing for fun on our own with candy for bets. At 8:00 we decided to run a four person no limit tournament for a few bucks, as still no one had come. I split that with my wife's sister, as when we got down to two, Bahr showed up, and we decided to play some for real with five people. We cut the buy in to make it more fun since some people were getting used to playing some of the games, and played the rest of the night five handed, having a great time. I ended up even on the night, getting cold decked for the last hour and a half, but still, a good time was had by all it seems.

I'm admittedly pretty pissed at the total lack of show up or call ins. Three people had said they were coming for sure. Two more were maybes. One of the three for sures called and cancelled, so kudos to Jay for at least letting me know he wasn't coming. I didn't agree with why he wasn't coming, but at least he let me know. The others never responded at all, even when I called everyone I could that day to try to get some verifications on the day of, so my dad knew how much goulash to make. Just annoying when I have people who suggest new games, suggest dates to make it easier for them, suggest changes in the stakes, all of which I accommodate... and then don't show up. Whatever.

Sunday we (my wife, sister in law, and I) went to the Cardinals vs Seahawks game with Thomas, who has season tickets. We had a great time. It was my wife's first football game ever, and she is a seahawks fan, so she had a blast. I had to keep yelling at the Card's quarterback to "Pass it to the red shirts, you idiot!" He did not listen, throwing three interceptions, and continuously passing to the second best guy on the field. If there was a wide open receiver, he would pass it instead to the receiver who was covered, or sure to get nailed as soon as he caught the ball. Poor Thomas is a huge Cardinals fan, and he was devastated during the game at how pathetic the Cardinals played. I'm not a huge sports fan, so I was able to root for the Cards and have fun without really caring that they were getting stomped. I was just having fun being there hanging out with everyone.

And that was my weekend. Now I need some time to recover from my weekend. Wish I could have slept in today. :)

Weekend!

2005-11-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

It's a busy day already.

Dan is back in L.A. He has an offer on a house. I hope they take it so he is done with that and doesn't have to worry about it much. It looks like I'll be walking him through his first few days/weeks at the company. So he's reporting to me without reporting to me. Funny stuff. Not that it matters, I know what needs to be done, he knows what needs to be done, I'm just helping him get all the data he needs to actually do it.

$1/$2 poker this weekend! I am excited, mainly because I haven't played in about a week. I'm jonesing big time. Last night I could have, but instead the wife and I played some World of WarCraft. We went on a quest slightly out of our league, so it was pretty exciting. We died about three times each, but it was all in good fun, and she needed some mind numbing entertainment. She's been feeling a bit out of sorts lately, and had her feelings hurt recently by a friend, so was kinda down in the dumps.

I expect to do pretty well, and have been reading up on Stud Hi Lo, and Tim has been walking me through some of the nuances of Omaha 8 or Better. I'd like to walk out of the game with a bit of a profit. Especially since the wife is playing, and I think she may have some problems in our poker shark tank.

I also have a Grand Prix Trial to run on Saturday, and two people to Judge test. I half want no one to show so I can just rest Saturday. The event is unlikely to be profitable, and will be a long trip and a lot of work for little to no benefit. *sigh* I am down with PTQ's, but I am so not a fan of running GPTs. Ah well.

Sunday is unknown. Originally we were going to the Cardinals game, but that looks nixed. I think I will send wife and her sister to the game, and I'll just hang at home with the kids. We'll see.

Have a good weekend all!

Who knows

2005-11-03T07:41:00.000-08:00

Wife sick, kids sick, me stuck at home not doing Pub Poker. It's been a boring week and i have no idea what to talk to everyone about. Sorry :(

Its a week

2005-11-02T07:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Dan came down and did some of his training for the new job, then went ot my place and we watched CSI, and played some Heads Up Holdem. I won, but easier than I should have as Dan just kind of gave up during the end. Then my son started complaining of a hurt foot, and with the nervous wife, it was off to Urgent Care. The final result, he got a bug bite on the bottom of the foot that was hurting him. Yay.

Tonight is Pub Poker night and Dan will be there! Come on down!

Omahahaha

2005-11-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

Last night while waiting for the kids to come by to hand candy to, I played a little pot limit Omaha on Ultimate Bet. I understand why Wakko likes it, but the math just makes my head hurt sometime. I ended up like 4 BB for the hour or so I played, which is crap. I was up 21 BB, but I had a couple big preflop hands that were bet high, then missed on the flop and I had to get out. Such is life.

Dan is back in town for the next few days. That should be fun. Tomorrow night is Pub Poker night, and Saturday is the first night of my Dad's mixed $1/$2 game. That should be interesting. I hope we get a good group.

Feeling sick today. I think I caught a cold hanging out all last night. Both kids have it for sure. I half expect to go home some time today when the Kindercare calls me. We shall see.

Have a good day all.

Things I learned this weekend...

2005-10-31T07:58:00.000-08:00

1) When the bill at Ninja is $117, and the other guy hands her $200 and tells her to keep the change, you have automatically lost the war to pay the bill.

2) Signing up for Rapid Rewards negates at least one Secondary Search flag. I was not searched during my three trips Saturday morning at all.

3) I do not have the patience for Audio Books. After the first flight, I turned off my IPod and bought two paper backs.

4) People in the poker lifestyle have no concept of time. Both people were late to meet me, and I almost missed the last two flights.

5) I do not win raffles. Ever.

6) My son likes MiniGolf.

7) Southwest's Boarding Pass system has a glitch, and you can never print out more than two boarding passes for a single trip. This proved to be a problem for me since I had three trips to make on Saturday.

Other notes for the weekend. I have both my WoW characters that are active over 100G now, so mount money is no longer a problem. That makes me happy. I also have not played poker if about 5 days, and am not missing it too much. Apparently I need a bit of a break.

Dan comes to town tomorrow. Woot. Halloween with the kids tonight.. All good over all..

Mule

2005-10-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

Some of you will get that topic, some of you will not.

Busy weekend for Halloween. Lots of stuff to do when you have kids, and the company party is this weekend. Ninja tonight, good times! Strange adventures tomorrow, scary times. Is it a bad thing when you have to take a flight, and you have a nightmare about your plane crashing, or have I just watched too many episodes of Lost?

No Poker this weekend I think. Too busy.

Have a good weekend all.

not a lot.

2005-10-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Nothing happened at pub poker. I mean I just never ever got a hand, and never hit a flop, and my only shining moment was actually having a real reason todo a live straddle. With 1800 in chips and about to hit the big blind, they raised the blinds to 400/800 on me. I live stradled all in. People are less likely to call 1800 flat than to call 800, then 1000 more, and I'd prefer not to have to play against 3 or 4 people with whatever random junk hand I get...

Just was not a great night for poker. *shrug* It happens.

This weekend is the company halloween party, that should be fun.

Some highlights

2005-10-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Reviewing my play of the PS Blogger tournament and thought I'd share a few hands.

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t200 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 6d, 4c.

6 folds, Button calls t200, Hero raises to t400, 1 fold, Button calls t200.

Flop: (t1000) Js, 3h, 9d (2 players)

Hero bets t800, Button folds.

Final Pot: t1800

Yay for raw naked aggression winning pots. I knew Button was weak tight. Not a play I make nearly enough. I am a crappy stealer.

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t400 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 6h, Js.

7 folds, Hero completes, BB checks.

Flop: (t800) 2h, 3d, 4h (2 players)

Hero checks, BB checks.

Turn: (t800) 5d (2 players)

Hero checks, BB bets t800, Hero raises to t1600, BB calls t800.

River: (t4000) 7c (2 players)

Hero bets t1600, BB calls t1600.

Final Pot: t7200

This one was just a funny hand. BB had J6 off as well. :)

XaQ Morphy said, "I have a tell on Ray, I know how he plays J6"
Ray_Powers said, "Our donkey styles cancel out"

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t600 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with As, 5s.

Hero calls t600, 5 folds, Button raises to t2165, 2 folds, Hero calls t1565.

Flop: (t4730) 8c, Ad, 2s (2 players)

Turn: (t4730) 8s (2 players)

River: (t4730) Ks (2 players)

Final Pot: t4730

Results in white below:

Hero has As 5s (flush, ace high).

Button has 4s 8h (three of a kind, eights).

Outcome: Hero wins t4730.

Here I get totally effing lucky. This is the only hand I can remember where I laid a beat on someone else in this tournament.

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t600 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is BB with Kd, As.

5 folds, CO raises to t2400, 2 folds, Hero calls t1800.

Flop: (t4600) 6s, 8h, 5h (2 players)

Hero checks, CO checks.

Turn: (t4600) 6d (2 players)

Hero bets t1800, CO calls t1800.

River: (t8200) Ad (2 players)

Hero bets t1800, CO calls t1800.

Final Pot: t11800

Results in white below:

Hero has Kd As (two pair, aces and sixes).

CO has Ah 7c (two pair, aces and sixes).

Outcome: Hero wins t11800.

That whole hand was an exercise in "wtf." His preflop raise with A7 off was weird. CO should have bet his open ended straight draw on the flop. I priced him out of his draw on the turn but he called anyways, and the ace on the river got me an extra 1800 out of the deal.

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t800 (8 handed)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 5d, Jd.

6 folds, Hero raises to t1600, BB calls t800.

Flop: (t2750) 7d, 9s, Qc (2 players)

Hero checks, BB bets t1200, Hero raises to t2400, BB calls t1200.

Turn: (t7550) 3s (2 players)

Hero bets t800, BB calls t800.

River: (t9150) 6d (2 players)

Hero bets t2400, BB folds.

Final Pot: t11550

Results in white below:

Hero has 5d Jd (high card, queen).

Outcome: Hero wins t11550.

More aggression versus the weak tight!

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t1200 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 9d, 8d.

2 folds, MP1 raises to t3600, 5 folds, BB calls t2400.

Flop: (t6600) 6s, 7d, 6d (2 players)

BB checks, MP1 bets t7200, BB folds.

Final Pot: t13800

Results in white below:

No showdown. MP1 wins t13800.

I think I should have played this one. I was running real dry, and a call here was 10% of my chipstack. The real question is if I should have pushed on a big gamble on that flop with the straight flush draw...

---

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t3000 (9 handed)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 5s, 5h.

Hero raises to t15642, UTG+1 raises to t54000, 4 folds, Button calls t31471 (All-In), 2 folds.

Flop: (t102163) 4s, 3d, 6h (3 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: (t102163) 9h (3 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t102163) Ac (3 players, 1 all-in)

Final Pot: t102163

Results in white below:

Hero has 5s 5h (one pair, fives).

UTG+1 has Qh Qd (one pair, queens).

Button has Ad Ah (three of a kind, aces).

Outcome: UTG+1 wins t54337. Button wins t47826.

And the hand that did me in. Ah well.

Was a great time. :)

Ray

Sick of Sick

2005-10-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm sick of being sick. Really. My body needs to get its act together or I am trading it in for a new one.

That is all.

States and the Blogger Tournament

2005-10-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a whirlwind. Friday at around 6pm I started becoming feverish and having dizzy spells, and in general just go deliriously sick. But I had to go run states, so off I went Saturday morning to hold what I thought would be a huge states tournament.

85 people. Bleh.

The event was relatively boring (thank goodness since I was sick as a dog), except for one funny exchange.

I had put up a booster draft for $20 for Japanese Ravnica. I announce it and a girl and guy together walk by. The guy is still in tournament and mentions that he wants to sign the girl up for it just to draft cards. The girl then goes off about the cost and how it s junk not worth $20. Then , to "Prove her point" she says (and I quote) "That's junk! That's not worth $20. For $20 I could get a lipstick and two eyeliners!"

Mental note to girl, when trying to prove our stuff is junk, do not try to equate it to what we would consider your junk in terms of value. Seriously, I would have taken nearly any answer there that made sense, like "four books" or "a nice dinner." But "a lipstick and two eyeliner" is not a compelling argument.

After states I went home and died a horrible sickly death, then got up Sunday, did some morning chores and settled in to play in the Pokerstars Blogger Invitational. 1473 people total. Sheesh.

I start off badly, and go from 2000 all the way down to 475 in short order, and at one point even go down to 410. But I was determined to remain focused and not just give up, and it paid off, as I clawed my way up from 410 to average chipstack, then, at one point, top 50 chip stacks. I maintained focus for hour after hour, but it was not meant to be, and I went out in 54th when my push with pocket 5's ran into pocket queens and pocket aces. Sheesh. Still, that's top 5%. I am happy with that result and had a blast, and I get a Pokerstars Shirt and Cap for being in the top 99!

Everyone seemed to have fun too, there was a lot of friendly banter back and forth, except for IanBarns, who seemed intent on calling me a donkey all day long when I called his all in push with pocket Queens when he had pocket jacks. *shrug* I had fun with it and set him back on tilt, but honestly, how dumb can some players be. If you think I suck, shut up and take all my money. Telling me I suck is not advantageous to you at all since, if I do believe you, I will then try to get better, and then you can't take my money. If he was trying to set me on tilt, he did a pretty horrible job of it. He called me a donkey, I told him to share the hay, etc. So in general, all got out of the whole thing was that he was a rude jackass, but overall the event was great, so who cares...

A couple links before I quit for the day.

The worst beat I took in this tournament.

Hurmmm, can't link the second one so I'll do a small paste:

IanBarns
Total Winnings: $1,214 Total Final Tables: 8

From pokerdb.com.

That's for the past YEAR of what looks like consistent play. That's the guy calling me a donkey? No offense, but I don't think I get the right to call someone a donkey until I at least have a five digit win under my belt....

Ray

Blogger Tournament!

2005-10-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

My pokerstars Blogger Login, Yay!!!!

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 6511753

Who let the dogs out?

2005-10-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Last night was pub poker night. I normally leave work, run home, then go straight to the bar to eat dinner and then play. This time I surprised the family by stopping off at the SwimKids, where my kids are taking a tumbling class. I met up with the wife and kids, and we went to Red Robin to eat before I headed out to play poker.

While we were waiting for the food to arrive, the kids were doing their normal playing and singing. Suddenly, out of the blue, my son starts to sing 'Who let the dogs out? Woof Woof Woof!"

I have no idea where he has ever heard this song before. Apparently its actually a popular kids song now. How funny. He learned it at school and is singing it. Weird.

Then it was off to pub poker. I think I played fine last night. I just never caught anything, and twice when I did, I was rivered for a massive pot loss. Such is life.

I want to highlight one of these cases to see what people thing. My play was probably controversial here, so I wanted to know what others thought.

I am late position with K-10 offsuit. Blinds are 50-100. I have an ok stack (about 3k).

Players I have no read on limps in from middle position. I call, guy to my left, who has been hitting hands all night, calls. Small blind folds. Big blind checks.

Flop is K 7 10 rainbow. Top two pair seems good to me. Big blind checks. Small blind bets out 300. I want overcalls here, so I think I can slow play it and I just call. Hand catcher calls, big blind folds.

Turn is a 6. No flush possible. First guy checks. I think the guy after me is going to bet (he hasn't checked around all night that I remember), so I check to let him do my betting for me. He bets 500. The first guy calls. I call.

River is a J. First guy checks. I check to the better, who obligingly fires out 1000. First guy folds. I raise 1000, leaving me with about 700 left. He has me outstacked by a lot. He calls.

He flips over AQ for the nut straight. Why he didn't raise me all in for my last 700 is beyond me, but honestly, how we played the whole thing is beyond me. He called and bet drawing to an inside straight, and hit it.

The question, though, is did I let him do it? I'm trying to decide if my slow play was good or bad. I think it was good the more I think about it. The fact that he hit his four outer sucks, but I had put him on KX, so I think I was right in letting him bet out for me. Both players were aggressive enough that the betting would keep going, and I got to hide the strength of my hand.

Thoughts?

Leaving money out there

2005-10-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

The topic applies to poker and life. Last night I finally sold all fo the games workshop inventory I had in the garage after the store closed for a price that was a win win for both of us. The new store guy got a smoking deal, and I got enough to pay off the last of the store debt. It took some pushing to get this sale to go through, mainly because getting a response from him at all was quite a challenge, and then getting him to actually come out and look at the inventory was even harder. But once he was here, it was an easy sell. I had put this off way too long, there was a significant amount of money to be gathered by selling this stuff, and I just sat on it for four months. Bad me. That's a habit I need to stop. Its as if I took 3K, then left it in my garage for four months for no reason.

My hand of the day exemplifies this habit of leaving money out there that should be mine..

***** Hand History for Game 13393652 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit)
Table Seed (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 1 is the button
Seat 1: Ray_Powers ($12.87)
Seat 2: LUCASSY ($1.15)
Seat 3: philb_damase ($4.10)
Seat 4: Hampfred ($1.75)
Seat 5: ARook ($2.50)
Seat 6: macchine1 ($3.40)
Seat 7: stevepar78 ($4.85)
Seat 8: capthook006 ($7.61)
LUCASSY : Small Blind ($0.05)
philb_damase : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Ac 6c ]
Hampfred : Call ($0.10)
ARook : Call ($0.10)
macchine1 : Call ($0.10)
stevepar78 : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Yes, I call here. I already have pot odds for the nut flush draw. It seems weird to play Ace junk, but Ace junk suited often has odds to play at this loose of a table.
LUCASSY : Fold
philb_damase : Raise ($0.10)
Hampfred : Call ($0.10)
ARook : Call ($0.10)
macchine1 : Call ($0.10)
stevepar78 : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Ok, so someone had a hand. That's fine. All the better to break off if my flush hits.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 5h 9c Kc ]
--- Woot! Two clubs!
philb_damase : Bet ($0.10)
Hampfred : Call ($0.10)
ARook : Call ($0.10)
macchine1 : Raise ($0.20)
stevepar78 : Raise ($0.30)
--- Wow. bet, raise, reraise. I get scared and fold like a little girl here. I should have stopped to think about it. I will have to put in 30. The current pot is 215, so really, I do I have better than 7-1 odds to make my flush? I do. I should have called this. :(
Ray_Powers : Fold
philb_damase : Raise ($0.30)
Hampfred : Fold
ARook : Fold
macchine1 : Call ($0.20)
stevepar78 : Call ($0.10)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Ah ]
-- Now I woudl have had top pair with a weak kicker too, but if everyone was betting on kings, or two pair, or even a set, this card gives me more outs.
philb_damase : Check
macchine1 : Bet ($0.20)
stevepar78 : Call ($0.20)
philb_damase : Call ($0.20)
--- I still would have had odds to call here.
** Dealing River ** : [ 7c ]
--- And to add insult to injury, I would have made my nut flush.
philb_damase : Check
macchine1 : Check
stevepar78 : Bet ($0.20)
philb_damase : Raise ($0.40)
macchine1 : Call ($0.40)
stevepar78 : Raise ($0.40)
philb_damase : Raise ($0.40)
macchine1 : Call ($0.40)
stevepar78 : Call ($0.20)
--- And to add MORE insult to injury, someone had the king of clubs, and I would have made a monster of a pot.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $5.40 | Rake: $0.25
Board: [ 5h 9c Kc Ah 7c ]
Ray_Powers lost $0.20
LUCASSY lost $0.05
philb_damase lost $1.60 [ 7d 9d ] [ two pairs, nines and sevens -- 9d
9c 7d 7c Ah ]
Hampfred lost $0.30
ARook lost $0.30
macchine1 lost $1.60 [ Ks 3c ] [ one pair of kings -- Ks Kc Ah 9c 7c ]
stevepar78 bet $1.60, collected $5.40, net +$3.80 [ 4c 5c ] [ a flush,
king high -- Kc 9c 7c 5c 4c ]
capthook006 sits out
stevepar78 wins $5.40 from the main pot with a flush, king high

This was a HUGE mistake. This is something I really need to fix in my game. :(

Pub poker is tonight. If somebody sees me do this again tonight, bitchslap me.

Ping!

2005-10-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

After work today I spent about 3 hours typing in Games Workshop inventory, trying desperately to get the inventory ready to sell to someone opening up a new store. I hate Games Workshop. I hate it I hate it I hate it. Bleh.

At least I had the Coyotes game to keep me company. And during the game of Phoenix vs Calgary, I was amazed to hear the "voice of the coyotes" diss Canada! It wasn't the best diss ever but it was damn funny for television.

Color Commentary Guy: Calgary has only scored on their power plays 7% of the time this year.
Play by Play guy: Less than that now! (Referring ot the fact that they did not score for SIX power plays this game.)
Color Commentary Guy: I didn't want to do the math.
Play by Play guy: It doesn't matter, the math is different in Canada.

Nice.

I also played some World of Warcraft, mainly just auction housing and fishing. I installed new updates of Titan Bar, Fishing buddy, Auctioneer, and Fish Ping! Oh wow do I love Fish Ping. When the bobber splashes it plays a splash sound you can easily here, so instead of staring at the screen until your eyes bleed, you can cast, move your mouse over the bobber, then close your eyes or look at something else until you hear the "Bloop!" sound. So much easier, and making up for the fact that Oily Blackmouths and Firefin Snappers seem to be showing up only half as often as I am used to. Damn random variance.

I didn't play poker last night, but I have to whip up an e-mail for a poker game for my dad. I'm kind of annoyed at this. My dad wants to have a poker game at his house, that's great. He can organize it. Why am I organizing his game? Bleh, anyways, those of you who know me will likely get an e-mail soon.

And now, today's hand for review:

***** Hand History for Game 13393450 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit)
Table Seed (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 4 is the button
ARook : Small Blind ($0.05)
macchine1 : Big Blind ($0.10)
philb_damase : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ 2c Ac ]
stevepar78 : Fold
Antonella16 : Fold
Ray_Powers : Raise ($0.20)
-- First question to answer is why play A2. Mainly, I am playing for the flush capabilities, because at this table, I almost always have odds to draw to my nut flush. This table is very loose preflop. Why raise? Because I like being the aggressor, and I hate being the first one to limp in on a pot. I want people to think I have a hand, so that I can hopefully push someone else off a weaker hand, like an ace medium kicker. In retrospect, these ideas clash a little bit, because by raising, I forced out the usual limpers and did not have my odds for the flush draw really.
LUCASSY : Fold
philb_damase : Call ($0.10)
Hampfred : Call ($0.20)
ARook : Fold
macchine1 : Fold
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 8c 4c 9h ]
--- Well, my flush draw hit, and the blinds folded, so I have a good feeling that this did not hit anyone, so I want to bet it to just try to take down the pot right here.
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.10)
philb_damase : Call ($0.10)
Hampfred : Call ($0.10)
--- Hurm, they both stayed in. Do they just have overs? What the heck?
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 9c ]
--- Well, my flush hit, If someone else is on the flush draw, they will raise me here thinking I was betting AK or a pocket pair. Let's see if I can extract some bets out of anyone.
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.20)
philb_damase : Call ($0.20)
Hampfred : Call ($0.20)
--- Er?
** Dealing River ** : [ Jc ]
--- Now its four to the flush! Someone has to have a club and can raise me with it, right? I mean, I know no one has a full house by now..
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.20)
philb_damase : Fold
Hampfred : Fold
Ray_Powers does not show cards
Ray_Powers wins $1.60

I seriously do not get this hand. Anyone want to throw out some guesses as to what the other two people had?

Monday Monday

2005-10-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

First, I'd like to note I have added Mark Cuban to my blog links, a reference from Wakko. I read it off and on for a bit, but this blog convinced me he was a man worth linking: Television DRM

I really didn't play any poker this weekend except a couple hands on party poker where I just couldn't get anything going. What they say about mood affecting your game is so true. Its not that I was in a bad mood, I just wasn't in the mood to play, and my game reflected that.

I had some fun with the wife playing World of Warcraft and we both hit 24. I got her a new bow to use. I still need a new axe and some leather wrist equipment that doesn't suck, because they all seem to right now. I'm up to 56 gold with my level 24 guy, and my level 40 has gone from 42 to 68 gold in the past two weeks through auction house whoring. I need to get to 200 minimum so both the wife and I have mount money. Fun Fun.

I also watched the first half of season one of Lost. I really can not decide if I like it yet or not. I wonder if its even possible for them to make Shannon a more annoying character though? I have want the island to turn barbaric and make her a sex slave to the rest of the crew; it's her only possible use.

Ok, on to today's hand to analyze. Comments in bold as always. This is a short one.

***** Hand History for Game 13392893 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit)
Table Seed (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 4 is the button
macchine1 : Small Blind ($0.05)
stevepar78 : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Kc Ah ]
--- Middle position with AKo seems ok. I want to try to raise with this to narrow the field, or at least bet for value.
capthook006 : Call ($0.10)
Antonella16 : Call ($0.10)
cantwin : Fold
Ray_Powers : Raise ($0.20)
LUCASSY : Call ($0.20)
jtom72 : Fold
Hampfred : Fold
macchine1 : Fold
stevepar78 : Fold
--- What the? People folded to my preflop raise?! What is this table coming to? :)
capthook006 : Call ($0.10)
Antonella16 : Call ($0.10)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Qc 8h 3s ]
--- Bleh :( At least I have two overs.
capthook006 : Check
Antonella16 : Bet ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Fold
--- But apparently I will fold anyways. Seriously, that's the big blind that bet. He probably has an 8. There is $1.00 (minus rake) in the pot, so I need better than 1-10 odds to hit my A or K or runner runner straight, which I have. I should have called this I think. :(
LUCASSY : Raise ($0.20)
--- This is much scarier. If I think he has two pair or a set, I need to fold. If he has queens, I am still in the same odds boat. Knowing this guy, I would put him on a queen, but not two pair.
capthook006 : Fold
Antonella16 : Raise ($0.20)
--- Woah. Here is where I should have folded. I must be WAY WAY behind at this point.

Rest of the hand shown here just for people's curiosity. The obvious questions come for when/if I should have folded here. Thoughts?

LUCASSY : Raise ($0.20)
Antonella16 : Call ($0.10)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 2s ]
Antonella16 : Bet ($0.20)
LUCASSY : Raise ($0.40)
Antonella16 : Call ($0.20)
** Dealing River ** : [ Qd ]
Antonella16 : Bet ($0.20)
LUCASSY : Raise ($0.40)
Antonella16 : Raise ($0.40)
LUCASSY : Raise ($0.40)
Antonella16 : Call ($0.20)
** Summary **
Main Pot: $3.95 | Rake: $0.20
Board: [ Qc 8h 3s 2s Qd ]
Ray_Powers lost $0.20
LUCASSY lost $1.80 [ Tc Qh ] [ three of a kind, queens -- Qh Qd Qc Tc
8h ]
jtom72 didn't bet
Hampfred didn't bet
macchine1 lost $0.05
stevepar78 lost $0.10
capthook006 lost $0.20
Antonella16 bet $1.80, collected $3.95, net +$2.15 [ 3h Qs ] [ a full
house, queens full of threes -- Qs Qd Qc 3s 3h ]
cantwin didn't bet
Antonella16 wins $3.95 from the main pot with a full house, queens full
of threes

Dan Update and Next hand

2005-10-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

First, Dan accepted the job out here in Phoenix, so he'll be moving here in abotu two months, kick ass! He'll be back November first for training, so we'll meet up then for more fun..

Ok, now for my donk hand of the day.

***** Hand History for Game 13383361 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit) - Sun Oct 9 20:28:24 GMT 2005
Table Shiner (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 2 is the button
Seat 1: king_king ($4.25)
Seat 2: beejay ($1.44)
Seat 3: Mini ($1.20)
Seat 4: LaughingPenguin ($2.65)
Seat 5: Steeevee ($26.52)
Seat 7: Ray_Powers ($15.22)
Seat 8: adpres ($3.60)
Seat 9: ottoto ($2.85)
Seat 10: LUCASSY ($6.29)
Mini : Small Blind ($0.05)
LaughingPenguin : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Td Ac ]
Steeevee : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
-- Slightly suspect calling here in early position, but the game is pretty lose, so it seems ok.
adpres : Fold
ottoto : Fold
LUCASSY : Call ($0.10)
king_king : Call ($0.10)
beejay : Raise ($0.20)
Mini : Call ($0.15)
LaughingPenguin : Call ($0.10)
Steeevee : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Calling this though was ludicrous. What exactly did I think I was beating here?
LUCASSY : Call ($0.10)
king_king : Call ($0.10)
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 9h 2c 8s ]
Mini : Check
LaughingPenguin : Check
Steeevee : Fold
--- Hehehehehehehe.
Ray_Powers : Check
--- I don't know if I should have bet here or not since the board likely missed everyone. Thoughts?
LUCASSY : Check
king_king : Check
beejay : Bet ($0.10)
Mini : Call ($0.10)
LaughingPenguin : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Fold
--- I think this was right though since I did check, as I was likely drawing to 3 outs (the tens).
LUCASSY : Call ($0.10)
king_king : Fold
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 2s ]
Mini : Check
LaughingPenguin : Check
LUCASSY : Bet ($0.20)
beejay : Call ($0.20)
Mini : Call ($0.20)
LaughingPenguin : Fold
** Dealing River ** : [ Kd ]
Mini : Check
LUCASSY : Bet ($0.20)
beejay : Call ($0.20)
Mini : Fold
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.70 | Rake: $0.10
Board: [ 9h 2c 8s 2s Kd ]
king_king lost $0.20
beejay lost $0.70 [ 8h 6d ] [ two pairs, eights and twos -- 8s 8h 2s
2c Kd ]
Mini lost $0.50
LaughingPenguin lost $0.30
Steeevee lost $0.20
Ray_Powers lost $0.20
adpres didn't bet
ottoto didn't bet
LUCASSY bet $0.70, collected $2.70, net +$2 [ 2d As ] [ three of a
kind, twos -- 2s 2d 2c As Kd ]
LUCASSY wins $2.70 from the main pot with three of a kind, twos
--- Seriously, how much softer can these games be?

Pub Poker, and the next donkey hand

2005-10-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

Played Pub Poker with the whole crew last night and had a blast. I honestly felt like I played pretty good until I moved tables and saw Dan just kind of hanging out after being knocked out early. Realizing that my wife would probably like to hang out with him more, I pushed all in with KQ suited ( not horrible, but really totally unnecessary, I had plenty of chips), and got called by two people, one with AK. oops. I mean, I half wanted to go home, so its fine, but still.

I was also bitter when not once, but twice, people violated the check it down idea (see earlier blog), once tripling up a guy, and then, in a fit of karmic injustice, the guy who screwed it up the first time got to quadruple up when he was all in and was the recipient of another bad bluff bet at the side pot that let him back in the game.

And now for today's analysis of a hand:

***** Hand History for Game 13382713 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit) - Sun Oct 9 20:17:24 GMT 2005
Table Shiner (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 3 is the button
Seat 1: king_king ($4.35)
Seat 2: beejay ($3.16)
Seat 3: Mini ($1.40)
Seat 4: LaughingPenguin ($2)
Seat 5: Steeevee ($26.80)
Seat 6: achi007 ($1.40)
Seat 7: Ray_Powers ($10.62)
Seat 8: adpres ($4.50)
Seat 10: LUCASSY ($4.14)
LaughingPenguin : Small Blind ($0.05)
Steeevee : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Qc Jc ]
achi007 : Fold
Ray_Powers : Raise ($0.20)
--- While I would not normally advocate raising with Queen Jack suited, I also aboslutely hate limping as the first one in a pot. I don't think I am going to do as well in a multiway pot with this hand, so I want to try to eliminate people.
adpres : Fold
LUCASSY : Fold
king_king : Call ($0.20)
beejay : Call ($0.20)
Mini : Call ($0.20)
LaughingPenguin : Fold
Steeevee : Fold
** Dealing Flop ** : [ Jh Ah Kd ]
--- Jesus. That was an interesting flop. Flush draw, straight draw, plenty of paint. I have bottom pair and a gutshot straight draw. I think I have to bet to see where I am. I think I am behind though.
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.10)
king_king : Call ($0.10)
beejay : Fold
Mini : Call ($0.10)
--- Yeah, somebody has an ace I think. Normally I would not be so sure, but with these people calling my preflop raise from early position, I am almost positive.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ Js ]
--- WOOOOO HOOOOOOOOO! Praises be to the poker gods! Well, I already have the lead, and it's going to look like continuation betting, so might as well keep firing. In retrospect, I should have check raised here. I missed a bet.
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.20)
king_king : Call ($0.20)
Mini : Call ($0.20)
** Dealing River ** : [ 2d ]
--- Yeah right, like that helped anyone. Fire!
Ray_Powers : Bet ($0.20)
king_king : Raise ($0.40)
Mini : Fold
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
--- Another missed bet. WTF did I think, he was slow playign Q10, KK, or AA? I should have pumped this to his likely two pair.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.55 | Rake: $0.10
Board: [ Jh Ah Kd Js 2d ]
king_king lost $0.90 [ Qd Ad ] [ two pairs, aces and jacks -- Ah Ad Js
Jh Kd ]
--- I hate it when I am right. :(
beejay lost $0.20
Mini lost $0.50
LaughingPenguin lost $0.05
Steeevee lost $0.10
achi007 didn't bet
Ray_Powers bet $0.90, collected $2.55, net +$1.65 [ Qc Jc ] [ three of
a kind, jacks -- Js Jh Jc Ah Kd ]
adpres didn't bet
LUCASSY didn't bet
Ray_Powers wins $2.55 from the main pot with three of a kind, jacks

Any thoughts on this one?

Constantine

2005-10-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

So, my brother in law lent me Constantine, and I finally got around to watching it last night. All i have to say is "I want my two hours back."

This is hands down the worst comic to movie adaptation I have ever seen in my life. Allow me several moments of rant on this one.

1) Worst casting ever? Keanu is not, nor will ever be Constantine. He's not even close, and can't even act like Constantine. Chaz, while a fun character for the movie, is not close to the comic Chaz except a little bit in his opening scene. Midnite was the only good casting in the whole movie where they stayed close to character.

2) Los Angeles? WTF? Did anyone even read the comic first? Constantine lives in London. They could pawn it off as him visiting there, but, uh, he has a place to live, and Chaz is there. Chaz's wife would not let him live in LA for a while, and even if she did, he woudl not magically have his cab in LA.

3) The lung cancer story was totally mutilated fromt he comic book version.

4) It wasn't even scary. I knew it would be bad with the casting what it was, so I determined to at leats try to enjoy it as a horror movie. But it wasn't scary. Not at all.

I rate this movie a 1 out of 10. And it only gets a one because it had cool special effects.

On to Poker, for the next few days I'll do a hand a day. Yesterday's hand was played ok in my opinion, but I had a concern about missing bets which it seems Full Contact Poker universally agreed with.

This hand... has no redeeming qualities, and if I had to topic my post based on the hand, I'd title it "Donkey Anonymous"

Comments in bold as always:

***** Hand History for Game 13330752 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit) - Sun Oct 9 02:50:10 GMT 2005
Table Shiner (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 1 is the button
Seat 1: homebrew ($1.60)
Seat 3: Kinbaku ($2.91)
Seat 4: Ray_Powers ($12.32)
Seat 5: biltmore ($4.40)
Seat 6: thebandit1 ($8.08)
Seat 7: glenndo ($1.90)
Seat 8: LUCASSY ($3.85)
Seat 10: S1LLYRABB1T ($3.55)
Kinbaku : Small Blind ($0.05)
Ray_Powers : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ 7c 5c ]
--- Now that's a big blind special if I ever saw one. :(
biltmore : Call ($0.10)
thebandit1 : Fold
glenndo : Call ($0.10)
LUCASSY : Raise ($0.20)
S1LLYRABB1T : Call ($0.20)
homebrew : Fold
Kinbaku : Fold
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Rage of the donkey, the beginning. My reasoning at the time was that I was putting 1 small bet into a 7 small bet pot, which is good odds for the flush draw and one gap straight draw. Maybe not the best logic, but possible. The real answer of course is that I am likely dominated, and quite possible smashed even if I did make the flush due to flush over cards.
biltmore : Call ($0.10)
glenndo : Call ($0.10)
--- Espexially when there were TWO more callers.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4h 8c 8h ]
Ray_Powers : Check
--- Like what am I gonna do? bet here?
biltmore : Check
glenndo : Check
LUCASSY : Bet ($0.10)
S1LLYRABB1T : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Maybe not, but I am gonna call! My thought process was that the betting could easily be done by two overcards, and my gutshot straight draw and backdoor flush draw still had possibilities. Why my brain did not think Pocket pair is beyond me.
biltmore : Call ($0.10)
glenndo : Call ($0.10)
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7d ]
--- And now my 7 paired! My flush draw is gone tho, so I don't feel too confident in this hand. If I was going to be a raging donkey, I should have at least bet this out to see where I stood.
Ray_Powers : Check
biltmore : Check
glenndo : Check
LUCASSY : Bet ($0.20)
S1LLYRABB1T : Fold
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
--- But no, instead i will be a raging.... calling station.
biltmore : Call ($0.20)
glenndo : Call ($0.20)
** Dealing River ** : [ 9c ]
--- Yes, I still have... a pair of sevens. My only redeeming hope here is that everyone had overs.
Ray_Powers : Check
biltmore : Check
glenndo : Check
LUCASSY : Bet ($0.20)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
--- So I shall continue to be a raging... calling station.
biltmore : Call ($0.20)
glenndo : Fold
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.85 | Rake: $0.10
Board: [ 4h 8c 8h 7d 9c ]
homebrew didn't bet
Kinbaku lost $0.05
Ray_Powers lost $0.70 [ 7c 5c ] [ two pairs, eights and sevens -- 8h
8c 7d 7c 9c ]
biltmore lost $0.70 [ 9h Jh ] [ two pairs, nines and eights -- 9h 9c
8h 8c Jh ]
thebandit1 didn't bet
glenndo lost $0.50
LUCASSY bet $0.70, collected $2.85, net +$2.15 [ 7h 7s ] [ a full
house, sevens full of eights -- 7s 7h 7d 8h 8c ]
S1LLYRABB1T lost $0.30
LUCASSY wins $2.85 from the main pot with a full house, sevens full of
eights

I honestly have no excuse for this hand.

Am I missing bets here?

2005-10-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

I really want comments on this one. I like to go back over my hands and see where I may have missed bets... Comments in bold.

***** Hand History for Game 13330443 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit) - Sun Oct 9 02:43:12 GMT 2005
Table Shiner (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 6 is the button
Seat 1: homebrew ($3.70)
Seat 2: goriver ($5.60)
Seat 3: Kinbaku ($1.65)
Seat 4: Ray_Powers ($10.42)
Seat 5: biltmore ($4.50)
Seat 6: thebandit1 ($8.13)
Seat 7: glenndo ($3.60)
Seat 8: LUCASSY ($5.45)
Seat 9: player25 ($6.32)
Seat 10: S1LLYRABB1T ($4.35)
glenndo : Small Blind ($0.05)
LUCASSY : Big Blind ($0.10)
biltmore : Big Blind ($0.10)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Js Ts ]
--- My self admitted favorite hand. Its a loose game, and I am in middle position. I would either limp in with this, call a limp, or fold it to a raise.
player25 : Fold
S1LLYRABB1T : Call ($0.10)
homebrew : Fold
goriver : Call ($0.10)
Kinbaku : Fold
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Call a limp it is.
biltmore : Check
thebandit1 : Call ($0.10)
glenndo : Call ($0.05)
LUCASSY : Check
--- Seven people in the pot, that's a lot, but its good for my flush theoretically.
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 4s 8s 3c ]
--- Well, I have my flush draw, and two overs.
glenndo : Check
LUCASSY : Check
S1LLYRABB1T : Bet ($0.10)
goriver : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- I decided to call here. Folding seems out of the question. I wonder about a raise though. I do have a flush draw and two overs. The two blinds checked, and I don't see who else would have hit this flop. Worst case scenario is pocket 3's limped in and then hit? Unlikely. I think, in the end, I don't raise because I want to keep people in to pay off my flush if it hits, but I want opinions here.
biltmore : Fold
thebandit1 : Call ($0.10)
glenndo : Call ($0.10)
LUCASSY : Fold
--- Down to five people now
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 9c ]
--- Now I have an open ended straight draw and STILL have two overs. Theoretically any spade, 7, 10, J, or Queen can win me the pot. That's 19 (9 Spades, 2 non spade sevens, 3 non spade 10's, 3 non spade jacks, 2 non spade queens) outs.
glenndo : Check
S1LLYRABB1T : Bet ($0.20)
goriver : Call ($0.20)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
--- I think I question not raising here the most. During the turn the people with missed draws will fold whether its 20 or 40. The people with something will stay in either way. My biggest fear is a high flush draw out there than mine, and if that happens, well then I am fucked and need to deal. Do I bet for value here? This is my biggest concern.
thebandit1 : Fold
glenndo : Call ($0.20)
** Dealing River ** : [ 3s ]
--- As seems to happen to me all the time, I hit my flush, but paired the board. So I lose to any higher flush draw, and anything that make a fullhouse. I like my flush, but if ahead of me I see bet, raise, reraise, I am probably laying this down.
glenndo : Check
S1LLYRABB1T : Bet ($0.20)
goriver : Call ($0.20)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
--- Everyone saw the same cards I did. With a bet, call, I have to assume people have something they are willing to play with. I think a raise here will turn into a reraise if I am beat, and I should take my bets and be happy if my flush holds up, especially with someone after me left to act. I think some people would raise here and call this play too tight, and if so I want to hear that opinion, but for now, I think just calling was the correct answer.
glenndo : Fold
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.50 | Rake: $0.10
Board: [ 4s 8s 3c 9c 3s ]
homebrew didn't bet
goriver lost $0.60 [ 8c Kh ] [ two pairs, eights and threes -- 8s 8c
3s 3c Kh ]
Kinbaku didn't bet
Ray_Powers bet $0.60, collected $2.50, net +$1.90 [ Js Ts ] [ a flush,
jack high -- Js Ts 8s 4s 3s ]
biltmore lost $0.10
thebandit1 lost $0.20
glenndo lost $0.40
LUCASSY lost $0.10
player25 didn't bet
S1LLYRABB1T lost $0.60 [ Qd Qs ] [ two pairs, queens and threes -- Qs
Qd 3s 3c 9c ]
--- Interesting to note that if he had raised with his queens, I would have folded and therefore he would have won the pot....
Ray_Powers wins $2.50 from the main pot with a flush, jack high

Ok, opinions?

The overcall

2005-10-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

This blog is a quick hand analysis I thought I'd go over in here that highlights the importance of the overcall. For those of you not familiar with the concept, an overcall is an idea whereby you do not raise a bet with a great hand because you want the people following you to call as well, making you more bets in the long run. I had a hand that exemplified this concept last night so I figured I'd discuss it here. Comment included in the hand.

***** Hand History for Game 13417192 *****
0.10/0.20 Texas Hold'em (Split Limit) - Mon Oct 10 05:28:45 GMT 2005
Table Rotation (10 max) (Real Money) -- Seat 10 is the button
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Th Js ]
AzAce : Call ($0.10)
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
--- Okay, lets not mince words here. This is a bad call. Jack Ten offsuit in early position? WTF am I thinking? Well, I was thinking "Its my last hand of the night, this table is unlikely to raise preflop, and I am already up for the night. Let me see a flop for my last hand for fun." That's my excuse and I am sticking to it.
blondine : Call ($0.10)
LUCASSY : Fold
Hawkeye1997 : Fold
casinoman : Check
sheldon : Fold
1917 : Call ($0.05)
spyderblack : Check
** Dealing Flop ** : [ 9d 8h 3c ]
--- Well, that is quite the flop for me. I have an open ended straight draw, two overs, and there is no flush draw whatsoever. The table is very loose passive, with a couple maniacs (one directly before me in the betting), so anyone could have paired up on this board.
1917 : Check
spyderblack : Check
AzAce : Bet ($0.10)
--- Including this guy. But he is also a maniac at the table, so he could also be betting with nothing. I don't think its good to raise here because if I do hit my straight draw, it's going to be the nut straight, so I want more people in to call the bets.
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.10)
blondine : Fold
casinoman : Call ($0.10)
1917 : Call ($0.10)
spyderblack : Call ($0.10)
--- Wow, that was a lot of callers. Sounds good to me I guess. Weird calling station tables.
** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7s ]
--- BOO YA!
1917 : Check
spyderblack : Check
AzAce : Bet ($0.20)
--- Here we get to the overcall idea. If I raise, now that the bet has already doubled since its the turn, I am going to start pushing people out. If I just call, people still on a draw, or with a pair somewhere in there, are likely to call. So if I raise, I am likely to only get a call from the original better, which is +1 Big bet, if I call, I may get everyone else to call, which is +3 big bets.
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
casinoman : Call ($0.20)
1917 : Call ($0.20)
spyderblack : Call ($0.20)
--- The best possible thing in the world for me could have been for spyderblack to raise here, but I'll take the extra two big bets I just got by not raising.
** Dealing River ** : [ 8c ]
--- This is a little scary, with a pair now on the board, its entirely possible that there is a full house out there. With the amount of money in the pot, there is no question I will need to call it down here, but I still need to think about overcalls or not. I have to assume AzAce will bet now matter what, since he's playing super aggressive.
1917 : Check
spyderblack : Check
AzAce : Bet ($0.20)
--- And of course he does bet. I think raising here is bad. If I raise, I will scare out anyone who does not have a full house, getting no more bets. A full house will reraise me, meaning I LOSE one extra bet in raising (since I still have to call it down). My best bet here is to call, and hope to get some overcalls if my hand is indeed still best.
Ray_Powers : Call ($0.20)
casinoman : Fold
1917 : Fold
spyderblack : Fold
--- Aww, pickles. No more free big bets for me.
** Summary **
Main Pot: $2.40 | Rake: $0.10
Board: [ 9d 8h 3c 7s 8c ]
1917 lost $0.40
spyderblack lost $0.40
AzAce lost $0.60 [ Jc Qs ] [ one pair of eights -- 8h 8c Qs Jc 9d ]
Ray_Powers bet $0.60, collected $2.40, net +$1.80 [ Th Js ] [ a
straight, jack to seven -- Js Th 9d 8h 7s ]
blondine lost $0.10
LUCASSY didn't bet
Hawkeye1997 didn't bet
casinoman lost $0.40
sheldon didn't bet
Ray_Powers wins $2.40 from the main pot with a straight, jack to seven

So, AzAce was semi-bluffing the whole way with two overs and a gutshot straight draw. I am not really faulting his super aggressive style for this hand, since the board looked like total crap, and it was easy to assume that he could get someone with two overs or a low pair to throw it away when they saw how aggressively he was betting. It was just his bad luck that I happened to hit my straight on the turn.

All in all though, a good final pot for the night, even though it was a hand I likely shouldn't have been in to begin with. :)

Check it down?

2005-10-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

I seem to be in a habit of re-using content lately, but this is a post I did to Full Contact I wanted people's opinions on.

-----

I'm just curious as to what everyone's feeling is on this nowadays.

Its late in a no limit tournament, getting close to the bubble. You, and two others are in a pot. One guy is all in for his last few chips preflop and you two are playing with an addition small side pot (less than 2 big blinds). The flop comes up blanks, missing you. Do you bet to try to bluff the guy out of the side pot to win those chips, or check it down to try to make sure you knock out the all in guy, betting only when you are confident you have the all in guy.

Last night I had this happen twice, and it went both ways. The first time a guy bet the flop, the other guy folded, the first guy proudly flipped over j-10 (which hit none of the board) and took his small pot, but also effectively tripled the all in guy with his ace rag when the board blanked, and I wanted to strangle the better.

In the second situation I was allin with AK, and two people had me covered. The flop came 2-10-2 and the small blind bet, the other guy folded, and the small blind flipped over A-10, which to me seemed fair, as the guy was saying with that bet 'Look, I have a top pair top kicker, unless you can beat that, I'll just take this guy out.'

Thoughts?

-----

I know they have it, but what is "it"

2005-10-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

The original blog here has turned into a CardPlayer.com article, so I thought I'd post the (unedited) Article here in place of the original blog.....

Cardplayer Article 29# Submission Sept 30th, 2005

by Thomas 'Thunder' Keller

Column Name: Thunder on Poker

Article Name: Pub Poker

One of my good friends Ray Powers from Chandler, AZ - an avid pub poker fan - and I have been discussing poker a lot lately via aol instant messenger as he is trying desperately to improve his game and I often have a lot of deadtime between playing people 300-600 headup holdem, omaha 8 or better, and tripledraw on ultimatebet.com. Recently he described his last pub poker foray and I found it so amusing that I felt compelled to share it with all of you guys my wonderful readers! So without further adeui, here is a brave step into the unknown, mans' final frontier, pub poker! The following tale is told by my friend Ray Powers with my commentary interwined in italics.

Last night was pub poker night. Jay, Mike, Leigh, and Brad were all there with me to play (well except Leigh, who does not play). Dan did not show, the slacker. The best part was his reason was that he was broke. Uh, it's a free event, and its not like one of us wouldn't have bought him a beer or something. Whatever. Ray chose not to envite me this time, I guess he probably thinks that I would find playing poker for free boring, and he is probably right, but I am always up for having a drink with good company, even if poker has to be involved.

I told the group that we had been slacking, and at least two of us need to make the final table tonight. Alas though, it was not meant to be as I was the only one to survive past the second break, and that was mainly because I had no hands the whole night. I literally played five hands the entire night. I went out 12th out of 64. Thats okay Ray, you have to learn to enjoy losing, plus finishing 12th in a tourney is a lot better than I have done lately.

However, all was not lost as I did have a fun time when we had "poker kid" at our table. This kid looks like he should not even be in the bar, as I would put him at 19 or so at best. He appears to have spent a long time practicing chip tricks, and whenever he gets in a hand, he puts on his cool reflective sun glasses so we can't read him, and acts like Mr. Professional at a free pub poker tournament. Its pretty funny. It was made all the more funny when, short stacked on the big blind, he folded in an unraised pot thinking the pot had been raised and would have ended up winning the monster pot with a full house. When we pointed out his mistake, he through his glasses and chips down and got all pissed off. Sounds like a young Mike Matusow. Just kidding, love ya Mikey!

Hey poker kid, this is free pub poker. I'd tell you to have a drink and chill, but I don't think you're old enough to drink. Regardless, play 'seriously' if you want, but realize that this is a free event for basically nothing, and stop treating it like the final table of the World Series of Poker.

I think I am misplaying these free events because my rockish tendencies towards hands is leading me to believe that people have more than they actually do more often than not. During one of the hands I did get to play, I looked down at pocket tens.This looked like a gold mine compared to my average nightly hand of 2-5 or 3-9 so I raised from late position to three times the big blind and got two callers.

The flop came down K54 with two clubs. I figured the action would check to me and I would place out a feeler bet to see if this flop hit anyone big. Things did not happen as I envisioned. The first person very confidently bet about three-forths the pot and the next played called with no hesitation. Both players looked extremely confident, so I figured at least one or maybe both had a king. If not, one or both could easily of had a straight or a flushdraw giving the field a ton of outs to beat me even if my tens were actually the best hand at the moment, so I folded when the action got to me. If only one player had stayed in I would have considered calling or coming over the top, but with both just oozing the feeling that they had the best hand, I decided to muck and live to fight another day, I still had a decent sized stack at this point so I did not feel committed to this pot.

They continued to bet and call down to the river, where one player turned over A-5, and the other A-4 respectively. So as it turns out I actually mucked the best hand when both of my opponents combined had only six outs to beat me, the remaining two fours, fives, and aces. Both players were extremely confident in their middle and bottom pairs respectively, and I bailed on the pot thinking I was beat to two outs, whereas if I felt confident that I had the best hand I would have definitely stayed in and likely raised the flop.

While its easy to think that I just got outplayed in this spot by someone trying to force me off my medium pair, that's not what I got from these two opponents. They both honestly felt their lower pairs were good, and exuded the confidence of having the "best hand." This makes it extremely difficult for me to read them since I get the feeling from them that they are very confident that they are holding the best hand, but don't have the slightest idea of what a strong or weak hand really is considering the board and the previous action.

I told my friend Ray that I actually liked his play of laying down on the flop in this spot (especially since he still had a lot of chips left) and that one of the toughest part of playing amatuers is reading them since as the old poker proverb goes, you cant read someone who doesn't even know what they are holding themselves. Luckily though, against amatuer players like these one can afford to lay down the best hand frequently since these players are often all to willing to get all their chips in with any pair when your holding a very big hand (at least top pair top kicker on a nonthreatening board.) Now if Ray was short-stacked in this spot I definitely think he has to move in here and hope to pick the pot up right then or hope that if one of his opponents does call then that his tens hold up or that he spikes a wonderful ten on the turn or the river if he is in fact beat.

Thomas "Thunder" Keller is a 25-year-old professional poker player and one of poker's young and rising stars. He can often be found playing at UltimateBet.com under the name thunderkeller. To learn more about him, go to his website at www.thunderkeller.com. Feel free to contact him at thunderkeller@yahoo.com. Also feel free to contact my friend Ray Powers at raymodnjpowers@yahoo.com and check out his blog at http://raypowers.blogspot.com/ .

Poker, Flowers, and WoW

2005-10-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

I feel very Poker rutted lately, so I posted a big rant on Full Contact about my poker woes, and got some good advice. I am going to cut back on poker for a couple weeks, doing only the Pub Poker nights, and no more online play for a while. I just need a break from it.

Instead, I'm playing more world of warcraft, I am leveling with the wife, and playing some more on my won, mainly trying to make some auction house work go so we have plenty of money. In addition, I am going to have to level my level 38 guy to level 40 so I can get the top levels of tailoring and enchanting for my other characters. My "main" right now though is still the level 23 I play with my wife. Yeah I know, level 23 is nothing, but I am putting a lot of effort into this guy. At 23 he is already maxed on Fishing and Cooking, and I'm trying to max out his engineering. Its tough at this level.

So tonight is supposed to be a date night, but the wife and I had a fight this morning, so who knows. So, here's a weird thing. When I have a fight with the wife, or when things are not going well in our relation ship, I often am tempted to buy her flowers. Much more often than when things are going well. It's not to apologize either, because, while it sounds macho and braggart, I am right in our arguments much more than average. If I had to guess a percentage, it is likely in the 90% + range. So I rarely have anything to apologize about.

So why do I want to buy her flowers? Its a reminder for me that regardless of all the bullshit fights we have, I still love her, and I still want her to be happy, even when she is driving me absolutely fucking crazy right this instant, the long term thought in the back of my head is that I love her, and buying her flowers reminds me of that. If they remind her of that as well, all the better.

Have a good day all.

Lots of little things

2005-10-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

I got to see my son's first T-Ball game on Saturday. It's pretty funny watching a bunch of 3-5 year olds run around, not really understanding what they are doing. My son caught one ball and threw it to first, and got a couple of good hits, so no complaints. He is having fun, but doesn't have the patience for a whole game yet. I think that will come.

I also got and read Freakonomics over the weekend. I highly recommend it. Its got some great (and surprising) information inside of it, and is highly entertaining. It has a weird feel of Fight Club to it while at the same time being dry, data full, and well, non-fiction. But it gives you a distinct feeling of "the world does not work how you think it does."

I had very little poker this weekend. I was in one multitable tournament and I raised a pot with AQ, and got a caller. The flop and turn came out rags, but I stayed aggro with my two over cards as it kept getting checked to me. Finally, I went over aggro and pushed all in. I had a very good feeling that he had nothing, maybe a low pair with tons of overs on the board, but likely a weak ace, or very small pocket pair, and there would be no way he could call for his whole stack so early on in the event.

Well, I had the first part right. He had a pair of fours , bottom pair. But he called, and an ace or queen did not come and I was out less than 15 minutes into the tournament. It was a very maniac play I admit, and I would not do it again. While my read was dead on, I forgot the golden rule that, at the early levels, all the idiots are still in the tournament, and they're willing to make bad calls like that. Early Rock is the way to go.

I played some World of Warcraft this weekend as well. I did some Auction House work on my higher level character, did some fishing with my character I play with my wife to make more money, and did some solo on my lowbie priest to get him up in levels and try to pump up his alchemy a bit. The wife and I tried to do Wailing Caverns by ourselves (both level 22). It went ok for a while, but not great. Was fun still though, so who cares.

That's about it for now. Have a good one!

ADD for babies

2005-09-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

When do kids gain focus? I had my son for TBall practice again and he kept getting distracted and wanting to go play in the park or run around, or something. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy baseball, as he was having fun, but he simply did not have the focus to stick with it for long. I wonder at what age they derive better focus.

This weekend I get to go to his TBall game, so that's sweet.

I'm slightly grumpy at the wife for not playing World of Warcraft with me last night. Sounds funny, but its just one of those plans gone awry thing. On the way into work yesterday we talked about doing an instance together, and went over strategy and some things we needed to do, etc. So when I got home, I worked on buying some eq upgrades, doing some fishing to make up money for the upgrades, and then logged into my priest alchemist. I sent him hunting for materials, and made enough potions to last us for the instance, and then mailed them off.

Then the wife said she didn't want to play.

Bah.

Catch Up

2005-09-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

Well, the prerelease went great. Money was good and the event went well. And sometimes things just work out to your advantage.

I've been having computer problems for a while now, so I was hoping, if things go well, I could just screw it and buy a new computer. But I figured that asking the wife would be a challenge for this one.

On Saturday, however, amidst the chaos of the event, my wife turns to me and says "This is ridiculous. We really need to buy another portable so we can have two to run things at the same time for these events!"

Well, uh, ok. If we have to.

I got one today, 1.8 Centurion, 15.4 in Screen with a really nice graphics card, 80 gig drive, express bus, etc. World of Warcaft looks amazing on it. We upgraded the memory from 512K. I bought a one gig, but it turns out they had two 256's in their, so they left a 256 in and plugged a one gig in the other slot, so plenty of memory.

That being said, WoW was laggy last night. Did anyone else have this problem? It felt like it was a network issue more than an issue with my computer... The wife and I sat on the couch, portable next to portable, playing. It was damn fun.

Played some poker last night too. In a limit holdem ring game playing $.10/$.20 I went from $4.95 to $9.77 in an hour or two, even after losing a HUGE pot when my full house lost to a bigger full house. OUCH. Then I played in a tournament, missed some big flops, was down to half stack with the blinds advancing, and saw KK in my hand. I really needed a double up, so I just pushed all in and prayed I would get a call. I did, by Jd8d. Flop was J98. Turn was a 10, but I could not get the Queen or King I needed and our I went to two pair. Bleh.

I really feel so much more comfortable in a limit ring game. I think I can perform in a ring game correctly almost every single time. In a no limit game I don't feel nearly as confident, but I think its mainly because my no limit experience is mainly multi table tournaments. I need to work on that.

Tonight is pub poker time, which should be fun. I've had a big urge to write lately, so I may start doing that again. We'll see how it goes.

Exhausted

2005-09-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Not ignoring you all. I just am exhausted. Prerelease went great, but now all the work is catching up to me. Tonight is all paperwork, tomorrow is poker. I'll try to think up something good in the next 24 hrs to talk about.

Everybody's Working for the weekend!

2005-09-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

Except me. I am working this weekend. The whole weekend long. Its time for one of my big events that happens about once a quarter, which is normally a big pay off for me. But this event has been so much more work for what feels like less actual benefit. The hosting company keeps requesting more and more stuff from me and I'm not making any more money out of the deal.

Here is a short list:

1) They wanted me to prescan all product I am using and have it to them by today. We normally just scan all product we are using after the event, but now we have to do ALL of it before. And when did we find this out? Yesterday. I spent last night doing Phoenix, but had no way in hell to do San Diego. Maybe next time we should get an actual advance notice of this....

2) Web Stats. The hosting company suddenly decided they want to track the web hits to our site for traffic measurement. This week. Fortunately I have a great web master who already has some fantastic stuff set up, but another ton of work to heap on the week of the event.

3) Surveys. They want us to pass out surveys at this event. That's bad enough, but the kicker came when we got a spreadsheet asking us to compile all of the survey data for them and send that back. So now I am their marketing R&D department too?

4) Lifestyle DVD. This week we suddenly got a DVD in the mail They want us to play this DVD over and over again at the event to highlight the lifestyle of their game. Because you know, I want to spend an extra $200 on AV to advertise for them a dvd that is unlikely to actually be viewed by anyone but bored parents. Again, just got it this week.

5) Prereg. This is admittedly not from the hosting company. I noticed in the last marketing blitz responses a couple of comments about players desire for Preregistration, so I reimplemented preregistration. I gotta be honest, preregistration is a huge annoyance factor for me, and I only do it for customer satisfaction issues. It requires more staff, it has more logistical issues, and it means more work for me pre-event. I was surprised to learn that some organizer a) give discounts for prereg (so they're doing more work for less money) and b) charge the players in advance (thus having to pay transaction fees, and possible chargebacks for no shows). Whatever works for them I guess.

6) I am short staffed! Another issue that is not really the hosting companies fault, but I was short to begin with this time, and in the past week one guy has stated he is sick, and my wife, who is a huge help, won't be there for the first hour or two. Not so good for me..

So I'm stressed and bitching a bit, but that's the way it goes. I'm sure it will be fine when I get there. I always find a way to make it all work out.

Have a good weekend.

A typical Wednesday night.

2005-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

I caught very few hands. I made it to top 14 and lost when my short stack went all in with the best hand and got rivered. End of story.

I thought I'd cut it down to the basest form because everything else is just details about bad beats. At least I had the one hot girl of the entire tournament at my table for most of the night.

I have no urge to type here today. Sorry. I'll go now.

Caught Up

2005-09-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

I got the big judge e-mail done for the prerelease, making me feel a lot better about getting things done. Took me over 90 minutes. Sheesh. Then I did another half hour of preregistrations. I hate preregistrations, but the players love it. Its really a ton of extra work for me, but if the players want it, so be it.

Not much really happened past that. We played with the kids for a little while, then it was their bed time, then the wife and I had our bed time *wink wink* so there's not much to write about for the evening. Tonight is pub poker, and next week I hope to play in the work tounament for $40. It seems soft, so I think I can handle it, but who knows.

I downloaded the WSOP audio coverage and am listening to it at work. hehehe. Not much else to talk about today. I'll give you guys some poker talk tomorrow.

Second Job

2005-09-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

So, my secondary job is event management. I run tournaments for game companies mostly, and this weekend is one of the larger one's out there, called a prerelease. I am responsible for a 350 person event in Phoenix and a 350 person event in San Diego simultaneously. I need to arrange product, staffing, sites, and all the other fun stuff that goes along with event management.

The way this event works is that each player pays an entry fee and gets a set amount of cards for this game that they then use to build a deck they use to play against their opponents. The cards they get come in two forms, tournament packs and booster packs. In addition, for playing in this event, they get a special prerelease card. So, when I get the product in, I normally set aside a night to do "baggying." This is the process of building little bags of what each person should get when they sign up: one prerelease card, one tournament pack, and two booster packs. Making these bags in advance makes it much easier to get an event running when it is time.

Yeah, that's what the wife and I did last night. I invited some friends to come help, but everyone bailed on me. The wife was pissed about this, but me, not so much. I mean, first of all its is pretty annoyingly boring work and its for free, not to mention the fact that I gave them zero days advance notice, so I can't really blame them. While I am sure that some of it is the inherent laziness of my friends, its not something I think I can hold against them. Heck, *I* didn't want to do the job.

No poker last night and no cute kids stories. I'll try to work on that more tonight.

Some Interesting Hands

2005-09-19T07:47:00.000-07:00

This weekend was pretty good. It was a relaxing time, got some work done, got some chores done, got to spend time with the wife and kids, and got to play some poker. I have two hands to post today as a good example of the highs and lows of poker, but first I want to share another story for the weekend.

My three year old son watches me play online all the time, and is very interested in cards as a whole, obviously a daddy trait. He even says cute phrases like "Chip In" when I bet, and whenever he sees an ace he says "Ace Wins!" All those are cute in their own right, but then he hit me up with a new one. Happy me gets dealt pocket aces, and since he always says "Ace Wins!" when one ace comes up, I asked what two aces meant, and he replies to me "That means you have to do War!" And was very confused when I couldn't put down three more cards for "war."

Too cute for words.

Ok, now, to go over my "High and Low" hands, starting with my High hand, mainly because this was a first for me:

> ***** Hand History for Game 11431756 *****
> 10.00/20.00 Texas Hold'em (No Limit) - Sat Sep 17 05:27:43
> Table 17 (10 max) -- Seat 8 is the button
> Tourney ID 5970, Level 1
> Seat 1: Piano54 (2280)
> Seat 2: runningman (1870)
> Seat 3: cerapino (1470)
> Seat 4: fairview (1340)
> Seat 5: bars1 (1390)
> Seat 6: Ray_Powers (1410)
> Seat 7: leroy777 (1010)
> Seat 8: gross (3080)
> Seat 9: gavsol (2730)
> Seat 10: HowardLederer (1500)
> gavsol : Small Blind (10)
> HowardLederer : Big Blind (20)
> ** Dealing down cards **
> Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Kh Qh ]
> Piano54 : Fold
> runningman : Call (20)
> cerapino : Fold
> fairview : Fold
> bars1 : Call (20)
> Ray_Powers : Raise (40)
> leroy777 : Call (40)
> gross : Fold
> gavsol : Call (30)
> HowardLederer : Fold
> runningman : Call (20)
> bars1 : Raise (60)
> Ray_Powers : Raise (200)
> leroy777 : Fold
> gavsol : Call (160)
> runningman : Call (160)
> bars1 : Raise (340)
> Ray_Powers : Raise (1410)
> gavsol : Fold
> runningman : Fold
> bars1 : Call (1050)
> ** Dealing Flop ** : [ Ah Th Jh ]
> ** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7d ]
> ** Dealing River ** : [ Qd ]
> ** Summary **
> Main Pot: 3240 | Rake: 0
> Side Pot: 20 | Rake: 0
> Board: [ Ah Th Jh 7d Qd ]
> bars1 lost 1390 [ Kd Ad ] [ a straight, ace to ten -- Ah Kd Qd Jh Th
> Ray_Powers bet 1410, collected 3260, net +1850 [ Kh Qh ] [ a royal flush, ace high -- Ah Kh Qh Jh Th ]
> Ray_Powers wins 3240 from the main pot with a royal flush, ace high
> Ray_Powers wins 20 from side pot #1 with a royal flush, ace high

Yay for my first Royal Flush! Pretty Lucky too, considering I was dominated preflop.

That one made the sting from this one hurt a lot less. In fact, I just plain laughed when this one happened.

> 3000.00/6000.00 Texas Hold'em (No Limit) - Mon Sep 19 03:45:55
> Table 16 (10 max) -- Seat 8 is the button
> Tourney ID 6038, Level 15
> Seat 4: bztian (7529.40)
> Seat 5: player79 (88957.20)
> Seat 6: mudflats (37287)
> Seat 7: GCCinny (92117.20)
> Seat 8: countrygirl41 (20605)
> Seat 9: Ray_Powers (25490)
> Ray_Powers : Ante (300)
> bztian : Ante (300)
> player79 : Ante (300)
> mudflats : Ante (300)
> GCCinny : Ante (300)
> countrygirl41 : Ante (300)
> Ray_Powers : Small Blind (3000)
> bztian : Big Blind (6000)
> ** Dealing down cards **
> Dealt to Ray_Powers [ Jh Jd ]
> player79 : Fold
> mudflats : Fold
> GCCinny : Fold
> countrygirl41 : Fold
> Ray_Powers : Raise (25190)
> bztian : Call (1229.40)
> ** Dealing Flop ** : [ 7s 7c 5c ]
> ** Dealing Turn ** : [ 7h ]
> ** Dealing River ** : [ Kd ]
> ** Summary **
> Main Pot: 16258.80 | Rake: 0
> Side Pot: 17960.60 | Rake: 0
> Board: [ 7s 7c 5c 7h Kd ]
> bztian bet 7529.40, collected 16258.80, net +8729.40 [ 7d 4s ] [ four of a kind, sevens -- 7s 7h 7d 7c Kd ]
> Ray_Powers bet 25490, collected 17960.60, net -7529.40 [ Jh Jd ] [ a full house, sevens full of jacks -- 7s 7h 7c Jh Jd ]
> bztian wins 16258.80 from the main pot with four of a kind, sevens
> Ray_Powers wins 17960.60 from side pot #1 with a full house, sevens full of jacks

What ya gonna do there, really? Called by 7-4 offsuit and he picks up four of a kind? Ah well...

Have a good one all.

Family Man

2005-09-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

Last night was my son's first T-ball Practice. Although I'm not a sports dad, this was a very exciting thing for me. He got his glove and was gleeful about the prospect of "playing ball." Now, he's three years old, and his team was the 3-4 range, so my expectation of anything remotely resembling a real baseball game was low, but as long as he had fun, it didn't matter to me.

The coach was fine, the coach's daughter who is also playing was pretty bratty, but whatever. Randy hit a couple of balls off the tee, then went out to the field to catch balls the other kids hit. That went about as expected, with 7 kids all huddled as close to the batter as the coach would let them running after every ball that was hit because somehow they would all miss it. My son actually caught two balls, and his throwing is pretty good when it goes off. Sometimes he just plain releases too early and the ball goes straight up.

I was surprised by the fact that the 3-4 range had somehow become the 3-5 range when I wasn't looking, and it turns out my son was the only 3 year old, the rest of the kids being four and five. But he didn't seem to be intimidated at all, so good for him, although his three year old lack of attention span did make for the funny event of the evening. The coach was teaching the kids how to run the bases which he described as a drill beneficial to "both the kids and the parents." The parents were extremely amused at the fact that he showed the kids all of the bases, and their names, and what order to run them in, but the kids just did not get it. He would say 'Ok now, what base do we run to FIRST?" and we'd hear kids yelling "Second! No wait Home Plate!"

Eventually they all got it and they did the first run to first plate. Then they had to run to first AND then second. The first kid decided to run the whole bases. The second did it right, then came my son who ran to first and rounded it like a champ... And then just kind of ran off aimlessly, settling on the pitcher's mound where he proceeded to spin in circles because he thought it was funny.

I was torn between cracking up with the rest of the parents, and silently taking note to check my child for brain damage. Just kidding, I cheered him on and told him good job and got him back into line for another go. He was having so much fun.

Since he was so good listening to his coach and I was so proud of him, I decided to give him a super special treat. Since we were literally less than a half mile from home, off all major roads, I asked him if he wanted to sit in the front seat instead of his booster chair in the back. I figured for such a short drive at 25 miles per hour in the complex he would be safe, and I'd buckle him in tight of course. I told him he wasn't allowed to tell mommy though, because she would be mad. (Mommy was off with my daughter at her swim class. We have a busy Thursday night.)

He was grinning like mad all the way home, and we got home and I cooked up a quick dinner. Shortly later my wife came home with my daughter and I started talking to my daughter about her swim class when I hear this exchange:

"Did you have fun at baseball practice?"
"I got to ride in the front seat!"

DOH! Pwned and double pwned!

Yeah, I didn't get any last night.

(For those of you that only listen to me for the poker updates, here's a quick one. Knocked out early of an MTT when my big blind 36 ran into 3Q on a board of 733. Who woulda thunk? Then I played a ring game and won about 5bb/100 in a short session. It felt good playing in a ring game of limit hold'em. Its where I feel most comfortable right now.)

Moved

2005-09-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

So, I was a huge fan of modblog for the longest time. My good friend Brad had worked on it for a while, and it had some great functions. But as time went by, the server started having problems and the blog was down for long periods of time. I was disappointed, but determined to stick it out, until today.

Yesterday someone on Full Contact Poker had nicely pointed out that my blog link in my sig was not working. If someone saw my blog link in my sig on Full Contact Poker and clicked on it, they got a blocked error and to contact abuse. I contacted modblog to find out what was up and they mentioned that modblog had recently blocked several "gambling and porn" sites from linking to them because of complaints. Now, Full Contact Poker has one blog on it Daniel N's, but is basically just a forum site, not a "gambling site." This was annoying.

But then it got worse. Modblog then complained that the three links I had in my blog were a violation of their Terms of Use because they were advertisments with click referrals.

Link 1 was a link to Poker Source online, which doesn't sell anything, but gives people good deals on Bonuses for signing up on Poker sites. In that link there is a referrer code I use, but its not per click. Still, ok, I would concede this one just ot be nice.

Link 2 was to Cardplayer.com, the electronic form of the Popular Poker Magazine, which sells basically nothing.

Link 3 was to Full Contact Poker, which as we just went through, is a forum site.

They were nice enough about the whole thing when I pointed this out, but nonetheless, they have now been filed under my "too stupid to deal with" category so I am moving my blog. To here I guess. Going to try it out for a few days and see how it goes. Meanwhile, if you have no idea who I am and just stumbled here because you troll Blogspot, feel free to check out my old blog at http://monkster.modblog.com.

You know, if they don't block it.

Not Rich Yet

Don't play when not in the mood...

Poker tracker what?

Just an update.

Weekend Play

Make up!

One comment on my night..

Killing my "leeway"

One Monster gives me some breathing room..

Rest of the weekend

First night on UB

Starting all over again in poker

Play like my four yeard old...

... say what?

Blogging move?

Mmmm beer

Short and Sweet

Clean Up

Banks! Banks! Banks!

What's the right answer here?

X-mas Present for myself?

Fixing things

Not a lot

Entertainment

Well, I was caught up

Caught Up

Busy Night

Pokerish Weekend

Mother Fucker

Yay and Boo for my computer

Pub Poker and Poker Tracker

Woot for PSO

Blog or BLARG?

Please Hold

Cleared Caribbean

Whiny

Odds of hands, and the usual dry side pot argument

Things I learned today..

Thanksgiving

Comment Responses

100 hands

Captain Placeholder

Con

Oif

Different stakes..

No Content

So, how did that PTQ go?

Misc.

The power(?) of AQ

Choose wisely

Pass to the *RED* Shirts!

Weekend!

Who knows

Its a week

Omahahaha

Things I learned this weekend...

Mule

not a lot.

Some highlights

Sick of Sick

States and the Blogger Tournament

Blogger Tournament!

Who let the dogs out?

Leaving money out there

Ping!

Monday Monday

Dan Update and Next hand

Pub Poker, and the next donkey hand

Constantine

Am I missing bets here?

The overcall

Check it down?

I know they have it, but what is "it"

Poker, Flowers, and WoW

Lots of little things

ADD for babies

Catch Up

Exhausted

Everybody's Working for the weekend!

A typical Wednesday night.

Pass to the RED Shirts!