Sleep With the Fishes, Dine on the Whales

I walk to the car, try to metaphorically wipe the bird crap off my shoulders and contemplate how my bankroll got severely lightened on the day. I recall the fun hands where I got hurt, such as the one when I raised preflop and got a few callers. Flop was 882. I fire out an almost pot size bet and I get a caller. Turn is another 2. I make the same bet and get a call. River is 6 or so. I check, he checks. I show 99. Dealer is about to hand me the pot as he shows 7-2. He points to the deuce for her benefit and the turned full house. At first I think he's doing it for me rubbing it in a bit. My frustration is evident and I fire him a look, then I realize who is dealing, and see that she still almost swept me the pot. She of the 8 deals per 30 minutes and two mistakes per down. You know who she is. The dealer you are suprised to see every time you play there thinking she'd be fired. Still, I wanted to be angry at the dude as even though he wasn't showing me up he was destroying ...

There's an older gentleman I've played with a few times and every time at one point he's said his favorite catchphrase, "Some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue." Yes, quite undeniably true when it comes to poker. I finally had a bad wednesday. I don't have room to complain as I've been running so good there. However, I will complain. In the past on Wednesday I'll make mistakes and still profit, this day was just the opposite, I got punished for my mistakes and even worse for my opponents mistakes too. Yes, I was covered in pasty white bird excrement. I'm going to jump around my day long sojourn at Harrahs and probably break up this post a little bit. At noon or so, I see Monkey and Keith arrive from Biloxi. They showed up late for the tournament by an hour. I have plenty of time to chat with them as I've not even made the break. Yes, I've busted early from the tournament. Let's get to the donkley real quick. I do...

So while I was in the hospital, for those five days, I killed time by reading a book. No Internet connection will do that. I walked around Barnes and Noble the day before we went in and looked for something thin, but also something challenging. Build the brain a little bit. As I'm a life nit, a hardcover for under $8 helped to. Unfortunately, this blog post is the result of the thinking I did after reading the book. This blog will be verbose and wordy, dance around politics and big issues, and probably have nothing to do with the reason you read this blog. So feel free to skip entirely or partially, or if you feel like thinking please read and I encourage you to challenge me. These are rough thoughts, which I'm fleshing out through the blog and not ironclad concusions, so I welcome the opportunity to sharpen them or discard them. However, because of the roughness of them they may appear haphazard or scattershot , so if you do decide to read bare with me. I found ...

So we had the baby. He's healthy and so far docile--though I've read not to be fooled by newborns early demeanor sometimes it takes a little for them to find their voice and energy. So far so good. It was a c-section which explains my absence from the world wide web. My wife will remain in the hospital (which has no internet service) until Saturday. It's amazing how little a person can do when the have stitches across their mid-section. The hospital staff has been great but it's almost impossible for me to get away. Poor wife is getting poked and prodded literally every hour throughout the night so basically hasn't gotten any rest at all. Me on the in-room sleeper gets a little more, but not much. Thank you all for the good tidings and well wishes. We are already learning what everybody is talking about when they suggested we wouldn't get any sleep due to the baby's feedings. The little guy is either sleeping or eating. Which is good. Not much crying, which ...

How did I win that pot calling all in for all my chips. And why make that call? Let's backtrack a little to a little earlier in the poker tournament. A couple of hands earlier in the poker tournament a good player to my left gets it in with a middle pair (66 maybe). He gets called by a dude with an open ended straight draw and two overs. He bricks. The dealer is shipping the pot to the 66 dude after both players show their hands. The dealer is mucking the loser's hand quickly and me and the kid next to me both stop him. Unlike online poker tournaments dealers make mistakes which shipping the pots, though I guess depending on the sites I could have said like an online poker tournament the dealers make mistakes. The board was doubled paired on the river, both pairs higher than the 66s. The high card in the other players hand gave him the pot. The guy glared at us. Not his day. I hate to interject when I'm not in a hand, but both players showed their cards and the de...

Played the Harrahs Donkley and finished 16th just out of the money. Traded 10% with AT&T as Ray calls him, so need for the moniker I gave him All Day Alex, and really wanted to pull at least a cash as the last two times we've traded equity he's given me a rebate on my entry fee. Plus, he doesn't like to chop so with him I always have a chance at getting more than my buy-in back. Anyway, I didn't get it done. I got short and battled and battled and shove the first open pot when blinds were eating everybody up. There was a kid who happened to be in the big blind when I shoved with almost a third of the chips in play. His run seemed to be like Darvin Moon's (the guy pictured with almost all the chips at the Main Event). To meet Davin go here . AA, KK, QQ, flopping a set to best an overpair, 1010, no matter what he held it either held or hit. The board paired he had a card that matched it. I don't think he was even aware of how good he was running, as usual peo...

So, I followed up my run in the Beau nightly that Gene D chopped with a little cash session. Typically, I go deep in Beau tournaments with a no cash or min cash and then run second best into best for a couple of hours in cash. So, it's a frustrating trip. I'm a tourist there and I guess I play like one. For some reason I was reading 2+2 the night before and saw a thread were some preteens were asking if any name pros remember playing Tom Dwan before he was issuing Durrrrr Challenges. And one guy, who I believe is a very successful online poker pro in his own right says yeah, he remembers Dwan. He was getting familar with his poker tracking software and comparing his numbers to other players he thought were pretty good at the level he was playing at. Then he looked at Dwan and the guy said he couldn't believe Dwan played 44% of his hands. He wasn't coming in with limps either. I determined I was going to play one buy-in and just play wide open and channel Tom Dwan (who n...

*Congrats to Gene D, Southpaw Rounder, and All Day Alex T, who all cashed in a Wednesday tournament. I busted out of both, narrowly missing the final table at the Beau (as is my standard there), and playing too fast at the Harrahs Donkley. It turned out is was a good day for almost everybody, as Goondingy and I both had some winning sessions on the cash tables, too. Reid and I played next to each other and we saw some crazy things. Reid made a great call on a guy who was tilting after I rivered quads on him. The guy played it big with a bit of a scary board and all guy had was a gutterdraw to go with his pocket threes to Reid's overpair when Reid made the right read and called. River brought the straight and sent Reid home. Afterwards, another player disparaged Reid's play a bit saying he shouldn't have called because of the board. I corrected him and told him Reid made a good call. He corrected me and said the board stipulated a fold. I corrected him that Reid's read t...

*Michael Crabtree, the possible San Francisco 49er, wants to be valued based not on his draft spot, but on his true talent. He is threatening to hold out. His measuring stick is fantasy drafts that had him higher rated than the receiver Al Davis took one spot before him, and paid too much for (Heyward-Bey). So instead of getting the number two receiver's salary he should be paid like the first receiver drafted. Basically, Crabtrees argument is Davis is in his dotage and everybody else knew Crabtree was the best pick. Interesting negotiating tactic. Imagine if that were applied to poker. Phil Hellmuth would argue every tournament should be awarded to him because of all the donkey plays he had to endure. Would we use consensus to determine winners then? Is groupthink really the metric we'd want to use to determine value? True, in evaluating yourself, it's important not to be results orientated, but this is taking it a step too far. The worst player can win a poker tournament,...

Just going to cover some poker topics before I go back into peeling back the skin of my tortured self ie finish off the Duce story, tell he Dollar Bill Jefferson tale and let spill some more weird items from my pysche. -The WPT was just purchased for $9 million. You can win that at the WSOP Main Event. That's almost a joke. You'd think there would be more value in the brand name then just $9 million. Technically, there is. Gaymnia purchased part of the WPT with the selling parties still owning a good chunk of it, and actually using the $9 million to fund non-poker related projects. WPT... World Poker Tour... needs funding for non poker related projects. Right... World POKER Tour... raising capital for NONpoker events. Anybody else scratching their head about this? Word is a lot of Gaymnia's efforts will be in capitalizing on the WPT brand for creating (or recreating) an online poker site. Just as the WSOP has been moving in that direction. Kind of the inverse of when b...