Sleep With the Fishes, Dine on the Whales

Just wanted to let everybody know we got some server issues again. Sorry about that. Lots of Gulf Coast Poker Championships Results ready to be dropped on the site. Great news is Kai Landry and Monkey have made the final table and really shown they know how to play Texas Hold'em poker . Jonathan Little also made a decent run into day two until the cards caught him in a VERY cold half hour where he went from three times average to out. Ouch. Last night I played some online poker and upped my aggression level. Played four Sit'n go tournaments and won two, came in fourth in another, and third in the other. Not bad. I was really pushing the chips in when I felt I had the edge. I won most but not all of my coinflips. The third place and fourth place I also had sizable chip leads and watched them erode as my two good Ethiopian friends Runner, Runner visited multiple times. Was kind of sick. As I was playing all four at once, I expected the wheels to come off on the othe...

Out.

Dinner at 630. No quotes since this morning. I'm short.

Table switch. Lot less chips on here.

18k 60 til money. Blinds 600 1200

16k 80 until the money.

About 12k. Boring. No hands.

15k in chips. Blinds 300 600. Half field gone.

15k in chips. Blinds 300 600. Half field gone.

Double up qq again.

Another fifth gone.

Kk in big blind folded to me. Fun.

8k blinds 200 400 50

One fifth of field gone.

Up to 9k. Qq for the win

Keep em coming.

Quote number 1; where ya from. I'm outta bangladesh.

Table decent. Good player on my left. One or two other strong spots but not too much to worry about.

Going wrong way. Under 6k.

Made two great reads. Played one awful. Got hamstrung by the board on the other. Outkicked by 1 on both.

Won blinds with aa.

At 7k. Blinds 50 100.

Lost a big one

Won 1st two pots. Lost small one.

Below is the text of an email I just sent out. I will be playing today's event at the Beau basically for my friends amusement (and hopefully profit). Hello, hello, Not quite sold out for today's session of "fantasy" poker, we have a couple of spots left. If you want 5% of my action today text me (before 1 pm EST) that you are shipping me $25 (504.496.2023). There are a couple of slots open so you can book more than 5% if you want, but I'm going to limit it to 10%/$50 a head to maximize the number of people participating. Again, I will be playing in the $300 +$40 (+$10) tournament at the Beau Rivage today. I will confirm if you are in as long as I'm not sold out. For those of you that already have a piece of me I will be blogging with photos ( http://www.sleepwiththefishesdineonthewhales.blogspot.com/ ) and updating with chip counts and big hands as long as I have phone service and battery life and am still in the tournament. Comments welcome. Als...

Giddy up. Horse for a lot of partial owners today. Game time is 1 pm est at the beau.

Brian told me he had a number of winning Texas Holdem sessions at Harrahs but had gone into bankroll rebuilding mode and would pull up when he was far enough ahead. Then eat and come back for the minimum buy-in. Third night he did it a dealer he didn ’t even have that night told him he had to put all his chips from his first session on the table if he wanted to play. So, after dinner, Brian left a winner, again, I guess he's not just an expert in online poker strategy , he's pretty good live too, and I rejoined our old table. I then ran into Mr. Luckbox . Irony is I heard a big stack at the other side of the table lamenting about how lucky the guy was and I thought to myself, that’s poker get over it, somebody is always getting all the cards. Yeah. Then I proceded to get the dealer down from hell. Yeah. So, I sit down and take a look at Mr. Luckbox ’s chips and think I’m going to double through him and maybe follow Brian’s lead and head to the exit a solid winner. He raised ...

Having had my fill of online poker recently I headed over to Harrahs on Saturday night for some live action Texas Hold'em . When I was coming in to sit down who do I see but Lusky call me to his table. He's just returned from Vegas he had some really high highs and some low lows. He's newly married and he and his wife had gotten involved in the real estate game. Anybody that's familiar with what's been going on in Vegas knows that's a tough line of work or in strong terms a financial death-wish. Course they got into right before the crash so they had no idea it was coming. Fortunately, the poker has been going well, and he's been crushing the cash games since he's been back though probably misses out on the dearth of Pot Limit Omaha games. After playing for a bit he opened under the gun, the next guy re-raised him, and then action was on me. I looked at AA. I decided Brian wasn't opening in that spot with air too often, the guy that popped him seeme...

To continue with yesterdays post mulling over the value of virtual goods in Online Gambling sites. Several sites are becoming one stop casinos offering everything from online horse betting to being able to gamble on Plinko or Scrabble. Okay, maybe not yet, but they are headed that way. Let's Poker was an early innovator in the concept of virtual goods to players. Unfortunately, for Let's Poker they were an American based poker site just getting start when U.I.E.G.A got passed (or is it U.E.I.G.A I can never remember if the "e" or the "i" comes first--somebody should come up with a mnemonic device for that). So, unable to build a player base to test out their theory and not wanting to move to Costa Rica for the foreseeable future the site went under. Which is a shame because they had a lot of fresh, at the time ideas, like moving quickly on a mobile betting platform. So, we don’t know if the Gamer inspired variations of poker would have been a lur...

Read an article recently on whether or not online gambling sites should sell virtual goods. I say yes. The article brought me back to one of my favorite now defunct online poker sites "Let's Poker." Let's Poker offered a little bit of everything from poker (including California Poker), to casino games but no sports book or Horse race betting . Anyway, one of their ideas in building the site after they had built up a player base was to appeal to gamers transitioning over to poker. Gamers have been very receptive to virtual goods and the thought was they'd be very receptive to a poker experience that was similar to a gaming experience. Kevin Flood wrote the article that brought these memories back. Read it here . The influx of poker players from strategy games like the original Starcraft is evidence the guys at Let’s Poker had tapped into an emerging market for the future of poker. The “Internet” kids are no longer the emerging market, they are the market. F...

Yes... so back to my tale. Instead of a quiet evening of online poker , I'm playing a gut-wrenching and ear- splittingly loud night of online poker. Yeah, ferberizing your baby is like voluntarily scratching the chalkboard with your fingernails and then peeling them off your fingers. Weird but in Japan they encourage their babies to wail and wail loudly. It's said to generate good health. Uh... excuse me? This 400 year ritual involves mothers giving their babies to... Sumo Wrestlers and high priests. There the babies are encouraged to wail long and loud. The babies that cry longest and loudest are recognized as the winners of the Naki Sumo. I'm not making this up. Talk about starting life with a bad beat . So, I guess if my wife and I knew this we would have invited a Sumo Wrestler over as we ignored the cries of our infant to coax him to cry even louder. I'm new to the parenting thing but I thought part of it was keeping your children from crying. Granted my wife w...

Where were we... excuse the purple prose... it was a dark and stormy night, one I thought I was going to finally get some time for online poker games . I was playing in four tournaments with a screaming, angry baby as a soundtrack. Bit like watching the Godfather with a screaming, angry baby as a soundtrack. Hard to put together two thoughts much less contemplate poker strategy . I had just bet twice with pocket rockets. Turn isn't a club but puts a Jack on the board. I bet big again. Call. River is a queen. I don't like it. Hhe shoves for not much more. I feel beat, I look at the wife and shake my head. She shakes her head. Call. Broadway he had A10 in the hand. Oh, that's fun. I still have chips. The wife feels vindicated in her understanding of proper poker strategy. "Just fold 'em," she raises her eyebrows in knowing school teacher fashion. I nod like an attentative student and return to the screen. In the background, if it was possible the screaming baby ...

Where was I? I had a free night to play Texas Hold'em poker online, yes, then I mentioned Feberizing a baby. That's right. Feberizing a baby? Or as Brian H calls it Febreezing a baby. Yeah if we were Febreezing a baby we'd just spray it. For those that don't know Feberizing a baby is conditioning the child to sleep on its own. Usually this is best done somewhere around month 8 or so, before they are really aware they aren't in the same room as mom and dad. A little bit later and it's a little bit tougher. We had gotten into the bad habit of letting our little guy sleep in between us and he really enjoyed that. Course if you don't get 'em out about by age one you run the risk of having a third wheel in bed until they hit puberty. Okay, not quite that long but for far longer than I want a third person hanging out with me and my wife in bed. Well, not counting Shanna Marie (pictured go here for more you pervs). Okay mom... just kidding about that second g...

Before I get started on the Texas Hold'em poker online I played this weekend, I bitched on here about the SPAM in my comments section and apparently angered the Gods of spam. Just got the deluge of comments on my last few posts. That was like deleting a hotmail account in 2000. (Speaking of Y2K little more than a year to the next Faux-pocalyspe Y2K-2?). Though the end of the world feels a lot closer to happening 12 years later with the madness that is the global climate and the speed that everybody is going nuclear. For the record, I don't believe the Mayans foresaw the end of the world... let's just use simple logic, if they could do that why wouldn't they have foreseen the end of their culture and prevented it. Hell, they would have landed at Spain and conquered it, instead of vice-versa. Okay, that's tangent number 1, sorry. Let's get back to the poker part of this blog. So, I had a bit of a free evening on Saturday with the lovely and vivacious wife away fr...

Where were we? Let's see I chronicled again my lack of playing poker though I did click some online links in my down time that looked a lot like this: https://www.bwin.com/play-online-poker . I was pressed for time so I mainly just played one sng after another. I ended about even. Well... then I went into link dump mode and was talking about the dude going the length of the Amazon and mentioned my friend who cycled across the country. My friend accompanied by his own Cho (see article) who joined him shortly into the adventure completed the trek and I often think back... damn I'm glad I didn't waste three months bicycling across the United States. Still, the bicycle journey was impressive, a similar one undertaken by a Dane who biked from Scandinavia to South Africa for the world cup more impressive, but the walk down South America most impressive. Read here about the Brit that did it. By the way, why is it always Brits that do these things, don't they have anything be...

We're back after a spat of technical difficulties, able to get GCP back up and running and updating. We had a smattering of problems the last few weeks and we wish you our sincerest apologies. Note to self, just because a beach place says Wi-fi doesn't mean you'll be able to load a page any faster than one of those modems that used to sound like a rusty R2D2. Sorry to those of you that missed us, and for those of you that didn't notice, check in more often. I've been able to get in a few sessions of Texas Hold'em poker with some success, mostly online. While in Pensacola I wanted badly to hit the Greyhound race track to see what things were like and unfortunately didn't get the chance. Maybe next go round I'll check in there, does anybody know if the run poker tournaments ? I'll catch up with some back posts that I haven't loaded up to the blog in the last week or so in a little bit but first a little bit of a link dump about what I've been...

Obviously, these last few posts aren’t just in response to the questions posed by the anonymous reader, more the comment just got me running on several longwinded trains of thoughts. Though certainly a couple of these posts are directly related to it and who might best help my chances I play online poker . Picking a coach is also difficult because there are some styles of play we probably can’t just adopt from the get go. Just like Sit and go poker tournaments strategy does not necessarily translate to multi-table tournament strategy. Monkey recently blogged about watching Tyler Smith borderline maniacally challenge a table with aggression. It wins him tournaments and it has him flame out of televised final tables, but when it’s working it’s inspiring and oh so, tempting to duplicate. Just raise, raise, raise. Some of my best results have come when I’ve been able to channel that mentality (so, too some of my worst) but that's usually only at a table I'd define as soft. With Ty...

Continuing my meandering ramblings loosely in response to a comment that got my brain aflutter, in this post I kind of continue to actually answer the question posited to me and discuss a coach for when you play poker online and who I'd recommend. I was talking about what works in poker coaching. I don’t know how much I could learn from Phil Ivey instructing me in stud or Texas Holdem poker , I would probably learn a lot if he were to verbalize the rationales for his decisions to the nth degree but that doesn't really seem like Phil, you know. Therefore, I see what you are saying teaching and excelling at poker are sometimes two different things. The makeup of a successful poker player may not make a great poker coach. However, I'd imagine Brandon could be a great coach as he has sound reasoning for the decisions he makes and could probably pass that on to an eager student as he's an articulate person. Granted, you may learn more from a lesser poker player who is a bet...

To continue with my loose response to the commentor I almost missed. Really, games like Rush poker are custom built for the next generation to figure out ways to quickly exploit the gameplay and lessen the aptitude of feel players. Even now those of us not privvy to that kind of information (or lacking the disposability of time to learn it and innovate) are probably at a massive disadvantage. We all want to learn poker and figure out seams of strategies on our own but sometimes it's better left to those who have done the work and applying their concepts. My friend ran an online site that went busto (in part because of U.I.E.G.A) and on it they were offering California Hold 'Em . In that game they expanded the deck from 13 cards in every suit to I think 14 or 15 (but with two ranks unsuited to keep flushes from being easier than straights). That game never really took off, in part due to the demise of the site, and its attempt to debug Texas Hold'em robbed it of some o...

To review I was opining on whether or not stalling is an angle shoot in live poker and or online poker (especially rush poker). Not that many of us really care because unless you get out of hand it is maybe dancing in a gray area or a tiny violation/infraction of poker ethics. Nothing that is really going to distract us all that much when it comes to decision making in Texas Hold'em or our next tournament of Pot Limit Omaha . In live poker, by definition it kind of is because you are exploiting the rules of the game and maybe even worse exploiting people's politeness in letting you make a decision to affect the game outside the constraints of normal gameplay. You could make the same argument, to a degree in online poker, but there is a set time that everyone is given to make a decision. Using it for anything you want (whether playing 10 tables at once and barely executing your play at time) or for extra thought or a bathroom break is at your discretion. But in live poker, yes,...

First off thanks for the compliments and the comments. It's always nice to see that somebody is reading these things. Sometimes after finishing a session of online poker games I wander to my blog, put something up, click publish and wonder if the blog post is just bouncing around an empty internet. Are the only people reading spammers looking to drop some links on here? I know from my page views people are reading but comments always make you feel good (even the bad ones mean somebody is paying attention). Nice score on the $600. I'm sure like all of us, at the time you wished 6th was 1st but any time you outlast all but 5 people in a +1300 person field you've played great and finally got a little share of run good. I'd take 6th place in every tournament I played in and be a rich man. I'll respond to the coaching in my next post, as we all need to learn poker in a fluid manner because the game is always changing and progressing. Especially these days. I s...

Recently my blog started getting spammed hard and I had to set up comment moderation. I think I can fulfill the maximum quota of links in a day, on my own right? I don’t think they get too much in the way of the people that read this blog though. I mean who cares if I mention I like to play at an online casino or two. Or if I mention my favorite bwin casino blog that I occasionally check out. Unfortunately, every week or so I get about 20 comments which are just veiled attempts to spread links ( spam ) and I’ve since been neglectful in sifting through them to find the real ones. These guys are slightly sophisticated, starting off with an endearing compliment vaguely about the content of the post (flattery doesn’t get you everywhere) but then falling into some tripe about whatever product they are hawking sometimes completely unrelated. So my apologies to the anonymous author of this comment below for not responding in a timely fashion or getting back to her/him soon enough. ...