What Are the Kids Saying on the Blogs?

I thought I'd try to pick up the slack (minus the cutting and pasting) while the Wee One remains MIA throughout the current presidential election cycle. Here's what I've been reading lately:

1. Clique, clack. StB ruffled some feathers with his series of posts on The Circles of Poker Blogging Hell. Well done Steve. Life's too short not to rock the boat once in a while. Any time Uncle Bracelet looks like a model of sanity and clarity, hilarity cannot be far behind.

2. Speaking of ruffled feathers, Kaja took "swimmom" to task for conceding a BBT3 TOC seat to ScottMc. It led to some testy discussions of collusion (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Really? Collusion? Some of you people who drink the kool-aid around here -- and you know who you are -- need to stop and smell what you're shoveling. (How's that for mixing metaphors?)

3. The overtired A-lister, B-lister, C-lister jokes continued. This is a bit that was moderately funny two years ago after Jordan wrote his infamous post. It has long since been sucked of any comedic value. Time to let it go.

4. Waffles went busto. Again. Yet people keep backing him. Backing Waffles is like masturbating to hentai tentacle rape porn. In your heart of hearts you know what you're doing is really, really wrong. Yet it's so much fun you just can't help yourself.

5. This thread in NVG on 2+2 roped me in with its fiendish title yet managed to deliver on both the hotness scale and the ha-ha scale. Any thread that results in the following graph can't be all that bad:


6. CJ is trying his best to resuscitate Up For Poker. It was really close to flatlining for a while there. He selected Robert at The Vegas Year as an excellent read. I couldn't agree more.

7. Dawn Summers is still evil. Now that Lent is over, she has returned to her pokering way faster than Waylan Smithers takes to a Turkish prison. Perhaps that means some actual content will be returning to IHO in the near future.

8. Buddy is high. Right now. As you're reading this.

That's all I have for this week. Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Read more...

When Life Gives You Lemons

...it's probably the IRS' fault.

Remember that little blogger tourney in Summer 2006 that I won at Caesar's Palace? So does the IRS. Although I have no recollection of receiving a W-2G from Desert Palace Inc. d/b/a Caesar's Palace Hotel & Casino, I got a notice from the IRS today that they *do* have such a recollection. They also recollect not seeing it accounted for on my 2006 tax return (again, because I don't even remember receiving it in the first place). After interest, I owe the IRS $636. Awesome.

Let this serve as a cautionary tale for anyone out there (hi LJ!) who may have had a big live score recently. If it was in tax year 2007, think long and hard about whether you were given a W-2G before you finalize your return.

Read more...

B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E

Quick review of The Grand: it starts off promisingly with a couple of early ha-has. Unfortunately the second half gets really bogged down by focusing too much on the actual poker being played and not enough on the character stories around the poker. Those stories are what makes the mockumentary genre entertaining (titles like Best in Show). Overall, this one's a miss. Wait for it to hit cable.

--

Since I made the switch back to playing almost exclusively LHE in cash games a long while back, my NLHE game has suffered. I just don't have the aggression that I once had. LHE requires aggression, but aggression is used to save that extra bet when you're beat and win that extra bet when you're best. Because you can never put someone to a pressure decision for all of their chips as you can in NLHE, it's a different kind of aggression.

This is all a way of saying that I think my NLHE cash game sucks these days.

I made a rare appearance Thurday night at Wall Street Poker where the game was $0.50/$1 NLHE with a max buy of $125. Three and a half hours later I cashed out at my high water mark for the night, a whopping $138. My stack bounced between $100 and $130 all night. I would lose chips by calling down with solid hands that were beat and repeatedly calling small raises with small pairs only to completely whiff on the flop. Then a nice bluffing opportunity would come up (including getting Jordan to lay down QQ and one other player to lay down ATs on an A-J-x-J-x board with only an underpair) and I'd restore myself to near even. Rinse, repeat. Given that I wasn't hitting many flops, I'd like to think that means I wasn't playing a *totally* tight-weak game. But it seemed to me that people at the table were just trying to give their money away and maybe if I'd been a bit more selectively aggressive, I would have gotten some of it.

Here's my problem. I do really well in the 10/20 LHE game at the Borgata (though honestly I think a blind, drunken marmoset could do well in that game). Because I do well in that game, I feel little incentive to brush off my NLHE game. Buuuuut, outside of LA and Borgata / Taj, the game has switched to almost exclusively NLHE.

NLHE cash games are the snakehead fish of the poker ecosystem. Almost anywhere they are spread, they quickly devour the non-NLHE games, reducing them to at best one or two tables at one or two limits (other than the smallest of limits, for which there will always be a recreational tourist player base) that may or may not always go off. Five years ago, NLHE cash games weren't spread anywhere on the Las Vegas strip - it was all LHE. Try finding medium limit holdem in Vegas today. There are a few tables at the Bellagio, and that's about it.

Everything evolves, everything changes. Rather than gnashing my teeth against the change, I could just switch back to NLHE the way everyone else has. Force myself to re-find that NLHE aggression. Force myself to get better so that I feel more comfortable sitting in those NLHE cash game again. I just won't enjoy it as much as LHE.

Read more...

Adventures in Transportation

Neal: What's the flight situation?

The scene: Charlotte airport, 12:50pm Thursday afternoon, American Airlines flight 4898 direct to New York LaGuardia, seat 5C. I hear a woman say "I'll put him by the window" before lifting up a small child and setting him down in the seat directly behind me. Cue an hour of shrieking and kicking of my seat. So much for that nap.

--


Del: You're in a pretty lousy mood, huh?
Neal: To say the least.
Del: You ever travel by bus before?
[Neal shakes his head]
Del: Hmm. Your mood's probably not going to improve much.

The scene: Port Authority Bus Terminal, 10:15am Saturday morning. I've just boarded the Greyhound bus for Atlantic City. It's dark and crowded, with earlier boarders begrudgingly making way for those of us that came after. As I'm waiting for the aisle to open up so I can make my way towards the back, a large, middle-aged woman taps me on the hand.

"You can sit here if you'd like," she says, pointing to a window sit beside her.

I shrug. "Sure, why not."

She stands up and allows me to slide into the window seat. After I've taken off my jacket and situated myself a bit, she maneuvers her bulk back into her own seat.

"Now I don't have to worry about being uncomfortable," she says with a guilty grin, and proceeds to spread out all over both seats.

--


Car Rental Agent: I really don't care for the way you're speaking to me.
Neal: And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile in my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

The scene: Philadelphia Greyhound bus terminal, 4:03pm Saturday afternoon. I have 27 minutes to buy a ticket to Doylestown and catch my connecting bus. There are eight people ahead of me in line. The ticket agent behind the counter is moving slower than ketchup out of a Heinz bottle in one of those old "anticipation" commercials, smacking her gum and chatting up the security guard. The minutes tick by until it is 4:20pm and there are only two people ahead of me in line: Mexican guys with large suitcases who are traveling together. I'm only able to hear the ticketing agent's side of the conversation, which goes like this (you should imagine it in a tone reminiscent of "Welcome to Costco. I love you." from Idiocracy):

...
Ticketing Agent: You want to go to Mexico?
...
Ticketing Agent: Where do you want to go in Mexico?
...
Ticketing Agent: I could send you to Laredo, Texas.
...
Ticketing Agent: I can't just print a ticket for "Mexico". I need a specific place.

Repeat ad infinitum as the minutes tick away. Finally she has the brilliant idea to direct them to customer service ("I have a line" -- really? did you *just* fucking notice that?) and I make it onto my bus with about three minutes to spare.

--


Driver: You're going the wrong way!
Neal: He says we're going the wrong way.
Del: Oh, he's drunk. How would he know where we're going?

The scene: a car driven by ANIGuy, 2:20pm Sunday afternoon, somewhere near Doylestown, PA. A Transbridge bus passes us in the opposite direction, prompting CK to joke "There goes our bus!"

"It better not be," ANIGuy deadpans.

Five minutes later, it dawns on all four occupants of the car (the littlest donk was with us also) that we are in fact enroute to the wrong bus stop. Despite valiant efforts by ANIGuy to defy local law enforcement authorities and their silly posted speed limits, we are only able to backtrack to the correct stop just fast enough to see the bus leaving it.

--


Neal: Well Del, you're a charmed man.
Del: Nope.
Neal: Oh, I know. You just go with the flow.
Del: Like a twig on the shoulders of a mighty stream.

The scene: New York Penn Station, 5:45pm Sunday afternoon. Home at last, after a long detour to the Trenton NJTransit railroad station. The end of a great weekend of meeting up with some old friends (if indeed I have met Riggs before, I blame not remembering it on being named to the 2006 All-Lewey Team), and meeting a whole bunch of new friends. Special thanks to Donkette and ANIGuy for hosting - it was a blast.

Read more...

Never Trust A Russian Lawyer

Gall In! Bankrupt Gambler Sues NJ - Casinos Thief Att'y: They Fed My Addiction

What really caught my eye in this article was the following paragraph:

Arelia Margarita Taveras, 37 - who represented victims' families in both the World Trade Center attacks and the Flight 587 crash in the Rockaways - said her gambling problem was so out of control she once spent five straight days at Resorts Casino tables in Atlantic City subsisting on complimentary candy bars and orange juice.

Hmm, good thing I don't know anyone like that.

Read more...

Life Crackpot Theory #310

Event horizon, in general relativity, is a general term for a boundary in space-time, an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side is never seen again.

--Event Horizon entry, Wikipedia

I've always been kind of fascinated with black holes. They appeal to the nerd in me the same way the New York City subway system does. With black holes it's because there exists this infinitely tiny singularity that is responsible for the most crushing gravitational force in the universe; a force so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. (That, and maybe it's also because I was once called a "black hole of negativity" by someone I used to count as a friend.)

Therein lies the conundrum of the black hole. Because light can't escape the gravitational field of the singularity, black holes can't really be observed. Once an object has passed across the black hole's event horizon, the light that such an object would normally reflect to an observer never makes it past the event horizon. Instead it is sucked into the singularity at the heart of the black hole along with the object itself. As an object approaches the event horizon, the light the object reflects moves away from the event horizon ever more slowly, as the light attempts to overcome the stronger and stronger gravitational forces of the singularity. The result it that it appears to an outside observer that the object is slowing down as it approaches the event horizon. The observer will never see the object cross the event horizon; at the event horizon, the light emitted by the object will hover right there and never reach the observer.

Really cool stuff. But you may be asking yourself why I am yammering on about general relativity. Why indeed...

Once in a while I have occasion to re-read posts that I've written years ago. It might be because I was looking for a particular post or a particular link. Sometimes I just randomly type a word into the search box on top of my site to see what it pulls up. Last week I was looking for a link I wanted to send to someone and I came across a post I wrote in February 2006. As I was re-reading it, I had a glimmer of understanding about the paradox of my Life Crackpot Theory #229 as stated near the top of that post. (If you're too lazy to click, the idea is "One of the great cosmic ironies is that human beings are incredibly adaptable and resilient, yet highly resistant to change.")

I'm still not sure why people should be BOTH of those things. I think the reason people are so resistant to change is not just because everyone wants to feel like they're exerting some sort of control over the universe around them, their own mini gravitational field. It's also because everyone's life has an event horizon. Anything that passes beyond that event horizon is beyond that person's influence and lost forever, never to be observed again. The motion is opposite -- something passing *out* of the life event horizon as opposed to *into* a black hole's event horizon -- but the result is the same. There are the rare instances when this is objectively a Good Thing. But for the most part the things that are in orbit around our lives are there by our own choice, and when we lose them we lose a part of ourselves in the process. It's the feeling of loss that is so bothersome. It's that feeling that we're not in control, that our life gravitational field isn't exerting any more influence than a gun control lobbyist at an NRA meeting.

The frustration comes from the fact that if we try to exert more of our "gravitational influence" to keep something in orbit around us, that force often ends up acting like two similarly charged magnets and pushes that thing further away. Even though we create our own gravitational field around our life, we have no control over what orbits us and little control over what escapes that orbit.

I guess I'm saying "Go with the flow" and accept whatever life throws at you. It's about the best you can do.

Read more...

Not So Random Thought

If you are a white man, accompanying an Asian woman with a Jewish last name to a doctor's office or hospital is a surefire way to convince everyone there (without even trying) that you are her husband. In fact, it becomes so ubiquitous that eventually you give up and stop correcting people.

"Hi, I'm here for Sarah Goldbergerkleinenweinsteinman."
"You must be her husband."
"Um... sure."

Read more...

Time Time Time

CK's in surgery. Right now. It's a fairly routine retinal detachment surgery, made mildly alarming only by the fact that her doctor insisted it occur today. Yesterday.

I gave her props for coming up with a unique way of getting me out of work. And such fun too! This is an eye, ear and throat hospital. Everyone coming out of this place has a freakazoid bandage on their head. Some of them more than one. The latest "victima" was a troll of a sixty year old Honduran woman sporting a huge swath of bandages wrapped around her melon and one where her nose should have been. I wanted to suggest she look into canine olefactory transplant surgery (benefits: ability to sniff out bedbugs; social acceptance when jamming your nose in someone else's crotch), but thought better of it after she laughed maniacally and said to nobody in particular, "Wait 'til they get a load of me!"

This is what I do to entertain myself while I wait.

UPDATE: Surgery over. Doc said there were no complications.

Read more...

Disappointing Big Game

Well, there it is. 213 hands, and I was propelled basically by 1 hand: flopping trips against an obvious overpair with Ts8s. I didn't feel like I was playing tight, but the stats suggest otherwise. I did some spewage in the middle stages, yo-yo'ing up and down. I screwed myself in Level 11, going from 16k to under 12k and never really recovered after that. Getting moved to the aggro-donk feature table didn't help. My biggest problem was medium strength button raises that got popped by the small blind three times (and it's not like I was raising my button indiscriminately every time). Not sure what I should have done with any of them.

The first was in Level 1, against Lucko, with KsJs. I raised to 100, he reraised to 330, I called and folded an A-A-3 flop. I might have floated here but it was early and I didn't really see the need to dust it up on a bluff. The second was in Level 11 with Ad9d. I button raised to 1k and the SB popped it to 3k for about 40% of his stack. I maybe should have folded but I thought my hand had decent enough strength to call given that I had about 15k chips at the time. Flop was K-T-x no diamonds and I had to fold when the SB suspiciously bet only 2400 - half his remaining stack.

The last was with 88 in Level 13 when a different SB popped my 1500 raise to 5k (again, half his stack). I feel like there's no way I can call or shove here, but wondering how else I can play this? Do I just hope not to get popped? For that matter, do I just have to let go of the KsJs and Ad9d?

Read more...