Hello everyone, it’s been quite some time since I or anyone else has posted here, but I thought maybe if I posted something we could get the ball rolling on some more posting, even if it’s just to have JCarver post how Quinn from Dexter is dreamy and he really loves True Blood but wishes the vampires would stop being so mean.

It’s been an up-and-down year for me, poker-wise. Obviously I’m not going to come close to last year, as I had a Sunday Million win, a Cake Poker 250k win, and assorted staking wins, but so far I haven’t even won as much as I did two years ago, although there’s still time. I’ve been doing a lot of adjusting to my game recently, spurred on by IRISH POKER CHAMPION MAX SILVER who has sort of rekindled my interest in pushing small edges and generally being a more interesting poker player.

When I first began playing poker, I really looked for like every spot that I could balance my range and I threw in all sorts of thin raises, floated a ton, 3bet more, all of that. I was never insane or anything but I think I was pretty annoying to play against. After that, I switched to cake poker, and none of that really worked because it was 2005 and everybody would call you down for their stack with bottom pair, so I pretty much stopped doing everything except going for heavy value and game selecting, which is more or less how I played until very recently.

I should clarify, I don’t think I ever got really run over even by good players because I also love to call like a fish, and a lot of regulars would think that if I don’t 3bet a lot and don’t seem to get active in pots, that means that I love to fold also. I think this image really helped me get bluffed at a lot and I was able to get a lot of action from people who pegged me as a nit and would just bluff into me.

This strategy worked very well and honestly continues to work as long as I game select. In fact I’m not even sure that I can’t beat games with regulars, it’s just bad for my mental state to try and play in games with only regulars, because then when I have a downswing I get into the “did I make a mistake playing” thing and I’ve found that if I play in games where I KNOW I’m a winner, I remain pretty much tilt-free even if I have a big swing. In fact, that’s always my advice to people who are on a downswing, and for me it really works: If you start losing a ton, no matter what you do, make sure the next games you play are in games that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt you are a HUGE favorite in. I mean there should just be no doubt in your mind that if you lose, it wasn’t your fault. Obviously you can’t find games this good all the time and I don’t stick to only these games when I play, but if I’m on a big downswing, that’s what I do, and it works.

Anyway, even though it works, I’m sort of remembering how exciting it is to pull off a big river bluff, or own someone with a turn minraise, all that sort of thing. Things I completely stopped doing because I didn’t have to. I’m still making some mistakes and probably going for value in some cases that are too thin, but it’s at least been interesting and I can tell that I’m getting value in some places where I wouldn’t have before. The one thing I’m sort of trying to figure out is how much of my value range I should change into lines that I would normally be polarized with. Hands like top pair top kicker that I would normally try go to for like 2-3 bets postflop could turn into hands that I should be playing for stacks if I have a certain image, and I haven’t been doing that very much. Whereas with my old image I would be turning them into bluffs, now I think I might be able to get action from top pair worse kicker etc. It’s definitely something I’ll have to work out.

Reintroducing some spicy play to my game has helped my work ethic, also. I’ve been 20+ tabling 1-2 through 10-20 depending on what’s running, and it’s been fun. Granted, I can’t always make the right decisions playing so many tables, but I read Leatherass’s book, and as much of a fist-pumping tool as he comes off as in his youtube videos, he does make some really good points in his books, and I will read poker books by pretty much anyone no matter how hateable they might be (for example, I own every David Sklansky book) if I think I can profit from it. My work ethic comes in waves though. I go from wanting to grind 5-8 hours a day playing 20 tables to just barely wanting to play at all for weeks. There was a time in January where I played tons of tables for 30 hours a week and I was like “Maybe I should go for Supernova Elite!” I’m glad I didn’t. I would have surely killed myself by now.

I’ll try and keep this blog updated with how poker is going, although I don’t really know why anyone would care. I’m a solid midstakes grinder. Sometimes I make money. Sometimes I don’t. I could post about hands I guess. Maybe I will!

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I saw an ad on TV this morning, and it really surprised me.

This is the ad I saw:

Geico – Mistaken Identity

In the ad, the Geico gecko is talking with the old Geico man about some bullshit, when a woman comes up and starts yelling at him. The thing is, in this conversation, she mistakes him for someone else who she has slept with in Toledo in 2003. When he turns around, she just says “Oh, you look just like him from the back.” She doesn’t say “Oh fuck, you’re a gecko, that was really dumb of me to think I might have slept with you.”

THIS WOMAN HAS FUCKED A GECKO IN TOLEDO IN 2003. IT WASN’T THE GEICO GECKO BUT SHE ENGAGED IN SEXUAL ACTIVITY WITH A GECKO AT SOME POINT AND GEICO IS MAKING LIGHT OF IT.

Seriously we live in a world where people get upset over the most trivial shit and the self-proclaimed 3rd largest insurance firm in the country is making bestiality jokes in ads that run all the time on national TV. I’m not really sure how this flies. Maybe because the gecko is not something that people normally have sex with. Like, I wonder what the reaction would be if the Geico mascot were instead a horse, and a guy came by and was like “Don’t you remember me, from that farm in Washington?? The beautiful night we spent together? The emergency surgery I had aftewards??”

I think people would be really upset about that, but instead it’s completely cool that a lizard was, well, I don’t even know what a lizard would be doing to this woman. I mean he’s very anthropomorphized, sure, but he’s still a really small gecko. I seriously doubt his little lizard dick would do much to her at all.

I get the impression that whatever encouner she had wasn’t very satisfying, and she was only coming up to confront him, either about poor performance or about perhaps leaving and never calling her again. I feel like I know what happened though. Apparently geckos, when they mate, wrap their tails around the other gecko in order to lock them in place. I imagine that when they attempted to spoon afterwards, the gecko probably had his tail around her, and then, instead of having to cut his arm off or anything silly like that, he just left his tail there! Geckos can grow their tails back! It’s perfect!

So this bitch gets drunk, takes a gecko home, probably passes out without remembering what happened, and wakes up holding a fucking gecko tail in her arms. Do you know how much that must have fucked with her? I mean I guess she eventually remembered his name, but that’s pretty scarring.

Anyway I guess my point is, I will not be buying any insurance from Geico because I don’t appreciate any company making light of bestiality except for Cheetos.

I’m out here in Vegas now for the WSOP, and Bad Beats Crew member evang told us that he could get us passes to E3 if we flew out for the day.  Being big gamers, Jason and I jumped on this chance pretty quickly and along with another house resident, booked a flight and flew into LA at around 9 in the morning.
We took a cab over to the convention center and met up with evang, where he gave us our special passes that would get us into E3 without paying anything.  This was obviously pretty nice, as the tickets cost $500 each.  Having someone in the industry sure is nice!
E3 must have had some sort of haunting problem because we found this parked outside:

Anyway we got inside, proudly holding our affiliate passes, wondering what kind of awesome shit would be in store.  We gave our passes to the gruff-looking lady outside the doors, and she said “I need two forms of industry ID please.”  Apparently the passes evang gave us are only good if you are actually a member of the gaming industry!!  Thanks evang!

Not to be deterred, we decided to pay the $500 for tickets because it would make evang feel bad and that was enough for us.

$1500 later we got in and saw the EA area first, where they had the new NCAA and Madden and other games.  They looked great graphically, but I couldn’t tell much of a difference with NCAA as far as gameplay.  Didn’t get a chance to check out Madden.   They made a big deal about the line play being different in Madden this year but it seems the same in NCAA at least.

I didn’t take too many pictures of things, but one of the cooler things (for me anyway) was Steve Wiebe of The King of Kong fame attempting to set a world record in Donkey Kong.  Possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever heard of being done in public in front of a crowd but it was pretty cool.

Unfortunately Billy Mitchell would win the day as Steve reached the DK kill screen (the point at which the game will no longer let you continue) 70k points short of setting the new world record.   Hopefully he’ll try again, he seems like a good guy and I support anything that will ruin Billy Mitchell’s life.
We saw the demo of Uncharted 2 which is the game that Evang is working on, and it looked really fun.  We got to play multiplayer for awhile and JCarver ended up winning for his team.  I’m pretty sure he cheated but whatever.  The game seems really good and you should buy it if you like fun games and for some reason have a PS3.

The Square-Enix display was pretty cool too, the Final Fantasy 13 movie looked pretty interesting.  You can tell I don’t remember anything of substance about it because I’m saying things were “interesting”.  To be honest, it didn’t really strike me as anything unusual for a FF game.  The animation was extremely well-done and it looked good but you can’t really tell until you actually play it, obviously.

The Nintendo display was pretty cool also, they had the guy who does the voice of Mario there.  He is a friendly but sort of weird looking old white man, probably in his sixties.   We played the new Super Mario Bros Wii game and it was pretty fun.  You sort of play against and with each other with all 4 players on the screen at the same time, and you can like stomp people down pits and stuff.  It’s pretty cool, looking forward to playing it when it comes out.

We also played Lego Rock Band, which finally features “The Final Countdown” (it’s about time some RB game did), and briefly saw Beatles Rock Band, which is pretty cool.  It actually has like up to 3 vocal players so you could theoretically try to do all the super hard Beatles harmonies and shit but seriously who is going to be able to find 3 singers to play Rock Band with?  I don’t really see it happening with too many people but whatever.

While we were walking around, I met this random nerdy looking guy hanging around behind one of the displays and he seemed lonely and didn’t have a badge so I got him to take a picture with me to cheer him up:

Anyway that’s about all I remember, I’m positive JCarver will post a more thorough trip report though.  I do have an important announcement though, which I alluded to in my previous post.

BAD BEATS CREW WELCOMES ITS NEWEST MEMBER, ANDREW “WAY RON” HART!!!!

BBC Wayrin

Andrew happily donning his Bad Beats Crew E3 badge, gazing thoughtfully into the heavens.  We asked Andrew to join Bad Beats Crew and he instantly agreed, stating “I sure am glad to be finally able to get away from those faggots in the EAD crew.  This is a turning point in my life.”
We wish him all the best and are happy to have him.

I just got back from E3 and let me tell you the most exciting thing that happened:

BAD BEATS CREW HAS A NEW MEMBER!!! I can’t announce who it is yet but this will hopefully drum up some speculation and interest into who this fabulous new BBC member is that I just can’t wait to introduce.

STAY TUNED!!!

Today I am going to share with you a masterpiece of art.  A friend of mine found this at a store for a whopping $20, and when he called and told me about it I had to get it.  It’s probably the best poker-related anything I’ve ever seen.

Gaze upon this beauty (click for big):

Just try and contain your excitement

There are several things I’d like you to notice about this painting.  First, the cards appear to be the size of road signs.  Apparently two old men (presumably Dan Harrington and Bob Ciaffone or somesuch) are playing poker, and need to be able to see without having to put their glasses on.  Fair enough, right ?  But no!  If you look closely at the cards being revealed, it’s readily apparent that a poker chip is actually playing poker.

There are just so many awful things that are going on with this painting, it just keeps giving back to me every time I look at it.  I love how there’s gin spilled all over the table, and that in the far left stack of blacks, the bottom chip is for some reason bigger than the chips around it.  It’s supposed to be just sticking out, but it’s drawn so badly it’s just gigantic.  Also, the greens in front are just floating a good millimeter on top of the cards.  It’s supposed to be a shadow but instead they look like they’re just tilted on their side magically.   I love how there’s no perspective whatsoever, and of course the greatest part of the whole thing is the KING OF HEARTS WINKING AT YOU.  I guess he’s hoping your opponent has exactly AQ or QQ or something so you can get paid off!  It’s gonna be pretty hard either way considering THERE ARE NO CHIPS IN THE POT.  Somehow this game has no blinds and antes and both players have chosen not to bet at any point (further evidence this is actually Dan Harrington and Bob Ciaffone playing).  It’s also going to be very hard to get paid off considering the opponent apparently has no cards.  At least the winking king appears to be to at least be contrite enough for being in this painting that he’s killing himself.

The best thing about this painting is that it isn’t even a painting.  It’s a poster, with some epoxy or something brushed over it to make it look like brush strokes.  That means this isn’t the product of some struggling artist who’s never seen a card before, this is being mass-produced because asshole college kids are buying these pieces of shit for $20 all over the world somehow.

Now I just have to decide where to hang it.

As I mentioned in my last blog I haven’t been able to play too many tournaments this month, as I had to go home two weekends for both parents’ birthdays.  I did get to play a couple things this past weekend, which included a couple WSOP sats which I was lucky enough to donk into a seat in one of.  Pretty sick too, because I was down to 3 BB in one of them at a pretty early level and doubled up twice and got back into it and went on to get a seat.  So I’ll be there in July, nitting it up and folding into day 2 and blinding off I’m sure.  Look forward to exciting updates about Vegas!!

In other non poker news, I went and test drove the Hyundai Genesis V8 when my local dealership got one in.

This is the car I mentioned wanting to get in my blog before and got made fun of about it a lot for it being a Hyundai.  Obviously, I don’t really care about badge or brand as I’m seriously considering buying a Hyundai and most people would never consider it, but it is a really good car.  I discovered this site recently, motormouths.com, which is sort of like Metacritic but for cars.  It gives you an average score of all the published reivews it can find of each car, and lets you read all of them.  The Genesis has an average rating of 89/100, which puts it tied for 2nd best Sedan, tied with the Pontiac G8 GT and behind the BMW M3.  Pretty good company to keep.   It’s obviously taking cost into account though, because it’s above a Mercedes S-Class and it would be silly to suggest that either of those cars are better than an S-class.  However, they’re like $40k each and the S is $90k, so I think it is very fair to say they’re at least like 80% as good for half the price.

Here is a link to the page with the reviews of it in case anyone is curious:

http://motormouths.com/car/hyundai/genesis

So anyway, I took it out and drove it about 15 miles on highways and through bumpy roads on the UNC campus, pretty much all around, and here are my impressions:
- Engine: Great.  370 bhp is massive for a car that only costs $42k fully loaded with every option, which brings me to:

- Features: Great.  Built in nav, super sharp LCD screen, heated & cooled seats, very intuitive iDrive like interface that’s actually useable because of the shortcut buttons around the knob making all the functions a maximum of 2 clicks away.  Voice activation of all major functions, bluetooth integration, iPod integration, keyless start, etc.

- Comfort:  Great.  Super soft leather seats more comfortable than any Lexus or Cadillac I’ve been in.  The car is also huge and offers tons of legroom and headroom.

- Handling/Steering: Average.  Good for a car this size, handles better than the Lexus LS 430 I tested last year, and actually has a rather sharp turning circle for such a big car (17.8 feet, roughly equal to a BMW 5 series), but the steering does feel a little numb.  However, the steering is well-weighted which I liked.  I don’t really like cars where you can fling the wheel around with no effort, and so I was happily surprised that they went with a medium-to-heavy steering effort.
Before anyone accuses me of gushing too much and saying I am just a huge Genesis apologist, I will tell you this:

I didn’t buy one.   And I won’t, until at least next year.  There are a few small problems or features missing that I would like.  The first is a heated steering wheel.  This is going to sound really stupid to anyone who’s never had one but the first time you get into a car when it’s ten degrees outside and your wheel heats up and your whole body just feels nice because of that warmth coming from it you will never want to not have one again, I promise.  I know Cadillac also offers this, but BMW has for years and I don’t know why more companies don’t offer it.  It’s a relatively small thing that makes a huge difference when it’s freezing out.   I would also like rear heated seats for the sake of people with me, mainly because it seems like most other cars in the premium luxury class offer this, but it’s not a huge deal because I don’t really give a fuck about people in my back seat.  If they were important they’d be in the front seat.

There’s a couple more small issues too.  If you are scrolling through a large list of tracks on the iPod, it scrolls kinda slowly and doesn’t accelerate.  Also it uses firewire to charge so it won’t charge an iPhone 3G.

The big main reason I won’t buy one though is the suspension.  It’s fine on normal surfaces and even is rather firm in the style of a sports car but the probelm is when you get to a rough road, it bounces all over the goddamn place in a way that you would never expect from a car that’s this nice otherwise.  If you take it on a rough road you feel like you’re in a golf cart.  My BMW has a had suspension like it and never does this, and I have also driven a Cadillac Fleetwood which has the softest suspension ever made and it never did anything like this, so there’s something actually wrong with the suspension I think that needs to be addressed.  They changed the suspension when they brought the car over from Korea, and I think they just didn’t really work out the kinks in it before releasing it in America.  It’s something that I just couldn’t live with on a day to day basis, but I’m really excited for how good this car will be with a proper retuned suspension in it.  According to a Genesis owners forum post I read, they are redoing the suspension for 2010, so if that’s the case, if the suspension really does turn out to be fine, I’ll definitely get one.  It’s a superb car otherwise.  If they don’t, I guess I’ll just join all the old people and get a used Merc S-class or something.  By then a 2007 S550 will probably be around $50k anyway, which isn’t a huge difference.  I really do hope they fix it though, because you get a huge amount of car for a relatively small amount of money with this thing.

This will be my last sunday playing tournaments for a couple weeks, I am going out of town to hang out with friends next weekend then out of town for my mom’s birthday the weekend after that.    Unfortunately, I hardly made the most of it today.  I had a decent stack in the warmup, the second chance, the 750k, and the cake 250k, but I blew them all and only cashed the warmup.  I feel like one thing I am getting worse about is getting bored once I get like 30-40 BB and trying to make moves that may not even be bad but are high variance and have been getting me eliminated, when I could just keep stealing blinds and chipping up.
I think if I watch more videos of JC or DN or someone just folding a ton of hands and not getting messy it will reinforce it and I’ll be back to doing that, but I’m pretty disappointed that I think I could have at least made a decent run in 2 or 3 more tourneys today and definitely at least cashed in a couple more where I just sort of spewed my stack off, which is something I don’t normally do.    Like in the cake 250k, I had 66 with like a 40k stack at 500/1000 and raised small UTG  to like 2350 and got 4bet on the button by a player who I knew to be fairly aggro at 6max to like 10000 and for some reason I decided this would be a good time to shove allin, which is pretty awful, and he tank-called with JJ.  I mean I’m sure he’s bluffing there some of the time, but it has to be pretty often for my shove to be good and I don’t think he was doing it that often, I was just bored or something.

I’ll take the next couple of weeks off from tournaments and just play cash during the week, and hopefully by the time I get back to playing tournaments a couple weeks into April I’ll be ready to patiently climb to the final tables again.

I had a pretty eventful couple of days after winning the million which I didn’t write about until now because I wanted it to be sort of a surprise to people, but PokerVT flew me out to Vegas to record a final table video with JCarver, and it turned out really well I think, so we should be seeing that up tomorrow!!

I was supposed to get to meet NOTED GAY MAN POKER SUPERSTAR DANIEL NEGREANU while in vegas but he was apparently busy being in a “music video” of some sort so that didn’t happen, but I got a free trip to hang out with my friends Jason and Vivek so it was pretty sweet anyway!

I’ve played a couple more sundays, cashed in the million again (38th for $2600), which was on one hand sort of disappointing because I did have to play for EVER and didn’t get that much of a payout, but on the other hand I ran super hot to even get that far and ended up sucking out on a bunch of people when the money went in so I can’t really complain.   I feel like I am getting better at tournaments though and that they are still pretty soft so I will try and put some more work into watching videos and trying to take down another sunday.

My goal is to be the next tommy before I can be the next Jcarver, so that will require taking down another sunday or two, which will require actually playing them, so I guess I’d better get on that.