Yeah, yeah, yeah...
I've been remiss in my posting, I know.
I apologize to all my hot-hot-hot imaginary readers (keep those pics coming!)
I'd gotten on a real kick for awhile there, and all of you (me?) were starting to expect regular updates I bet. Checking every few hours.... waiting... anxiously...
FOOLED YOU!
But yeah, it's been busy here. I've not even played online poker in about a week, and that's saying something!
Of course, the fact that I'm writing this during my lunch break should say more...
I figured I'd take the excuse of my birthday to force myself to write a quick update.
It's been busy, with preparations for mighty TAX DAY and familial obligations.
Speaking of that, sunday was my nephew's birthday party. His birthday is actually today; Yes, god does love me so much that not only did he give his only-begotten son to me, but he also made sure I had one less birthday date to remember.
The kid is absolutely adorable, and an absolute camera-whore (I mean that in a good way, Jen, if you happen to read this). You can generally whip a camera out at any time, point it at him and elicit a goofy grin.
He's clearly going to be up and walking in about 10 seconds. he currently walks around by pushing his little wagon as a support-mechanism... If Fischer Price made walkers, this is what they'd look like...
He had a great time at the party too, playing with all the toys (and boxes and wrapping paper and string and bits of food and basically anything that came within reach).
His favourite toys though seemed to be this little xylophone (I'm sure my sister LOVES it by now) and a big SUV-version of a Radio Flyer wagon. It literally was called an "ATW" (yes, that's "All Terrain Wagon").
I'm guessing it gets about 18 mpg and sadly has more trunk space than my car... (though it has the same lack of power windows and door locks, so hah!)
So we spent most of the second half of the party pulling him around in this thing outside (it was a gorgeous day) while he made "vroom-vroom" noises and (I shit you not) moved his feet like they were on the gas pedal whenever you stopped pulling him.
I may just have to get him a little steering wheel and a license plate for the thing... but then I might start to get vehicle-envy...
Oh, and whenever you pulled him down a hill, he'd throw his arms in the air like he was on a roller-coast. I swear the kid is way smarter than his age allows-for. Must be my family's genetics at work... clearly...
Anyway... it would take too much space to discuss how adorable this kid is, so, let me "sum up".
He's cute. We share a birthday. End Scene.
So I'm off to a gathering of friends for a few days... perhaps I'll post from there.
You won't know unless you keep checking... every 10 minutes! Startinnnnnnng.....
NOW!
As promised in the previous posting, here's the wrap-up of the poker tourney I recently attended. I was also going to summarize my current online play, but the tourney description is just too damned long.
A quick front page summary:
Live Poker == Not so Good.
Online Poker == REALLY Good.
More after the flip.
The 2nd "Annual" North-South Poker Showdown was held this past Saturday, 4/2/05 up at Pitt's new (and quite nice) house up in Reading.
There were, I believe, 22 or 23 players in attendance. Unfortunately, due to the lateness of the scheduling and several conflicts, the South Shore contingent was quite small, consisting of only 3 core members of the SSP crew and one occasional player.
A quick rundown of the structure:
It was a $20 buy-in NL Hold'Em tournament. Every player started off with a stack of 500 chips, and the blinds started at 5/10 with escalations every 20 minutes, which made for a fairly well-paced tournament. Escalations went 5/10, 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 25/50, etc.
The prize breakdown was 50% for first, 25% for second, 15% for third and 10% for fourth.
I myself went out exactly halfway through in 11th position (by my quick count), which was a bit worse than I had hoped, but not so bad as to be overwhelming.
The other two core members of SSP (Rich and Terry) went out 7th and 6th respectively, while Matt, the other SSP player in attendance went out somewhere around 16th or 18th.
All-in-all, not a bad finish for our crew, especially with the sheer numbers stacked against us.
I was fairly happy about my play, to be honest, because I played a very good tight-aggressive game.
I started out very tight, only playing premium hands (position-dependant, of course).
As the tourney progressed and the blinds began escalating, I loosened my game up a touch, made a couple of key steals and caught some good cards to build up one of the larger (if not the largest) stacks in the tourney.
At the halfway mark, I caught a really good run of cards, and reached the pinnacle of my stack.
It was, in fact, this that caused my undoing.
A run of two hands, back-to-back were what did me in.
The first hand, I started with pocket aces, the best starting hand in Hold'Em. The player immediately to my right (who had significantly less chips than I did) went all-in before the flop to steal the blinds (which were at 20/40 at that time, I believe). Obviously, I loved it.
I went all-in over the top of him, to push everyone else out, so I could eliminate him, knowing I was well-ahead of him and probably had him dominated pre-flop.
I was right. When we went head's up, he showed his pocket kings. Now Pocket kings are an amazing hand in Hold'Em, and I would happily go all-in with them in almost any situation. But against pocket aces, they are a severe underdog (I think 80/20), so I justifiably felt pretty comfortable (and pretty good about my play, I still do, regardless of the outcome). I did make the comment to him, before the flop, that I've had (and seen) aces get beat many times, so I wasn't counting my chickens.
Unfortunately for me, he drew out to a king-high straight on the river, taking a bit less than a third of my stack away, and again proved that the odds are just that... odd.
Okay... I shook it off. I mean, bad beats happen, I've dealt them as often as I received them, and I was still easily one of the top stacks at the table.
So, next hand deals around, and I look down and see Big-Slick, Ace-King (suited, no less). Again, I'm pretty damned happy.
Now I'm no fool, and I'm very leery of Big Slick, as it is NOT a made hand, and it's very easy to miss a flop entirely with it.
This is a bigger deal in a limit ring game though. In NL Hold'Em, Big Slick is a more powerful hand, especially when you're sitting on a big stack, as it gives you the ammo to play through a well-grounded semi-bluff.
So this was all in my head as play worked its way around to me...
And lo and behold, the guy immediately to my right yet again goes all-in!
I mentally paused for a moment, but not for long enough, and this was my only real mistake of the entire night.
From my observation, this guy was a fairly tight player. He wasn't splashing around overly much, and was rarely, if ever, caught stealing.
I think my head was still a bit bothered by the beat though, and all that the very short pause gave me time to think was, "He can't have Aces or Kings again, it's just impossible." I figured he was sitting on Ace-Big (Queen or Jack) and was on a rush, or at WORST was sitting on a healthy middle pair or low high pair (somewhere around pocket 8's to pocket jacks).
So my far-too-quick mental calculations put me at, at worst, a 50-50 shot.
So I again went all-in over the top of him, as there were two people left to act after me that had stacks nearly my size or slightly more than I. I couldn't just call, as this would give them far better pot-odds without risking the majority (or all) of their stacks to potentially knock out two players.
Such an occurrence was a long-shot, but you have to protect against it.
It was folded around again and I was left head's up against this man, this behemoth, this nightmare of mine.
And what did he flip up? Only one of two hands that could have dominated me.
Yep.
He had Pocket Kings.
AGAIN.
The board went as expected. I believe he actually made a set of kings by the river (yay, I had a pair of kings!)
It was all a blur, to be honest.
So that hand cost me most of the rest of my stack. I had, I believe, enough left for one or two Big Blinds, and they were almost upon me.
At that point, the tournament was pretty much over for me, but I did make a valiant effort at it.
I managed to build my stack up to about 10-15 Big Blinds again through some savvy bluffing and good cards, but lost it all to a race about 15 hands later (I was the one holding the overcards that time).
So as I said, all-in-all, I was fairly pleased with my play.
The Ace-King all-in was, at best, a vaguely questionable play. It would have been an amazing laydown, had I been able to do it, but I don't think many players would fault me for it. I may have even been able to have made the laydown, had I thought about it just a bit longer.
Ah well. It was definitely a good learning experience, and had the cards fallen a different way on that first all-in (AA vs. KK), there's a good chance I would have made it to the final table, and probably even into the money.
Unfortunately, I followed those good choices with a series of bad ones.
The first, and worst one was electing to join the "loser's bracket" ring game that was going on.
Big mistake. After the way the tourney ended for me, there was no way my head was in the right place to sit down and play more poker.
But I dropped another 20 bucks in and sat down and quickly blew through most of my stack.
I finally realized what I was doing a few bucks before I completely burned away my stack, but by then, it was too late to do anything but pick a hand and make a stand (which I, unsurprisingly, lost).
So yeah, that's 40 bucks I'll never get back, but at least 20 of it was spent playing, to me, excellent poker and learning a bit of something.
I will NEVER make the same mistake with AK again. And given the stakes of such a hand, I think that's a lesson worth 20 bucks. Maybe even worth 40 bucks.
That's it for now. Next post will be the summary of my online play.
Ciao!
I'll be posting later tonight about the poker tourney I attended last night (a hint as to how I did can be found in how quick I am to talk about it).
But I only have a few minutes right now (damn you daylight savings time!) so I want to quickly put a few words and a link up about the single scariest thing that I can see about the future of our country...
There are many policies by promulgated by the Bush administration that I have issues with, from his socially conservative legal pushes, to his highly questionable choices (and re-choices) in judicial nominees.
But the single scariest policy push of his has been the "starve the beast" policy that he and his people are clearly carrying out.
For those who don't know the term, it refers to a fiscally "conservative" (and I use that term loosely in referce to Bush & Co.) policy ploy.
Fiscal conservatives, by definition, think the government spends (and taxes) way more than it should. They would like to see the end of popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education spending, etc. Basically anything not having to do with National Defense and a few other, smaller programs.
With these programs gone, what they consider to be the ungainly tax burden the government places on its citizens can be removed. They'd like nothing more than the entirety of the federal income to be derived from something as abhorrent (to me and anyone who makes less than 200 grand a year) as a national sales tax or a flat tax.
However, they have been politically burned in the past when they've tried to directly remove or reduce these programs, as they are, in fact, quite popular with the people. People being funny in how they like government programs that help keep them alive and out of poverty.
So a branch of the conservative movement has hit upon a new idea... "Starve the Beast".
The American people like their entitlement programs, yes, but they also like tax cuts. And sadly, most of them either never took Econ 101 or just don't care enough to realize that you can't have both.
So these conservatives get massive tax cuts passed (including Bush's two large tax cuts from the start of his first term and the massive reductions in capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes that mostly took place towards the end of Clinton's run).
And everyone loves them. I mean, who likes taxes?
And then, wow, suddenly the government is in debt. And more debt. And MORE DEBT. And then there's a war. And another war. Couldn't be avoided.
And now the government is so far into debt that something MUST be done. But we can't increase taxes! It's an election year (every other year) or it just isn't popular with the people... so we have to cut spending.
But what the Starve the Beasters are starting to see is that people REALLY don't like spending cuts either.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us here.
Welcome to the world of unintended consequences, and the realm of my worst nightmares.
The above-linked article (and the articles it links to) are good summaries of my fears.
The well-being of our economy is ever-increasingly in the hands of foreigners; some of which we don't get along with all that well (China).
Shifts in their monetary policy could absolutely destroy our current economy, sending us plummeting into a depression the likes of which only our grandparents can dimly recall. But WORSE.
Because this time, not only would our economy be shot to hell, but we'd still OWE trillions of dollars to foreign lenders. And we CAN'T declare bankruptcy.
I'm a student of history, and trust me when I tell you that overwhelming foreign debt is one of the largest contributors to the collapse of governments in the past few centuries (see story of Mexico in the 1860s for one example of this).
It all seems really dry, I know, but trust me, it's scary as shit. We're not past the point of no-return yet, but we're fast approaching the time where only major policy shifts (such as massive tax increases or massively painful spending cuts) will save us.
And frankly, I don't see the current idiotic administration being capable of either.
No, instead we'll argue morality and the rightness of when people should die and what should or shouldn't be taught in our schools in fiddle-like fashion while Rome slowly burns around us.
Nothing like a good show to distract the masses from the desperate state of the country around them...
I figured it would be dumb for me NOT to post on such a day...
But then, of course, it's also dumb to post if you have nothing to really say (see the prior post for an example of this).
I've spent the whole day watching my new PC slowly crawl towards my house (via the UPS tracker, of course, not some really cool binoculars, though that would be neat too).
It's increasingly asymptotic approach to my home is starting to grate on me.
Oh, and one of the most pathetically stupid April Fool's threads has been going on on NANOG. I've gotten to the point where I just ignore the posts now.
It was a marginally funny joke to begin with (basically, a slightly-convoluted story about a merger of Cisco and Nabisco to allow the writer to call the company "NaCisco" [yes, that was the joke]) which has been followed by hundreds of would-be hucksters making jokes about bread crumbs and packets settling during shipping.
Ah me...
Not everyone can be the comedy genius that I am, I know. I just need to be more tolerant of their tag-along attempts.
I'll be playing in a poker tournament saturday, my first live game in most of a month and my first real tournament since winning second place at UG9.
I'm looking forward to it, and to the absolute drubbing I expect the North Shore crowd to take at the hands of my "crew".
I'll be happy to finish in the top third, and ecstatic to place in the money. I'm not expecting any miracles...