I guess I didn't realize the 400k started at 5:00 CST. I figured it was more like 8:00. So being gone from 12:30-4 probably was pretty poor planning if I really wanted to try and get in.
I'm still running horribly. Such sick stuff I've been seeing. So....so sick.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
All or Nothing
Despite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that I am running *absolutely* piss poor (seriously...you wouldn't believe it), I woke up this morning and decided to try and play my first 400k.
My satelliting restrictions are pretty strict, so itsrather likely almost certain I won't get there. But regardless, I'm gonna try, so look for me when the time comes.
My satelliting restrictions are pretty strict, so its
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Checkin' In & my 7 Facts
Man, I can't believe I haven't posted at all this month. I can't say a whole lot terribly interesting has happened, although there have been some post-worthy hands here and there. That said, they won't be posted because they've come and gone.
I managed to work my way up to $330 or so before we went to TX the first weekend in May. (BTW, any of you TX bloggers familiar with Wimberley? That's where my cousin's wedding was.) I also placed an order for my latest and greatest poker tool before we left for Texas, and had received it by May 8th. That's right, I'm no longer chained to my desk while playing, but I have some mixed emotions about it. When I'd play at the desk, tucked away in the corner, it would require me to turn all the way around to look at a TV, which I didn't often do. So at worst, I was generally just listening to a TV, if not paying no attention to it at all. Now that I can play and watch TV at the same time, I don't feel like I'm getting as immersed in a table as I used to and I think I'm suffering because of that. I've had a LOT of bubble finishes over the past couple weeks, and I think the difference between that bubble finish and a cash is probably a crucial read here or there. So I'm trying to work the kinks out of mobile poker playing. But regardless, my MacBook RULES. Full Tilt has fully functional software on the Mac OS, but if I feel the need to play at another site, I just boot natively into XP.
You all should go get a Mac like me and this guy.
As far as the poker goes, my BR currently stands at $172, down from that recent high point of $330. I just brought it up last night from the low point of $154 to where it currently stands. Its fair, I guess, as I had been running pretty hot there for a while, and definitely have had a downswing over the past couple weeks. Not only am I running cold and getting cold decked like crazy, but like I said, the adjustment to playing poker on the laptop in front of the TV is also causing a downswing in results. But I'm confident I'll find a happy medium in short order. I've been losing a lot of 70/30s and 80/20s lately, not to mention coin flips, and when I suckout its usually generally not in a very big spot, ie all-in on a short stack or calling a raise with odds. Pretty typical negative variance that my game is prone to. I get my money in as a big favorite in big spots, and get my money in as a dog either with odds or in a push or fold situation where doubling up is just the first step to recovery. I'm finally seeing some signs of this most recent streak turning around, however, as I've had some luck go my way the past couple of nights. I did lose a buyin at .10/.25 Monday in an KK vs. AA cold deck, but I also won and placed in two SNGs, then last night managed to squeeze a couple buyins out of .05/.10, although I made a huge laydown that cost me another couple buyins on top. You guys have gotta hear this, then I'll move on to the real reason I'm here.
I pick up 66 in LP and limp, along with 3 others. Flop comes Q67 rainbow, and we either check the flop or all call a small bet from EP. The turn is a 4, and things just get out of hand. SB bets out, BB raises, and MP re-raises all-in. I mull over it for a while, and eventually come to the decision that I'm scared to death that the BB has 35 or 58 and has stumbled onto the mother of all BB specials. I'm also beat by 77, which is a possibility, and QQ, which seems much less likely. There were no PF raises, so it'd be hard to see AQ or KQ, so the whole thing just smelled fishy to me, and with the way I'd been running, I decided to make the laydown. When the SB called the all-in, along w/the BB I felt pretty good about my great play here...until the cards were rolled. Q9 in the SB, Q6 in the big, and Q9 in MP. I would've had them drawing dead to the last two 9s. I guess when I was mulling my play over I forgot to take into account the single most important factor...that this was .05/.10 NL Hold Em. Fack.
Anyway, the real reason I'm here today is because I was tagged in four spots for this "7 Things" meme that went around. I said I'd be here to do it when I got caught up on my reading, but I'm still only to 5/17 and probably with 200 or more posts to go, so who knows if I'll ever get caught up. Either I subscribe to too many blogs or you people post too much. Anyway, I was humbled by the pure fact that four people even knew who I was, so before they give up on me I want to get this thing in. So away we go. I give you, 7 Things You Didn't Know About Me:
1. I used to be legitimately smart. My birthday is in early June, which is an awkward time to decide when to put your kid in school. Well, my parents held me back a year, but early in my kindergarten year I was reading like a badass and it was obvious kindergarten was child's play for me, so they transitioned me to 1st grade by the middle of the year.
2. The mountain climber on The Price is Right used to make me cry. Its true, when I was a wee one spending my days at home with mom and watching TPIR, I would run screaming from the TV whenever the mountain climber game came on. The music scared me and I didn't want the poor little fella to fall off the cliff.
3. My wife and I went to HS and were aware of each other, but didn't meet until college. I went to a relatively small high school (around 100 per class) where I knew the names of pretty much everyone three years in front of me and three years behind me. I even played b-ball before gym class with my future wife's older brother when I was a freshman and he was a senior. My wife was only a year behind me and was a flutist in the band and we even had some common friends, but our paths just never crossed in HS. Then finally her freshman and my sophomore year at Iowa State our circles of friends overlapped, and the rest is history. It may not sound like that big of a deal, but I had some sort of interaction with *almost* everyone 3 years above and 3 years below me, especially the ones in band, but Linz and I never spoke a word to each other.
4. I'm 6'6". This one's kinda lame because if I actually would man up and go to a blogger event you guys would see this, but for now you pretty much don't know anything about me, so I'm gonna have some softballs here. I'm 6'6" and have very little natural athletic ability. My dad played college BB at a small college in Iowa, and my little brother (6'5", 315 in his prime) got a scholarship to play college FB at ISU. I always rode the pine in basketball with some decent ability but a lack of basketball instinct. As for football, I was a pretty badass tight end in middle school, but they wanted to move me to lineman in HS, so I didn't play. And I'm an average to slightly less than average golfer. I tried little league for a couple of years, too, but it wasn't until like middle school age, and I think I just started too late and...wasn't all that good. I'm not uncoordinated or clumsy or anything like that, but I ended up pretty much just average at any sport I took up.
5. I'm in IT management. I have a computer science degree and was a programmer (Lotus Notes database developer) as an intern and for the first 4 years, and took a promotion to "Lead" at the beginning of this year. Early in 2005 I decided that I didn't wanna bang code all my life, so I got on a development track toward management, and hope to keep moving on up from here.
6. I've only ever driven pickup trucks. The same one, really. My first vehicle was a 1988 Chevy S-10 Sport 4x4, then I upgraded to a 1994 S-10 4x4, and in 2004 I bought my first new vehicle, a Chevy Colorado Z71 4x4. They were all extended cabs, should I have the absolute necessity to carry and extra person or two around. I'm not sure when I became a truck guy, but it has suited me very well. Being as tall as I am, getting in and out of cars, especially behind the wheel, is a nightmare. Midsize trucks are cheaper than SUVs, are fun enough to drive, get decent enough gas mileage, and have that cargo space, so I guess I've just stuck to what works. And I'm not a "gets me from point A to point B guy", either. I take a lot of pride in the vehicle I drive and look at it as an extension/representation of my personality, so all three of them have had some character. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to have a passenger vehicle/have to start thinking about family, so I'm hoping to look at H3s next spring. It will be WIERD not having a pickup.
7. I built and sold poker tables for 2 years. While playing what amounted to play money poker at a local establishment on a regular basis a couple times a week in 2004, a buddy and I saw a custom built table, and being a man's man, my buddy tried to duplicate the effort. Well, he did, and before he knew it, he was taking requests to have some built and making a deal to have them sold at the establishment, and thinking about other potential. So he brought on me and another guy to build, had one of his buddies put together a website, we got my buddy in PR involved, and before we knew it we had a feature story in the Des Moines Register, color photos and all, an article in a national Better Homes & Gardens publication, as well as some other media appearances, and orders were flying in. We were even scheduled to shoot features for the three local TV stations that all fell through. At any rate, we built steadily throughout the year, and during the 2005 Christmas season we built 6 a week for 3-4 weeks. We sent tables as far as Michigan, Washington, Texas, and Canada. In spring 2006 my buddy took a new job that changed his schedule pretty drastically, then shortly after built a new house that saw him with basement projects and stuff, and the business kind of faded away. We'll still build for friends and family and ourselves, but I think other than that we're pretty much done for. But it was a blast while it lasted. Check out our website.
Since I was a slacker and didn't get to this, I'll throw in a couple of bonus facts. One for each week I put off doing this.
Bonus Fact 1. I know Corey Taylor of Slipknot/Stone Sour fame. I live in Des Moines, where both bands are from, and back in 2002/2003 when Corey brought together his old band, Stone Sour, as a "side project" from Slipknot, I hooked up with a guy from Amsterdam and we put together StoneSourNews.com and StoneSourBoard.com and got ourselves out there as the first source for Stone Sour information. He had the capabilities to build the site, and I had the local connections. Before long we had friends and family of the previous incarnation of the band as well as the new incarnation, as well as the band members themselves participating on the messageboard. Then all of the sudden I'm invited over to Corey's house to hang out, and continued to remain in that circle throughout the first album cycle, including VIP and photo passes to shows, etc. The site and board got huge, with over 10,000 members, and the whole thing was a wild ride. I talked to him sparadically throughout Slipknot's album cycle and missed an opportunity to get together with him when Stone Sour started up again to hear the album, and its actually been almost exactly a year since we were last in contact, but I heard from a mutual friend that he mentioned getting in touch with me sometime soon. He is an amazing human being. Just incredibly kind, intelligent, and resilient. Its an honor to call him a friend.
Bonus Fact 2. I proposed to my wife in Vegas, at the Bellagio. Yeah, how many thousands of people has this probably happened to, but for a couple of simpletons from Iowa, it was a pretty big deal. In 2004, my company sent me to Vegas for a conference. We made arrangements for my girlfriend at the time to come along, and to stay through the next weekend after the conference. I had gotten the idea to propose a couple months previous, picked out a ring, and had my co-worker bring it out to Vegas for me so that nothing suspicious would happen. I had plans to do it at The Bellagio (it was pretty much all we knew of Vegas, being our first time in town and loving the movie Ocean's Eleven), but didn't really know how it was all going to come together, and like an idiot, didn't call until the morning of to get dinner reservations. We ended up at Jasmine, the chinese restaurant, which was the only place we could get into. Strike one, I thought, cuz Linz doesn't like chinese. We showed up for our reservation and they made us wait momentarily while they got us a table by the windows (they knew of my intentions, but Linz just thought they were being nice). We had a nice dinner that she actually ended up loving (and has since discovered that chinese food is, in fact, awesome), including the cheapest bottle of wine on the list ($30 at Bellagio, $12 at the grocery store), and just as I'm waiting for the fountains to start in order to propose, the waiter comes with a dessert that we hadn't ordered. He leaves it with us and says "compliments of the house" and at this point Linz knows something is up but can't quite figure out what, so I bust ass down to my knee and propose. She accepts through tears, and the table of asian guys next to us goes wild. I kid you not, one of him introduces himself to me as "Charlie", and insists we have a glass of his wine. Mission accomplished, and Linz and I have vowed to return to Vegas at least once a year from here on out.
Well I've managed to work my post to one of epic proportions yet again, so I will bid you adieu. Thanks to the four of you who tagged me for this, but I will not be tagging because I think pretty much everyone I read has done it. Such is the way it goes when you're a week behind in your reading.
I still hope to catch up on my reading, and then I can get back to blogging with a little more regularity as well.
Check ya later.
I managed to work my way up to $330 or so before we went to TX the first weekend in May. (BTW, any of you TX bloggers familiar with Wimberley? That's where my cousin's wedding was.) I also placed an order for my latest and greatest poker tool before we left for Texas, and had received it by May 8th. That's right, I'm no longer chained to my desk while playing, but I have some mixed emotions about it. When I'd play at the desk, tucked away in the corner, it would require me to turn all the way around to look at a TV, which I didn't often do. So at worst, I was generally just listening to a TV, if not paying no attention to it at all. Now that I can play and watch TV at the same time, I don't feel like I'm getting as immersed in a table as I used to and I think I'm suffering because of that. I've had a LOT of bubble finishes over the past couple weeks, and I think the difference between that bubble finish and a cash is probably a crucial read here or there. So I'm trying to work the kinks out of mobile poker playing. But regardless, my MacBook RULES. Full Tilt has fully functional software on the Mac OS, but if I feel the need to play at another site, I just boot natively into XP.
You all should go get a Mac like me and this guy.
As far as the poker goes, my BR currently stands at $172, down from that recent high point of $330. I just brought it up last night from the low point of $154 to where it currently stands. Its fair, I guess, as I had been running pretty hot there for a while, and definitely have had a downswing over the past couple weeks. Not only am I running cold and getting cold decked like crazy, but like I said, the adjustment to playing poker on the laptop in front of the TV is also causing a downswing in results. But I'm confident I'll find a happy medium in short order. I've been losing a lot of 70/30s and 80/20s lately, not to mention coin flips, and when I suckout its usually generally not in a very big spot, ie all-in on a short stack or calling a raise with odds. Pretty typical negative variance that my game is prone to. I get my money in as a big favorite in big spots, and get my money in as a dog either with odds or in a push or fold situation where doubling up is just the first step to recovery. I'm finally seeing some signs of this most recent streak turning around, however, as I've had some luck go my way the past couple of nights. I did lose a buyin at .10/.25 Monday in an KK vs. AA cold deck, but I also won and placed in two SNGs, then last night managed to squeeze a couple buyins out of .05/.10, although I made a huge laydown that cost me another couple buyins on top. You guys have gotta hear this, then I'll move on to the real reason I'm here.
I pick up 66 in LP and limp, along with 3 others. Flop comes Q67 rainbow, and we either check the flop or all call a small bet from EP. The turn is a 4, and things just get out of hand. SB bets out, BB raises, and MP re-raises all-in. I mull over it for a while, and eventually come to the decision that I'm scared to death that the BB has 35 or 58 and has stumbled onto the mother of all BB specials. I'm also beat by 77, which is a possibility, and QQ, which seems much less likely. There were no PF raises, so it'd be hard to see AQ or KQ, so the whole thing just smelled fishy to me, and with the way I'd been running, I decided to make the laydown. When the SB called the all-in, along w/the BB I felt pretty good about my great play here...until the cards were rolled. Q9 in the SB, Q6 in the big, and Q9 in MP. I would've had them drawing dead to the last two 9s. I guess when I was mulling my play over I forgot to take into account the single most important factor...that this was .05/.10 NL Hold Em. Fack.
Anyway, the real reason I'm here today is because I was tagged in four spots for this "7 Things" meme that went around. I said I'd be here to do it when I got caught up on my reading, but I'm still only to 5/17 and probably with 200 or more posts to go, so who knows if I'll ever get caught up. Either I subscribe to too many blogs or you people post too much. Anyway, I was humbled by the pure fact that four people even knew who I was, so before they give up on me I want to get this thing in. So away we go. I give you, 7 Things You Didn't Know About Me:
1. I used to be legitimately smart. My birthday is in early June, which is an awkward time to decide when to put your kid in school. Well, my parents held me back a year, but early in my kindergarten year I was reading like a badass and it was obvious kindergarten was child's play for me, so they transitioned me to 1st grade by the middle of the year.
2. The mountain climber on The Price is Right used to make me cry. Its true, when I was a wee one spending my days at home with mom and watching TPIR, I would run screaming from the TV whenever the mountain climber game came on. The music scared me and I didn't want the poor little fella to fall off the cliff.
3. My wife and I went to HS and were aware of each other, but didn't meet until college. I went to a relatively small high school (around 100 per class) where I knew the names of pretty much everyone three years in front of me and three years behind me. I even played b-ball before gym class with my future wife's older brother when I was a freshman and he was a senior. My wife was only a year behind me and was a flutist in the band and we even had some common friends, but our paths just never crossed in HS. Then finally her freshman and my sophomore year at Iowa State our circles of friends overlapped, and the rest is history. It may not sound like that big of a deal, but I had some sort of interaction with *almost* everyone 3 years above and 3 years below me, especially the ones in band, but Linz and I never spoke a word to each other.
4. I'm 6'6". This one's kinda lame because if I actually would man up and go to a blogger event you guys would see this, but for now you pretty much don't know anything about me, so I'm gonna have some softballs here. I'm 6'6" and have very little natural athletic ability. My dad played college BB at a small college in Iowa, and my little brother (6'5", 315 in his prime) got a scholarship to play college FB at ISU. I always rode the pine in basketball with some decent ability but a lack of basketball instinct. As for football, I was a pretty badass tight end in middle school, but they wanted to move me to lineman in HS, so I didn't play. And I'm an average to slightly less than average golfer. I tried little league for a couple of years, too, but it wasn't until like middle school age, and I think I just started too late and...wasn't all that good. I'm not uncoordinated or clumsy or anything like that, but I ended up pretty much just average at any sport I took up.
5. I'm in IT management. I have a computer science degree and was a programmer (Lotus Notes database developer) as an intern and for the first 4 years, and took a promotion to "Lead" at the beginning of this year. Early in 2005 I decided that I didn't wanna bang code all my life, so I got on a development track toward management, and hope to keep moving on up from here.
6. I've only ever driven pickup trucks. The same one, really. My first vehicle was a 1988 Chevy S-10 Sport 4x4, then I upgraded to a 1994 S-10 4x4, and in 2004 I bought my first new vehicle, a Chevy Colorado Z71 4x4. They were all extended cabs, should I have the absolute necessity to carry and extra person or two around. I'm not sure when I became a truck guy, but it has suited me very well. Being as tall as I am, getting in and out of cars, especially behind the wheel, is a nightmare. Midsize trucks are cheaper than SUVs, are fun enough to drive, get decent enough gas mileage, and have that cargo space, so I guess I've just stuck to what works. And I'm not a "gets me from point A to point B guy", either. I take a lot of pride in the vehicle I drive and look at it as an extension/representation of my personality, so all three of them have had some character. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to have a passenger vehicle/have to start thinking about family, so I'm hoping to look at H3s next spring. It will be WIERD not having a pickup.
7. I built and sold poker tables for 2 years. While playing what amounted to play money poker at a local establishment on a regular basis a couple times a week in 2004, a buddy and I saw a custom built table, and being a man's man, my buddy tried to duplicate the effort. Well, he did, and before he knew it, he was taking requests to have some built and making a deal to have them sold at the establishment, and thinking about other potential. So he brought on me and another guy to build, had one of his buddies put together a website, we got my buddy in PR involved, and before we knew it we had a feature story in the Des Moines Register, color photos and all, an article in a national Better Homes & Gardens publication, as well as some other media appearances, and orders were flying in. We were even scheduled to shoot features for the three local TV stations that all fell through. At any rate, we built steadily throughout the year, and during the 2005 Christmas season we built 6 a week for 3-4 weeks. We sent tables as far as Michigan, Washington, Texas, and Canada. In spring 2006 my buddy took a new job that changed his schedule pretty drastically, then shortly after built a new house that saw him with basement projects and stuff, and the business kind of faded away. We'll still build for friends and family and ourselves, but I think other than that we're pretty much done for. But it was a blast while it lasted. Check out our website.
Since I was a slacker and didn't get to this, I'll throw in a couple of bonus facts. One for each week I put off doing this.
Bonus Fact 1. I know Corey Taylor of Slipknot/Stone Sour fame. I live in Des Moines, where both bands are from, and back in 2002/2003 when Corey brought together his old band, Stone Sour, as a "side project" from Slipknot, I hooked up with a guy from Amsterdam and we put together StoneSourNews.com and StoneSourBoard.com and got ourselves out there as the first source for Stone Sour information. He had the capabilities to build the site, and I had the local connections. Before long we had friends and family of the previous incarnation of the band as well as the new incarnation, as well as the band members themselves participating on the messageboard. Then all of the sudden I'm invited over to Corey's house to hang out, and continued to remain in that circle throughout the first album cycle, including VIP and photo passes to shows, etc. The site and board got huge, with over 10,000 members, and the whole thing was a wild ride. I talked to him sparadically throughout Slipknot's album cycle and missed an opportunity to get together with him when Stone Sour started up again to hear the album, and its actually been almost exactly a year since we were last in contact, but I heard from a mutual friend that he mentioned getting in touch with me sometime soon. He is an amazing human being. Just incredibly kind, intelligent, and resilient. Its an honor to call him a friend.
Bonus Fact 2. I proposed to my wife in Vegas, at the Bellagio. Yeah, how many thousands of people has this probably happened to, but for a couple of simpletons from Iowa, it was a pretty big deal. In 2004, my company sent me to Vegas for a conference. We made arrangements for my girlfriend at the time to come along, and to stay through the next weekend after the conference. I had gotten the idea to propose a couple months previous, picked out a ring, and had my co-worker bring it out to Vegas for me so that nothing suspicious would happen. I had plans to do it at The Bellagio (it was pretty much all we knew of Vegas, being our first time in town and loving the movie Ocean's Eleven), but didn't really know how it was all going to come together, and like an idiot, didn't call until the morning of to get dinner reservations. We ended up at Jasmine, the chinese restaurant, which was the only place we could get into. Strike one, I thought, cuz Linz doesn't like chinese. We showed up for our reservation and they made us wait momentarily while they got us a table by the windows (they knew of my intentions, but Linz just thought they were being nice). We had a nice dinner that she actually ended up loving (and has since discovered that chinese food is, in fact, awesome), including the cheapest bottle of wine on the list ($30 at Bellagio, $12 at the grocery store), and just as I'm waiting for the fountains to start in order to propose, the waiter comes with a dessert that we hadn't ordered. He leaves it with us and says "compliments of the house" and at this point Linz knows something is up but can't quite figure out what, so I bust ass down to my knee and propose. She accepts through tears, and the table of asian guys next to us goes wild. I kid you not, one of him introduces himself to me as "Charlie", and insists we have a glass of his wine. Mission accomplished, and Linz and I have vowed to return to Vegas at least once a year from here on out.
Well I've managed to work my post to one of epic proportions yet again, so I will bid you adieu. Thanks to the four of you who tagged me for this, but I will not be tagging because I think pretty much everyone I read has done it. Such is the way it goes when you're a week behind in your reading.
I still hope to catch up on my reading, and then I can get back to blogging with a little more regularity as well.
Check ya later.
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