Poker is not a healthy habit (but it sure is fun)

I'm dragging a bit today.
And it doesn't have much to do with the fact that I rifled through more cardboard boxes in the last two days than a hobo's lifetime. Or surrendering to the crowds at Kohl's when Black Friday came (name the song or band I'm referring to there) and settling for a $59 Portable DVD at Radio Shack and a bunch of gift cards purchased online. Or the fact that I"m at work after a three-day weekend. Or that the house is almost moved, but that it seems like "we've only got a few more boxes to unpack" has lasted for two weeks now, as if we're stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-like move, where every day, a fresh stack of cardboard boxes packed with Kate's 25,783 knick-knacks that only a woman could love awaits me.
No, I played a $10 buy-in home game tournament last night. Blinds go up every 20 minutes, with a computer keeping track of the blinds, the time and their size. Pretty cool. I went after a get-together with our little group, which ended with lots of queso and the first half of the beaaaaauuuuuoooootiful Kansas/Florida game.
I taped the second half and headed over to the game, which kicked off at 11 p.m. I got home at 3 a.m.
And I got up at 9 a.m. to run eight miles with my running partner.
Poker is a hobby that seems to conflict with staying healthy, despite Cindy Violette and all her crystals, strange-ass food and general meditating. When I play poker, I eat candy, queso, ice cream, drink beer and frozen lemonade and stay up too late. When I run, or climb mountains, I eat healthy, drink water and get up early.
Poker happens late at night, when the dark side of human nature howls like the coyotes behind our new house.
Running or climbing usually happens that morning, when the birds are chirping, the sun is shining and Jayden is either happily screaming and running through the house or peacefully watching "Little Einsteins," a show that teaches him classical music and that friendly rockets can fly if you pat your lap fast enough.
Running makes me feel good. Climbing gives me wonderful memories and enough photos to entertain those who watch the Discovery Channel's "Everest" show (8 p.m. mountain time Tuesdays, you MUST check it out) for three years.
Poker frustrates me, stresses me out and occasionally really pisses me off, like when I lost to five two-outers in the last two days. Yes, poker makes me feel good when I win, in the same way that a herion injection probably makes a junkie smile.
I believe everyone needs a vice, or else we become boring monks. Poker is definitely my vice. I could give up beer, or fattening foods (or at least reduce them), or nekkid ladies, but I could not, should not and will not give up poker.
I am at war with my vice.
I took second in that tournament.
That will help pay for a new pair of running shoes.
I am at war.
But we secretly meet at night, in the fog and under the bridge, through the cover of darkness, to embrace.

Thank God for Thanksgiving

Reasons I could be in a bad mood:

• I ran 22:55 in the Turkey Trot this year. A 7:23 per mile pace, but a disappointing time. The 5K is a tough course, and the first mile is all uphilll, and I ran that mile too quickly, frying me for the rest of the race.
• I'm playing the other division leader in my fantasy football game this week, a game I really need to win. He has Terry Glenn. Terry Glenn decides to look like a hall of famer. I have Joey Galloway. Joey Galloway decides to look merely competent.
• The Chiefs play the Bronocs tonight. They need to win.

Reasons why I'm not:
Food, family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving.


Edit: And a HUGE Chiefs victory doesn't hurt!

Pre-Thanksgiving Day thoughts

The tunnel is still dark, but I can just barely make out a flashlight at the end, a tiny, glimmering light.
We're getting there.

Boxes are starting to disappear. We are starting to see our carpet in the basement (a not-so-flattering shade of Miami Dolphin blue that isn't quite teal but is closer than I would like, but we'll tackle that in a couple of years). We aren't tripping nine times a day over knick knacks and paddywhacks. Jayden isn't falling into cardboard boxes nearly as much as before.

We're starting to make our place into a home instead of "a place where we've put all our shit."

• • •

This job doesn't pay well, but it can be fun sometimes. And it has its perks.

Phil Gordon's manager e-mailed me about a story I wrote about the new online regulations. When I said OHMYGODI'MSUCHABIGFAN and mentioned I didn't have the DVDs, he sent a signed copy of Final Table Poker to me.
It's fantastic.
AND IT'S SIGNED.

Sorry. I'm sounding ubergey right now.

• • •

Two days and counting
No, not to the turkey.
The Turkey Trot.

I’m not sure why I’m putting so much stake into this race. Yes, I’m certainly competitive. Um, OK, VERY competitive, but mostly with myself. So, yes, that’s part of it.
But I think it’s because I really do measure my progress through this race.
I first ran the Turkey Trot, a 5K, two years ago and was proud of my 27-minute time. Last year I was a little bummed at just over 23 minutes but recognized that I had, indeed, improved a lot. This year I’m shooting for just over (or just under) 22 minutes, and I think I can I think I can I think I can.

I sincerely hope that this race will go much like the half marathon a couple weeks ago, when I set what I think may be an unrealistic goal and actually do better than it.

But 5Ks are unpredictable at best. They are three miles, but they are basically sprints, and a bad start can wreck your whole race. And there’s certainly a good chance of a bad start, given that the race’s first mile is mostly uphill. Run it too fast, and you burn yourself out the rest of the race. Run it too slow, and you’ll never catch up.
And running up hills just kinda sucks.

I’m trying to enjoy the preparation for this race as much as I can. The Trot is one of my favorite races of the year, a time when Greeley gets together to run before we all stuff ourselves. It’s a wonderful holiday tradition.
I hope I feel that way after it’s over.

• • •
Suckouts are really starting to piss me off.
I suffered three brutal, but-I-was-dominating (!) suckouts last night in my SnG. I win one of those, I definitely cash. There's nothing more disheartening than playing well and getting good hands the whole game, only to lose because some idiot calls you with an inferior hand and gets lucky. Because I'm a good player (cough, cough), as you all are, I suffer far more than I dish out. It honestly makes me want to go all-in with K,J on the first hand and laugh like a monkey when I spike that second J on the river.
Maybe I will with a $1 tournament. Or I'll play penny poker.

I know they shouldn't bother me as much as they do. They're part of the game, poker is still gambling even if it is skilled gambling, and I should let all the jackasses who gloat about it later just roll off my back. Maybe I'm playing too much, but I'm not, actually. I think I am playing more SnGs lately, and maybe I'm just not as densitized to them as I was in the past, given that a lot more happen in SnGs just because of the nature of the game. After looking through my records, I've seen that I average at least one suckout against me per SnG (usually a 3:1 favorite or more), which is probably normal. In fact, suckouts, in SnGs filled with decent, rocky players, are probably the only way players get knocked out, other than getting blinded off.

Besides, karma is karma, and last week, in a live tournament with 15 others, I lost the first one when my KK lost to A,J when she spiked an A on the river. The second, however, I won, after flopping two straights and two two-pairs in the last 10 hands when it was down to five.

Still, I'd love just one week when I don't have any.
Good luck with that.

• • •

Turkey. Mashed potatoes. Rolls. Yams. Crab Rangoon.

My brother always served the Rangoon with his Thanksgiving dinner, and that's my favorite part.

Given that the Chiefs are playing the Broncos that afternoon, I don't think we'll be playing Scatagories (fun for the whole family) this year.
The news of that is better than pumpkin pie.
Almost.

Unsettled: Update

Well, it's a start...






Now I know this isn't QUITE the score that Iak just had. His is just a smidge more impressive. However, given my last post, and all that talk about feeling unsettled and all that, well, it's almost as if a box fairy decided to come to our house and unpack for us.
She unpacked my brain, that's for sure.
I raised with air many times, remained aggressive and yet not stupid, and used the good luck that came my way (and to be fair, there was quite a bit of it) to the max and took this down.
A new me? Maybe. It's not like I was a soft little twinkie before I started to change my style a bit. But, yeah, I'm feeling better about mixing it up now.
Ironically a cash game got me started for the night. I had KK, two called my raise, the board came Q,10,6, two diamonds. I bet the pot, and a guy raised me 3xs the pot. I thought for a bit and folded. I folded after my frustrating hands for the past hour, when Full Tilt was deciding to kick me in the nuts again and again and laughing merrily all the while.
He showed me A,A.
It reminded me that I am good at making pretty good laydowns, and that helped my confidence a bit.
OK, afterglow over. Be patient with me. Even the small victories count for something. They sometimes, after all, lead to $12K scores.
Right, Iak?

Unsettled

Although our lives are slowly, painfully, being unpacked from our cardboard boxes — if I need something, there's a 3-1 chance it's actually available now, although still more often than not, the object sucks out and I can't find it — I still don't feel comfortable.
It's exactly where I am in my poker game.
Poker, as in life right now, isn't automatic anymore. Calls have become tougher, bluffs seemed forced and my range of starting hands now appears to wider than the average American's plate at a Western Sizzlin buffet.
It's been a year since I started playing poker online for real money, and in that year, I quickly developed a tight, occassionally aggressive game. It's certainly not a bad game to play when you're starting out on the .25 NL tables and the $5 SnGs. But in the last month, as I've moved up in SnGs and played the cadre of rocks at Full Tilt, I've come to realize that I wasn't outplaying the others in the last year as much as I did outlast them. I never made any moves, bluffed only in tournaments and sporadically at that and rarely played anything beyond the top 20 percent range. And I'm ashamed to admit it, but I rarely thought about position.
I know that I'll never be an aggressive player, nor do I want to be. But what I don't want to be is predictable, and I'm afraid that my game, to anyone not playing three tables, fantasizing about Hiliary Duff and chatting on Yahoo, is far too predictable.
So I'm trying to change that. Occasionally (but not enough), I raise in position with a speculative hand. Occasionally, I bluff when no one wants to take the pot. Occasionally, I'll pretend I have an A, when in fact, I may not! How sneaky!
Results have been mixed.
Unfortunately, playing looser, apparently to that inner poker player who tells me what to do, means making looser calls, and while I've caught more bluffs lately, I've also made some eye-rolling payoffs.
Thanks to Fuel, who has helped me think about things other than the cards, and to Iakaris, who is providing more than enough inspiration on how hard work pays off (and having the brain of three journalists like me don't hurt neither), I'm trying to improve my game.
At times it's paid off. At my home game last week, a game filled with good players, they had no idea where I was for the first time in two years and I won a lot despite an overall lack of quality cards. Other times, suhc as last night in the DADI, results have been not all that impressive.
I know that in three months, I'll be grateful that all that work from the move gave us a better life.
I just hope that in that same time, I'll feel the same way about poker.

Go go go

We heard the heartbeat today at the Doctor's office.
:)
Number two appears to be coming along nicely at almost 12 weeks.


And his heart rate was 166, or about what my heart goes when I'm running a 5K, the hardest thing for me to do because of the intensity of the race.

Atta boy (or girl)

Top 10 thoughts now that we're seeing the light

10. I'm so out of sorts right now. Where's this? Where's that? It's like hunting for eggs on Easter, only there's no fucking chocolate to reward you for finding something, only a sinking feeling as you realize now you have to find a place for it.
9. Poor Jayden. Our 16-month-old is addicted to Little Einsteins, and Comcast doesn't carry Playhouse Disney, so we can't find it anymore. After quite possibly the worst temper tantrum ever thrown by someone his age, we are rushing out to Target tonight to get a DVD for the upstairs living room, as the DVD player was downstairs in the new, "surround-sound" basement that my wife will probably get around to hooking up in three months.
8. Why can't I do that? I'm a retard when it comes to stuff like that. Seriously. I was proud of myself for simply figuring out how to hook up my X-Box, a VCR and a DVD along with our cable to our TV by using a splitter.
7. Aren't these "Top 10" formats lame? At least I'm posting in this incredibly chaotic time.
6. I'm still playing poker. Bodog continues to be the site of choice, even though it's my third favorite site of the three I play on, but I'm winning there too much to stop. The players just aren't that good, especially at Omaha, and I'm getting good hands to boot.
5. Can you get high from the smell of cardboard boxes? Maybe Pot Committed can answer this one, if she recovers enough from her Amsterdam trip to recognize the English language once again. At least her writing hasn't suffered.
4. We heard coyotes howling outside our new home last night. Cool. We're a little farther west from the center of Greeley than I thought.
3. The mountains look full of snow already. I hope I can eventually get up there to enjoy it.
2. Our new bedroom is purple, and I've just decided that has to change by this spring.
1. Good luck to everyone playing blogger tournaments and the Full Tilt stuff this week. I hope to join you.

Top 10 thoughts now that we're in our new home

1. Man, we still have a lot of crap.
2. I've seen enough boxes.
3. Maybe by next month we can use our garage.
4. Where's our mailbox?
5. A 9 on the river against my KK? (Oh, wait, sorry, that's a poker thought, but it does demonstrate how my week in poker has gone).
6. Jayden, stay out of there.
7. High speed, wireless Internet is wonderful.
8. Lots of water pressure in the shower and a big tub in the bathroom. What else could I want?
9. Ouch.
10. Home game tonight. I really need it.

Top Ten thoughts during the move

10. What the hell is that?
9. Do we really need that?
8. Goddamn we have a lot of shit.
7. Where's Jayden?
6. Oh, he's in a cardboard box.
5. Wow, my arms are about to fall off.
4. I can't believe I have to work Election Night and then get up at 6 a.m. to close the next day.
3. Thank GOD the truck is all packed.
2. *(&^(*((&9.
1. We move to our new place tommorow. Now the real fun begins.

The day after

oooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Ow ow ow ow ow.

Ouch.

Stupid half marathon.





P.S. We move starting Tuesday. I hope I can move after we move.



P.S.S And I lost a $85 pot when my set of 10s lost to AA when villian got his A on the turn.
So that didn't help either.

Half a marathon, one big goal

Shivering in the cold and surrounded by hundreds of runnings stoned on adrenline, I allowed myself a moment to dream.
8:30 would be nice, I thought.
Runners don’t really measure races in a whole time. They piece the seconds and minutes together and talk about their pace per mile. Running is designed to be a consistent motion, as efficent as a Detriot factory line or a McDonald’s during lunch hour.
If you run anything beyond a 5K, as I was doing Saturday, it’s especially important. Imagine motoring your car off the line (Rev on the Red Line, as Foreigner put it) and then screeching to a halt. You’d be seeing your mechanic by the end of the week. Your joints aren’t much different than a car. If you jump between 7:05 and 9:30, you’ll grind your joints to dust, and you simply ain’t finishing the race.
This would be my second half marathon Saturday, around a lake and through some woods to the finish line we go. In May I ran my first, a triumph that left me proud just to finish. This time I’d be looking for something more. Now that I know I can finish, I told myself, let’s finish strong.
An 8:30 per-mile pace would do just that.
Three years ago, I don’t even remember why I started running, but I did. For years I was in good shape, climbing all the while, with dozens of peaks already under my belt, but I never ran. It seemed, quite frankly, too painful. I could always bike 25 miles and barely break a sweat, but whenever I tried running even a mile, I was always left gasping for air and clutching my side as if a little goblin was stabbing it with a pitchfork.
I finally entered a 5K for something fun to do on Thanksgiving and was proud when I finished it at an 8:40 pace. Not bad, I told myself, never expecting anything more.
But being a journalist has taught me that sometimes you don’t change. Sometimes life changes you. And for a project that would be one of the most challening and rewarding stories of my life, a story on a man who was an elite runner before being diagnosed with a rare kind of cancer, I showed up one night at a running group coached by a local God of Running and the owner of a shoe store in town, Doug Bell.
Bell is a guy who started late but now runs 15-minute 5Ks even though he’s in his mid-50s. He owns the national indoor mile record for the Masters division. It’s something insane like 4:49.
So he’s an impressive guy, but in order to be that good in such a demanding sport, you have to be positive and believe in yourself at all times. And as it turns out, there’s a reason dozens of runners show up for intervals, what amounts to running torture sessions, on Wednesdays - Doug’s passion and encouragement rubs off on others. In fact, after only one session, he broke through my cynical barrier of self-doubt, and I bought into it. I started showing up every Wednesday and running the same torture sessions with guys (and gals) who could be my father or mother and were good enough to kick my ass anytime they pleased.
My times dropped at an alarming pace, and with it, my weight. I was never fat, or even chunky, but I did develop a bit of a gut. Suddenly I found myself at my high school weight and running times that I never thought possible, even remotely possible.
Saturday, three years later, I was a true runner, a guy who wasn’t a world-class or even a state-class runner but an elite runner nonetheless, a guy who could beat 99 percent of the population and finished in the top 10 percent of any race.
Still, I always doubted myself and was usually shocked when I did better than I thought. When I ran 6:10 in the mile this last time, in October, I was stunned. I continued to doubt myself, or at least think of those times as flukes, the result of a good meal the night before.
When the gun finally sounded, I turned on my brand new iPod Shuffle and got going.
The first mile always requires as much mental toughness as the last two, mostly because everyone takes off as if his or her shorts were on fire. I forced myself to believe in my own goals and my own pace and ignore the others.
It worked.
Sort of.
When I looked at my GPS, I was stunned, again, to find me look at 8:05 for a pace. And I told myself right then that I would run at the pace that felt good, rather than the pace I thought I should be running.
That takes belief in yourself because you have to know that you’ll have enough energy to finish. And finishing, as always, without walking or crapping out, is the most important thing.
The race continued to go well. I stopped once to dump my top layer and a second time to dump my water backpack. A stopped a third time to down a gel. Other than that I ran smoothly and was never tempted to stop.
By the time mile 12 rolled around, I was in pain. My hips felt like cinder blocks, my knee bitched at every step and my ankles felt stretched, as if I had just gotten out of a dungeon.
And I decided to pick it up.
When I looked at my GPS, I was running 7:15, and it felt good. My iPod had crapped out (in fact, I’ll have to send it back after talking with Apple), so no more Haste the Day, Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai, Audioslave, Into Enternity, Testament, Gnarls Barkley and others to give me the energy I would need.
I would have to rely on myself.
When I crossed the finish line, I put my head into Kate’s shoulder and just sat there. I was utterly spent.
Then I looked at my time.
8:22.
You can dream big, like winning the World Series of Poker, having twins or being handed the keys to a Porchse after you smash your Toyota into a tree.
And you should.
But it also helps to dream little goals, like running a time you never thought was possible,
Dreaming big is how we somehow seperate ourselves from the daily grind.
Dreaming of small goals, and then somehow trusting myself, leaving the doubts on the course and acheiving them, is how I free myself from it.

Mommy, where's Daddy?

Doesn't this smack of a Deadbeat Dad sort of sleeze, sort of a "Here's an X-Box game son see you in three months I'll miss you a lot now I have to go bang my stripper 17-year-old drug-addled girlfriend" feel to it?

Fuck you, Pokerroom.

Pokerroom raised me as a poker player. I played in a weekly home game just with friends and happily chased inside straight draws until I started playing poker online for fun. I played on Pokerroom because it was Mac compatible, but it was also a damn good Website. Even today I'd say that. It was far better than Party Poker, that's for damn sure, and I loved how you could play it anywhere (even at work!) on the Web.

When I finally reached $1 million in play money, I decided to start playing for real money and played a ton of $5 six-handed SnGs. I believe I played about 80 on that initial $20 deposit before losing it. I read a ton of books, used my birthday money to deposit again, and now I'm a winning player with a pretty decent bankroll.

What strikes me the most is the fact that pokerroom doesn't HAVE to leave, just like Daddy doesn't have to suck, either, yet it is because it's just easier that way. "We're sure gonna miss you!"

Yeah? Fuck you. Just like the son who turns to his more caring step-fathers and uncles, I've moved on to Full Tilt, Poker Stars and Bodog. I"ll hang with them forever and never visit Pokerroom again. And if this all shakes out and Pokerroom, cap in hand, wants my love back?

Nah.

It's not the game, it's the limits

That's it. I'm playing more Omaha.
.5/.10 Omaha, that is.
$25 profit from last night.
I basically broke even at Omaha before last night playing .25 PL Omaha, which I considered fine, given that the game is very, very cruel. You have a K-high flush? Someone has the A. You have a full house? Someone has a better one. You have a straight. The river just blew it up.
And yet that's also what makes the game so much fun.
But I also played far too tentatively. If I had a set I would still check if more than one person was in the hand, convinced that someone would draw out against me (and I was usually right).
At .5/.10, I felt comfortable to play a lot of hands, since Omaha is more about speculation and draws than simply waiting for pocket pairs, and I felt comfortable enough to bet the hands hard if I did, say, hit my set.
Plus the players are much worse at that level. Someone really thought they could use all four cards on the board if they had it.
I loved it.
I'm adding a .5/.10 game to my two .50 NL tables I play every night. Late last night (yes, I took my kid trick or treating, don't worry, the highlight was the house giving out bottles of booze for the adults), I was playing Omaha at Full Tilt, and I lost to a higher flush, a higher full house and a higher straight. Plus both my two pairs lost (as I expected them to).
And that cost me $2.
I love that game.

P.S. Bodog Omaha at .25 is basically the same thing. Just a tip.

P.S.S. See you at the Mookie tonight. I'll be the one bragging about tiny bottles of Jack Daniels.

P.S.S.S. Was anyone else a little disappointed that the WSOP and ESPN didn't think we could handle watching a final table of HORSE and so switched it to NLHE? All ESPN talked about was how hard it was to play all the games and how cool it was that all these players struggled...and then showed us NLHE the whole time.
Wow.
I was enthralled with the players, and I loved the two-hour broadcast, but geez.

Boxed in

With my left hand wrapped in a band-aid the size of a hamster, the result of a serious rug burn after a mishap in a haunted house (or something like that), I strained and huffed and puffed my way through a monster stack of boxes into my brother-in-law’s trailer this weekend.
My poker game that night wasn’t much different.
Poker, like life right now, is a struggle.
It’s a happy struggle. For three years we wanted to sell our house. We put half our lives in storage. We waited to get high-speed Internet. We didn’t put up a Christmas tree. We took our pictures down and let “stagers” decorate our home for us. And we left our home three times a week and let strangers drag in mud on our carpet.
Now, finally, it’s all over. That takes the sting out of lifting your 157th box of the day.
Poker, also, is a happy struggle. Ultimately, after all, it’s there for my entertainment, and poker wouldn’t be fun, say, if all players did was push with J,3 os every time you held AA (ah, for the days of play money again).
But, damn, despite all that, my back hurts, and now my ass hurts as well after a weekend full of brutal, bad beats and tilty poker sessions.
Nothing, I believe, saps your ability to play well than losing a buy-in. I certainly won’t go the bad beats, but in all of them I was at least a 75 percent favorite, and all eight times I lost. And I would love to say that it was because of bad beats that I lost all my money. But I would be lying.
I found myself questioning my own play even before Bad Beat Thursday almost a year after I made my first deposit. I’ve made some good money (enough for a laptop and a trip to Vegas) playing poker, and I had one losing month out of the whole year.
All that goes out the window when you find yourself struggling at a $1 NL table, when you play well for hours and then give it all back and more in one hand. Or when you play SnG after SnG, including those advertised token races, and continue to bubble after months of crushing them.
You ask yourself several questions:
1) Was I winning simply because I was playing bad players? And now that I’m moving up, and (theoretically) playing better players, am I now one of the fish instead of the sharks?
2) Should I be more aggressive?
3) Why me?
After I did lose a buy-in at a $1 NL table (maybe not a lot to you, but ouch to me) Saturday, after a Thursday night that we should call the Night of the Living Suckouts (in honor of Halloween), I took a step back.
Throughout the last couple of weeks, as our lives are now cardboard boxes, cardboard boxes (yes, I meant to repeat that) and packing tape that seems to stick to itself more than the cardboard boxes, our mantra has been One Step At A Time.
It has probably saved my life already a couple of times, as my wife has nearly exploded once or twice. Truth be told, I would have spontaneously combusted myself a few times without that reminder.
Saturday night I took the same mantra.
One Step (Box?) At A Time.
OK, yes, I need to improve my aggression. But I’m not a calling station. I’m not weak/tight. I am an aggressive/tight player who sometimes errs on the side of being too cautious.
Fuck it. That’s who I am.
Once I realized that, I started winning again. I took two $8 beginner tournaments on Bodog and finished up $25 on Full Tilt. I cut my losses in half for the night. I even played my first Omaha Hi/Lo tourney, a 45-person, and cashed the damn thing (Drizz would be so proud of me). I went to bed satisfied.
I have started to bluff at orphan pots just begging to be picked up. I am making continuation bets now, even in cash games. And I am raising more pre-flop.
That’s enough for now.
One Step At A Time.
One day, when the boxes are unpacked, we’ll look for a new sofa.
And one day, I’ll tackle the $1 NL games again. And I’ll play them aggressively.
Just let me unload the trailer first.

Make the bad luck work for you

So you've had kind of a shitty week of poker, and you sit down Wednesday night ready to have some fun.
And the plan of fun quickly turns to shit, as bad luck, rather than chips, come your way yet again.
And you tell the person currently reading this blog (hi!) that this will not be a blog of bad beat stories. Trust me. I'm basically even for the week despite the blahness of it, and I've had a couple good weeks prior to this one, so No Bitching Allowed.
But you get NO action on your good cards in The Mookie. You raise with K,A four times and nothing. And you get QQ and nothing. Now I know I can be downlike rock-like at times, but I probably raised at least once an orbit. You might think that someone might want to look me up, no?

So, of course, I'm on life support, with about 1K in chips, and my M is 5, so I get 9,9 and shove. And someone with A,K calls me. A good call, in my mind. When the eager-beaver overacheiver gets not only one but two Ks on the flop, I'm done in 34th (?) place, and I lose yet a coin flip with a pocket pair against two overcards for the second week in a row.
Boooooo.
I am not pissed at all, given that I enter The Mookie because it's fun to play with good players and have little to no expectation of winning on a regular basis. When the field is stacked, as they say, things simply have to go your way to make the final table.

So I then enter two token races, Turbo races, mind you, and I place 7th and 8th in both. Six places pay. I had chips in both and got blinded off essentially both times.

Now I know I have a serious hole in my game in that I don't like to steal too often. I prefer to wait for the cards and play them well. And the problem comes when you are second in chips in the goddam turbo tournament and the other short stacks refuse to cooperate and win their coin flips. You eventually just get eaten away by the blinds. And the blinds are so high you might as well go all-in rather than raise 3xs, given that you'll be left on life support if you lose.
Sorry, I don't want to put my hard-earned chips on the line with 10 high. And 10 high, or something less than that, was what I was seeing in these late rounds.

NOTHING makes you question your game more than bubble finishes. I'm too weak. I'm too predictable. I'm too patient. Patience, of course, is a good trait in many tournaments.
But basically I'm through with the Turbo token races. Yes, they pay better, but I think I might try the $6 slower races, as they pay less but are more suited to my style.

Then I entered a HORSE SnG for the first time evah and got sucked out on five times. Twice in Omaha, which don't really count, and twice in 7-card stud, the final blow coming when the dude called my two pair of As and Js with nothing and needing two spades with four cards to come. He got them both, the last on the cruel 7th Street. I win that and I probably cash.
Sigh.

So now I'm frustrated, but I saw something in Razz. I had never played Razz before but knew enough about it from reading all y' all. The game struck me as easy and fun.
So with a little coaching from Slb and Felicia's advice to never bring in unless you have three cards with 7 or under (I modified it to 8 or under), I dove into a $1/2 limit razz game to end the night.


I started down $8 but hung in there and played tight. And then I won a $25 pot with 2,3,4,6,7. Who-hoo! I was about $20 most of the night after winning another big pot when a guy called me with Q high (?). I did lose a couple of tough ones, including the last pot when a Q on 7th Street screwed me, but it worked out well and I won $12 for the session.
Plus the rake helped me with my bonus.

So the moral of the story is, if you're getting shitty luck, play Razz, where you will be transported to an alternate universe, where bad luck is good, Hair Metal is still popular, and Britney Spears never got pregnant and is still appearing on TV half-naked.

Crabby

Results from last night:


• Two $8 beginner SnGs from Bodog, played at the same time:

First - $16 profit
Third - $4 profit

$20 profit. Not bad for an hour's work!

• $10 NL cash game played while playing the SnGs

$5 profit


• $100 NL cash game on Full Tilt:

-$25


This doesn't make me a shark because sharks can take on the badasses as well as the guppies.
Apparently, lately, I'm really good at shredding guppies by the mouthful and losing to the sting rays and barracudas at the $1 NL tables.
I think this makes me a scavenger type, or a type of fish that feeds on the bottom feeders and dead money.

I am poker crustacean.


P.S. Tonight I will continue to crawl along the botton depths as I'll be hunting for tokens on Full Tilt in preparation for the DADI tournament!!!!

My 1-year-old is better than me

Occasionally, it’s hard not to get jealous of my 16-month-old.
Especially when Mom comes to visit.
I take the “oohs” and “awwws” and “how cutes” from all the hot women I run into as a source of pride. I helped create Jayden, after all, and I gave him those long, darling eyelashes that everyone just gushes over. I also think he’s pretty cute myself.
So I don’t get jealous there.
I take the “look at how talented he is” comments with a grain of salt. Basically everyone underestimates babies. If they can go through a day without getting a lot of poop on their foreheads, everyone thinks they’re going to design the next particle accelerator.
So I don’t get jealous there either.
But Mom comes to town, as she is now, and a small part of me, just a small part, sometimes gets a little annoyed. She’s obviously there to see Jayden.
Her grandson.
My friends have told stories about how their parents’ attention shifts once they poke out a kid or two. I was prepared for that. Mostly.
Jared, one of my best friends, is a veteran Dad. I basically see him as the Phil Ivey of dads for all you poker players. So he fills me in on little bits of advice. He loves to tell a story about a visit from his mother.
I’ll get some of the details wrong, but basically his mother, upon her greeting, was in the backseat with his two boys for a good 20 minutes before Jared finally said, “Oh, by the way, hi Mom.”
I greeted Mom at the airport, so I knew that wouldn’t happen.
But since then a lot of her attention has gone to Jayden.
Now it’s not fair for me to say Mom’s ignored me. In fact, the break from all Taz, all the time, has been nice. Jayden, shall we say, likes to explore and seems to have an unlimited reservoir of energy in which to do so.
But Mom came out to visit, maybe, once a year. This time she said she plans to come out every four months. And she said, once, “I’m out here to get my grandchild fix.”
Don’t I count?
Sometimes that thought creeps through. But I can’t allow myself to think that way.
And here’s why.
The package may be funnier and cuter. And a lot more adorable.
But when she comes out to see Jayden, she’s still seeing me.

I am poker champ?

Part of me says yes.

A much louder, more annoying and more insistent part of me is saying no today.
Exhibit A, presents the louder Prosecutor (Mr. High on Poker, perhaps?), says that I went all in with 7,7 when I still had 950 of my original 1,500 in chips in the Mookie last night.
"He limped in, your honor, and then pushed to a re-raise, which screams small pocket pair!!!"
Said Jordan, an aggressive Jordan, mind you, also raised me off K,Q and A,J twice with 7,2.

But I digress. My opponent called with Q,J, which is not a good call, except in those cases, when he read me like War and Peace, or perhaps Jayden's current favorite, "Duck on Holiday." (I can't give myself credit for War and Peace).
He got his J and that was that. So much for my Final Table/money performance last week. That's older news than Brad and Jennifer's break up.

Exhibit B, Mr. Prosecutor (Jordan) says, is the fact that I stacked off at Bodog at a $10 NL table (.5/.10 for those of you counting at home) when I flopped a straight with A,5, the only slight problem, of course, is that there were three clubs out there, and not only did one of the opponents have the other two, both did.

Exhibit C? I can't beat Full Tilt. Sure, I can crush Bodog's little puny limits, and crack the hell out of the $8 Beginner Tournaments and make $250 in two weeks playing those tables. But throw some decent players my way, the Prosecutor says, and you leak chips like little blood vessels escaping your injured, helpless bankroll.

OK, so my defense jumps to my rescue. So you didn't win a race in the Mookie. Is anyone good enough to win a tough tournament like that without winning a race? Maybe. But I doubt it.
And OK, so you stacked off that $10. You wound up WINNING $25 ahead after you settled down and played good, aggressive poker. Who cares if it's against weaker opposition? Money is money. Most casinos are filled with bad players, players much worse than the Internet, and you don't mind stacking them.
Full Tilt is a bit of a concern, sure, but you've won on every other site, and you've only lost $50 on that site. Just play well and the money will come. You even folded Q,Q last night to a raise and a re-raise after being painfully card dead, and sure enough, one guy had A,A and the other guy had K,K. Yes, a Q came on the flop, and you would have won a $150 pot, but you wanna call off $50 for 20 percent every time? I didn't think so.

The defense, however, just gets shouted down too often.

Poker is a tough hobby. I don't mind being tough on myself. That's how I'll improve.

But far too often, I attach my play to my self-worth and call myself an idiot when perhaps I should just realize that, hey, that's poker.

And let the Prosecution rest.

Spice plus Sports equals Pokerpeaker

I'd be Sporty Spice.


If I have to explain why, you obviously haven't read this blog much.

Plus she was a lesbian. Maybe. So we have those two things in common.

That's enough for me.


Question of the day: I've been playing these $8 beginner tournaments at Bodog to help clear my bonus while I'm two-tabling. Basically it pays five spots instead of three. I've been crushing them. I am not a pro, but I'm not a beginner either. So at times I feel like Kramer beating up all the kids in his karate class on "Seinfeld."
My question is, does that make me a bad person?

You want what? Fine, we'll take something better

Well. It’s been a hectic couple of days, so hectic I was only able to squeeze in five hours of poker.
Which reminds me of one of the funniest quotes from Homer Simpson:
“I had to work two jobs and take care of Maggie and the other kids at home. It was tough, but somehow I managed to squeeze in eight hours of TV a day.”
But I digress, as usual.

We got the house.
We just didn’t the house we wanted at first.
But we may have gotten the house we wanted more.

On the first house, the owners counter-offered. Technically. Actually, their offer was about as funny as a donkey justifying why he was correct to call with his inside straight draw after you bet twice the pot.
We offered $5,000 off the list price and $5,000 in closing costs. Yes, with that kind of offer, you expect a counter.

They countered with full price.
Or we could pay $5,000 more and have $5,000 in closing costs.
And they wanted to close three weeks later than our move-out date.
And they wanted to put a contingency on that moving date that basically said if they didn’t find a home they liked before the closing date the deal was off.
My response was pretty simple.

“Have the realtor call us when they’re ready to sell the house.”

So that left us scrambling Friday to find another house, and sometimes, when you take a second look at something, the light shines much brighter, much like how when you take another look at how you played your set and realize that the guy had an uber-draw and it really wasn’t as big a suckout as you thought when you lost.

We initially dismissed a house we really liked because it seemed to be too expensive and it didn’t have a fence in the back. With our options limited — one of the homes we looked at Friday was decorated before the age of disco, with the golden yellow 60’s lava lamp wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom the highlight — we took another look at it.
And we fell in love.

The fence, we decided, could be built in the back, and Mom, God Bless her, instantly volunteered to help pay for it. Yes, the price was more than we wanted, but our payments would be about $100 more a month, and we would bargain them down a bit.

We offered essentially $7,000 off the list price and said we had to close Nov. 8.
Last night our realtors called with the good news: They signed the contract.

Sometimes things happen for a reason, as cliched as that sounds. We would have been happy with the first house, but we think we’ll be much happiera with the new one.

Packing feels like fun after the long struggle.
After three years, one more month, and it’s all over. Well, until Kate decides she wants to change something about the house. But that’s a new struggle. After three years, I’m ready for any struggle that’s new.

Beginners luck at the Mookie...aka waiting on a house...aka I'm a nervous little rascal

That title is a tribute to the blogging world's rising star, Iakaris, who generously railbirded me with buckets of good advice at the final table of the Mookie.

The encouragement was much needed, given that I was in a tournament with bloggers for the first time, which is something like going from fighting guys in Iak's medical school Chemistry 678 class for a long time to facing, um, Mike Tyson? (The old Mike, the badass one, not the ear biter, although even that version of Mike could put a world of hurt on me, to be honest; I'm a lover, not a climber, or something like that).

Thanks also go to Drizz and Slb as well.

I would link y'all but I don't have my linky HTML thing here at home, and it's 11 p.m. and I haven't heard about our offer on a house yet so I'm a little cranky. Bitchy, even.

I am proud of the way I played, but I would also like to say that having, say AA and then flopping a set and having someone else flop an underset, shall we say, helps a little. Pushing with JJ when you are on life support and getting a call from 6,6 and then flopping Quads, shall we say, helps. Having Will, whom I love, push with A,J on the short stack and having A,Q winking at me helps, and having 7,7 hold up against A,K helps too. So lady luck was not only on my side but in my damn bed last night demanding I put out for the fourth time in an hour. And she had huge boobs.

I may have done better had I not gotten too frisky with Q,J sooted and K,9 os near the end there, trying to be the bully I know I should be with a big chip lead but can just never seem to manage the right spots to do so. But it's all good, I made the money, and the money, even last money, is better than bouncing on the bubble.

I will have to play more blogger events, as they are a blast.

• • •

Complicating things a bit is the fact that we were supposed to hear about our offer by 9 p.m., and it's 11:05 p.m., which is definitely not 9 p.m. That's OK. We're only talking about our fucking life here. I'm guessing they want to counter offer, which is fine, we can deal until the sun goes down, except it's far down now.

• • •

Tough workout tonight. Six three-minute runs, with three sets of two three-minute runs back to back and a three minute rest in between sets. I ran them at about a 6:30 mile pace each, and so my leg cramped up at the final table, which is something I've never seen before on ESPN.

Speaking of which, were you gagging as much as I was when Dutch Boyd on this week's show gets his whole sob story about making the final table but never winning the big one? And then him squawking about how great he was and that no one can beat him even though he was playing against the WORLD CHAMP (the last great one anyway, not our current douchey)? And then ESPN stating for like 10 seconds in passing that he tried some venture and "a lot of people were upset at him?" Way to report the shit out of that ESPN.
Sigh.

Yuck. Yuck yuck yuck.


Here's to final tables, final offers and one final stretch before I hit the hay.

Full House

Why do we play 3,3, even to a standard re-raise, when just about anything can squash it after the river?
Hope.
We hope that that magical third 3 will hit a rainbow flop, and then you get a whole lotta chippies shipped your way and you get to brag in your blog that you are the Best Poker Player Ever.
If a fourth hits, you get to say something about quads and beeches.
The chances are small, of course, that you will hit, but when you do, magic happens.
Or everyone folds to your bet and you get $2.
But I digress.
I kept this in mind every time we would spend an hour picking up toys, shoving magazines in the bottom drawer under the TV and loading up the two wild labs and the kiddie-poo in the car for a showing. I kept it in mind through the endless open houses when I had to take the labs to the dog park on a windy, cold day and the Chiefs were actually playing on CBS that week instead of the goddam Denver Broncos. I kept it in mind when, twice, we had offers waived under our nose, only to yank them away at the last second, once because they decided our basement was just a little too big. Suckouts happen against you as well, even when you have a set.
Such is the housing market in Greeley, CO. I even wrote stories on it. If you had a home you needed to sell, well, your chances were about as good as hitting your set on the flop. We have too many lots and despite our monster growth, not even people to buy them.
In our case, our chances were much, much worse, given that in three years on the market, we had two close calls and no offers. Our home was nice, honest. We aren't meth users. We just had only two bedrooms and a monster-huge basement (finished). That was enough to turn away most families who were in that first-time homebuyer market we were trying to serve.
That's about a 1:456 chance, which is, if I"m not mistaken, like getting AA back to back and getting them paid both times? It's twice as easy to flop a flush than those odds.
But then, during another showing last week, Kate called and said the people were there for more than a half-hour and were very excited about the house. At that point, I was through. I had had enough of playing those small pocket pairs only to get stiffed on the flop. I was convinced we were never going to sell our home.
Friday, we got an offer.
I couldn't even believe it at first. And it was fair, really a fair offer.
We've spent the last few days shopping for a new house. We need more room for the J-man and possibly another one on the way in the next few months (before you start sending me cigars, no, it hasn't happened yet). We need a house we're happy with.
We need a home.
I'm trying not to think too hard about it, but tonight we will narrow our choices and pick a home. I'll finally be able to get high speed Internet and have my own "guy's" room. Our "two car" garage won't force us to lose 30 pounds every time we try to get out of our cars. I won't have to fuck with the goddam weeds in the back all the time or pick up after our ugly cottonwoods.
Our buyer is a kind old lady who loved our house. I doubt she's backing out. The chips have not been shipped my way yet.
But I think, finally, I just hit a full house.

Mile High

I didn’t expect much from my last mile of the year with Doug Bell’s track group on Wednesday nights.
The group meets once a week to run intervals, which are short, measured bursts of intense running designed to boost the way your body processes oxygen. They are painful and intense and yet I credit them, more than any other part of my fitness plan, for dropping my race times and making me as fit as I can be.
I am not an athlete. I am a hard worker whose only talent, in my mind, is a strong will and a lot of endurance. I have little, if any, athletic ability and get by because I work hard, not because I have any grace or skill. Mountain climbing and running are great sports for me, then, because you can excel in them with hard work instead of Michael Jordan’s athletic ability.
As a result, I doubt myself frequently when it comes to sports.
So as I trudged up the hill ready to start, I planned on running under 6:30. I ran 6:16 in August, a time that thrilled me, the fastest I had ever run, ever, in my life. I started running two years ago but did run a bit in junior high school, but I never reached past 6:30 in the mile. I figured 6:16 was a fluke, and I wasn’t exactly confident after throwing up and battling the 24-hour flu Monday night.
Bell’s group runs the mile as a way to test ourselves, to see how hard we’ve worked and how we’ve progressed through the interval/racing season. So it’s an important test, and everyone takes it very seriously.
Bell, who still runs 5Ks in under 17 minutes despite being in his mid-50s, sounded the gun, and off we went.
I yelled at myself to relax as I ran down the hill and into Nottingham Field. My biggest problem is sometimes I run TOO seriously, tensing up, which constricts my breathing, a fate that is pure death for a runner trying to set a personal record.
By the half-mile, my time was 3:00.
Really.
I was stunned.
My legs tightened a bit, as they always do, about halfway through the third quarter, but I told myself to just maintain the pace. I struggled to do so, but I told myself to continue to relax and breathe.
I picked it up a little at the end, but I didn’t have the kick I wanted. When you’re already at your maximum, asking your body to do much more is a little difficult.
I crossed the line in 6:10.
I couldn’t let out a primal scream. I didn’t have the breath for that.
A smile, and the satisfaction that maybe I was an elite runner now, was enough.

Straight flush to the rescue!!!

How can you not love hands like these?



* Stage #461508779: Holdem No Limit $1 - 2006-10-03 16:27:33 (ET)
Table: GOLDEN DR. (Real Money) Seat #5 is the dealer
Seat 5 - BRONCSX3 ($123.10 in chips)
Seat 6 - EROCPLAYER ($277.85 in chips)
Seat 7 - PUSHINSTACKS ($98 in chips)
Seat 8 - KOOLROMEO ($112.85 in chips)
Seat 9 - TWEETY1947 ($45.40 in chips)
Seat 1 - POKERPEAKER ($75 in chips)
Seat 2 - LIGHTNING36 ($101.70 in chips)
Seat 3 - RANGERXBOB ($144.99 in chips)
Seat 4 - CLIFFF ($38.50 in chips)
EROCPLAYER - Posts small blind $0.50
PUSHINSTACKS - Posts big blind $1
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to POKERPEAKER [Js Qs]
KOOLROMEO - Folds
TWEETY1947 - Folds
POKERPEAKER - Calls $1
LIGHTNING36 - Calls $1
RANGERXBOB - Folds
CLIFFF - Folds
BRONCSX3 - Folds
EROCPLAYER - Calls $0.50
PUSHINSTACKS - Checks
*** FLOP *** [10s Jc 9s]
EROCPLAYER - Bets $2
PUSHINSTACKS - Folds
POKERPEAKER - Calls $2
LIGHTNING36 - Folds
*** TURN *** [10s Jc 9s] [2d]
EROCPLAYER - Bets $3
POKERPEAKER - Calls $3
*** RIVER *** [10s Jc 9s 2d] [Ks]
EROCPLAYER - Bets $5
POKERPEAKER - Raises $20 to $20
EROCPLAYER - Raises $60 to $65
POKERPEAKER - All-In(Raise) $49 to $69
EROCPLAYER - Calls $4
*** SHOW DOWN ***
POKERPEAKER - Shows [Js Qs] (Straight flush, king)
EROCPLAYER - Mucks
POKERPEAKER Collects $149 from main pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total Pot($152) | Rake ($3)
Board [10s Jc 9s 2d Ks]
Seat 1: POKERPEAKER won Total ($149) All-In HI:($149) with Straight flush, king
[Js Qs - B:Ks,P:Qs,P:Js,B:10s,B:9s]
Seat 2: LIGHTNING36 Folded on the FLOP
Seat 3: RANGERXBOB Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 4: CLIFFF Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 5: BRONCSX3 (dealer) Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 6: EROCPLAYER (small blind) HI: [Mucked] [As 3s]
Seat 7: PUSHINSTACKS (big blind) Folded on the FLOP
Seat 8: KOOLROMEO Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 9: TWEETY1947 Folded on the POCKET CARDS

One soft ball, big balls to play tight and why puking at 3 a.m. may only be the 24-hour flu

OK, first things Frist.
I played poker last night.
ON THE INTERNET!!!
(Said in that bully’s voice on “The Simpsons): Ha ha!
Strangely enough I managed to do this without deciding to start selling heroin to prospective customers at Jayden’s day-care, sampling the majority of Las Vegas’ hookers or betting the deed to our house on a pair of 6s.
But you never know, right? Thank God poker is being banned. Now I’ll only watch evangelists on TV and dress in white all day and smell faintly like peppermint.

• • •

I was especially proud of my two-hour session on Absolute Poker, and not just because I managed to say fuck you to the Man. I cleared 100 hands of my 400-hand PSO bonus, which means I’ll get it done even before the SWAT team and black helicopters swarm my house. Ha ha! And not only that, I finished ahead $30, which was nice given my bad luck as of late (two-outers were golden against me in the last couple of weeks), and I played $1 NL for the first time in my life, figuring that, given the current situation, there was no time like the present to try it out, right?

But I was most proud of the fact that I was down at least $50 combined on both tables and yet managed to come back and finish ahead. Usually if I’m down for the night, I’m down for the whole night, either stewing far too much about the bad beat I took (tonight’s specialty was losing to a pair of 3s with KQ and top two pair despite me betting the shit out of the hand when he spiked his set on the river) or playing with my balls shrunk up to my stomach because I don’t want to finish further down for the night.

Sure, I hit quads on the turn with MY pair of 3s and got insane action on the hand. That helped a lot with the comeback.
But mostly I made a tough call.

• • •

Playing a tight style, as I do, seems easier. Dan Harrington in his tournament series even says it’s much better for beginners to play in that style because the energy they expend throughout the tournament is much less than the level needed to be an aggressive player. You don’t face nearly as many tough decisions that way, he said.
That’s true, and yet, playing tight means occasionally you face some incredibly difficult decisions on whether to call.
In order to play tight effectively, you have to be willing to make some tough calls, or even raise, in some difficult situations.

Last night I had A,10 and simply called, as I like to do a little more than I’m willing to admit. When the flop came 10-high with a flush and straight draw out there, I bet it hard. I had two callers.
The next two cards were blanks, or at least they looked like blanks to me, given that there was no way they could have helped the draws. I think one was a 2 of diamonds and the other was the 4 of clubs. I bet it hard again on the turn and then checked on the river, the smart thing to do when you’ve got a medium-strength hand, or at least that’s the way I roll.

Unfortunately, many times, the “play-ahs” at the table see a check on the river as a good opportunity to bluff, and that’s when you have to made a decision while the board is beeping at you.

My opponent, as we were heads up at that point, bet the pot, a stiff bet of $25. I’ve thrown away TPTK many times facing such a bet in the past and been right many times.
But the bet made no sense, unless he had a set, but if he had a set or two pair, even, wouldn’t he of raised me with the draws out there when I bet initially? I figured yes, and that he was bluffing, and I made the tough call.
He was bluffing.

I’m not bragging about the hands. It’s possible, too, that I was already slightly tilting from losing to the 3s and this was a “ah, fuck it” call, and I got lucky. But reading bluffs is probably the biggest way I’ve improved as a poker player in the last two months.
And it’s because I’m willing to make those tough calls now to protect my game as a tight/aggressive player. If you don’t, tight just ain’t right.

• • •

I’ve always loved softball. I played it all through my elementary years and through high school, forgoing baseball (the ball goes too fast) for a more relaxing game that still let me dream about being George Brett for a day.
That’s why, I suppose, I have looked forward to tonight’s game all week, even though I’m 34 and even though it’s coed softball in a novice league.
Our Tribune team is 6-0 and we’ve got a chance to go undefeated for only the third season in the almost 15 I’ve played for the city league.

The good news is we’ve already won our division, so the pressure is off. The bad news is we’re playing the other team that won its division, and I have a sneaking suspicion those players are just better than us. We should, at least, give them a great game.

I plan to go out and play as hard as I can despite puking my guts out at 3 a.m. My first thought was “Oh, no, I might not be able to play,” as if I was a 10-year-old worried about his night trick-or-treating and having to go to school first. Fortunately when I woke up this morning I felt pretty good. Not 100 percent but a lot better than I thought I would. Say 80 percent? 80 percent is good enough for softball.

I have no idea why my stomach decided to believe I was at 28,000 feet climbing Everest, but maybe there is something to that “24 hour flu” everyone talks about getting. I always thought that was an urban legend, as I rarely get sick, like once every five years, but when I do, it usually takes a week of me moaning on the couch for me to recover.
I have to go. There’s only three more hours before I have to leave for tonight’s game.
Then I’ll be on slinging the virtual chips under the cover of darkness, or, at least, my basement.

P.S. Mega props to CC of Quest of a Closet Poker Player for tipping me off to a college student in Greeley who makes almost $10,000 a month playing online poker and appeared in the “Wall Street Journal.” CC's analysis of the new poker laws will not only shine some sun on that little black spot in your heart, it's the best breakdown of what exactly is going on I've read on the Web.

My game plan

OK, after reading through the stories and information online, here's what I'll do:

• Pull all but $50 from my Full Tilt account.
This, of course, assumes that Full Tilt stays in the market.
• Pull all money from other sites such as Poker Room and Hollywood Poker. Those two sites got me started, and I would love to stay, but I have to consolidate at this point.
• Work like hell to work through my Absolute Poker PSO bonus.
When I do that, pull the money out of Absolute Poker.

• Continue to play poker at Full Tilt as often as I possibly can (see above for caveat).
• Continue to read about what others are doing.
• If Full Tilt does pull out, find a site that will accept U.S. players, see if it matches with PSO or VPP and play there.
• Deposit no more than $100 in that site and pull any money I win over $100 from there once a week into Neteller.
An incredible pain in the ass, but right now, until I'm assured that things should be OK, then I'll have to do that.
If I lose that $100, then I do. I've won far too much from online poker to completely just give up. I figure $100 is worth the risk.

• If things do get as bad as the Chicken Littles say they will, then:
— Cry
— Look into setting up an offshore account?
— Fuck it and try to play live poker as much as I can. Any suggestions for finding underground games in your cities? (Actually, I do have some resources here from my reporting; I wonder if I could work them and find games around town).
Also, go up to Black Hawk more often.


What is everyone else doing?

Run like hell or storm the wall?

I have no idea what to do.
Should I accept that the man has won this battle and pull all my money or keep it there and see what happens?
I would love to say fuck you and continue to play.
But I don't want to lose that money either.
Here are some questions that I don't know if anyone can answer:
• Neteller is an offshore account. How, then, do the laws pertain to them?
• Is Neteller solely for poker accounts? Can a bank legally reject a transaction just because the money is PROBABLY for poker?
• Can't Neteller send us a check? Does the company have to act through a wire transfer? So if we just kept the money in Neteller and received checks from them, isn't that a way to skip the law?
• When would the law go into effect? As soon as Bush signs it?
• Is there any real way a bank can pour over every individual account and reject it based on a wire transfer that MIGHT be for poker? I'm not buying it. I really don't think banks want to enforce this law and could care less.

I guess I'll pull money from my fringe accounts. I'm tempted to pull from Full Tilt but I don't want to do that just yet. I'm also tempted to pull from Absolute and screw the PSO bonus. But I also want to see what happens first.

• I really hope this is all much ado about nothing.

• What is everyone else doing?

Bonus whoring, suckouts and a site that isn't the Absolute

Got a bonus for me?
I'm there.
As I've said before, my new Mac notebook now runs Windows, and that's led me go nuts on Poker Source Online.
I've cleared in the bonuses on Party Poker (instant bankroll) and Full Tilt ($50 Best Buy card), and while I continue to work off my $250 deposit bonus at Full Tilt, something that I figure will take me a couple of months, I figured I would work off another quickie at Absolute Poker.

My first, instant impression of Absolute is "eh." This is only after playing maybe 25 hands last night on my neighbor's hijacked wireless connection before I went back to working on my movie of Jayden's first year (I know you're all DYING to see that), but I guess my standards are pretty high, given that I've seen ads on national TV and Mark Seif and others endorse it.
I was shocked to find only one table with 9 players for a $50 NLHE cash game. I had to settle for a six-person ring game, and it's going to be difficult to clear 400 hands at those (.50 or more rake equals one hand). It was late, granted, but it was also Saturday night.
Do you Absolute players notice this or was I just drunk and didn't know it?
The interface seems confusing to me, too. It's possible that I'll clear my PSO bonus and maybe $50 of my deposit bonus and then just skedaddle. I'd rather play on Full Tilt, and there's too many other Web sites I haven't tried, like Poker Stars.

I didn't look, but it's possible Absolute has more games at $1/2 limit, which I could try. I prefer NL. It seems to me that limit takes a lot of the essential elements out of the game, including bluffing, betting and pushing drawers off their hands, but that may sound to you like the comments of an inexperienced limit player. It's also possible that my extremely tight game is more suited to limit and I just don't know it yet.

Speaking of my game, I am paying more attention to position and attempting to bluff more than ever. I'm attempting to switch up my game, which is solid, effective and winning but far too predictable to move up to the higher limits, as I hope to do one day. There will be growing pains, but the other day I did win a hand I shouldn't have with K,A, and there's something about bluffing a player off a hand that gives you satisfaction, as the Stones would say. When your AA holds up, you're more relieved or vindicated, not thrilled.

And speaking of my game, it's been a frustrating three weeks. I don't want to sound whiny, but I've been mostly card dead, and when I do get a monster, my patience is rewarded by having my opponent hit his two-outer on the river. Waaaaaaaaaaa, I know, I know, but when it happens a lot, poker loses its luster a bit.

I'm proud of the way I've handled the losses, however. In the past, I would stew about suckouts for days, bitching about the unfairness of it all. Now I realize that suckouts and bad luck are just part of the game. Dan Harrington mentioned in one of his brilliant tournament books that we tend to forget about the times we're extremely lucky. I've learned more from Harrington than any other pro, and he's right. My suckout to sucked-out ratio is still unfairly high, and yet that tells me I'm playing well for the most part and getting my money in with the best of it. If I keep playing like that, ultimately I'll win, even if I lose money in a three-week period (maybe more, the losing streak, however mild, ain't over yet).

It's helped me keep a clear head. When I had my full house lose to a higher full house because the guy hit his two-outer on the river in a cash game, in the very next hand I was dealt A,Q and a guy to my left when all in for his last $30. Some would look at this as a "golden" opportunity to get your money back, but I folded, and I doubt I had him beat. Medium-sized losses don't have to become big ones.

And speaking of clear heads (I'm speaking a lot, aren't I?), I went for a 10-mile run today, and that really helps clear the head. It was wonderful, and I'm in good shape for the half marathon in November. I'm not even tired. I'm thinking about doing a marathon, actually, but geez that's a long way to run.

And speaking of suckouts, my fantasy team just lost a 50-point lead when my opponent had two players going and I had Carson Palmer. Santana Moss scored three TDs, LaMont Jordan got a TD and Palmer sucked and fumbled twice, meaning he cost me about as many points as he scored.
Now THAT'S a two-outer.
Suckouts just don't happen in poker.

How much is it?

I've never said that at an online poker table, but I probably would, if the amount wasn't placed next to the call button.
After messing around on Party Poker for a bit, or just enough to collect my Poker Source Online bonus, I've started working on a bonus from Full Tilt.
Now I hated Party Poker, as I've said before.
But I love Full Tilt.
Right away I could tell the games would be more challenging when a guy re-raised me with 9,9, pushing me off my JJ, in a cash game. I play $50 NL cash games, and for the most part, on the Mac Web sites, Hollywood Poker and Pokerroom (I know I should link these but nah), if a guy re-raises you, you can count on KK or AA.
You could argue that his play was a donkey move. I prefer to think of it as a good, aggressive way to make money from a pocket pair that is difficult to play post-flop. Had I re-raised him I'm sure he would have folded. Had I called I'm sure he would have played it cautiously. I folded because of what I've faced in the past.
Now I'll have to re-adjust my game.
And the biggest re-adjustment, I'm ashamed to admit, will be paying more attention to a player's image.
Through my two-tabling, chatting with or bugging other bloggers (hi, drizz!) and watching poker on TV, I have devoted maybe 25 percent of my attention to each table I play.
Unfortunately, or perhaps extremely fortunately, I've still managed to book solid winning sessions most of the time, or at least enough to show a decent profit every month.
I do this, of course, by playing tight, aggressive, ABC poker.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that won't work on Full Tilt.
A guy to my left raised me continually throughout the night my first time on, pushing me off marginal hands that normally would take down pots on the other sites. I was down $15, mostly because I folded to his aggressively play. When I got A,J, I called yet another raise from him, about 4x the BB, his standard.
Now I never usually call with A,J in a cash game. There's no reason to, in my mind.
But this time I called. I even thought about re-raising, but I wasn't prepared to go to town with it. Yet.
When a J-high flop hit, with two diamonds, I bet about half the pot, and he re-raised me. I knew he would, and I decided right then and there that my TPTK, a hand I would normally toss to a re-raise, was good.
I raised him back. When he pushed (he had me covered by at least $75), I called.
He had a diamond draw and did not hit his flush. I won a $75 pot and wound up finishing up $20 for the night.
I paid attention and it paid off.
Last night, my second time on Full Tilt, twice I folded A,J with a J-high flop after he re-raised after my re-raise. I'm pretty sure I was beat there but I wouldn't know for sure.
I was watching ESPN.
There are still bad players on Full Tilt, some of them really bad. Last night I took $30 off a guy who played Q,4 os against my AA.
But it takes some attention to recognize them.
So I"ll still chat, as I enjoy that, and maintaining those relationships with the poker folk is definitely beneficial to my game.
But no more TV. Maybe, for now, no more two tabling.
And the Professional Poker Tour will have to accept 25 percent of my attention.
The rest I'm turning to the table.

Let's ban fantasy football too then

Five reasons why fantasy football and online poker are the same:

• I don't have to go to some bash on some boat to play it, even though I really, really, really, really, really want to but my budget won't allow it (that and my wife and possibly the 1-year-old would have looked like Linda Blair pre-Exorcist had I asked her after being gone so much this summer climbing).

• They take more luck than we want to admit, especially us "educated" players who hate, say, the guy who takes, say, Drew Brees in the first round and crushes your team with Terrell Owens and Steve Smith and Shaun Alexander as receivers (strictly a hypothetical, that's not me). Does this sound familiar with a guy holding A,5 against your A,K?

• It's really, really fun when it's going well and really, really crappy, almost tedious, when it's not.

• I say Who-hoo! when I'm doing well, as I did Sunday, when my team scored 91 points.

• It's a little geeky, but in a hip sort of way.

Bonus reason: Both go better with beer.

Fall is here, and that's really cool

Now that I’ve accepted the end to the summer climbing season, I had a wonderful run Sunday morning.
It was the perfect morning, the kind of morning you only get in the fall.
Climbing in September can be as addictive as crack to mountaineers. The changing leaves are a reason, but mostly it’s because of the weather.
Fall arrived this weekend, and it’s already creating some welcome weather.
The weather was bad this fall, but when it’s good, it’s realllllly good. It’s usually clear and cold, but not too cold.
I planned to go about eight miles Sunday as training for a half marathon I plan to run at Boyd Lake in November. I started out in my running tights (not exactly flattering but wonderful for those cold runs) and a warm top, and my hands were biting at me when I started with my running partner.
We ran down from Northridge to the Poudre Trail, down past the trail, up 83rd Avenue and to 20th and back to Northridge.
As the run progressed, the day slowly got warmer, as if it was camped under a small, blue, gas flame. By the end, I was sweaty and almost hot, but just in time for the run to be over.
The mountains to the west looked gorgeous, with deep, white snow coating their tops. The clear, cold weather gave us a good view, something you just don’t see in the summer, when smog and ozone gets clogged in the warm air, obscuring their view.
Once you accept the fact that fall is here, it doesn’t take long to really enjoy it.

Goodnight season

This is dedicated to “Goodnight Moon,” one of 1-year-old Jayden’s favorite books.

Goodnight, climbing season.
Goodnight snow.
Goodnight weather that makes the wind blow.
Goodnight frustration.
Goodnight forecasts.
Goodnight summer, which really didn’t last.
Goodnight granola bars.
Goodnight sunlight.
Hello time with the little guy day and night.
Goodnight equipment, stashed out of sight.
Goodnight ruined plans - I’ve got no more fight.
Hello long runs so I’ll be ready.
For some snowshoeing and skiing come January.


P.S. Hello poker, time to play
So my aces can get cracked another day

Worst. Champion. Ever.

Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.
Poker really doesn't need this. Poker is more popular than ever, but it's still kind of a sleazy game, so it still needs all the good publicity it can get. They're trying to ban what made it so popular, after all.
And so who do we have currently representing our game in prime time all over sport's biggest station?
No, unfortunately, it's not Allen Cunningham.
We've got Jamie Gold.
Ugh.

You could sort of excuse the flap with his promise to split half his winnings. Yeah, it's kind of sleazy, but it was bound to happen one of these days, with every player who didn't make it in through an Internet tournament or satelite backed by someone. And you could sort of excuse the fact that he's a geeky, shallow, smarmy person. This year's tournament was loaded with them, the result of too many Internet players in Mom's basement apartment. Heck, at least Eric Molina didn't win (I bothered to look up his name this time).

But the guy is SUCH a douchebag. So many times on ESPN yesterday I hid my head in a pillow. All that talking, telling players what he has and then pretending he was sorry to knock out another player.
"I said top top," he said to one player. "I'm sorry."
"I told him what I had," he said later.

These are exactly the kind of players I hate, in my poker game and my softball game. I'll slide cleats first into them without a second thought.
Gold has to be poker's most embarassing main event champion since Robert Varkonyi.
And I hesitate to say this because at the least, Varkonyi is good family man, a humble, nice guy who got Phil Hellmuth's head shaved. How can you not like him? He said at the main event this year they had a baby, and last year he stood by and supported his wife all the way to her cash in the tournament. I'd leave my 1-year-old with Varkonyi for babysitting.
I'd walk through fire to snatch him from Gold's arms.

My finger was in my throat the whole time they were doing the Gold story about his father. The soft piano music. The close-ups of Gold's sincere face. The tears.
Yes, it's a sad story, but I just don't buy that all of Gold's money is going to his Dad. Why fight to keep half his winnings then? His father may be dead before that money is released.

I suppose we've gotten lucky in the past. Joe Hachem and Greg Raymer were great champions. Even Moneymaker did a lot for the game by promoting the idea that anyone could win. He's embarassing himself now in those commercials, but they paid him a lot of money, I'm sure, so who can blame him for doing them?
Gold just makes me shake my head, a guy who thinks he's a great player and doesn't realize that he hit the run of his life.
Here's to seeing him get knocked out next year.

• • •

I haven't written much about football, even though I love it, because I'm a Chiefs fan, and I went to the University of Kansas. We're not talking powerhouses here. The Chiefs put on an inspiring 9-6 overtime loss Sunday.
So, yes, I love football, but I'll just keep quiet about it for now.
My fantasy team is pretty good. I've finished first in my league twice, second once and fourth once in six years.
I just made a brilliant roster move. I picked up a kicker to cover for Vinateri in case he can't kick (and how hurt, really , do you have to be to not kick a football). Except he's on his bye weeks.
Nice.

• • •
Now that my new MacBook runs Windows, I'll slowly work through Poker Source Online bonuses and then stick with the ones I like. So far Party Poker isn't going to make the cut, and that has nothing to do with the fact that I lost huge pots last night with A,Q and A,A against 10,9 and 3,4 when both hands flopped trips. And no I didn't slow play them. And you have to come to my house to collect your $1.
I just don't like the software, the poor customer service and all the bugs. But I do like the PSO bonus and free money.
I've played 250 raked hands there. Once I reach 1,000 I may move on.

Mountaineering can mean pretty leaves as well as a summit

I scraped my first windshield of the season Sunday.
A thick coat of frost stuck to my car as my wife, Kate, and I walked out of the Alpine Inn, a quaint place we found in Gunnison a few hours after ditching my attempt to climb Vermillion.

That’s right. The climbing season might very well be over.

Fall is here, and in the San Juans, it appears, the cold and snow is leapfrogging fall and right into winter.

A windy, cold and unforecasted snowstorm knocked out my plans to climb the high 13er, what us climbers call a Centennial because it’s one of the highest 100 peaks in the state, near Silverton. It also may just end my season. I’m sick of fighting the weather every weekend — as I’ve already said, this was the fifth weekend in a row of bad weather — and I’ve only got this weekend before I can expect a path to a high summit without a lot of snow.

Driving home Sunday was, in a sense, as painful as the trip up would have been, as the skies were blue and crystal clear, featuring the kind of weather that makes mountaineers weep in gratitude.

But I left this weekend feeling like I had a good trip instead of crying over another lost chance to climb.
Kate, my wife, went with me, and we got to do see some of the best leaves I’ve seen in my life.

The best place we saw was over Monarch Pass on U.S. 285 outside of Poncha Springs. So that could mean by the time you make plans to go see it, that color might be over. The second-best place was over Red Mountain Pass just outside of Ouray, and even though the color was spectacular up there, it still has potential, and I’m guessing this weekend would be eye-popping.

We stayed in the Box Canyon Lodge in Ouray, where we could soak in several hot springs tubs. When I woke up Saturday morning, after reading a forecast of clear but cold and windy weather, the rain pattered against the window of my room. I couldn’t believe it. We drove up to Red Mountain pass anyway, thinking I could get a late start on the peak, and the mountains looked like ice cream cones, with harsh weather topping them like whipped cream.

Um, no.

But it didn’t seem to matter too much, once I got over my initial grumbling.
The drive up to the pass was beautiful, the kind of sights you only get to see three weeks out of the whole year. I still got to share with Kate many of my favorite adventures when I was chasing the 14ers, including the fun, 4WD road up to Mount Sneffels, Ouray’s king of the mountains, that I drove in hurricane-like weather the night before I planned to climb it, only to find starry skies at 3 a.m. when I got up from the back seat of my car to go to the bathroom.

On the way home, Kate said, “I want to go back next year.” She looked relaxed. It was good to get out of town and have a break from our little guy. And she realized, just like I discovered many years ago, that we are lucky to live in Colorado.

We started planning out next year as we drove back. We could stay a couple days in Lake City, where I staked my “base camp” the week I climbed five 14ers in a week and attempted a sixth (Sneffels the first time, when a thundersnowstorm drove me off). We could then go back to Ouray and get Vermillion. Maybe we could even bring Jayden, who would be 2 by then and might enjoy the sights.

Sometimes my most important mountaineering adventures, I am constantly reminded, come when I don’t even sniff a chance at making the summit.


Here are a few photos of the leaves and the snow later on. Check out the rainbow at the place we stayed Friday night. The hot springs were nice, too:

Embarassing on ESPN

Well, I was pretty embarassed for poker last night during ESPN's World Series of Poker broadcast.
We live in an agricultural community out here in Weld County, Colorado, on the edge of both the mountains and the plains, but I saw far more jackasses last night than I have in my seven years here.
I can't remember all the names. They all run together anyway, and I don't want to spend one brain cell more on them anyway.

My favorite was the guy in the Sugar Ray "I just wanna fly" sunglasses who berated a player for calling an all-in with A,10 (correctly, but still...) and then called later with 6,5 os and a board that matched about as well as my junior high school outfits.
Norman Chad actually had some good lines last night berating the beraters. "How did you get here unsupervised?" was my favorite to a "How could you call that?"


I don't blame ESPN for showing all the sparks. It's entertaining.
But it's also embarassing to the game. All those hat/sunglasses/iPod dipshits thinking they're Phil Ivey, going all in with shit and then acting like it's the greatest move since the Stop N Go. Jamie Gold couldn't have come off as more of a douchebag if he gave off the slight odor of vinegar and baby powder. Even Jeffrey Lisandro, a classy, tough player, talked about taking off the head of a tournament director.

When do we get back to poker?

Poker is not the nicest game. I realize that. The objective is to take the other person's money. You do this through deception, trickery, bullying, besting or outright lying. But it's a beautiful, interesting, thoughtful game as well. And we don't need to muck it up any further by focusing on all the asses. There are plenty of classy players who, by the way, play a wonderful game, like, I don't know, Allen Cunningham. It would be nice to see a few more hands from him instead of brief clips of him dragging a pot or two.

My theory on all these guys is poker is basically for dorks, geeks and video game whizzes who have found a new itch to scratch. Before you flame me, yes, I include myself in that group, although I think the mountain climbing and running gets me out of the basement every once in a while. Many of you have kids or softball or gardening or something else.
These guys currently making a fool of themselves on ESPN don't seem to have anything else.

Suddenly these guys find themselves doing something somewhat cool and hip. There's a spotlight on them. They've never felt that before. So they have no idea how to act.

In the future, ESPN, can you please focus on those who do?

Scraping by on the SnG short stack

One of my best traits at the poker table is my ability to sip on a short stack until the money comes in a SnG.
It is unfortunately, something I've had a lot of practice doing.
I'm fine with that. I prefer to wait for good starting hands instead of think I'm Phil Ivey and shove my chips in with, say, A,4, as many of my opponents prefer to do, at least at the levels I play ($10 + $1 is my highest stake, but I've started to play those more frequently).
Actually, I don't even think Phil Ivey does that.
Anyway, probably half the time I play, I find myself nursing a short stack and waiting for a good opportunity.
You probably do to, if you're like me and:
• You fail to catch a fish
• You fold to most raises and refuse to get involved early on in the game unless you've got a hand you simply can't fold
• You are satisfied with cashing most of the time instead of taking chances so you can win
• You bluff sporadically but not enough to steal more than once per orbit
• You get a cold run of cards
• You suffer at least one suckout (par for me in an SnG is at least once, usually when something like my A,K loses to 10,3 sooted)
• You think patience, rather than aggression, gets you more money in an SnG (anyone who believes differently can look at my 67 percent ROI according to Sharkscope and see how they match up)
So, you've played good poker and you've been rewarded by having half as many chips as three of the other world-class poker players who doubled up by playing J,10; Q,K and 5,5 to a raise, respectively, the last guy tripling up when he went all-in against QQ and KK and spiked his 5 on the river.
Here's a few tips on how to make the money. This is mostly the same as Harrington's low-M stragety and his short-stack advice in his latest, Vol. III. But read on because you may offer a few more tips after mine here.
• When you're in, you're all in - Your equity gives you a good reason to push with hands like 9,8 soooted or Q,10 if your M drops below 5. On the bubble, most players won't take a chance of getting crippled unless they've got a monster, and if they do, well, there's nothing you can do.
But...
• Don't call an all-in unless you either have a great read on a guy, and you might by this time, or you have a 10-percent hand like AA, AK sooted, KK or maybe QQ and JJ. Anything beyond that and you're likely in a coin flip, unless, again, you think the guy is a maniac.
But....
• Trust your instincts. In fact, players become chip leaders in SnGs because they're idiots, took chances and got lucky. If you have A,10 and you're against one of those players, and you're really short, call. Occasionally you have to take a chance to win at SnGs.
However...
• If you do call a maniac, or you push all-in because you're close to gasping for air, try to push with a hand that won't be dominated. Avoid hands like A,4, where someone will mostly likely call with any A, leaving you dominated. Try to push with, say, Q,10 or possibly 9,8, giving you a greater chance for a pair.
Also, if you get a pair, any pair, run with it if you're below 4.
And...
• Don't wait until you're almost dead to push. Your equity is your best weapon. If you have an M of 2, all you're doing is pricing someone into calling you. You have to have the chips to hurt someone if they call. If you do, most of the time, they won't call, and you've stolen some significant blinds.
Finally....
• Once you're in the money, you can loosen up, but only slightly. I can't tell you how much extra money I've won because players go back to their usual "Hey, I've got Q,5, I'm pooooshing here" and knocked themselves out. Obviously push if you have to, but don't just go all-in on the next hand because you've barely doubled your buy-in with third.
Good luck riding that short stack.

A reminder

Kinda frustrated right now.
After a week of beautiful weather for climbing, it's depressing, damp and dingy outside, and that's kinda how I feel on the inside. The forecast calls for a 60 percent chance of rain, which, all you poker players now, means 100 percent chance you will get sucked out on if you are ahead that far. It also means 100 percent rain, basically, in the mountains, or storms or snow. A high of 35. Winds up to 25 mph.

Does that sound fun to you?
Me either.
So I'm staying home unless the forecast changes.

People ask me if my climbing has changed since I had Jayden. Not really, I tell them. I still do dangerous routes.
But this has changed me in this way: Before I'd be more willing to just risk it and see if the weather suddenly got better. Now if I'm going to spend that much time away from him — usually climbing is at least a 12 hour day when you factor in the driving — I want a decent shot at the peak.
It doesn't sound like I'm going to get even that.

I may regret it tommorow, but I'm not going unless I pull a three-outer and the weather clears. As the forecast just keeps getting worse, I doubt it will happen.

Sigh.

• • •

I'm not a "God Bless the U.S.A." kind of guy. I think Bush is probably our Worst. President. Ever. I really hate the war in Iraq. And now they want to ban online poker. Hmph.

But I wrote this editorial for the Tribune that will run Sunday, and I believe every word of it. I hope you enjoy it and have a good weekend.



It’s still painful to see clips from what was one of our worst days in America’s history.

Even five years later, seeing that second plane slam into the innocent World Trade Center sends a spike through our hearts. If you catch any video of those people jumping out of the buildings, chances are you still have to avert your eyes. And footage of the collapse of the two towers can still bring tough, brave men from our local fire departments to tears.

But one memory, an important memory, should bring a smile to your face.
We responded with a patriotic flourish we haven’t enjoyed since World War II.

We sang “God Bless America” at ball games. Flag pins, flag shirts and flag hats became hip additions to our wardrobes, as if they were endorsed by fashion gurus from the show “Project Runway.” We even cheered for the hated, rich and somewhat snobby New York Yankees because we knew that city deserved a World Series after taking the kind of punishment no place should ever have to bear.
Most of all, we brought our flags out of the attic, dusted them off and flew them proudly, day and night, as a defiant fist-shake to the cowards who attacked us.

On the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, even for just one day, it’s time to fly them again.

The way we showed our love for our country was something positive out of all the horror. It was proof that good things can come out of unspeakable acts. It was a way to show terrorists that nothing will shake us from our foundations of freedom.

It’s probably safe to say that we always loved our country. We just forgot along the way to show it. Marriages suffer from the same natural tendency to take something so stable, so comfortable and so natural for granted. And yet, just as a heart attack, a car crash or the need for counseling can bring back the affection married couples once shared so freely, watching so many of us die so unexpectedly and without warning made us realize how dangerous it is to assume our country will always be there for us.

It seems funny to fly our flags on a day that was so terrible. After all, we fly our flags on holidays, days that are fun to remember and enjoy and celebrate, such as our nation’s independence.

Fly our flags on Sept. 11, then, to celebrate how our nation responded to such a knee-buckling strike.

Fly our flags to celebrate that patriotism and keep it in the backs of our minds.

Fly our flags to celebrate how one of our worst days soon became some of our best.

We now interrupt this blog...

(Let's pretend I have on a tacky checkered suit, a sweaty handshake and a bad haircut).

HEY! GREAT BLOG! I LOVE IT, REALLY, I DO, GRRRRREAT STUFF.

FOR THE LATEST IN CASINO ACTION AND OTHER ANNOYING ADS, GO TO WWW.QUITPOSTINGSHITONMYBLOGINTHECOMMENTSSECTION.COM.

Freerollin'

I got my new laptop, a Mac Book that is my reward for a long summer of guiding, and so I spent Friday figuring that out rather than play poker.

Except that I did play one game, telling myself it would be a nice reward for a day of watching Jayden and figuring out the new computer.

And I played another $10 + $1, 30-person SnG, figuring I was freerolling for the week after my $120, first-place win the other night.

And I took second.
And won another $85.

You ever start avoiding the poker table because things are going too well? Like you figure variance is gonna kick you in the nuts one of these days?

I'm going for a hike Labor Day.

I just don't want to mess with karma right now.

Get a goal and get off your butt (so sayeth the Fitness God)

I've decided to pimp myself a bit more. I'm posting this story just because I think you'd enjoy it and I like to share what I'm doing for the Greeley Tribune.
Plus a lot of you are great writers and I like your thoughts on the craft.
Here's the story

• • •

We're also blogging now for the Tribune, as per our editors' requirement because without the Internet, we're nothing as a paper now. My editors, surprisingly enough, didn't like the idea of a poker blog. They wanted something that has something to do with my beat.
I cover adventure sports such as mountaineering (I know, shocking) and entertainment, so now I've got a blog about fitness sports, outdoor recreation and running.
So now I get to write blogs like the one I wrote below. I like it, sort of, but it will sound preachy as hell. The message is good, but I sound like fucking Richard Simmons.
Anyway, here goes:

Sometimes the news is so obvious we miss the underlining message behind it.
We're getting fatter, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Obesity now exceeds 25 percent in 13 states, and 31 states reported a rise in obesity.
I know. You’re shocked. Health officials have wagged a collective, fried finger in our face for a few years now, saying that our taste for triple-decked desserts, portions the size of Kentucky and sitting on our butt will continue to plump us up more than a turkey before Thanksgiving.
But did you notice something else? Colorado, our state, is the thinnest.
We’re not Olive-Oyl thin, so let’s not get cocky about it. But we’re still the thinnest.
Why? Well, to me, it’s obvious, even if my answer will appear incredibly self-serving (but a blog is pretty self-serving, too, so deal with it).
We have mountains here.
That’s it. The mountains mean our state offers far more recreational opportunities than most other states, and trail for trail, we probably have more recreational opportunities here than any other state. In fact, we probably have more things to do here that involve a little sweat and a lot of fun than all the southern states combined (and all those states were the fattest).
You don’t have to get high, like I do (anything above 13,500 is my preference), to enjoy the mountains. There’s fishing, hunting, boating, hiking, wildlife watching, leaf gazing, star searching, camping, skiing, snowboarding and mountain biking, and all of those activities are better in the mountains. If you combine that with the trail running, recreational sports such as softball (the Trib’s coed team is 2-0, who-hoo!) and biking already available in other sports, there’s really no excuse for not getting enough exercise in this state.
And exercise, dear reader, is why I can eat whatever I want and still weigh as much as I did in high school.
It’s hard to stay motivated to exercise when we don’t have any motivation other than a stern health official clucking her tongue at us. It’s easy, however, to work out when you know you’ve got something waiting for you.
I wouldn’t work hard nearly as hard if I didn’t have the mountains to motivate me to stay in shape to climb them.
You want to keep the weight off? Find a goal. Say you’ll hike Flattop in Rocky Mountain National Park by the end of the year. Say you’ll bike the Poudre Canyon. Say you’ll ski a black diamond.
Say you’ll start to appreciate Colorado’s mountains, a big reason why this is the best state in the lower 48.
And say hello to the thousands of state residents who have already used the mountains as a motivating tool to stay fit.

• • •

So, the point is good. Just one activity can motivate you to get or stay in shape.
Look at what softball has done for Drizz. Dude looks like Hulk Hogan, so I've heard.
Look at what gardening has done for Felicia. Girl looks like that chick on the Bravo show "Work out."
Look at what bowling has done for Low Limit Grinder. The guy is the next Walter Ray Williams Jr.

Or, at least, they are in better shape than many. Some? At least that.

• • •

Poker? Oh, yeah. I won a $10 SnG last night and a $5 SnG last night.
Things are going so well right now. Mostly I'm getting good hands but I've picked off several bluffs in a row. The dudes seem to think that going all in when the board doesn't seem to match their bet and they didn't raise will scare me off, especially when I'm chip leader.
Sorry, think again. Nice play with Q,8 though.
Mostly, my lesson here is by bonus chasing a little too much, my cash game had grown really, really stale, and I played it far too much. I'm refocused now by playing strictly SnGs this week.
The lesson? Always mix it up, and switch to another when one isn't going well.

Have fun this Labor Day. The Jman is teething about seven pearly whites right now so the nights are a little rough these days. Being a parent will get you in shape and out of shape at the same time.