WTF…After reading about how great the Old 97’s were at The Fat Guy a couple weeks ago I “obtained” a few tracks. I must admit, I like it. Oh man, does this mean I’m turning into a country music fan? sigh I normally listen to things like Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein and the like, but tonight found myself humming “On a bust, on a bust, on a busted afternoon”. Unreal.
It’s been unbelievably cold here (MSP) for the last week or so, isn’t that right Scott? 
Here’s what my car showed me on the way to work this morning (crappy picture from my cell phone):
With the wind chill it feels like -46. Unreal.
Supposed to be -12 tonight, good night to stay in and go fishing
After a couple nights of writing about the differences between multi-tasking and multi-threading and writing some quick little multi-threaded GUI apps for class, I decided to fire up ‘ol Empire and see how it goes.
Tonight was up and down. Like MeanGene, I fired up two tables. I agree with him, I think playing keeps my focus on the poker itself. Yes, it’s split between two tables, but I’m actually paying attention to the games. While playing one table I find myself wandering: watching TV, surfing the web, etc. Playing two tables makes that much more difficult. Had the ‘ol “up on one table, down on the other” syndrome tonight. Ended up down $3. Bad beat this, bad beat that. Just kidding. Got rivered a couple of times, but they did not get free cards. I was able to buy a couple of pots and worked the jam a bit but I need to go and re-read Izmet. I’ll have to look back at the stats, but I was very conscience about my starting hands and only played good ones, even some suited connectors this time! I also concentrated on getting out if the board told me to. Called one hand to a bet on the river when there were a couple of overcards (I had four to a flush on the flop), but just didn’t think the guy had the cards when he bet. I was right that time, but of course got sucked out a couple other times.
The upside is that I cleared my latest Empire bonus, so that helps. Got a long way to go to become a VIP member though
I’d just like to say a big “Thanks” to 
). He’s right, it is tough to do this every day and have it be anything close to entertaining. Well, of course, this is probably not all that entertaining, but hopefully it’s semi-useful for others. Plus, if you can hang in here until April there’ll be a Vegas bachelor party trip report to read
Learn to labor and to wait. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
One of the most important aspects of poker is patience. The labor part? Grinding away at 50/1 hoping not to get sucked out on the river for the 43rd time in a session.
I’m just looking back at the last couple of weeks and am noticing some things about my play. One of the first things is that while I talk about the ram and jam here, at times I don’t do it enough. This is directly related to general aggression. Basically I am not being aggressive enough when I have good cards. I have come to notice that if I have the upper hand (so to speak), I tend to let people off with free cards. As we all know, free cards == infinite odds. This is not a good thing. The worse thing is that the other day I did it a couple of times when I had the nut flush draw going on the turn. I checked around and four of us saw the river. Ug! Yes, I missed my flush, but a bet on the turn probably would have knocked out a couple of people (maybe all). It was one of those hands where I sat there and as soon as I clicked “Check” I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to click “Bet $1”. One dollar. See below.
Another big hole for me right now is suited connectors. I’m not talking the typical :party: “play any s00ted cards”, I’m talking legit suited connectors. I don’t like them. I really get nervous when I get these (not including big slick suited, that’s easy). I have read Abdul’s pre-flop strategy and I still don’t like them (I need to read that and Izmet again, and again). To tell you the truth I’m not sure why. For some reason I think that they are not worth much, but in reality they are. I need to adjust my play to incorporate suited connectors again. Once again, I’m not sure why I think a flush draw is a better chance than a straight draw, but looking at my play that’s exactly what is happening. In some ways I’m taking
Iggy reminded me that I need to quit thinking about the money. I hit a big downswing over the last couple of weeks which led me to change my point of view of my bankroll. Playing with scared money led me to change how I thought about my bankroll. I need to stop thinking about the money and play the hand correctly, no matter what. If the odds say I should play the hand, then play the hand. I need to look at it in terms of just being “chips”. It is not money, at least not in the “real” sense. I must get over the mental block of this being money and just play the hand correctly. Even playing straight ABC poker at the low limits still requires you to to get over some of the mental parts of the game, especially when you’re a new player. I don’t get too upset over the bad beats and I try to not to let the downturns affect me too much (after all, poker is just one big session, right?), and I think I’ve done fairly well in that respect. Sometimes the money thing still comes back to bother me. I know it should not bother me, at 90% of the time it doesn’t, but in certain situations it jumps in my face. It didn’t bother me when I was winning, but when I’m losing it started to bother me. Playing scared is not good mentally.
I’m hoping that by bringing these issues up, it will force me to confront them head on and get over my damn self and fix them. There are some semi-serious issues here. Thanks to some pointers I see that a lot of this is mental and that I can get past them if I don’t let it bother me in the first place.
The World Poker Tour just had their version of Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Challenge (CPC) called “WPT Hollywood Home Game”. The players consisted of: Jack Black, Drew Carey, Steve Harris, Aisha Tyler, Fred Savage and Mimi Rogers. Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten were the commentators and Evelyn Ng “dealt” (they actually had the players rotate the deal). In my opinion, this was way better than CPC. First off, the actors actually knew how to play the game which is a huge improvement over CPC where half the people (or maybe all of them on the West Wing episode) didn’t even know the basics.
The graphics are nicer this year. I’m assuming this will be the style of the graphics that they will be using for the upcoming season of the WPT. The one thing that I wish they did was to put the percentages of who is ahead up all the time. They will periodically flash them over ther graphics of what pocket cards the player has, but I would still like to have them up all the time.
They also gave each player a “red card” that allowed them to call in the pros to ask advice. They had Daniel Negreanu and Jennifer Harmon as the pros. They were called in a couple of times and the players took their advice every time and (IIRC) they won every time. I think this was a pretty good idea for this type of game, Daniel and Jennifer got excited and were rooting for their advice to play out. It was kind of fun.
I’m not sure if the WPT is planning on more of these, but if they do, they’ll blow away the CPC, at least if they keep getting the same caliber of players. Overall I thought it was pretty entertaining, much, much better than CPC, not that it’d be that difficult to bet that.