Chris Halverson’s Blog

The only poker that I have played all week was about 30 minutes last night with Mrs. H before the Alias season finale. We played 1-2 HE using coins as 1 “unit”. My result:

-20 units

Nice

My wife wanted to play a little bit so she could learn the betting rounds and such. It was suckout city and play things to the river. We played where we would always flip over the cards so that I could help her out a bit. Classic hand #1: I have two pair (board paired and I had pocket pairs). I’m betting out, she’s calling all the way down. Calls me on the river and says, “Well, I didn’t get my flush, you win.” I look at her cards and she got trips on the river. I push the “chips” her way. Want another? OK. I have mid-pair on a scary board. She doesn’t bet so I figure I’m good. I bet out on the river and she calls thinking I’m trying to buy it. She say, “Ace high, I didn’t make my straight.” I look and say, “You’re right sweetie, you made an Ace high flush” and push the chips her way again.

I had to “rebuy” to stay in the game. She busted me in 15 minutes I started to make a little comeback, but then the show started and she “won”. Oh boy, the potential home game could be interesting…

Scott, just for you:

That’s right, I’m going to go see The Gourds on June 2. What’s odd is that I have never even heard any of their stuff except the widely circulated Gin & Juice cover. Oy! Of course, not only was I called out by TFG, I was told to go by reknown music critic Jack Sparks. Oh man! Then Henry says that they are his favorite group.

What’s a guy to do? You go buy a $5 ticket to a concert. Hell, it’s only $5. I’ll spend more for lunch that day and throw that much away chasing a ten high flush to the river that night. I may as well go and hear some good music. If I’m lucky I’ll meet Sparks and we can plan our getaway to Scott’s shindig in August.

Scott has already turned me onto the Old 97’s (who will be in Austin, TX on July 23!), who now rank as some of my favorite music, as well as Hank III, who has some pretty damn good songs too. If Scott and Henry give the Gourds the thumbs up, how can I resist.

What does this teach you? If you bug me enough in public to do something, I will probably end up doing it. Astute readers such as Iggy and Felicia have already figured this out. All they do is say, “Poker Blogger Tournament on Sunday” and I dutifuly show up to donate my money.

Just so you see how excited people are about the Gourds, here’s Jack Spark’s take on going to see the Gourds:

drop your cocks and pull up your socks…Wednesday, June 2nd…First Avenue…Mainroom…The Fucking Gourds, from Austin, Fucking, Texas…indeed, the honkies will be tonkin’ that night…men will leave home, tense and angry, and the knots in their trapezia will magically leave them as they sway to the strange, weird, and often creepy lyrics of the last hillbilly band on earth…the BEST band on earth…it’s pretty hard for me to be objective about The Gourds…but, you need to know that Wednesday, June 2nd, will be an absolute waste of fucking time in your life if you don’t go to First Avenue to watch this show…it’ll be like getting your ass kicked by a cow…

Hell ya! I can’t wait! I’m now on a quest to see if any local stores have any Gourds music so that I can listen to them a bit before I show up. I’ll be a hayseed yet!

OK this really doesn’t belong in the poker category, but some of you just subscribe to that feed, so…

I’ve got my web cam back up and running. If you’ve every wondered what a slightly bored Java programmer looks like during the day, feel free to check it out. I’ll try to make sure it’s up during the week from now on. I did this for a few months then I lent the camera to somebody and I just got it back. I know, major excitement It’s not full motion, just new images every 10 seconds. Also remember, this is at my office, so if I don’t look “happy” it because, well, I’m at work.

My Web Cam

Last night on of our local TV stations had a 5 minute “Extra” on the poker phenomenon. They sent one of their reporters to Canterbury to interview a few people and to talk about the game in general. They talked with Paul Allen, the horse track announcer and host of a popular sports radio talk show here in town, who also hosts a celebrity tournament every month. All in all a pretty decent piece and you get to see plenty of inside shots of Canterbury. It’s pretty much a fluff piece, but it’s meant for the general audience. Yes, you can listen to a “grandma” talk in a stereotypical Minnesota accent
Go see it at Kare11.com or if you don’t want to give them the hits, you can view it from my site (joy, another possible copyright violation ). I don’t have a streaming server or anything, so you’ll have to download it (18MB) first. You can stream it from the news site, but I downloaded it for posterity.

Does this mean that poker has officially jumped the shark?

Poker

I swear, Minnesota coming alive poker wise. If you haven’t seen, there’s a 20 year old Minnesota guy on 2+2 doing a challenge: $60K in 60 Days. He just posted days 6 and 7. So far he’s up $6500 and right on track.

Intro and Day 1

Days 2 & 3

Days 4 & 5

Days 6 and 7

I keep seeing more and more MN people on 2+2. See, we’re not all hicks out here in flyover land.

Iggy and HDouble are on their way to Vegas. I’m very jealous. Enjoy the scotch and raise a drink for me. We hope you kill ‘em out there and represent us well.

Haven’t seen anybody post this article, but it’s an interesting one from a tournament pro. Simon ‘Aces’ Trumper talks about the grind. For those of you who saw “Poker Kings” on TV a couple of weeks ago, you’ll recognize him. The Tournament Poker Rollercoaster. The gist: Not everybody makes money and it’s easy to go broke.

Speaking of “Poker Kings”, didn’t you just love Hellmuth on that show? Unreal. They show him on camera talking to somebody saying (paraphrasing): “Yeah, this show started out talking about 4 other people but it’s ending up to be 50% about me, just like I kew it would.” LOL.

No poker for me yet this week I’m still in “school work” mode (well, and playing with WordPress, see below). Probably tomorrow or for sure this weekend
WordPress

Wow. That’s all I can say. I’m really, really liking WordPress. I installed and imported in all my MT entries in literally 10 minutes. Another hour and I re-wrote my macros (pokerhand and another that I use for abbreviations for poker blogs) in PHP and made them “real” plug-ins. And they just worked. Now I just need to get the look and feel done and I’ll probably cutover. The speed is as good or faster than MT with no damn rebuild. I hate the rebuild step, it’s ridiculous. PHP is built into my Apache server so there is very little overhead to have dynamic content. In addition to that, I am able to create cruft-free URLs easily which is something I have wanted to do for a while. Also the auto-creation of various RSS feeds is nice. MT 3.0 doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of new featuers other than TypeKey which is of dubious value anyway, so I see little value in staying with them. You cannot download 2.661 from their site anymore, so if you want to install now, you have to use the new version. It’s up to about a 95% chance that I’ll switch to that soon depending on how easy I can move my “look” over. Either that or soon I’ll have a new one look.