Chris Halverson’s Blog

Poker is an interesting endeavor. There are times where you’re invincible, where you think you could take on Johnny Effing Chan if only you could sit down with him (only one time, waiting patiently for the nuts), times where Phil Hellmuth would be your bitch. Then there are days where you can catch a card to save your life. The majority of your wins are suckouts, high percentage and with the right odds, but suckouts nonetheless. Times where you feel like every two bit newbie who sits down after watching the WPT or WSOP and plays any two sooted will wipe the floor with you.

How’s your poker been going? As you can probably tell, mine has been up and down lately. I had a pretty good night on Monday, but Tuesday night left me wanting. Even on one table, down 8BB on the other. “Tight Chris” was playing last night and it got to the point that if I raised, say with the one time I got rockets UTG, everybody folded around. Joy! Ditto on the other table. Tight Chris still couldn’t catch cards at the right time to make an impact at that table.

My major excitement last night (to me anyway) was when I pulled off a couple check raises Actually, one failed. I rivered a full house in EP and I checked after leading out betting on the turn. The other person in the pot used up almost all their time and then just checked too. Damn. The other time it worked perfectly. I checked in EP, there were four others in the pot and I knew at least one of them would bet. I had the nuts (flush or something, it doesn’t matter) and raised the better and got them all to come along to the river. I led out then fearing a check around. I generally don’t check raise, it’s on the edge of FPS for me, but I had the nuts both times, there was no way I could lose, so I went for it. I still don’t slow play my sets though. They go hard from the get go

I tightened up a bit after I reviewed how I was playing (at least at my Party tables). I was chasing things too much. I’ve beeen playing kind of fast and loose lately, going more on “gut” than odds and such. I know that at the low limit games pot odds aren’t as big a deal, the implied odds from the calling stations make almost any drawing hand worth it, but I had noticed that I was making just terrible calls. Thankfully none of this has hurt me too much. I would win enough to offset them for the most part. I’m not playing dumb, just not as smart as I should be. I’m not worried, nor has my bankroll taken any sort of hit outside normal variance (normal poker variance, thankfully not blackjack variance), so things are still OK. I have enough outside things (family, school, etc.) to get too worked up about poker. Yes, I’m not building up my bankroll by hundreds per day, but I am getting in a hundred or two hands a day and on the whole coming out ahead. Winning 2BB/100 hands and only playing 100 hands doesn’t increase the roll very fast, but I’m worrying more about my play than the money. I figure once I can concentrate on poker I’ll have enough of the skills to really start going to town. That’s when I’ll concentrate on the money side.

On a side note, I started running yesterday. I decided that my fat ass wasn’t getting any thinner sitting on it all day and then at night playing poker, doing school work, etc. I lost about 40 pounds last year dieting, but have since gained about 15 back. I think if I excercise I’ll be able to lose the rest or at least not be so “flabby”. I wouldn’t mind weighing what I do now if I didn’t have a potbelly. I felt like I was going to die, but an hour or so later I felt great. This morning when I woke up at 5AM to go again, I was sore as hell. Ug! I’m only doing about 1.5 miles right now. That’s taking me about 20 minutes and I’m dead afterward. I do feel better a while later though and I’ll get there soon, lowering my times and increasing distance. I’m going to concentrate on the running (or other cardio) for now, I’m in a world of hurt in that area and I think it will go a long way to helping me lose weight and to get into shape.

Well, nothing too much to write home about. Friday night found me at Party where I couldn’t catch a card for about an hour, then went on a little tilt to piss away 5 or 6 BB. Hmm…Let’s try another site and see if it’s better. Nope. Same deal. Can you say, “Chase”? Geez…

Saturday comes along and after doing some housework, homework and other various exciting tasks, I sit down to read some 2+2. I see there’s a new casino to whore so I jump on that. BJ was allowed, but no autoplay, so I have to play through $2500 worth of bets. I setup a table and do 2 $2 bets at a time. About an hour into it I once again am reminded of the variance in blackjack. I deposited $100 and got a $100 match. I was up to $250 at one point, but in the end I cashed out $160 for a pure profit of $60. Not bad. Software was pretty decent too and it was easy to figure out if you cleared the bonus because they actually told you. You didn’t have to do any calculations to figure out if you needed more, you just went to the page and it said, “You’ve cleared the bonus”. Nice. The software was kinda “funny”. The buttons seemed really close to each other and I accidently hit the wrong one a couple of times. The “best” one was when I hit “Double” instead of “Stand” when I had a 17 and I got a 2 and won. Gotta like that I’ve also already got the cashout. This rocks, they’re definitely on my list of “good casinos” to keep going back to if they offer another bonus.

Sunday night found me watching the final table of Fox Sport’s “Championship Poker at the Plaza”. Good stuff. I thought they were going to finish it this week, but there must be at least one more week. If you haven’t seen this, you should try to catch it. FSN replays it about every day so it’s hard to miss. My poker? Yikes. I was down 10BB, then hit a minor rally to finish up 3BB. Decided to try another site and couldn’t find a game at my level that looked good, so packed it in for the night.

School this quarter is going to be super easy. I’m way past the requirements for the course, but there was one area where I didn’t have a lot of experience so I decided not to try to pass out of it. The upside is that it will be super easy, the downside is that it just takes some time.

If anybody knows of any decent Java programming jobs in the Twin Cities, can you let me know? I’m on the lookout now. This is a pre-emptive search, my job now kinda sucks and I got a new boss who is intent on changing my whole career to a new focus. I’m all for learning new things, but I don’t want to totally change now when my expertise is still in demand other places (ie. it’s not like what I know is obsolete, it’s just not our company’s focus). Email me, IM, comment, whatever. Thanks in advance.

Overall, not my best weekend of poker. The casino whoring made up for Friday night though. Hopefully things will be better this week.

Thursday night brings us Celebrity Poker Showdown (or Letdown if you’re Pauly inclined). As I have mentioned before, I don’t actually mind this show. Yes, the poker is basically terrible, but the one thing they do a good job with (despite a certain unnamed wireless company) is showing the social aspects of poker. Yes, it’s totally over the top, but it shows that poker can be fun, even if you’re losing money. This is something that we should encourage

Anyway, you can imagine my glee when I saw that two of my favorite “celebrities” were going to be on: Penn Jillette and Jeff Gordon! I love Penn and Teller. While my favorite racing is Formula 1, if you’re in the US and not a total racing snob, there is no way you cannot watch NASCAR because it’s on for 36 weeks with about 25 different TV shows on during the week in between the races. Needless to say, my favorite NASCAR driver is Jeff Gordon (I’ve got a cap, calendar, die cast, etc.). I was, however, afraid that he’d be the first gone. He looked pretty timid there for a bit, like he didn’t know what he was doing (that’d be a shock on CPS, huh? ) He picked it up quickly though and did some decent plays.

Penn was, as one would expect, totally over the top and it was great. “Jeff Gordon goes all in!!!” His theatrics while playing were hilarious. He would get a rag, then scream out, “YES!” and shake the whole table. He was having a blast and actually playing OK for a while. He was definitely the bully for the first half of the game, but in a broader sense, was more of the social person, keeping everybody having fun. When Gordon busted him I had mixed feelings, but was more happy as it gave him the chip lead In the end it was even better when he won the thing (despite messing up a couple of calls that should have been automatic leading Phil Gordon, no relation, to call him an idiot). I loved it

I think CPS needs more people like Penn on the show. They keep trying to get comedians on there but they always end up being dumb and not funny. Penn was funny the whole time, which was amazing because nobody busted out until it was into the second hour. Penn kept everybody “light”, if I want “serious” poker I’ll watch the WPT and WSOP, CPS is not meant to be serious, but it ends up that way which makes it kind of boring at times. Add totally bad poker to the mix and it ends up bad. Last night’s episode was definitely one of the best IMHO, not necessarily poker wise, but more in the vein of what I think CPS should be. Some OK poker, but more importantly, show that it’s fun to play and that you can have a good time. Poker doesn’t need to be super serious all the time, just go have fun. Of course, that’s what I want the new people to think, sit down and have fun. It doesn’t really matter that all your chips are heading my way, you’re having fun!

Uh, ya, no comment on my poker last night. Two sites, down on both, bad beats, action flops, rigged sites, etc. Actually, I don’t think I played that well, I got caught chasing a couple of times and it hurt. I need to watch that, but it’s that “I’ve folded around 3 orbits, these cards look OK…” syndrome. Tonight is Friday, hopefully it will turn around.

Well, I figured since Toyota is sponsoring every type of “leader” board on the WSOP, maybe I can encourage them to sponsor my blog. I won’t hold my breath, but it may be worth a try…

I had a couple of down sessions at 2/4 over the last few days. Enough to make me drop down to 1/2 for a couple sessions to reinforce that I still did know what I was doing. Thankfully, I was able to take those for 10+BB each time. I had also started reading the Small Stakes forum as well as the continuing with the Micro Limit forum on 2+2 (yes, school has started, but they’ve screwed up something in my lab environment so I can’t even do my homework yet).

After those decent sessions and reading some more I jumped back into the 2/4 lake. I won the fourth hand after I sat down, then two hands later I made a huge mistake. Granted, it could have been worse, but talk about misplaying a hand. As Iggy would say, “Oh the humanity!” Basically, I flopped the nuts and went into weak mode. The problem was that there was a ton of action and I didn’t raise. WTF was I thinking? I was watching the WSOP and talking with my son, but that’s no excuse for not playing the hand correctly. Yes, I won 17BB but was a terrible play. There was absolutely nothing that came on the board to scare me, yet I didn’t do anything. I’m not even going to use the “I was doing other things” excuse as this hand was so obvious that anybody could have played it. Maybe I can delude myself into thinking that by not raising I kept everybody in while I had the nuts, but it still doesn’t work. It was a bad play “poker” wise, yes, I won, but it was bad. Terrible bad, something that even most 50/1 players would have raised with. I’m just glad that I didn’t let it put me on tilt, I’m sure winning helped temper that, but I’m still a bit upset about it.

Thanks to going back to playing as Tight (and more aggressive) Chris, I walked away +43BB. While I got run over by the cards a bit I did play pretty well. After realizing what I did on that big hand I paid more attention and played hard and more correctly. Therefore I pumped hands and pots when I got them and the latter part of the night was still very profitable as well as being played more correctly.

The variance at 2/4 is something I’m still getting used to. A losing night is magnified at 2/4 compared to 1/2 (thanks Mr. Math) and it is a mental thing to get used to. Dropping $50 is something that has happened a couple of times. At 1/2 I would be freaking out, but at 2/4 it doesn’t seem as bad because the next night you may win $75. That’s where not being results oriented helps. I know I’m not disconnected enough in that regard, but I’m getting there. It also helps to think in terms of BB otherwise you get caught up in the actual dollar amounts which can be a bad thing mentally. 2/4 is a definite change from 1/2, but I’m getting the hang of it.

Regarding Saturday’s home game, I just wanted to clarify a bit from Drac’s play. He emailed me to remind me that he was actually a favorite on every hand that he was busted out with. I didn’t really make that clear earlier. I mentioned that it was a repeating theme that he busted out first, but each time he was definitely the favorite. On the one that I busted him I was an underdog but got my cards (two ways, one on the river of course). He did play well, just got sucked out on. I know my call was marginal at a best. Just a run of bad cards. He didn’t bust out in the rebuy period during the first tourney like I did

I was at work today when I get an instant message from my son saying that I had a package from somebody called “Tao of Poker, whoever that is”. I type back: LOL! Sweet! He said, “Uh, ok”.

In case you didn’t know, I got the consolation prize to Pauly’s Hilton Sisters challenge where you had to crack pocket aces with the sisters. BadBlood beat me to the punch, and in fact I had kinda forgot about it, but thankfully mentioned it the day before the deadline and I remembered that I had done it too.

Pauly was nice enough to count me in. For your viewing pleasure:

Pauly, being the artist he is, thankfully marked on the back which side is the “top”. Being a midwestern non-artist rube, that proved very helpful as I was most definitely looking at it incorrectly. I can’t wait until he becomes famous and I can cash in on this.

Thanks again Dr. Pauly!