Chris Halverson’s Blog

Poker

In order to keep up the appearances of this actually being a “poker blog”, I can say that I actually played poker last night.

Or at least I played some game that involved cards, donkeys, and maybe resembled poker. Unfortunately, I think one of the donkeys was me.

I played .50/1 NL for about 45 minutes. It was terribly tight and I was down about $20 mostly due to blinds and a couple limps. Due to the tightness of the table, I excercised a new concept to me called “game selection” and decided that the 1/2 NL couldn’t be any worse and I’d be able to make up my $20 quicker.

Uh…yeah.

Once again, this table was fairly tight. I was hanging about even after 30 minutes, basically stealing some smallish pots to do so. I then proceeded to totally misplay a flopped set against a straight and flush possibility and dropped about $100 in one hand. Basically, I didn’t price the drawers out on the turn and the river was a 3rd suit and also put 4 to a straight on the board. I sure didn’t think my set was any good anymore, especially when my feeler bet was raised $100. All I can say is that I played it terribly and one hand cost me big.

I dutifully logged off and thought about firing up Full Tilt, but decided I’d wait to lose the rest of that bankroll for another night.

School

I thought this quarter was going to be a lot more difficult than it’s turning out to be. I thought I’d be able to learn some J2EE stuff that I haven’t really dealt with, but it turns out that we don’t necessarily have to do so. The school provides us with a JBoss instance on a server, but we can also use our own computer using a local JBoss/MySQL install to do it and provide screen shots of the application that we’re writing. Sweet. We also don’t necessarily have to make total use of EJBs, which will make the app about 100x easier.

There’s still a big ass paper to write as well as code for an application, but I am going to leverage this application into my last class project (next quarter) and a real work project that I can’t seem to get approval to work on. All in all it should be a good deal and hopefully will give me more poker time

Well, it figures that I actually played well in a tourney that didn’t pay anything. I ended up 15th out of 144 in the Charlie tourney on Sunday night.

Surprisingly, I was fairly short stacked all tourney I always seemed to be at about 2/3 the average. Finally it got to level 9 (300/600/50) and I had about T3000 left when the average was aboutT15000. I got TT in LP and called two raises to go all in. One person had AK, one AA. I still had outs, but the board made a 2-5 straight draw and I was out in 15th.

Oh well, I actually played fairly well, so I was pretty happy and the money went to a good cause.

Thanks BG and everybody who got this setup.

I just wanted to give a huge “Thank you” to Pauly for all his hard work and live blogging during the whole 6 week run of the WSOP. Your reports were awesome and the addition of local color from the Redneck Riviera was a great addition. You blew doors off any of the “real” reporters.

Thanks also to Flipchip for the great pics and to the PokerProf for the additional reports. Great, great stuff.

You guys put in yeoman’s work from day 1 and kept us up to date constantly. You didn’t show up just for the main event and try to be self-important.

Otis deserves a big “Thanks” too for his reports of the Poker Stars qualifiers.

Thank you!

Playing Poker

Being a Professional Poker Player (TM) like I am, I decided that I should, you know, actually play poker once in a while. I fired up Party the other night and sat down at a 100NL table. I proceeded to double up plus over the course of an hour. To make it “better” (IMHO), I did it via good poker over the course of a few hands and not just one “double up” hand. I played some good poker and it paid off. Since I’ve been playing less frequently I’ve tried to make sure that I play smarter when I do play.

WSOP

Well, it appears that another “nobody” has won the WSOP. I still don’t know much about him, but let’s hope there’s a decent story behind him when ESPN does their coverage so that it helps draw new people and keep the existing people interested.

The Plaza

Checking my mail the other day I saw an envelope from Barrick Gaming. Opening it up showed that the luxorious Plaza is offering me a free 3 night stay around my birthday, including a birthday party. W00T! I’m not going to take advantage of it though (it’s in the middle of the week in August). Maybe I could mail my players card to Grubby and he can take advantage of it

Full Tilt

So Full Tilt now has hand history support…That’s cool and I may actually try firing it up again. We’ll see if I can actually have a winning session there. I doubt it, Hank et. al seem to have it in for me there

Charlie Tourney

Don’t forget, tourney tonight. I’m registered, but probably won’t be there since it’s at kind of a bad time for me.

WPBT “Charlie” Tournament
When: Sunday, July 17th, 6pm EST (That’s 5PM for us Midwest folk)
Where: PokerStars - Listed under the Private tab
Cost: $20 - Every penny goes to charity

Update: This has been solved. For some reason 18 months ago I couldn’t find anybody to do this. I searched high and low for a couple of days. Now I put it up on my blog and 2 hours later have a solution. You guys rock. Anyway, the quest has been solved, no more reward is available. You can, however, work on it to make it better, but it’s on your own dime Thanks go to Brian at The Virtual Nuts!

There’s a little money available here, read on for more information. All you JavaScript or web developers may be interested. Plus you didn’t want to do anything like play poker or anything anyway, right? I promise, real post coming this weekend.

While I’m a decent Java programmer, my JavaScript, and in particular DOM manipulation, skills are a bit lacking. I have written a Java servlet based timecard application for my work. I added some JavaScript voodoo to handle automatically changing some SELECT boxes. I basically copied the functionality from other sites, so I’m not even totally sure how it works.

Sample Page

Yes, it looks like crap, but I’m not going to bother with the stylesheet. Don’t bug me about layout unless you can make this type of thing “work” better by changing it. Nobody has any problems with the layout, so that is the lowest priority.

Here’s my dilema: I want to have a button beside each row that allows the user to copy the row’s content to another new table row. The new row would need to be appended to the table and have a new “id” number associated with each form element. I need the content to be dynamic again, just in case they’re dumb (not a stretch) and decide that copying isn’t really what they wanted. Obviously the user will want to change some things such as the date, but in general it’s to help the people who have a pretty straightforward timecard.

If you think you can make this work, please get me a working copy. Note that some of the stuff will continue to by “hardcoded” into the JS code because it’s used in multiple places. I don’t want or need AJAX to look up projects, there’s already things I do for that. I have marked these variables in the source. I just want the ability to copy a row keeping values intact. I may be interested in an AJAX “delete row” function though, but I can probably get that to work (plus there’s no corresponding “delete line item” method yet).

I’ve left everything in there as it is generated by the servlet. That means there’s technically a lot of extra stuff that kind of is in the way but that way you can also look at optimization issues and you can see what the whole page is really like.

The “Add row” is new, but seems to be working in testing. That particular button may be moved when it’s pushed into production. I’m not sure using the “innerHTML” is the right thing to do, but it works. If you have a better way, please let me know.

If you can get me a working version, I’ll pay you $50. I know this isn’t much based on freelance wages, but since I don’t really need this functionality, and since I’m basically funding it myself, it’s all I’m willing to pay. Plus, if somebody really knows what they’re doing, it shouldn’t take too long (assuming it’s possible). If, however, you can streamline things and make it quicker and more robust, I will pay up to $100 at my discretion. This is open to anybody who reads this blog. If you know somebody who may be able to do this, send it to them. I don’t care who it is that can make this work.

Using freely available JavaScript toolkits is fine, but they must work in a Java servlet environment (I’m using straight servlets, not Struts, Spring or anything). The application also must work with Firefox and Internet Explorer. If it doesn’t work with one of them, it’s no good to me.

Each row must have a unique “id” embedded in it, you’ll see what I mean if you look at the source. I need this to keep the various parts of the entry bundled together. Don’t give me a new row without it.

No payment if you cannot get it to work, I don’t care how much time you spent on it trying to get it to work. Also, the original functionality must still work in the same manner (ie. the correct boxes get selected).

All of the work will be owned by my company. You will be doing this as if you were a contractor. You will NOT retain any rights whatsoever to the code.

If you have any questions, feel free to email or IM me, or leave a comment (but then check back).

All decisions are final and made exclusively by me.