Chris Halverson’s Blog

Blogger Table Lessons

I got home from my son’s school’s open house last night to find my wife getting ready for bed. Yeah baby! Oh wait, she’s super tired and just wants to go to sleep. Oh, ok. My son is dead too, so there not even any watching TV with him. My class project is almost done and I don’t feel in the “Java” mood anyway.

So what’s a Professional Poker Player (TM) to do?

Let’s play poker.

I actually eased into it a bit. I was having a delightful conversation with a certain princess while also being in the blogger chat room. It finally got to me and I had to get on the blogger table list.

Oh boy. I thought I swore these things off, especially something like a 0.05/0.10 NL table. These have been a sieve for me, but they are always super fun and last night was no different.

Of course, I dropped two buyins.

BUT I HAD OUTS BOTH TIMES!

Maigrey took one when she flopped a straight. I was open ended to the nut straight though, so I HAD OUTS.

The other one? That leads to an important poker lesson for you non Professional Poker Players (TM) out there:

Do not raise large when somebody flopped the nut flush. You will not push them off.

So anyway, my all in push with two pair on a coordinated board did push the Princess off whatever lame drawing hand she had, however I was not able to scare off the guy holding what we in the business call “the nuts”.

I did, however, have 4 outs.

FOUR OUTS!

Of course, RiverStars didn’t pull through for me and I didn’t rebuy because I was tired.

It was a good time and it was good to connect with some of you again. I look forward to it again.

Thanks Princess

Thanks Maigrey for the chat last night. I needed that and appreciate you listening and understanding. You’re a sweetie!!!

Also remember: GAME ON!

You know, for being a Professional Poker Player (TM), you sure don’t play much poker. Oh, and are you ever going to update that damn blog of yours again? - My friend Jason at lunch, Thursday, September 1, 2005

I do have some legitimate reasons for the state of things around these parts lately. First off, after four years of nearly flawless service, Comcast has decided that the past three weeks should be “screw the neighborhood” time. Basically, I have a number of channels that don’t work, half of the ones that do are super pixelated and my Internet connection goes down for days at a time. For a while it was basically out from 11PM to 9AM every day with spotty service during the evening.

I’ve had a tech come out (because they wouldn’t escalate it if they didn’t send somebody out) and he said there’s too much signal. If anybody is in that type of business can you let me know if that’s BS or not? Anyway, the maintenance crew has to come out to fix that. They expect them out sometime in 2008.

Not having an Internet connection at home kind of makes it hard to play online poker. I’m getting the urge to play though, maybe a trip to Las Vegas would be good…

The upside to not having an Internet connection is that I’ve been burying myself in learning some new things. For those that care, I’ve immersed myself in learning the Spring Framework. I bought (and expensed) Spring Live and have actually got a large part of my final project (and therefore part of a work project that hasn’t been approved yet) done. Programming is fun again when you learn something new and can quickly see the results.

I did upgrade this here server on Labor Day from Fedora Core 2 to FC4. The install removed the MySQL database server and totally freaked me out thinking I had lost everything that was in it, you know, like this blog. We just reinstalled it and it found the databases right away, but it was a little freaky for a while. It wouldn’t have actually been lost, we do have nightly backups done, but it still made me nervous.

So ya, poker has kind of taken a backseat here a bit, but it’s not gone and neither am I. Once I get this Internet thing figured out I’ll be back to playing.