FeralBlog

My sister is packed and ready. I’m nearly packed as well, and excited as hell. After all the crazy shit of the last few weeks I can’t wait to have a few days where I do nothing but climb 5.10 jug hauls all day and scoop monster pots all night. I’ll do my best to keep both climbing and poker journals, so I can satisfy all 4 of my readers equally.

This whole “blogging” thing seems to have taken off lately. My best friend, my sister, and her very good friend (and also a friend of mine growing up) have all popped up with their very own in the last few weeks. If my mom starts a blog I will officially eat a hat.

It’s great to see these blogs; Ryan’s especially. He just made a dramatic move from Philly to Providence (well, maybe it wasn’t dramatic, but people in his life made it that way. I

It looks as though Lance is on track to pick up his record TDF win. This should come as a suprise to no one; he’s amazingly fit (with freakish lung capacity), and he’s backed up by the best support riders, the best technology, and the best training methods.

Another amazing repeat story is unfolding in Las Vegas this week, too. It’s the Main Event in this year’s World Series of Poker, and with only two more days and 27 players left, last year’s champion Greg Raymer is starting today in fifth place with $3.8 million in chips. Other notables are jailbird Mike “The Mouth” Matusow in first place with $5.1 million, and Phil Ivey in second with $4.6M. Considering the huge field he had to wade through, it’s simply incredible that Raymer is on the verge of another final table this year.

There was a lot of talk about the huge explosion in poker’s popularity this year, and how every event was going to be a crapshoot with all these Internet qualifier donkeys, but it would seem that in most events the cream rose to the top, with many big names taking many big events, including both Doyle Brunson and Johnny Fucking Chan winning their record 10th WSOP bracelets.

I have no idea how the main event is going to finish up this year. Phil Ivey is the odds-on favorite (3-1), and Raymer is right behind him (5-1). Matusow is a volatile presence, so a final table involving all three pros would be something, indeed.

Highlights:

• Bauhaus
• New Order
• Coldplay
• The homefries at a Palm Springs breakfast place
• Winning $50 very quickly at a super-loose California cardroom Saturday

Lowlights:

• The fucker from craigslist who never got back in touch about camping tickets
• Selling one too many extra Sunday tickets on Saturday, and having to buy another one Sunday
• Forgetting my ticket at the condo Saturday and having to go back for it
• Chemical Brothers
• Losing $150 not as quickly at a super-loose California cardroom Sunday
• The 5 hour drive back last night, and getting in at 3 a.m.
• The realization that I am now officially old and un-hip

Remind me again why I’m grinding it out at $3/6 limit while my sister is tripling up at $1-2 no limit?

update: Ok, maybe it’s not so bad. A few hours work, and I made like $400. It was a crazy action table, so I just picked my spots and got lucky a few times too, like when I flopped a straight flush with Q-10s. Too bad I didn’t get much action on that hand.

• It’s time for me to turn in my geek badge. Saturday morning I was futzing around on my work machine, which really is my primary machine nowadays because I’m lazy, installing the latest version of Firefox, when right after it completed my screen went black. Alright… I waited for a few seconds, and then just figured I should do a hard shutdown. Upon rebooting, my machine wouldn’t go back to the windows login screen. It would show the XP startup screen for a few seconds, then kick right back to the BIOS screen and start all over. Nothing I picked worked; Safe Mode, Last Known Good, etc. I started looking online for problems relating to startup and mup.sys, which is the last line that would load before the reboot, and it sounded like it was more of a hardward issue. I took out one memory stick, and then the other. I even tried different slots, and to no avail. Figuring this was too important to screw up or try to do a rebuild on (and re-installing all that damn software, ick.) I brought it to Best Buy. Picked it back up yesterday, and it turns out that there were some corrupt sectors on the disk (head crash, maybe?). Fixed those, and now my machine is back to normal. All I would have had to do it pop in an XP disc to boot from, and try the repair routines, but I’ve tried that a few times and broken things enough to force a wipe and reformat, so I simply gave up and wussed out.

• In the car I was listening to Whad’ya know? on NPR, which is one of my least favorite NPR shows, but it was on, so (shrug). It was the part of the show where he reads questions people have written down and gives his glib, unfunny answers. One was from a woman who wanted to know if she should be the one proposing to her boyfriend. Long story short, she was trying to use the peer pressure to goad him into saying yes. He sounded very un-thrilled, and then finally said yes. I would have probably done the same, and then screeched out of the parking lot and left her there for trying to put on so much public pressure. Show is here if you want to listen to the uncomfortable-ness.

• Poker continued to be good to me, and even with some ups and downs it was a +$500 weekend. I hit another ~$250 hand (this time in just a straight $3/6 hand, to give you an idea of how much betting and raising was going on), this time in like a 7-way pot with pocket kings. I’ve tightened my live and online play up considerably lately. A-x suited in early position? Throw it away. K-10 offsuit early? Throw it away. So far it seems to be working out well.

• House inspection tomorrow. I’ll be bringing my camera and taking a zillion pictures, first to give you all a better idea of what it looks like inside, and second so Kim and I can start coming up with a bit of a strategy on getting started on the fixing up. Her lease ends 3 weeks after we close, so we’re hoping that we can at least get the flooring and painting in the bedroom done so as not to have to move furniture all around after we’re already in. She’s quite the ebay maven, so we’re going to try and find everything there and save some bucks.

Last night I headed over to the Diamond to while away the hours waiting for my sweetie to get back. While I was there I sat at what could be referred to as an “action” table; there were a bunch of maniacs raising and re-raising nearly every hand pre-flop. I hunkered down and waited for big hands, and of course none came, and I was soon whittled down from my original buy-in of $100 to about $60 or so.

I was just getting ready to leave the next time the blinds get to me when there’s a kill pot (a $6/12 hand). I’m under the gun and dealt AK offsuit. Figuring this is as good a hand as any to decide if the poker gods love me or hate me I raise it to $12. 5 callers (see what I mean about it being an action table?). Flop comes 2-3-2. SB checks, BB (who was a completely aggressive maniac who would bet anything and also happened to get lucky a lot) bet, and I called. Everyone called, and everyone is in. Pot is now already $90. I can’t put the big blind on a 2, or even a 3, because he literally would bet or raise any 2 cards. Turn card is a beautiful, magical king. SB checks, BB bet, and now I raise ($24 raise at this point). We lose only one player and now the pot is $186. Someone is slow-playing a 2. I know it. Everyone else at the table knows it. We’re just waiting to find out who. River is a 7. It’s checked to me, I bet my last $9, get all but one caller, and we flip up. Other hands were K6o, pocket 5s, and the rest were mucked. So I got to take down that massive $260 pot! I actually raisied my arms up and did my best Homer Simpson “woo hoo!”, which I’m not sure everyone else appreciated, but fuck ‘em for being such maniacs. I stuck around for one more orbit or two, lost about $20, and decided to skedaddle while I was still in the black.

Moral of the story is: get your money in while you have the best of it. One big hand can make your whole night.

Kim left me yesterday to go with a friend to Nawleans for a few days, and as part of my boyfriendly duties I dropped her off at the Phoenix airport early yesterday evening. On the way back down I-10 I go right by the Gila River Wild Horse Pass Casino, so I figured I’d stop in again. I had been there once before, and found very juicy and soft games, but didn’t get any cards and left even after about an hour.

This time went a little better, to say the least. (more…)

I had this happen while doing a little multi-tabling last night: (more…)

Last night Kim had a hankerin’ for some bingo, so we headed over to the Diamond for the evening session. Bingo is a funny game; nowhere have I seen people trying harder to assign patterns to random number events than there. “Oh, sure… the first two numbers he pulls are the ones I needed last time.” As if the little plastic balls with no cognitive abilities and no memory were just playing a little game and taunting you. I especially enjoyed how the old folks directly across from us were ripping on the caller (the guy pulling the numbers) as if he had anything at all to do with the numbers popping out of the little vaccuum tumbler machine thingy.

After the bingo session (no, neither of us won, although I was within one number twice) Kim went to hit the slots, and I went to play some poker. There was a pretty long list for $3/6, so they started a new table and I got a seat. The action started pretty slow as everyone was just trying to get a feel for the table, and then it turned into magical loose table like that one at the Rio. All kinds of crazy loose passive play, 8-handed flops, etc. Of course I was only playing for about an hour and got only a few playable hands. Two good wins though… once with AJo (a notorious trouble hand) which I raised from early position, got two callers, hit an ace on the flop and had them call me the whole way down to the river. The other hand I had AKs in the small blind, raised to get the big blind out, and only got called by Star Jones across the table. Flop came all undercards, but with 2 of my suit! I bet out and was called, and then bet $6 in the dark before the turn card came out (it was a queen, and not my suit, btw). Star thought about it for half a second and said “He bet in the dark? He can have it.” and folded. I think if I had waited until the card had come out she would have called, but by representing AA or KK I got her to throw away whatever she had, maybe she had hit a pair on the board. I don’t know if I would have spiked a pair on the river or made my flush, but I’d love to think that my in-the-dark bet got her out of there.

Kim came to collect me with me up $20, so $15 for bingo plus $3 for snackies for us plus $1 for the woman who cashed out my chips meant I had made $1 for the evening! Kim was bumming because she had lost another $40 at the slots, so on the way out we passed by some sort of Monopoly nickel slot machine and I threw in $10. A few spins later, we landed on Boardwalk, collected 300x the nickel bet, and cashed out up $7! Total for the evening +$8 and lots of fun.