Ipod Anyone?

I’m registered in the free BloggerPods poker tournament on Full Tilt Poker

Come join me on Sunday, March 4th for Bloggerpod 2. I could really use the video model before our trip.

Dead Money Walking

Pineapple, double flop, and some other crazy games didn't help me come away a winner at the Pokercat's casa. The good news is that since I didn't win anything, I couldn't reward myself and saved a couple of hundred calories on the ride home. My best shot of getting any sort of break even hand happened on the last one. I finished on a Omaha high with a double flop. I think I was in the cutoff and with JJ99, I decided to push preflop to at least split the pot right? Two others made the call (with only a pair of 3s between them, Yay!) and I still lost both boards, arrgh! The first was a boat bigger than mine and the second was quads over my other boat. I just sat there is silence for a moment trying to figure out what happened and then realized I was done. I had a good time, but cash games truly are not my thing. I would like to get much better in case I go to the summer bloggers meet in Vegas. I don't think I played horribly, I just didn't play very well and the cards weren't nice enough to me to allow enough wiggle room while I was learning. I definitely see myself trying again in the future, but it will most likely be April at the earliest since we will be in (as some of my relatives say) "Hi-why-ya" soon. Thanks again for having me over, Kuro.

The neighborhood game is tomorrow and my brother is joining us from out of town. We are moving my Mom back to her old place but will be done by the afternoon. Wish me luck.

Learning A New Game

To prepare for Kurokitty's home game tomorrow, I did my first attempt at Omaha online. I quickly went through my play money reload limit at Stars, so I jumped over to FullTilt and tried a little limit Hi/Lo. I have played this one other time and did quite well for the night. I dropped one play buy-in and decided to give it another go. I still don't have it down very well, but I did get one hand that I felt pretty confident in dragging both the high and the low. I keep thinking I'm butting heads for the high or the low and need to learn to read the board for the split.

I didn't have time to learn triple draw, razz, or many of the other possible games that will be played. Hopefully the Pokercat and his friends won't crush me too hard and I'll have enough cash left over to get a fresh Krispy Kreme on the way home.

Ass Meets Couch

I've had a really good week of goofing around and doing leisure activities for the past 7 days. I can't think of much that I have done that has been productive but I have certainly been enjoying myself. The weather has been too cold to do much other than indoor activites anyway.

Last Tuesday, I was invited to watch the Thrasher's game from a suite and had a good time as they beat the Devils. Hockey games are easily my favorite event to watch live because there is so much going on even when the players aren't on the ice. Of course free parking and tickets for the suite make it nice too, especially when Dave is doing the driving.

I met up with Kajagugu on Friday night and joined his neighbor's home game. I had a good time with his neighbors and we managed to play 2 tournaments with at least 15 in each. I didn't fair too well, but I'll try again next time if I'm invited. He did much better and won the second one. Congrats. The commute was nothing and the host had a great layout with 2 tables, a ping pong table, XBox 360 and HD in his recently finished basement. My only complaint was how quickly the blinds became a large portion of my stack compared to how I usually run my games or play in the weekly MTTs online. It took me a bit to figure out how we could play 2 tournaments before midnight when we didn't start until 8. If I remember correctly, with a $1500 starting stack, we were at 100/200 at level 3. I usually set us up to be there at level 6 so we can get a little more play in without seeing so many pushes within the first hour. Since it is the host's game, I play it their way. They did add an extra 500 in starting chips and an additional 5 minutes to the blinds for the second tourney. I probably shouldn't look at this as a complaint but instead as an opportunity to try different things and make my game adapt to the conditions.

I got in lots of movie watching this week. Stacie and I watched The Fountainhead on Thursday for our "date" night. Since it was an older film and based on an Ayn Rand story, it is definately different than the movies that are made today. I enjoyed many parts of it, but her ultimate message is still a little more than my little brain can grasp. On Saturday, I followed this up with Jet Li's Fearless while Stacie actually went to the theater. This is almost unheard of in our house, but she went with a friend who had a day off without her baby. I really enjoyed Fearless and it was more than just a martial arts action film. They didn't do too much CG or wire work and it helped display his speed and talents. Later in the night, we settled in and watched The Guardian. We both enjoyed this one and I think it was a great move for Kelso to help break in to some new roles. It had the changing of the guard (on screen and real life) theme and it was worth seeing. We finished of the weekend with Flyboys and the Super Bowl. I can't say anything too exciting about either one of those.

My commercial picks were the GM robot, K-Fed, Blockbuster, the inner workings of the Coke machine, the Bud fist bump, and I was impressed with the Garmin GPS commercial. I didn't think that the commercial was all that great, I just thought they did a good job with the lyrics and I liked the nostalgia of watching Goldar and similar shows when I was a kid. I couldn't stand the guys washing the car, FedEx, or any of the Careerbuilder ones.

Countdown to Hawaii

Stacie and I are going to Hawaii in next month to see my good friend from college get married. We are pretty good about planning ahead and squeezing the most out of our trips. We are going over to Kauai a week before the wedding on the Big Island. This way we can make a vacation out of it before we get swept up in the wedding activities. But first I don't want to forget anything.

RSVP for wedding...........................check
Find loving sitter for Dundee........check
Book flight........................................check
Book rooms......................................check
book car............................................check
book helicopter tour.......................check
RSVP for fishing trip......................check
buy spare camera battery
and memory card...........................check
buy spare DVD battery.................check
figure out what "Beach Chic" is....still trying
get protective base tan..................not looking forward to this......borrrrringggggg
build pecs.........................................prolly not gonna happen
lose love handles.............................definitely won't happen
make all of you jealous...................check

Bummer Poker News

Ok, it seems every day I get bad news about the game I love. First it was the bullshit legislation, then some of the major sites stopped allowing us to log in, followed by the Neteller fiasco, now one of my favorite daily reads, Cardsquad, is closing shop. I noticed that Weblogs Inc (AOL) has killed off a Cardsquad sister site that I also read, PVRwire.com.

Apparently, I am not interested in the right things for advertising dollars. Under the category of "duh", I have also come to the conclusion that it rarely has a good result when your "niche" interest becomes owned by a big dumbass corporation. I look to Comcast's complete wrecking of ZD/TechTV as a prime example. I hope Google doesn't end up on the dark side in the next few years.

Another sort of bummer poker news is my 3rd or 4th place finish in the VIP / PokerSavvy freeroll last night. I say it's a bummer because I never got to finish playing in it. Sitting squarely at 3rd in chips after 2 hours of play, we were down to 5 and the site's server decides to lose it's mind. With the top 4 paying out, I wanted to try to move up the ladder or at least not drop any more. We all sat around for the next hour and tried to call customer service to get the game going again. I didn't feel like staying up any longer, so I just napped on the couch until around 12:30 this morning. I got up, saw the tournament was still locked so I decided to go to bed and see what poker Santa would bring me overnight. I checked the computer this morning and saw that the game did continue eventually and I was blinded out to a small payout. It was free money, but I was still disappointed to not take 1st out of 30, or at least a little better cash given the circumstances.