Sleeping with My Sister In-Law

My sister in-law has been with us since Wednesday, and since she’s expecting their third child, she’s been napping a good bit.  So when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped at the chance to sleep with her.

OK, not sleep with her, but sleep while she was sleeping.  I’ve come down with some horrible cold, and we’re in Stage II of it where I need to take Advil Cold and Sinus every few hours to stay cleared up.  I ended up sleeping probably sixteen hours from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon.  I even had to get up and leave during church as I was falling asleep, so I grabbed some coffee and stood watching the sermon on a monitor.  Let me back up for a quick weekend recap (I know everyone is waiting anticipation about what I was doing over the weekend!).

Sweetie and I went to dinner at the Q (that’s Qdoba for those without such a place) then saw a double feature:  Babel and Notes on a Scandal.  It’s hard for me to not like a movie, especially if I have Sweetie next to me and a bucket of popcorn in front of me.  I heard one guy say Babel was the worst movie he’d ever seen; it wasn’t horrible, but maybe it was a little pointless.  Sweetie said she didn’t cry, which means she wasn’t emotionally invested in anything that happened.  There were all these disasters, but I guess you were at arm’s length.  Notes on a Scandal has Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and saying much about it would mean a bigtime spoiler.  It was fine as well, British people talking British is hard to go wrong with, unless it is A Room with a View, the James Ivory movie that started the British movie deal phenomenon of the 80’s and 90’s.  I’ve never seen the movie myself as I’ve never made it through the first hour without falling asleep.

Anyways, my brother Econ made it back from one of his campus interviews Friday night, and we had a good talk at Caribou Coffee Saturday before they went to dinner and a movie.  He’s doing so well, and I’m so excited for him.

I slept the afternoon away yesterday then down here to the basement to get ready for my midnight work session with the contractors.  I’d been thinking about playing in the WPBT and waited until the very last minute as seating started to register.  Psyche–no late registration (literally registered just as seating was announced, before play began).  That led me to hitting three LHE tables ($5/10 and $8/16), donking off as much as I think $750 or so until I won back about $400 of it, then headed to a NLHE table with Fuel was playing.  I bought in light for $135 or so at the $1/2 NLHE table, chipped up a bit, then played a superb hand after Fuel left for the evening.  I raised a limper with 10-10, he called, and the flop came 5-8-8.  He checked, I bet $14, and he smooth called.  My money card 10 came on the turn, and I checked behind him.  Ac came on the river, he bet $30, I raised him another $65 trying to look like I wanted to push him out of the pot, he shoved and I called off my last $45 or so.  He flipped over 9d-8d for flopped trips.  Well, trips no good sir.

During all of this, I railed the WPBT Final Table which included Smokkee crashing out soon after his aces were cracked by Gene’s kings (all-in preflop, king spikes on the flop).  Congrats for Gene and Gary finishing in the place and show position to Raveen’s victory, all while he had his arms in his cadaver studying for a test today.  Lynette final tabled the $35k as well, and she’s been on a serious tear in these tourneys of late.

So a little Sunday play, down $200 for the session clawing back from -$750 at one point, and now I’m ready for a productive day.  I interviewed Mookie for an article on PokerWorks on Home Games, so be sure to check it out.  Will I ever be interviewed by Mookie for winning the Mook?  One of my goals this year, so we’ll see.  Oh, and I emailed a media contact for NETeller to try and get an interview, but the response was no update. Finally, after Econ and I watched High Stakes Poker that I’d saved for him, he headed to Amazon to check out William Chen’s The Mathematics of Poker.  One of the best reviews follows here (from S. Williams/Phoenix):

“Here is a quote from the book, “This is the general recursion that describes the relationship between successive values of Rp. To find specific values, we can use the fact that we know that Rp converges on r as P goes to infinity (since this is an approximation of the no-fold game as shown in Example 16.4). Hence, we can choose an arbitrarily large value of n, seet it equal to square root of 2 - 1, and work backwards to the desired P. As it happens, this recursive relation converges quite rapidly. Of course, we can see that for the no-fold case, Rp simply is r for all thresholds, and this game simplifies to its no-fold analogue.”

Of course! Duh, who didn’t know that! If you enjoyed reading that, there are 375 more pages of this stuff. Oh, and in case you get bored with such elementary level stuff, there are sections throughout the book, where the authors have “marked off the start and end of some portions of the text so that our less mathematical readers can skip more complex derivitions.” I can’t even give you a quote from one of these sections because I don’t have those keys on my keyboard…

I have been buying poker books for a while now and I finally found my limit. While I did slug my way through this book, I doubt it will make any difference in my game. I don’t see how knowing that, quote, “skew instead sums the cubes of the distances, which cause the values to have sign,” will improve my game. Whatever the heck that even means!

My advice, save your money and time, unless you want to put this book on your shelf and use it to intimidate your opponents. If one of them asks for advice you could give them this book, tell that it is a “must read” if they ever want to be a good poker player, and say that you LOVED IT! If they read it, they’ll never look at you the same way again, I guarantee it. And they might just quit poker all-together. Like I said above, if THIS is poker, I might quit myself!”

Side splitting!  Have a good day, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized.