And then comes St. Patrick’s Day.

After my morning patients yesterday, I had to wander over to the Verizon store to pick up a new phone, since the one they had sold me a little more than 2 WEEKS AGO was a lemon (totally cool flip-up full qwerty keyboard, which just didn’t actually register keystrokes).  ”Wow, that NEVER happens.  They catch those before they leave the manufacturer’s.”  I wonder how far they have to go in their training before they’re taught THAT particular piece of blarney.  Also, “we just changed the fulfillment center on our mail-in rebates.  You’ll have the money before it even shows up on your bill!  People are getting the money within 10 DAYS!” (Still waiting……)

But I digress….. So I go to the store and as soon as I get to the counter, while the guy is making the magic that transfers all the data from one phone to another, two girls come in, NEEDING to get a new phone as quickly as possible, because they HAVE to get to the local Irish bar and start drinking (it is 12 noon).  ”Yeah, last year I was there by 8AM.  I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get a table.”

I next went a couple of doors over to a brand-new Smashburger for lunch.  I’d never had one, and I LOVE me some burgers, and had heard great things.  They smash a half pound of meat down on the griddle, so that it cooks in its own fat, like a ground beef confit, put it on egg buns, and you build it how you want it (blue cheese, grilled onions, lettuce, pickles on the side, ketchup and mayo for me, thanks).  Yummo. Meanwhile, I take a table on the outdoor patio (a balmy 70 degrees for the festivities, although snow is forecast for tomorrow; March in Boulder), and am surrounded by people talking about how much Jameson’s and Bushmill’s they’ve ALREADY consumed, and how much more they are about to put in their systems. Oh, thank God NOT to be young again!

On the poker front, I’ve been having fun goading people who insult me by saying things like “come on, you can do better than that.” and “you know, there are classes you can take to improve your vocabulary, so that your insults won’t be so boring and predictable.”  and my personal favorite, “your insults would be more believable if you were actually WINNING some money.”  I know that it goes against my code of silence, but I was just getting bored, and it seems to make them play even worse.  Just that little devil sitting on my shoulder.  Meanwhile, the month has at least seen me recover the piece of my bankroll that I had tossed away in February, although I’ve had a few nasty losing sessions this week.  Oddly enough, the gains have ALL been in ring games, as I’ve not been able to even sniff a multi-table SNG cash in about a month.  Just no cards, and losing every coin flip when I get stuck pushing.  Ah well, part of the ride……

Happy day after St. Paddy’s.  Hope you aren’t waking up with the kind of hangover that the people I was eavesdropping in on yesterday are going to experience when at last they awaken this morning.

At first, it looked as if I was going to disappear very quickly from the game.  One of the first hands, I raised on the button with 5-4, and Linda played in the SB.  10-5-4 on the flop. Okie-dokie.  Only she had Q-10 and turned the 10.  I was feeling a little under the weather, and thinking that I was going out early.  Linda prophetically said, “Don’t worry. Razz is coming.”  Razz has definitely been the game in which I’ve amassed most of my chips in the family tourneys, and it happened again last night, where I was able to catch a couple of nice cards to take down substantial pots.

Thunder Bob was running over the table for the first round of games, and looked as if he was going to just roll to victory.  At one point, I was second with less than 1,300 chips.  And that was with 2 of the 8 players already out!  I luckboxed Linda in the high/low round to get into a solid second place.  I was dealt 7-6-5, and she raised with  king showing, I do believe.  I caught another 5 on fourth, and yes, I know I should have folded, but it gives me such joy to put an ugly beat on her, so that we can keep going back and forth about luck, bad play, luck, etc.  So naturally, I hit an ace on fifth, another one on sixth, and the cherry on the sundae, a made low on seventh, to take out her kings-up and send her to the rail.

Then the critical hand came in Hold’em with three of us left.  I had pocket kings, and Thunder Bob capped the street with me.  J-4-2 on the flop, and more money went in. a Six on the turn (may not have all the little cards in the right order), and a king on the river.  He had A-J, hit top pair, then a flush draw on the turn, but fact is, he was behind the whole way, and I vaulted into the lead.  We did have some back and forth after that, and djhomeschool actually wound up busting Bob and he had a small lead going into heads-up.  But along came razz!  I wrote an article on heads-up Razz a few weeks ago, and I’m feeling like I can definitely play that game well.  I was making good decisions about when to fold and when to attack, and wound up finishing Andrew off for yet another win!

Then this morning, I decided to change things up from my usual 8-game, stud hi/lo rotation and play some .25-.50 NLHE with 50BBs minimum and fast decisions.  I sat at a pretty aggressive table, and got kings under the gun.  Decided to call, which I almost never do with that hand (once saw someone call that hand pre-flop live in Vegas 5 times in under an hour and lost all five hands).  Unfortunately, I got four callers and no raisers, about the first time the deal hadn’t been raised since I sat down.  Fortunately, the flop came A-K-2, and I checked.  Second player bet $1, and the next guy, who had made this move before, went all-in for about $21.  Sweet.  I just called, hoping to catch the rest of the other guy’s stack too, but he folded.  Mr. all-in had A-8!

Three hands later, I raised an unopened pot on the button to $1.50 with 7-5 (but it was soooooted).  SB called, and the flop brought 3-4-6.  He bet out and I smooth-called.  Another 4 on the turn, and he bet again, so I put him all-in and he called with 3-2!  Avoided the four outs on the river, and had a nice double up in 10 minutes.  Had a couple of other winning sessions in nlhe and pot limit mixed h/e-omaha (which I’ve really been enjoying playing lately, and am actually starting to figure out), so I am hoping that the win last night is the start of something good.

One thing I’ve noticed: I’m much more prone to take risks in the Family tourney than in most of the tournaments I play.  I’m sure it’s the combination of the friendly atmosphere and the low stakes, but I’m wanting to bring some of that aggression to other tourneys.  I’ve been winning the majority of the Family tourneys (or chopping some times) that I’ve been playing, so something in the formula should be able to translate over to other tournaments.

Hey, how bout them Olympics!

His Holiness replied:  ”I don’t know who that is.”  Finally, some real perspective from someone not caught up in our TMZ world.  While so many people are focused on celebrity (and I’ll admit that in my work for this site, that has certainly happened for me in regard to poker), the Dalai Lama is just a wee bit too busy with his own life to spend time worrying about arguably the most famous lapsed Buddhist in the world.

Where do we draw the line between concern over what is happening in the world and gossip about things that are none of our business?  Does fame have to come with a total breakdown of privacy, just so we can prove that no one is without blemish?  Imagine if John Kennedy were president in this day and age, given his apparently unlimited appetite for infidelity.  Would that be the ONLY thing the nation would be dealing with, day in and day out?

If, as Andy Warhol famously said, everyone is going to have his or her 15 minutes of fame, does that mean that 10 of those minutes are going to be stalked?  In which case, there’s going to be a lot of job openings in the stalking business.

For me, spending time nourishing my family, supporting people in my community who are having challenges, and taking care of my patients is mostly what I have time for.  I don’t have the time, or inclination, to worry about what famous people are doing with their fame.  My own, un-famous life, is too much fun to stop in order to get caught up in anyone else’s drama.

While having access to 24 hour a day information via the electronic teat is extremely valuable when we are responding to situations like Haiti (imagine that earthquake early in the 20th century, for example), our national obesity is not just physical.  We have completely bloated brains from all the crap we ingest on a daily basis.  Hope this rant hasn’t added to your empty calorie count for the day.

After the first year, I had turned that $50 into $1,536, most of which I had withdrawn to spend on my family to make up for the time that playing poker was taking away from them.  Round about the middle of this second year, my available funds  dipped so low that I actually asked for feedback as to whether or not I should just rebuy, or stick it out and try to nurse the tiny bit I had left in my account ($29) back to health.

There were some good points made on both sides of the argument, but I finally decided to hang in there and see if I could start building it up again.  And I did!!!!  As of today, that original $50 is now $3,385!  This means that I more than doubled up again this past year (120.3% gain, to be exact).  While that doesn’t come close to my first year’s 30X gain, in actuality, I was only playing with $186 to start with this year, and that bankroll increased tenfold!

Now, does that indicate that I should really be avoiding touching any of the money in my account, in order to turn it into REALLY big money, or that I just play better when my back is up against the wall, so continuing to withdraw money for fun things (like the $500 I just used for our Vegas trip) is really my best way to stay ahead of the game.

One caveat about this year:  I checked one of those stat sites to see what it said about my game.  This was one that looks at cash game performance.  Turns out I have been ICE COLD for a long stretch of time, losing money at an astonishing rate.  It made me realize just how profitable I could have been this year had I just stuck to tournament play.  I was cashing in about 80% of the 18-person sngs I was playing, won a couple of 180 and 45 player games (and cashed those pretty frequently as well), and took down that 1,000 player tourney on Christmas Eve.  Guess someone wasn’t following his own online advice about playing where you can be the most profitable.  So that was my leak last year, but the bottom line is that I just enjoy playing cash games more, and I really don’t have time for anything other than turbos and the occasional evening into the wee hours tourney that screws with my body clock for days afterward.  Ahh, to be 21 again!

So my resolution for year three is to keep much better track of my performance in cash games, and to tighten up the holes, particularly in nlhe and plo, where I just lost too many big hands that cost a bunch of money.  And if I keep losing there, switch exclusively to tourneys.

My original goal, to turn the $50 into 10K without rebuying, is still alive, and I’m about 35% of the way there.  Is this the year I make it a reality?  And then, can that 10K become a million?  Stay tuned.

I started out at a table with just one other live body, who decided right away that he was going to cap as many streets in as many games as I would allow.  Now I’m happy to play mixed games heads-up, but I’ve never been a big fan of the lottery, so I even offered to just carve up the rest of the table, which would have left us each tripled up pretty early on.  He never said a word, just kept raising.  So I carved him up instead.  He left for awhile during the stud games, so I got to win every hand for a time, and then he came back for no limit hold’em, for which his strategy was to go all-in on every hand.  Gosh, so creative.

So naturally, I waited for a big hand, which turned out to be big slick suited.  He turned over 8-2 offsuit, and I even flopped a king, but no matter.  He flopped a deuce and rivered another one, and he was back in it.  I got my revenge though, as I called an all-in with K-J.  This time, he had pocket queens, so I flopped two jacks and rivered a king to send him to the rail.  That left me with five ghosts to pick clean, and I finally got transfered to a real table with almost 12,000 chips, good for about 35th.

I hovered between 18th and 50th for almost the whole tourney, just picking spots, taking 30 minutes off for dinner, coming back and continuing on.  Nothing too exciting.  Once the money bubble burst, I got into a razz hand where I got bet into on sixth when I had a made 8-7 and the best he had was a 9-7.  I raised, and then hit a four on the river for 7-5-4-3-A.  And he hit a 4 for 7-4-3-2-A.  That sent him off into the stratosphere, and me fighting to stay alive.  He was third when I exited the game.

With an M of about 5, I pushed with A-Q suited and ran into pocket kings.  No help, and out in 89th.  Another day, another ticket.  Unfortunately, Tracy is going to a seminar tomorrow, so I’m with the kids all day, and will miss both the blogger tourney and the 100K freeroll.  Might also have to pass on the finale on Sunday, as well as the turbo takedown, due to family commitments.  But I’ve got to say that, having been able to really play just two of these, that winning two tickets is very satisfying.

Good luck all you bloggers out there in the last two tourneys!

I had a relatively easy time of it, as some of the players at my first table were insistent on throwing their chips away, and were throwing them at me by the bucketful.  I was up to over 10K by the first break.

From there, I was able to keep adding chips gradually, and got up into the top 50 in the tournament, and stayed between 40th and 70th for the rest of the time I was at the table, playing more tightly than usual, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stick around for the endgame.  One hand of note, that I was not involved in:  The three big stacks at the table all went to war with raises pre-flop, although each still had between 30 and 50 K when the flop came 8-2-8.  The biggest stack pushed it all out, and after some hesitation, the third biggest called.  Imagine the surprise of the #2 stack, who was sitting with POCKET EIGHTS!!!  The others had jacks and kings, respectively.

I left at the third break, and by the time I was able to check back in, had been eliminated in 58th, for a $16.50 SCOOP ticket.  And the reason for the title of the post????  Poker Hack and Thunder Bob ALSO cashed today, for $11 tix, making a triple crown of cashes for the PW team (not the first cash for the Hack this week, BTW).  GO TEAM!!!!

She pulled up in her massive pick-up truck right on time, as my wife and I had just signed out on our lunch break.  We all quickly agreed to head over to the Peppermill, the legendary Vegas diner, where the morning before, our waitress had made sure my wife and I decided to SPLIT an omelet, rather than each ordering one, since the omelets are made with “between 8 and 10 eggs.”  You get the idea.

Linda parked the beast, and as soon as we sat down, we began a spirited discussion about Vegas, life, children, grandchildren (we don’t have any of those, but she has 7) and eventually, poker, punctuated only by Linda bringing out the camera to take a few shots of us (if you read her blog, you know what a skilled photographer she is).  We sat entranced, as she spoke of her life, telling stories about her dealing days, her new home in Pahrump and the insanity of her particular role as mother and grandmother, some of which you’ve all read about from her frank and beautifully written posts.

After lunch, we dropped my wife back off at the seminar, but I decided to play hooky and go play some low limit hold’em with Linda at the Orleans, an easy place for her to park her truck (think about one of those passengers that takes up two full seats on an airplane, and you’ll get an idea of just how big this thing is).  We joined a new 2-4 limit table that was just starting up, and we got to sit next to one another and continue talking while we both folded the vast majority of our hands.  The best part of the game was Linda’s commentary on players and dealers she knew from her past.  ”You see that guy over there.  I had to call the floor at least four times on him.  He’s a total jerk, and a cheater.  He’s had the floor called on him in every casino in town.” “The guy who just sat down next to you is _____________ (name of semi-famous player withheld, just in case he has a feed that tells him when his name is mentioned online).  Before you get too impressed, he’s a cheater and a total asshole.”  Fortunately, I wasn’t drinking liquids when she made these comments, as the ensuing table mess wouldn’t have been worth the laughter.

The game sucked for both of us.  Other than one guy, who kept tormenting Linda by consistently calling her raises and then flopping three-of-a-kind with crap hands, and was a really enjoyable person to sit with, players kept coming and going, and were by and large, sourpusses hoping to share the bad beat jackpot, which was over 100,000.  My own day featured having big aces out flopped by little aces, once flopping three aces with A-10, only to have someone else hit a boat with A-3 (it was sooooooted), and so on and so forth.  Funnily enough, we each lost exactly $64.  While both of us agreed that we would have rather been hiking (which was the original plan before the gods decided to drench Vegas and the surrounding areas, leaving the mountains a beautiful white, contrasting with the palm trees on the strip), we had a great time finally putting a face to all the exchanged emails and projects.

If we play poker again on another trip, my wife enjoyed Linda’s company so much that she even agreed to sweat our table, as long as she could sit and drink all day!!!!

OK, time for the first blogger event.

You can transfer money from your online account to the special account “Haiti Fund” that they’ve set up.  Poker Stars will MATCH your donation, dollar for dollar, and turn it over to the Red Cross.  My wife and I had already decided that we were going to contribute funds towards this cause, so being able to have each dollar do double the work was an absolute no-brainer.  I hope that others reading this blog will decide to do the same.  Regardless of what may be going on in your life right now, these people desperately need help to restore even a semblance of what little they already had.

In other news, took another second place in a 180 person $12 sng last night, so that’s where the donation is coming from!