So I had originally decided on the previous two blog posts to be a part of a huge update, but I guess once I started writing them I blabbered on and on and basically forgot everything I had planned on talking about. I guess I really should have paid more attention in 11th grade English class and trained myself to use outlines when writing; rather than spending my time laughing about the lonely bastards in 1776. Either way, there were two more thoughts that I need to throw out there.

Soccer
It’s rained almost every weekend, so I haven’t had much chance to use my new outdoor shoes. I’m not sure if I hadn’t bought them yet or not, but I ended up going with the greatest soccer shoe ever made – Adidas Copa Mundial. I had been anxious to get them broken in so I started using them for indoor soccer (because we have the new superturf like they have for professional football these days). So, they haven’t been working for me. In six games I maybe scored two goals. I think a part of it is just the mental block of using outdoor shoes for indoor soccer, but no matter what they haven’t been working for me. After determining that the new shoes were adequately broken in, I switched back to the good old Adidas Sambas. The result? In four and a half games, I’ve scored 12 goals and who knows how many assists. Yeah. I don’t care what kind of turf they have out there, I’m going to stick with my flatsoled shoes.

The illness
As if I didn’t already feel like I had too much to do, I got ridiculously sick last Friday with the flu. I now have a new appreciation for the flu. Every year the media makes a ridiculously huge deal about the flu shot shortage. I’ve had the flu a thousand times and I’ve yet to see the benefit of getting a flu shot. I mean, you run a fever, your body aches for a few days and then you’re fine again. Well, now I finally understand why the flu is so dangerous. I spent a solid five and a half days with a 102 degree fever. No shit. Sick like I’ve never been sick before. This wasn’t hang around the house and have a good time lounging around kind of sick, I’m talking lying in bed like a zombie writhing in pain while alternating between freezing and burning up. FOR FIVE SOLID DAYS. It was a new level of suck. Most of the time I couldn’t even play poker because my mind wasn’t working right. I spent a lot of time staring at my ceiling fan. I need to dust it. I honestly used to believe that people were faking it when they had the flu for a week. I figured that it was just like when I got it: feel bad for a day or two and then right back to normal (maybe with some residual coughing). I just figured that people who took longer wanted some extra time to sit around the house and watch reruns of the Golden Girls. But now I know.

I did manage to get a couple things done while I was out for the majority of the week. Between waiting around at the doctor’s office and two pharmacy stops I had plenty of time to read Bringing Down the House, the MIT blackjack club book (no relation to the Queen Latifah/Steve Martin movie). It was an extremely fast read. Overall I have to say I really liked the book. The author really did take some liberties to make things more interesting. There are some parts of the book where the author didn’t interview the participants of a situation, and as the story he insists that they never told anyone. I want to see how the movie turns out. I also finished Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I wasn’t even disappointed with the last mission. I took me six tries to get through it. My only real complaint with the game is the co-pilot shooter missions. Those were definitely the worst of everything. Even having to eat every so often wasn’t as annoying as I thought it would be. The last mission involved a part with the co-pilot shooter; luckily, I’ve finally gotten good enough at them that I can get by. But overall, the game is so good that I’ve continued to play it even after finishing it and that’s saying something, considering all the games in my collection now that I haven’t touched since finishing them.

Two weeks ago kat and I went to the Poker Bowl USA – Austin event. This was definitively the stupidest excuse for a poker tournament I’ve ever participated in. I knew it was going to barely be a step up from an internet pyramid scheme, since it was sponsored by Razor magazine, a men’s magazine that I’ve never heard of. It was more realistic for us to play $5 poker at thomas’ house when we were all drunk beyond repair and had no concept of money. I knew we were in trouble when we showed up at the event and the guy was seating everyone in order as they came in (as in first one here is seat one table one, second is seat two table one, etc). He asked kat and I if we wanted to sit at the same table (because that makes sense). We asked to be seated at different tables, but ended up at the same table when there weren’t enough to make a 14th table. Each of the tables had 8 seats, with one seat taken by a “dealer”. I put dealer in quotes because these guys were far from being dealers. I’m not sure where the tournament orgainizers hired these guys from, but they were terrible. The only “dealer” quality about them was that they were wearing tuxedo shirts. The “dealer” at our table consistantly flipped up everyones cards so you could see what each person’s hand was after every hand, whether it was called down or not. There were 98 players in the tournament, and the tournament was scheduled to take 4 hours. How do you end a 100 person tournament in four hours? You start every with 500 chips and start the blinds at 25/50. So that means, if you want to raise the minimum in the first round, you’re betting 20% of your stack. I saw four flops. FOUR. My played hands were KJo, 92o (big blind for no raise), J10s, and JJ. We outlasted roughly half the field; I had one table change; kat had two changes before we busted out. I won one hand. It was the J10s. I was all-in on the big blind and up against a much bigger stack with AJo. I managed to squeak out a straight on the river to stay alive. A couple hands later kat came by to inform me that she had busted out. By the time the blinds got back around to me, I was all-in on the big blind again (because the blinds were raised as I hit the small blind previously) and lost on JJ against A3o when and ace came on the turn. It was a complete waste of time in the end, but still worth checking out since there was a free trip associated with winning and no entry fee. The confirmation email I recieved said “Please plan to arrive at least 45 minutes prior to the beginning of play to check in for your table assignment and meet the models of RAZOR magazine” which we luckily didn’t pay attention to because the tournament was so disorganized that I would have been severely pissed if we had sat there for an hour before getting started (we waited 15 minutes though we actually arrived after the tournament start time) and the “models” were not the ones from the Women of Razor. The “models” were nice, but they weren’t what I’d consider model material. I felt sorry for them at one point because one of the “dealers” confused her for waitress and placed a drink order with her. If there’s one thing that’ll make you feel uncomfortable when you’re trying to act hot it’s having someone treat you like a waitress. Kat agrees that this was definitely the stupidest tournament ever.

Last weekend, I played in the GCue year-end tournament. The grand prize was a trip for two to the WSOP. The tournaments at GCue are the most “professional” live tournaments I’ve ever participated in. Kevin and his crew understand the rules well enough and manage to keep the tournament running at a decent pace, considering there is no money involved. There are a couple frustrating things about the tournaments though. First, GCue is probably the smokiest bar I’ve ever spent an extended amount of time in. And that compounds itself when you’re sitting there for 10 hours playing cards with a bunch of chain smokers. Also, since it is a pool hall, you have to play poker on the pool tables, which are a far cry from the tables you’d see in a casino and are a hell of a lot more uncomfortable. The players themselves weren’t terrible, because in order to qualify for the year-end tournament you had to have placed in the top 20 in one of the previous events. There were only two ridiculously stupid plays worth mentioning. Both occurred at my first table, which was a particularly tight one. For the most part, everyone’s tables were tight but there was at least one crazy player at most tables that either busted out or busted someone else out on a lucky draw. We had one loose player at our table, but I didn’t fully understand how loose a player he was until a few rounds into the tournament. The loose player is livid due to a misdeal where he would have definitely had the nuts. I redeal the hand and both the loose player and the guy who caused the misdeal call. The flop comes out 10-9-3. Everyone checks to the loose player, who makes it 500 to go (into a 100 pot) and the guy next to me raises it to 1000. Loose player quickly goes all-in for another 7000 chips. The guy next to me thinks about it for a while and then calls the all-in (which has him covered), with J9o – that’s right, he went all-in with middle pair. Tthe loose player turns over …. Q8o: all-in for an inside straight draw. 5-J for a turn and river and the loose player gets lucky. Hispanic guy across from me was another story. I couldn’t figure out whether he really knew what he was doing or not for most of the tournament. Until he checked out a nut flush because he was afraid that the guy he was up against might have made a straight on the river. We were five hours into the tournament and this guy didn’t know that a FLUSH BEATS A STRAIGHT. I wasn’t surprised when he busted out of our table second.

I was up and down the whole tournament. I didn’t get any good cards until well into the tournament and when I did, I saw a lot of folds. I did manage to make it up to 25k at one point, which would have been average size for day 2, but toward the end of day 1 I was fading fast and I made some stupid decisions. In the end I was at the low end for day 1 finishing with 11.4k. Considering that the average stack was about $27k and we started with $10k, I can’t be too proud. When day 2 started, I was once again seated at the tightest table (of three). I hit on one hand and I stole a couple blinds to stay alive before I got moved to another table. The new table was the end of me. I hit some pretty good hands when the following play occurred. I was in the SB with blinds at 500/1000. I had K8o and called the blind. BB checked and the flop came out 2-3-8 (one spade). I made it 3k to go, BB thought about it for a while and then called. Next card was K spade, I checked, BB checked. Last card was a blank spade. I bet 2k, BB raised to 6k. Of course, he had sucked out a flush. That was really the end of my tournament life. I lost 10k in that hand and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. A few hands later, I caught QQ in middle position and went all-in for 4.1k, figuring with two large stacks behind me, this was going to be my best chance to get back in it. The flop came out AAx and it was over for me.

And that’s my poker story. The End.

So I didn’t mention that I went to Oklahoma at the end of January. And I also didn’t mention that I bought a new bowling ball while I was up there. And while I can’t stand the lame-o names bowling balls are given, I ended up going with the intense inferno. So far it’s working alright for me, I can’t remember what I shot with it when I was bowling with jim, but last week I took it out a couple times with the following results:

Thursday: 137, 215, 157
Friday: 140, 182, 178, 154, 162, 192

Now while these scores aren’t really remarkable, they’re pretty decent considering that I rarely bowl. And that 215 ended with an open in the tenth when I left a fucking 2-7-8-10. I don’t know that I’ve ever had that leave before. I guess even more remarkable is that I didn’t have a single spare in that 215 game. That’s a lot of strikes for someone with form as bad as mine. Oh yeah, and there was no alcohol involved in this bowling.

Bowling was fun. I made kat go with me on Thursday, but on Friday, I had given myself the day off, so I just went down to the bowling alley and threw a few on my own. There are definitely some interesting characters in a bowling alley, and believe me there are more on a weekday afternoon. It felt good to just get out there and throw a few games in the middle of the afternoon; someday I’ll have to do it over lunch.

And I’ve decided that I’m going to post all of my bowling scores, in an attempt to humiliate myself into becoming a better bowler. We’ll see how it goes.

Since there has been a lot of negative things going on in my head over the last couples weeks, I thought it might be a good exercise for me to list out some of the cool stuff that’s happened (or I’ve seen) over the last few days. More on the negative stuff later.

• The Minus the Bear website has a link to a video that a fan made for “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse“. A very entertaining video for an awesome song.
• Walking Concert. Run to Be Born is a good album, but what’s even better is that the website has a link for people to request the song lyrics if they happened to purchase one of the first pressing cds, which was missing the lyric book.
• My 8am soccer game was rained out this morning. I still had to get my ass up at 6:45 to call the rainout number, but at least I didn’t have to go out and play. This was particularly good new because some of our key players were going to miss this game. So no soccer for me this morning. w00t!
• Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I’m still not finished with the game, but I recently acquired a jet fighter like the one from True Lies. Now if I can just fly it to Mars to find Kuato.
• $5-10 6-person tables at Party Poker. I’ve been playing them all weekend, and I’m up over $500. If I ever hit a bad streak on these it’s really going to hurt though. I think the loose play on these tables is roughly equivalent to the play in Lake Charles. Seriously. I had a J4o cap the first three rounds of betting to my pocket aces with a board that went 10-8-5-2-K. I guess once you bluff $40 into a pot you might as well bluff another $40. Right.
• Slashdot has a link to an interesting interview with Bill Gates. The funny thing to me about this is the slashdot comments. I like to read slashdot every now and again to remind myself why I dislike the majority of the linux community. My favorite quote is in reference to Gate’s contention that Microsoft can react to security issues faster than the linux community:

  “Gosh that’s true, Bill. The Linux system actually keeps millions of people on standby to deal with problems.”

  The funny part is, this comment isn’t mean to be scarcastic. Some jackass truly believes that there are millions of linux developers out there just waiting to fix problems. Just like the college radio dj who believes that “thousands” of people are listening to his 3-4am timeslot show.

Well, I’d like to say there was a good reason why it took me so long to make this post, but the simple fact is, I’ve been busy and I’m lazy. Plus I needed to sit down with Kat’s computer to make the window picture (with kat’s help of course).

Lake Charles, the trip report

I’ve always thought good trip reports were fun to read, but I’ve never talked myself into writing one. Even at work, where it’s strongly recommended, I just never seem to get around to it. Well, here’s my attempt at writing one for the Lake Charles New Year’s Eve trip.

The players: (in clockwise order from the top left)
MerriSue, Brian, Stan, McP, me, Jason, Kat, Dan,
and Xuan (pronounced just like Billy Corigan’s ill
fated projet – Zwan)

The plan:
Fit nine people in two cars and drive to Lake Charles, LA at noon on New Year’s Eve, for a weekend of drinking and gambling and drinking (which are the only things to do in Lake Charles). Stay in a couple rooms at the fabulous Super 8 in the heart of Lake Charles.

The story:
It all got off to a relatively good start. Everyone met at the dan/brian house relatively on-time (some people on Xuan-time). After much discussion an executive decision was made for lunch plans and we were off to Buffet Palace, the Jewel of Buffet. With food in our stomachs it was time to make the 5 hour drive to Lake Charles. The whole weekend was off to a good start when McP mooned us from the other car about 30 minutes into the trip (sorry, no pictures). The rest of the drive was uneventful and we managed to make it to LA in a record (for me anyway) 4.5 hours. After getting everything unpacked, we headed to the best restaurant in Lake Charles, Copeland’s. This was definitely a sign of the time we were going to have. For those of you that have never been to Louisiana before, the state is completely lacking in service. I guess everyone there is resigned to be lazy because they live in a nasty cesspool. Either way, it was a challenge to get a drink from the bar at Copeland’s while we waited around and hour for a table. The bar there was completely swamped so I really do feel for the bartenders, but the restaurant really should have staffed more employees. Once we finally got seated, we continued to have bad service from our waitress, who took forever to bring us the bottle of wine that we ordered. It took so long to get the bottle that we considered sending it back since we had already finished our meals. Finally we got out of Copeland’s and were on our way to Harrah’s for the real fun – gambling.

We opted to go to Harrah’s on New Year’s Eve rather than Coushatta in Kinder because no one wanted to have the responsibility of driving back (it’s a 40 minute drive to Kinder) and Harrah’s had a free shuttle service to our hotel. Harrah’s consists of two boats, with all the useful stuff on the second floor of each (as if that’s not a pain in the ass). Me, Kat, Dan, Jason, and McP immediately got on the list for 3-6-12 hold’em. I’ve never played limit like this, but the first two betting rounds are $3, the thurn is $6, and the river has an option of $6 or $12. Strange. This last rule made the game pretty expensive to play. Just to cap the river is going to cost you $48. Add that to the fact that people at Harrah’s are playing insane hands and it’ll get really expensive. After being on the list for about 15 minutes they started filtering us in to the tables. McP and I got seated at the same table. I got Seat 1, and McP in Seat 9. In Seat 5 was a guy who raised every hand. He was hitting like crazy too. They guy must have had around $600 sitting in front of him and was hitting with hands like 8-4o and 9-2o. He was extremely loud and obnoxious too. Midnight rolled around and all that business happened – champagne, kissing, blah,blah – not terribly exciting. After four or five hours, Kat and Jason decided to call it a night, along with the other non-poker peoples. Apparently the table stakes at Harrah’s were steep (like $15 blackjack and $25 for pai-gow), so I totally understand why everyone wanted to bail so early. On top of that, unbeknownst to me, no one was getting good drink service, except for me. By the time I had 10 crown&cokes, I had misread a hand (clear indication to me that it’s time to switch to water for a while). When Kat asked me when I was leaving, I nodded at the obnoxious guy who was raising every pot and said “When he’s broke.” About an hour later he was broke and got up for a minute. When I went to the bathroom, I saw him at the ATM withdrawing more money. It was going to be a long night indeed. He eventually busted out again and took off from the table around 5:30. I was up a little over $100, so I decided it was time to call it a night too. Overall I thought the pokerroom at Harrah’s was alright. I’m not sure how much of the traffic was regulars and how much was holiday traffic, but people were playing crazy. There would routinely be 7 people in a raised pot preflop. In fact, there were hands that were capped preflop with 7 players. And I thought Party Poker was loose. The dealers were alright, but nothing to write home about. Most didn’t maintain a good amount of control over the game and I was utterly surprised at the amout of table talk that they let pass. I also had a couple dealers that would not correct overbets so people who couldn’t count their bets ended up adding extra money to pots. This is a rule that I wish would be used at all casinos. If you consistently overbet a pot because you can’t figure out how much to bet, the dealer should give up on taking care of it for you. Learn to count!

The next day, everyone that went home early woke up and went to Coushatta early (as in sometime before 4pm). The rest of us slept in for a while and managed to get ourselves up there by the middle of the afternoon. Once I got there, I grabbed Kat from the sportsbar and we headed straight for the poker room. I liked the poker room a little better than Harrah’s, with a few exceptions. The guy running the room let multiple tables go shorthanded for some time when there was a list. Once again, dealers let horrendous amounts of table talk go on and never said anything to people that showed their hands to players that were still actively in the game. But the chairs were nicer and the drink service was definitely better than Harrah’s. The game was just as crazy as Harrah’s though. I was down for a long time but after 5 hours or so started getting back up a decent amount. There was once again an insanely loose player sitting in Seat 5 (I was again in Seat 1) and I decided that I wasn’t leaving until he did. The guy had $600 in front of him (though I had already watched him rebuy for $500) and I wanted to stay there until he left. Unfortunately, he left before I could get any of his money and I ended up with three extremely loose players at my table, who were continuing a tilt-feud from a previous table. This hand was the end of me. I had AKs from early position, I raised, and by the time it got back to me it was capped. Flop came out 5-6-7 rainbow; I bet, someone raised and everyone else folded. I called and tried to place him on a hand. The turn came K, and he got really excited and bet out agian. I called and placed him on either AA or KK. The river was another K, so I assumed my hand was either good, or we were going to split the pot. He bet $12 and I raised him, he turned right back around and re-raised me. I called, thinking we were going to split the pot, only to see him turn over 7-7 for a full house. That one really hurt. And that was when I decided that I needed to leave the table and do something else. I ended up down $100, basically breaking even for the trip. Booooooo!

The end:
The true end of the trip was the 2am breakfast buffet at Coushatta.

The album cover for the first Stan, Xuan, Brian, McP, Kat supergroup release,
coming to soon to a snooty record store near you

ERDS!!!

This was a nice wrap up to the whole event. The buffet was mostly empty so we had a whole section to ourselves. My food tasted extra good since Kat and I had been comped our meal for our time in the poker room. Free food is tasty. We also managed to get the best service we had the entire trip. 2am in a casino buffet. Who would’ve thought?

Although the service was great, the waitress’ picture taking skills were not.

The trip back was uneventful. No mooning, no car accidents, no speeding tickets. Just laughing to myself about the obsurd 4am idea to request a 6am wakeup call for the other room. It was hilarious at the time. Trust me.