What is the World Coming To?

Here's something you don't see every day--an actually well-informed and intelligent article about poker from the mainstream media (ESPN, no less!). Embarrassing admission time: I have a yooge crush on Phil Galfond. Dude is a great poker player, a good writer, a very nice guy (from everything I've heard) and pretty cute. What more could you ask for in a guy?

In other news, work is kicking my ass and I am running extremely well at the poker. Matt went back to school yesterday and left me with his MacBook Air--not a bad deal! I'd forgotten the luxury of having a laptop that doesn't overheat and completely crash every time I try to open more than three programs on it simultaneously. (I love my laptop about as much as one can an inanimate object; it has served me very well these past four years, but it is clearly on its last legs.) The two-finger scrolling is a new thing for me and is sooo nice.

One of my favorite things about coming back to work after a long weekend is checking my email junk mail folder and seeing what spam has gotten through our filters. I don't get a ton of spam in general, but it's definitely more than my gmail account (where I hardly ever get any) and always highly entertaining to me. Some of my favorites from the past week (yes, I am actually lame enough that I leave my favorite ones in my junk mail folder rather than delete them, so that every time I go in there I can laugh at their titles all over again): "Leg game," "I was seduced.", and "Your new proportion will keep her satisfied." That last one contains the following text:

FPpk
Having survived the Nazis, the Hungarians did not want to trade

Just imagine that your love wand becomes extremely huge! It is attainable!
Before deciding on applying to surgery, try our preparation!

The Russians were moving westward. But would they break the NaziWhat one is left with is a man who, even as an adult, was convincedTwo: When taking risks, dont bet the ranch.He is a chemical engineer and works for Tungsram, the wellknownthe other boys. In fact, George learned how to box, how to defend him-own interest in the subject. Although the family spoke Hungarian,

I wonder if anyone has ever considered writing a book about all the different bizarro spam people come up with. I can't be the only one who gets a huge kick out of this stuff, can I?

Nothing Much

Not much going on here. Prepping for Match Week in the office. Matt is home for Spring Break, so haven't had time to play much poker. We watched the movie "The Assassination of Jesse James" last night, which I thought was excellent.

On the Other Hand

Although being excessively results oriented (why do I keep hearing people call it "orientated," anyway? is that a British thing?) and sucking at/hating math are not very good traits for a poker player, I do have some personality traits in my favor:

1) Gambling itself doesn't interest/excite me. I have no desire to ever play -EV casino games like craps, blackjack, keno, or whatever else. I can't really understand their appeal, but there are plenty of poker players that give away their poker winnings "in the pit," as they say. I also don't have any desire to play in poker games that are above my skill level. If I somehow suddenly became a billionaire, I highly doubt that I would go donking around in the nosebleed games, even if the money meant nothing to me.

2) I am very competitive. I hate losing. I always want to prove to myself that I can beat my opponents/the level I'm playing at.

3) I love repetitive tasks. I get some weird satisfaction from doing the same thing over and over. It's more calming than boring to me.

4) This kind of overlaps #1, but when it comes to money, I am very disciplined. I play vastly over-rolled. I have never chased my losses by moving up to a higher game. I do understand the urge to move up to try to get even, but my fear of failure/getting outplayed is far too great to ever tempt me to do something like that.

5) I have an obsessive personality. When I get into a subject, I want to learn everything there is to know about it. Luckily, poker is one of those things that is so elusive, you can just go on learning and learning forever and still feel like you have barely skimmed the surface of the game.

6) I have a pretty good memory and am reasonably decent at recognizing patterns.

It's Not (aka Who Me, Emo?)

Played like a fucking idiot last night. Stacked off light in a number of spots where I should have known better. I've been playing very badly in 3-bet pots. Not much else to say other than I'm quite frustrated with myself right now.

Except, yeah, one more thing to say about this: My success at poker cannot be how I define myself. Self-worth is not measured by a goddamn results graph. It's just stupid to go through this again and again like a fucking yo-yo. One day, I am playing well, life is getting on the right track, hell, I'm not such a loser after all. The next day, the next week, I play bad, my pt/bb drops a point, whatever, suddenly I'm comparing myself to the rest of the world and coming up quite a bit short. This is not the way to go through life, obviously. And it's not a poker problem, it really has nothing to do with poker at all; it's just that poker provides a very tangible way to measure yourself over time. And so I cling to that. I wonder if any player ever really gets past this, or if the good ones just get better and better at hiding it.

I've got the lyrics to Aimee Mann's "It's Not" stuck in my head, so that may partially explain my emo-ness. She's pretty good at this songwriting stuff:

I keep going round and round on the same old circuit
A wire travels underground to a vacant lot
Where something I can't see interrupts the current
And shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot
And from behind the screen it can look so perfect
But it's not

So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stop light
I keep waiting for a change but I don't know what
So red turns into green turning into yellow
But I'm just frozen here on the same old spot
And all I have to do is to press the pedal
But I'm not

People are tricky you can't afford to show
Anything risky anything they don't know
The moment you try - well kiss it goodbye

So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator
And let me fall into the dream of the astronaut
Where I get lost in space that goes on forever
And you make all the rest just an afterthought
And I believe it's you who could make it better
Though it's not
No it's not...
No it's not...

Worst Book Synopsis Ever

About a book called, so surprisingly, The Mole:

In the spirit of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor or Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, Andy Brown's first novel follows a sibling relationship told through vignettes, each story centered around the removal of a mole. From this premise, Brown's novel expands the associations of moles from skin disease, to the burrowing animal, to secret societies and espionage, to tell the story of familial dysfunction, culture-jamming, eco-terrorism, and regret in the lives of young adults in the 1990s.

Ew, just....ew.

Biggest Pot

Not really that impressive, but it feels good after yesterday's tilt. It was like my third hand of the session too. So I did what any reasonable fish would do and decided to call it a day.

Full Tilt Poker Game #5489856488: Table Paul Wolfe - $5/$10 - No Limit Hold'em - 20:21:49 ET - 2008/03/03
Seat 1: Mr Cea ($439.85)
Seat 2: thenobb ($969.25)
Seat 3: ShesNoGood ($2,711)
Seat 4: JaccoH ($677.90)
Seat 6: josh3336 ($1,000), is sitting out
Seat 7: badring ($1,000)
Seat 8: urgolf9 ($420.50)
Seat 9: famouslastwords ($1,000)
badring posts the small blind of $5
urgolf9 posts the big blind of $10
The button is in seat #4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to famouslastwords [5c 5h]
famouslastwords raises to $35
Mr Cea folds
thenobb folds
ShesNoGood folds
JaccoH calls $35
badring calls $30
urgolf9 folds
*** FLOP *** [Ts 3d 5d]
badring checks
famouslastwords bets $80
JaccoH raises to $642.90, and is all in
badring raises to $965, and is all in
famouslastwords calls $885, and is all in
badring shows [Kd Qd]
famouslastwords shows [5c 5h]
JaccoH shows [Ad Td]
*** TURN *** [Ts 3d 5d] [Qc]
*** RIVER *** [Ts 3d 5d Qc] [4c]
badring shows a pair of Queens
famouslastwords shows three of a kind, Fives
famouslastwords wins the side pot ($644.20) with three of a kind, Fives
JaccoH shows a pair of Tens
famouslastwords wins the main pot ($2,040.70) with three of a kind, Fives
JaccoH is sitting out
badring adds $1,000
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $2,687.90 Main pot $2,043.70. Side pot $644.20. | Rake $3
Board: [Ts 3d 5d Qc 4c]
Seat 1: Mr Cea didn't bet (folded)
Seat 2: thenobb didn't bet (folded)
Seat 3: ShesNoGood didn't bet (folded)
Seat 4: JaccoH (button) showed [Ad Td] and lost with a pair of Tens
Seat 6: josh3336 is sitting out
Seat 7: badring (small blind) showed [Kd Qd] and lost with a pair of Queens
Seat 8: urgolf9 (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 9: famouslastwords showed [5c 5h] and won ($2,684.90) with three of a kind, Fives

Life Tilt

My job is driving me crazy today. Yay for Mondays. My boss actually came to me this morning to tell me that I should back up and delete an old file folder (last year's grad audit) from our shared hard drive because it takes up too much space. Our hard drive is 244 GB; the folder consists of a bunch of word documents totaling about 16 MB. Oh yes, you're right; I'll get on that right away! And so I did.

Also spent about 10 minutes this morning asking one of my coworkers for a copy of the cover page we send out with external elective applications. It is a standard cover memo that goes with every application with generic instructions for completing the application. So I ask, "Can I have a copy of the cover sheet that goes with these applications?" Coworker has no idea what I mean. I try to describe it. She pulls out some other form. I try to describe it in more detail. She says, "We don't have anything like that." Finally I go to last year's application copies and dig out an old one. Show it to her. "Oh, that? That's not a cover sheet." Uh, okay? It's the standard top page of each application packet that goes out. Is there some other name for it?

Anyway, played a bunch of poker this weekend; ended up somehow making a solid 4.5 ptbb/100, but I have no idea how. Felt like I was running sick bad while playing (had a bunch of sick hands, including one where I got effectively all in preflop with AKs against some crazy guy's 92s and lost, and another where I got all in on the turn for 150BBs with AK on an A55J board against another maniac, and lost to J6s--J on the river, of course). Tilted pretty badly; by the end of Sunday's session I was at the point of berating myself after every play I made that didn't work (definitely a masochistic streak in my blood), which is obviously not the best mindset to be playing in. Luckily I don't have the inclination to super monkey tilt like I have seen in some other players. My tilt is more subtle, probably not extremely -EV on any one hand but -EV nonetheless. I do a lot of pushing in marginal spots, looking to get it in with any decent draw. Nothing catastrophic to my game, but obviously any time I am making plays that I should know better than to make, it sucks and should be unacceptable. But I have a definite "quitting" problem, as Tommy Angelo would put it. If I'm stuck and there is at least one big fish in the game, I can never bring myself to leave the game. It's stupid, but there it is. I want my money back. And I deserve that money more than the fish, goddamnit.

If only I could learn a way to turn off my emotions...

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