The Fish is Me

I am still a huge fish in PLO. This is sad, as I have spent about a month now working on my game. Well, playing anyway. I haven't watched enough videos recently, because it's more fun to play than to learn (yes, I am the perfect fish). My recent mode seems to be: get home from work, eat dinner, play 4 tables of PLO50 on my laptop while watching an episode of something on HULU in the corner of my screen. Not the most profitable session type for me, but it has been kinda relaxing and enjoyable to play the "lunch-money" stakes again. And now I've gotten myself addicted to PLO, so while I recognize that I do suck quite badly at it, I'm gonna keep working on it and hopefully pull myself up into the "competent small stakes player" realm in the near future.

I am pretty curious what my PLO stats are like, but since I've been playing mostly on the laptop (a Mac), I haven't bothered with buying Pokertracker Omaha. My brother has promised to help me fix up my desktop comp when he's home for Thanksgiving, so I think I'll get it then and import all my hands. I'm guessing I'm playing too LAGGy, like 30/20/4, and winning at something sad like 1ptbb/100 (at least, I think I don't have a negative winrate--would be pretty depressing to find out otherwise. It's kinda hard to keep track when I'm jumping back and forth between my normal NL games and the PLO).

The main thing I've learned the hard way about the difference between PLO and NLH is the suckiness of pocket pairs in PLO. Still hasn't quite sunk in, though. Last night I was watching a video where the pro mucked crappy kings (like KK38r) from the SB against a BTN open without a second thought, and I was like, "Oh shit, I'm supposed to be folding there?!?" Weird game.

The nice thing about the PLO setup I have going right now is that I have been able to watch a shit-ton of stuff on hulu.com. The other night I even had this bizarre dream that I was going to open the first hulu review site (I actually looked this up afterwards and learned that there already is at least one of these--so sad, dream self). I'll have to settle for reviewing stuff in my blog instead.

So far on hulu I have watched:

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- great, great show. One of the funniest shows I've seen, in fact. I have my coworker's son to thank for recommending it to me. Best description of it I've heard is "Seinfeld on crack."

Friday Night Lights -- This show really grew on me. I was depressed when I got through the second season and realized hulu didn't have any more episodes. The show kept doing ridiculous, soap-opera-y things to the characters, but never enough at one time to completely sink the plotline. This show does get some extra points in my book b/c of all the hot guys on it.

The O.C. -- Yeah, I can't really believe I watched this show either. Don't know what came over me. It pretty much sucked as badly as could be expected. The scenery was nice, though (lots of mansions and beaches to keep my mind off the plot). And Peter Gallagher's eyebrows amuse me. As do storylines about the macho, bully kid walking in on his supposedly-straight dad making out with his male friend at his car dealership.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- There are a ton of these on hulu; took me like 2 weeks to get through them all. They all kind of blend together after a while, but the intro/outro bits by Hitchcock were always amusing. Three out of four episodes seemed to involve either one spouse poisoning the other for their insurance money or someone killing their wealthy relative for their inheritance money. Good times, good times.

Alfred Hitchcock Hour -- I never realized before that this was a different show. Hitchcock Presents was a 30 min. show that ran in the late 50s; the Hitchcock Hour was an hour long show from the early 60s. So far I'm just partway through the first season of this show, but I am generally liking it better than "Presents." Dramas are much better suited to the hour format rather than half hour, IMO. Actually, the first episode of this show cracked me up b/c it was about poker (main character is secretly a pro gambler and his younger brother is a poker fish who thinks he is good, so the older brother decides to "school him" before he ruins his life or whatever)--and it was kinda surprising to hear that the term "fish" was in the poker lexicon even back then.

My favorite episode so far has been one called Hangover, starring Tony Randall:

The scene where he is fucking up his presentation to the ad execs is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever watched. Just brutal.