Month: April 2006

Now that I think I’ve collected up enough hand histories for my low limit lesson, I went back to 30/60 last night.   Suited selected Brokeback Mountain and I played poker and half-heartedly watched.  I thought I might be put off by a bunch of homoerotic scenes, but it really wasn’t like that at all.  I found the more repressed character interesting and realistic, but I didn’t really think it was that great of a movie.  Perhaps if I had been paying more attention…

Playing poker during the movie went splendidly.  I was up about $1,500 after a couple of hours and very pleased with my play.  I think I might even have been starting to get over-confident.  I went to bed fairly eary and woke up at 3:00am and sat down to play for another hour or so.  I fairly quickly lost $1,550 so my net for the night was -$50.  That was something of a let down!  There was a guy at the table who was perfectly willing to cap the turn with second pair and lots of interesting plays like that, so everyone at the table was experiencing wild swings.  I made some mistakes, giving him too much action with his big hands and overplaying medium pairs, which was a big factor in my losses.  It was fun, though.  At least as much fun as giving away money can be.

Redpill had another meltdown on ITH and got himself permanently banned.  I’ve got a lot of thoughts about his situation that I will probably go ahead and post.  I’m getting a lot of email and PMs asking me about the situation, so I might as while try to put them down once and point people here.

I’ve been ignoring my blog because I’ve got six different projects that I’m juggling at once.  Some of them are boring from my real life, but I’ve also grown obsessed with the game of
When I’m not having to actually do something with it, I’m reading the deliberations of the various camps and alternately laughing at their Machiavellian schemes or marvelling at them.  It has been a blast.

The other big time suck is that I’ve been playing micro limits and culling hand histories to try to prepare an ITH Poker Tutor lesson.  I think it is going to be pretty neat and it is something that the newer players call for.  They often think that the play at 30/60 is totally different from 0.50/1.00 and that some of us give them crazy advice.  Hopefully, some of these lessons will show them that poker is poker, no matter what the limit.  It is amazingly more difficult to find appropriate hand histories to make a specific point that you would think.  You can’t really make it tell a logical story from start to finish, because the real world just isn’t that neat.  I hope that there will at least be a few nuggets in there somewhere.

I’ve been fighting the most horrible cold ever.  I’ve been dragging myself to and from work and managing to make it through the days for the most part, but I’ve played almost no poker and written nothing whatsoever for the blog.  However, I’m sure that I’ve turned the corner and I’m going to try to get my act together on both counts in the next few days.

If you haven’t done so already, you should get yourself to a newstand and check out the current issue of Bluff Magazine.  It has the account of the Big Game between Andy Beal and the coalition of poker pros known as the Corporation.  The current installment covers the first round where Andy cleaned out the pros completely.  It is written by the same guy who wrote The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King and it is excellent. It is the first poker magazine I ever bought and worth every cent.

Also, GSN announced Season Two of High Stakes Poker. Easily the best poker on TV and the second place show isn’t close.  I am always very happy when TiVo pops up with a new episode.  I’m hoping Phil H has a total melt-down this week.