Heads Up

So while I've been setting up computers and transferring files, I find myself with a pile of free time sitting at my desk in the home office. I can't really watch a movie or anything, because I only have so much processing power, and most of that is being used to move gig after gig of music and movies from one place to another. So every night I find myself firing up Full Tilt for a little pokery goodness.

And for a change, it actually has been good. I've been focusing on the Heads-Up SNGs, of the $10 variety, and have been pretty successful so far. I think I've run my $100 into about $170 so far, so I'm winning more than I'm losing. I don't track each SNG anymore, and frankly barely keep up with my progress in online poker, because most of the time I just don't care. But there have been some observations that I've made that I thought I'd share here. Please note that this is not a statistically relevant sample size, nor is there any real research put into this - it's just what I've seen. If you want well-written, thoroughly researched writing, check out Shamus. 'Cause it ain't gonna happen here.

1) The majority of the players at this level seem timid. I raise my button probably 90% of the time, regardless of what I'm holding. I want to put more money in the pot when I have position, and less when I don't. So I raise less when I'm out of position, and almost every hand on the button. My opponents don't seem interested in raising that often with the button, and not terribly interested in defending their big blinds, so I'm picking up a ton of orphaned big blinds.

2) There seems to be a lot of desire to get money in behind at this level. I value small pairs very highly at this level, as it's infrequent that both players actually hit a flop. I have seen several instances where an opponent will call me down on every street with no pair, and have picked up a few pots when my opponent got all their money in on a small flush draw with no pair. I tend to play pretty hard in these due to the passive nature of my opponents, but I'm also waiting until I pick up a pair at least to go to way. The number of people willing to go to war with nothing but a naked draw is pretty impressive.

3) It's easy to play these things one at a time, but I can't multi-table heads-up. I do much better when I can pick up betting patterns on my opponent, and I can't do that with multiple tables going. I'm pretty sure there's a simple mathematical formula that would make these profitable with less focus, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm just killing a little time and trying to pad my roll a little.

Weekend that was

So at one point Friday I twittered something to the effect of "Lee Jones is serving us homemade pizza in his kitchen while wearing an apron with sharks on it." Or something like that.

These are not words I thought I would be writing a few years ago. Aside from the fact that prior to watching the Moneymaker WSOP I didn't know who Lee was, I also would likely have laughed in your face if you told me that one day I'd drive 2 1/2 hours to play poker in a buddy's basement, then drive back the same night $100 poorer and happy to have done it. But that's exactly what I did on Friday night. I drove to the mountains of North Carolina to play poker and hang out with my friends. I was very successful at the hanging out part, less so at the poker.

But I didn't really care. Other than stacking off to Hot Brian the Red with my pocket Jacks on a K-K-6 board where he obviously had a king or else he never would have check-raised me there, I enjoyed the poker and thought I managed to avoid the worst of my typical errors. Except for betting with less than the nuts in Omaha. I will lose far less money in that game the day I learn to not get married to two pair early. But anyway, that day isn't here yet, so there it is.

I've been posting less and less, and not really minding. Because I've been pretty damn happy with the way things are going. Work is going well, life is good, and I just don't feel like I have a lot to get off my chest. So I post less. I keep meaning to work on some fiction, but I'm enjoying spending time with my wife on the rare occassions that I'm home. Maybe eventually.

I did finally get all my home media up and rocking along. I now have a Media Center PC going that's dedicated to music and video, with a bunch of TV shows and movies on it. And we won't talk about how they got there, will we? Good. I've got that jacked into an Apple Airport Extreme, with a 500GB external HD plugged into the Airport Extreme as a network HD. That was all 3 home computers can access whatever music is on the external disk. I have PlayOn installed on there as well, which allows me to stream Hulu, Netflix and CBS to my PS3, in addition to the other stuff on the Media Center PC. So far, so good with that. There was a period of difficulty when I realized that my earthlink email address (the address that I had my PlayOn code emailed to) was no longer any good since I switched over from earthlink to Roadrunner, but they sent it along to my Gmail, and we're good.

So in a little bit I'm gonna go home and watch Season 1 of Burn Notice. Because I can. And because Bruce Campbell is a badass.

Stupid Spambots

Anyone wanna hazard a guess why I wasn't even the slightest bit tempted to click on the link when this warning popped up via Skype a few minutes ago?

Registry Scan
3:17 PM
WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
=============================

ATTENTION ! Security Center has detected
malware on your computer !

Affected Software:

Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
Microsoft Windows Win98
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Impact of Vulnerability: Remote Code Execution / Virus Infection /
Unexpected shutdowns

Recommendation: Users running vulnerable version should install a repair
utility immediately

Your system IS affected, download the patch from the address below !
Failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction.

http://www.onlinecheck.cc/?q=scan


PS - if you guessed that I'm beta-testing Windows 7, you're off by a little bit.

Song I can't get enough of...

Jessica Lee Mayfield was one of the openers for the Avetts New Year's Eve show. She sounds like a young Lucinda Williams, even if she's not old enough to get into some of the places she's booked to play.

Long strange weekend

At some point I'll collect the Twitter updates from last weekend and put them all into a blog post. Until then, just accept that I drank a bachelor party's worth of booze, hung out with a bunch of college kids, and generally acted like a kid half my age. I've almost recovered now, and the simple fact of sleeping in my own bed for a few days has been a huge help. That's pretty much over now, as I've got a trade show tomorrow, a workshop on Saturday and then back to Atlanta on Sunday. I'll catch up with you soon.

For the ATL Bloggers

The Falstaff roving party will be at Loco's Bar on North Druid Hills near I-85 tonight @7PM for pub poker. Come on out and join me!

A night of firsts

So there was this long-haired hippy in town for a little more than a day before heading down to G-Vegas to prep for the Mastodon Weekend. After giving him directions on which sports bar along the light rail line would most likely show the soccer game on tv (I'll let Al tell you how he got lost between the light rail station and the bar that is 50 yards from the station), I finished up my workday, headed home to grab the Mrs., and then picked up Special K on our way to meet Al for a beer, food and more drinks.

Apparently there was some big festival going on somewhere in the world, so a lot of people wanted to go out and drink. Which was fine, but didn't bode well for finding parking in Charlotte's crowded South End district. After a couple of laps around buildings getting annoyed, I pulled into a parking lot that I totally wasn't supposed to park in and told the attendant we'd go in and get Al and then just head downtown (or uptown, or whatever they call it here, I get confused). He said that once the new manager came on they'd probably let people park there, just charge for parking. I asked him how he'd feel if I just gave him $20 and went on my merry way, and he didn't have a problem with that. He wandered off to deal with another car full of people, I stuck a twenty under his cigarette pack, and went into the bar.

We hung out there for a while, then decided to go downtown to eat. As we headed towards the car, the parking attendant said "As long as you're alrady here, it'd be easier just to take the light rail downtown and leave the car here." Figuring he was right, and since I'd already paid $20 to park, we trooped over to the light rail and bought our tickets. Al had an all-day pass, but Suzy, Special K and I had never ridden Charlotte's newest transportation device. So we picked up our tickets ($3 roundtrip, even though there was no one collecting the tickets or checking them) and headed downtown.

It's a light rail, pretty much like any other metro train system. Gets from point A to point B. Cheap, clean, not too crowded. So we got off at the 7th streeet station, which I had to confess I didn't know exactly where it was on 7th street. Then I realized that the big-ass parking deck that they built some years before the light rail ever actually happened and named the 7th street station parking deck was actually the location of the 7th street rail station. Al didn't forget to give me endless shit for not realizing this. Sometimes I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

So we headed around the corner to Mert's Heart and Soul, the finest soul food restaurant in Charlotte. Or at least that I've been to. Suzy and Special K had never been there, so it was cool to show them part of their town they didn't know, especially since they are both pretty much native Charlatans. The food was killer, then we meandered over to Dixie's Tavern for a few more drinks. None of us had ever been there before, either, so that was cool. Suzy and I aren't much of the go out downtown types, so there's plenty of places in Charlotte that we've never been to. Dixie's was cool enough, your basic dive bar with decent-looking bartender chicks and the usual assortment of douchebags. One guy in particular made me go over the douchebag checklist, and he hit pretty much all of them.

Soul Patch - check
Sideburns - check
Multiple Hair Products on hair roughly the length of BadBlood's - check
Popped collar on his North Face jacket - check
Fat friend with all the same characteristics - check

I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere with him in the background, hopefully it turns up.

Alas, it was a school night, so we had to turn in early. We sent Al off to his fleabag hotel and hopped the train back to our car. Same homie watching the car, and we headed off into the night. Now just a couple days until I really make an idiot out of myself and try to behave like I'm 25 again. Can't wait!

On Frugality

I know, two posts in two days. Don't even think about getting used to this. But I found some of my endeavors yesterday in reducing my monthly payments interesting, and thought some of you might as well. I'm not going to discuss too much my colossal fail at refinancing my house to a sufficient rate to make it worth doing (at least with Wachovia - I haven't given up hope entirely, but the ability to make a weekly mortgage payment by simply automatically transferring from my checking account to my mortgage account is pretty sweet).

But I looked at my cable bill, and again wanted to vomit a little. I do the digital cable thing, and I do the DVR thing, and I do the cable modem thing, so I appreciate the fact that I'm a pretty sizable consumer of their services. But I thought $134/month was a little excessive, so I decided to call and whine about it. After three or four phone trees and a couple of useless customer service reps I actually got to a guy who could help me, and when he looked at my bill he said that the best thing for me (assuming I wasn't planning on leaving my house or their service in the near future) was their new program that locks in pricing for two years.

Now this is a 2-year service contract, just like a cell phone. And it has a hefty early termination fee, just like a cell phone. But since I have no intention of leaving my house or Time Warner Cable's services within the next two years, a reduction of $30/month worked pretty well for me. i wouldn't do it if I were a renter, or if I thought I'd be moving any time soon. But since we've had digital cable for several years and have no real inclination to change, and I'm certainly not killing my cable modem any time soon, the potential to save $720 over two years was certainly worth it.

Then I moved on to XM Radio. After being one of the people who swore they'd never pay for radio, I quickly became addicted to XM when I got my Honda. Then I picked up a coule of SkyFi jukeboxes for $40/each at Best Buy, and signed them both up for service. So I was paying about $30/month for radio. Not bad, except that two of them never got used. So I called in to cancel the two portable radios, which will be finding their way to Craigslist soon. While I was talking to the customer service dude, he mentioned that they have a promotion going that would let me switch my quarterly 12.99/month service on my radio to a $30 every six months plan. So let me get this straight - I can pay $12.99/month, or I can pay $5/month? I'll take the cheap-o plan. Same service, just cheaper. Now it's a promotion, so I have to call back in August to extend the promotion for another six months, but it's worth it to me.

So there you go, a couple tips to save a little money. Cause a penny saved is a beer earned.

Ugh. Just Ugh.

I sat around a table with some friends Saturday night, and there were chips and cards moved around, but I can't with any degree of honesty call what I did playing poker. It wasn't just that I was running bad, which I was. It wasn't just that I had a couple of bad beats, which I did (although I dished out as many as I took, not that you ever feel the memory of the beats you lay on someone quite as keenly). It wasn't just that I was playing perhaps the worst poker I've played in some number of months, which I was.

It was that all of those things were going on and I felt completely powerless to stop it. For much of the night, it was as if I were playing poker in a dream. I saw my hands doing things with chips, and as the sane part of me screamed "NOOOOOOO!!!!" from inside my head, my hands threw out ridiculous overbets, stupid call after stupid call, and shoved my entire stack into the middle more times than I care to recall. There was a tournament to start the evening, of which I recall exactly one hand - my pocket queens held up very early to bust Mark, who shipped it in over the top of my raise with pocket tens. We peeked at the burn cards later to find that both remaining queens had been burned, which was nothing more than an interesting factoid.

I didn't win. I didn't cash. I didn't even sniff the money. I don't remember how I went out, but I'm pretty sure I got it in bad. I coulda saved myself the $30 if I'd just done like Special K and showed up late for the cash game. Frankly, I shouldn't play tournaments with extremely low buy-ins. I don't play tournaments that well to begin with, and if I'm not gonna be able to focus on the play because the payout is too low to be interesting, then I should just avoid them. I won't, because typically the tourneys are hosted by my friends, but I can pretty much just chalk them up to a predetermined loss.

At one point in the cash game, I thought to myself - "wow, I'm playing like crap. And I can't stop myself. I should leave early or this could get expensive." And I didn't. And it did. At one point I was $210 into the $.25/.50 cash game, following buy-ins of $60, $50 and $100. Somehow I managed to struggle back to even, including my tournament buy-in, on the back of catching cards and actually playing one or two hands well. And really, that's about all I played well. I think there was a hand where I flopped a straight and Jim rivered trips that I got paid on every street. There was another hand where Brian the Red doubled me up, although I don't remember anything about the hand. Then, just as I thought "there's about 45 minutes left in the night, I'm even, or just a hair ahead, I should go into complete lockdown and get outta here with my skin intact" I picked up pocket Kings.

Now, Special K had just had his Kowboys cracked on an Ace-high board the hand before, so I thought ugly things about my kings. But I dutifully raised about 8x the blinds and got a couple of callers. I know T and Skoon hung around, and there might have been one more to the flop. Flop comes down Q-J-x, Skoon checks and I fire $15 into a $16ish pot. T calls and Skoon raises me $30 more. He's pot-committed at this point, so I'm 95% sure all his money is going in. I look around at T's stack and she's got about $60-75 in front of her. I raise another $50 on top to make sure that anybody in the hand with me is playing for all their chips. T folds, which I kinda hated, and Skoon calls. I ask him "do you have two pair?" and he shakes his head. Until the 6 on the river comes down and he says "now I do," and turns over Q-6o. I double him up, and feel a little grossed out.

Now comes the worst part. Instead of regrouping, getting my head straight over the next few hands and recapturing my losings, I go on drunken monkey tilt and call Jim's preflop raise the very next hand with 6-8o. Flop comes down 7-6-7, and I call his flop bet. Turn is a 7, giving me a boat, and he bets out strong. Of course, in the depths of my rational soul I knew he had an overpair, but the monkey tilt that was controlling my hands shipped all my chips into the middle. I ask him if he has the case seven, he says no and tables queens. I mention that I'm drawing dead, ship him my stack, and go home.

It's not so much the money, as the tilt. I've had a real problem controlling tilt lately, and I'm not sure what it is. I have a theory that it's money. Before I was paying attention to my real-world finances outside of poker, I'd go busto, reload, build my bankroll up, take money out for real-life things, whatever. My bankroll wasn't really a solid thing, just another fluid place to park money. Now that I'm trying to be more conscientious about my household finances, and now that my freelance writing money has dipped by at least $10K this year, I'm much more conscious of not going broke. And I think it's fucking up my game. A lot. I'm pretty sure that contributed to me playing like scared money in W-Vegas, and I'm pretty sure that's what made me try so hard Saturday night to force things to go my way. So I'm gonna take some time this week to try and figure out where my head is at about bankroll before I go off with the other mastodons this weekend.

And I apologize to the people who had to put up with my tilt Saturday night. It felt as bad to me as it did to you, I promise.

If you're not familiar with the finest musical act to come out of Concord, NC in perhaps forever, then you owe it to yourself to get familiar. Especially since they just hired the finest lighting designer in my house to do their summer tour this year! Yup, I will be designing lights for the Avett Brothers summer tour, and couldn't be more excited. One of the things I've never done in lighting is a tour, so this presents a whole new set of challenges, and I get to work with some really nice guys who make amazing music. Check them out on YouTube and iTunes, they kick ass. My favorite albums are Emotionalism and Gleam II.