Headed back to the mountains

My trip dates are indeterminate as yet, but this is a big deal to me.

Why?

Because it means that there will soon be a legal poker room a mere 4 hours from my house, which is certainly worth the drive. With a G-Vegas underground game getting jacked last weekend, and a Charlotte game getting raided by the po-po, I'm less interested than ever in going to these games, and the idea of a trek through the mountains to fleece hillbillies once every month or two is a lot more palatable when it's a trek that I can make on an easy Saturday drive.

So I think once they get this puppy rolling, a road trip will definitely be in order. There are still hopes for table games at Harrah's Cherokee, but nothing positive on the horizon, so looks like I'm gonna be West Virginia bound at some point next year to check things out.

Poker at my house this weekend

In case anyone's in the Charlotte area for the holiday, or wants to be, I'm throwing a tourney at my house on Sunday. We'll start at 2PM, $50 buy-in, cash game to follow.

Lemme know if you're in the area and interested, I still have seats available.

Other stuff going on includes me riding my bike a bunch this weekend, and starting rehearsals for a new play this week. Friggin' exhausted.

Resurrection

Did I spell that right? Somebody lemme know.

Anyway, last night was spent in full-on geek mode, trying to resurrect my deceased desktop. I don't know what happened to it, but shortly after I began thinking "wow, three working computers is a few too many for a household of two," my desktop took a shit.

A big one.

I'm not really sure how to describe it, but it doesn't boot. It shows the little light-up ring around the power button that indicates it's powered on lights up, but never gets anything onto the screen. I'm sure that for a couple hundred bucks somebody could fix it for me, or tell me how to fix it myself, but let's face it - I was trying to figure out a way to consolidate computers anyway, and this is as good an opportunity as any.

So off I boogie to CompUSA to pick up an external enclosure for an internal hard drive, so that I can reclaim some of the 150+ GB of writing, music, tv shows and porn (DON"T FORGET THE PORN) I had stored on that hard drive.

So I hook all that up, after getting a haircut (BTW, did you ever notice that after a radical haircut change, like, say, back to short & spiky from the long & floppy, that it takes a second whenever you look in the mirror to remember why you look different?), and lo and behold, Norton 360 rocks!

Not only had I set it up to protect me from viruses (virii?) and other shit, but I had set up the backup to copy my My Documents folder from my C drive onto my D drive, which was now my 250GB portable hard drive. Bonus! Now I don't have to take my portable drive apart, yank out the D drive, put in the C drive, copy all the relevant shite from My Documents onto the laptop, then reverse the portable drive assembly process and put all that shite back together again, then copy all the relevant shite that used to be on my C drive but is now on my laptop's hard drive onto my portable drive.

But it backed up My Documents onto that drive already, so I don't have to do that. Yay, me.

Hey G-Vegas goobers - go to the Handlebar tonight and see Seven Nations, they kick ass, I promise.

I played a SNG last night. A HORSE SNG. I was fucking around in iTunes moving files and redirecting iTunes to look for music on my new F drive (portable formerly known as internal D drive), and reducing redundancy in my music storage, and I missed the change from R to S.

So 3-betting with A24 was not my best move ever. Especially since the blinds were high and I had the 2 showing. Of course I make this mistake on something like level 8, so I was fucked and out in 8th.

I play poker g00t.

WPBT Winter Gathering

So here's the latest info.

1) There won't be a room block, per se, but I will be staying at the Imperial Palace because it's centrally located and cheap. They were willing to give me a discounted block of rooms, but they wanted me to guarantee 30 rooms booked, and I can't do that kinda fiscal liability. We should all be able to get rooms there cheaply, and then folks that want to stay elsewhere can do so.

2) Still working on the tournament location, but it looks like we might be headed back to Caesar's. The new poker room management at the IP doesn't feel like they have the facilities to host a group as large as ours. I will contact other venues as well, and I'll keep you posted.

3) Here's the tentative schedule -

Thursday Night - Drinking at the Geisha Bar at the IP, followed by Craps and Pai Gow lessons, followed by an en masse storming of the Imperial Palace karaoke bar, led by the WPBT official karaoke uber-redneck, GCox.

Friday Night - Drinking in the Sports Bar at the MGM Grand, along with the assorted Mixed game donkage

Saturday - Tournament during the day, drinking heavily in the evening

Sunday - Football - Mandalay Bay Sportsbook - a winter blogger tradition.

For those less interested in football, I will be renting a mini-van and driving out into the desert to look at the pretty rocks. My mini-van is full, but we'd be more than happy to do a caravan of photo-geeks if more folks want to join in.

That's kinda the plan is it sits right now. The wife, the father-in-law and I will be going to see Love at the Mirage Saturday night, lemme know if you want to get together for some dinner beforehand and join us for the show.


Oh, and read the comments to my last couple posts. The conspiracy theory comment spammer hath returned!

Con-Vick

I don't have too much to say on the Michael Vick matter, except that I think what he did was reprehensible, and that I think he's getting fairly just punishment. No, we don't know exactly what punishment he's gonna get hit with, but I think that for a 27-year-old megastar to lose 1-2 years of his life to prison, as well as losing about a gajillion dollars in edorsement deals and in contract money, is pretty much fair. It's a given that he'll never wear a Falcons uniform again, and since I live in the town that now has the second-best quarterback in the division instead of third-best, I'm pretty pleased about that aspect of this whole mess.

No, I don't think he deserves a lifetime ban. If you can kill someone in a drunk driving accident and get back on the field, then killing a bunch of dogs does not earn you a lifetime ban.

No, that statement should not be construed as supporting dogfighting in any way. But one human life is still worth more to me than 100 dogs, and if the league didn't ban Leonard Little for life, than the league shouldn't ban Vick for life, either.

I do think he should get cut by the Falcons for the black mark he put on their organization and the slap in the face he dealt to owner Arthur Bank.

I also think he should have to beg and grovel his way onto someone's practice squad once he gets out of prison and finishes serving the year or more's suspension that he'll certainly have tacked onto the end of the prison sentence.

I also think that me being down to 230 lbs for the first time in 7-8 years is much better news than anything associated with Michael Vick. I'm wearing pants today with a 40" waist, which makes me down a total of 35 lbs and 2 pants sizes since I've started this weight loss endeavor. The last 5 pounds have been tough, but I've added weight training to the cycling, so hopefully that will kick-start the metabolism a little.

But damn, I want a milkshake some days...

Nothing goin on but the rent

Hanging out a little writing, and thinking that maybe deciding to do 6.5 miles through my hilly neighborhood this morning might have been a little silly, since it's 95 and climbing! But anyway, I'm getting closer to changing the second digit in my weight again, as it oughta only be a few more days before I'm down into the 220s for the first time in this millenium. That's pretty cool.

So when I bought the bike, I went a little all-out. My obsessive personality traits should come as no surprise to anyone who reads here, so it probably goes without saying that I couldn't just buy a bike. I had to buy gloves, a set of lights, an odometer/bike computer, pedals and the little clippy shoes as well. I already had a helmet from the 24 Hours of Booty ride, and I had bike shorts from that as well, but the shoes are taking a little getting used to.

If you've never seen them, bike shoes have cleats on the bottom. Not like baseball or football cleats, more like a metal clip that locks your feet into the pedals to that as you're pedaling you're pulling up as well as pushing down, to maximize the energy that's going into moving the bike, and so that the energy on the upstroke of pedaling isn't lost. They're great for making it easier to ride, and for making it easier to get up hills.

They're not so great for stopping. Let's revisit - when you're pedaling, you're clipped in by metal clips, and you have to twist your foot outwards to release the clip and free your foot. So when you're coming up to a stop sign, it's important to unclip and put a foot down to avoid rolling out into traffic.

It's also important to unclip the foot that's on the downhill side of the body. Otherwise, you've got one foot free, but the other foot is locked in, and you have an odd moment of stasis before you find yourself falling over. If you're lucky (as lucky as you can consider yourself if you're going to be a grown man who just fell over on his bicycle), you can manage to twist yourself around and fall mostly on your ass and back. And well, that's another reason we wear helmets. So I was lucky enough last week to only fall on the padded bits, but it's still pretty damn embarrassing to go ass over teakettle in front of a car pulling up to a stop sing in your own neighborhood.

Go ahead, visualize. Don't leave out the spandex, it makes it a better mental image.

So that's it, really. I'm riding most every day, either on the exercise bike, the real bike, or both if I feel particularly ambitious when I get home from work. I ordered some new jeans off Ebay, figuring if I'm still working on losing weight, there's no point in paying retail for pants I hopefully won't be able to wear by November.

I've also picked up a little more work for PokerNews, doing recaps of the UK Poker Open and some of the upcoming EPT and WSOP-Europe events. If this stays as steady as it has been, I can cut out some of the lighting design work I've been picking up to pay for vacations and fund them via writing instead. There are no ladders or 9-hour technical rehearsals in writing tournament recaps, so it's certainly a better gig.

In a Pauly-esque moment, my writing music today is Cross Canadian Ragweed - Back to Tulsa: Live at Billy Bob's. Worth checking out.

I get it, drugs are bad...

But this is fucking ridiculous.

http://www.charlotte.com/breaking_news/story/240093.html

Here's the gist of it - a 74-year-old woman is convicted of conspiracy to traffic crack cocaine, and sentence to 24 years in prison.

OK, it might be stretching it a little to think that Granny was a player in a crack ring, but I could certainly believe that she knew what her kids were doing and didn't do anything to stop it. I could also believe that if somebody came by for a pickup and the kids weren't home, Granny maybe took the money and passed out a rock or two.

But in her words, "My real crime ... was refusing to testify against my sons, children of my womb, that were conceived, birthed and raised with love," Groves wrote in a 2001 letter to November Coalition, a non-profit organization rallying support to free her and others sentenced to prison for long stretches on drug offenses.

So since she wouldn't testify against her own children, she got locked up for the rest of her life. Alright, fine. Drugs are bad, mkay? I get it. And we've absolutely got to win the war on drugs, since it's far more important than keeping people from killing each other, and maybe this granny did spawn a couple of real badasses who were shooting up the trailer park to protect their territory, but here's the bit that gets me.

They coulda let her die at home, and didn't. This old woman knew that she was dying, it was evident to the prison officials that she was dying, and they refused her request to let her leave prison and die at home. I'm pretty sure that an 86-year-old woman on her deathbed wasn't going to go out and sling a few more rocks of cocaine before she went to meet her maker, and it's not like she was ever convicted (or charged with) a violent crime at any rate. So what would have been the harm in allowing an old woman a little bit of dignity in her last days?

None, except maybe some dickhead prosecutor can point to someone else and say that she "rotted in prison." Well, now she's dead, and it's too bad it's a women's prison, because she didn't even open up a bed for Michael Vick.

I think I'm starting to get...

Why the good Dr. likes Phish and Trey Anastasio so much. I'm jamming to one of Trey's albums on Napster while I sit in the den doing my evening writing assignments and blogging, with my headphones on so that Suzy can watch AMC and we can at least be in the same part of the house together. That Trey guy can really jam.

Nothing really exciting going on, played a little Razz last night, won a couple bucks, no biggie. Did get bounced from a NLHE SNG early when a guy played his hand way stronger preflop and on the flop than I expected from 44 in middle position, so I slowplayed my flopped top two right to the rail when he caught a set on the turn and I re-raised him all-in. Oops, bad read. IGPRN (I go play razz now).

Broke out the bike the last two nights, and tonight I figured out how to get my little bike computer to get off metric, so I can understand how far I'm riding. I felt really good about the 10 miles I rode last night, until I realized that my odometer was reading metric and I'd really done 10K, more like 6 miles. Still pretty good for a guy that 3 months ago wouldn't go half a mile without a car, much less choose to ride a bike for any reason.

Another year older and...

Well, not really deeper in debt, as Tennessee Ernie Ford would say. More like kinda hanging around slowly making financial headway.

Let's see...not really a whole lot to report here, spent a little time last night on Full Tilt (this post is brought to you by Bonus Code Falstaff), and remembered that in low limit poker, it's very rare that you can actually make a move, so most of the time you have to catch some cards to meet with success.

So I caught cards early, didn't catch cards late, and parlayed my bad run of cards into a successful Razz outing. I picked up a quick $50 profit, gave it away plus another $70 in a nasty -20BB run at 3/6, then picked up about $30 of it back playing 1/2 Razz. I like the fact that I at least have enough familiarity with other games to have a modicum of success while I decompress from a bad run at Hold Em.

So here's a set of hands that I'm having trouble with - A9 - AJ. They look so good to start out, especially in mid/late position. A9 not so much unsoooted, but the siren call of A9s and ATs is so hard to resist. It's not helped by the fact that some of my biggest pots come from limping in late position with AT and picking up Broadway or a flush on the turn. So here are my issues with these hands, and I'd love to hear what you think. Please confine your evaluations to these hands in a limit format, because in a No-Limit game, I'll play any two cards for different reasons at different times, with varying levels of success. But the mathematical basis of limit lends itself a little more to a "correct" playing style.

A9s - really, it's not very good. It's another one of those hands that if I hit an Ace on the flop, I'm still not comfortable, since enough people limp with AT or AJ for me to still be way, way behind. About my only options for winning with A9s are catching my flush, hitting two pair, or a couple of 9s on the flop. Otherwise, it's kinda trash. So I'm thinking I should play it from an unraised blind or right around the button only, and toss it from MP.

ATs - honestly, see A9s.

AJ - HELP. I don't know how to play this hand, sooooted or unsooooted. I tend to play it too fast in EP, and too slow in LP. I seem to run into a lot of people who aren't raising me with hands that have me dominated, and the passivity of my opponents is kicking my ass. I find myself running into people who just call me down with AK, and then I call off a bet when they pop me on the river.

So what do you do with AJ?

Oh, and if you want to get me a present to celebrate the 34th anniversary of my birth, join me on Fantasy Sports Live and use bonus code Falstaff!

Or just send money to Jhartness on Full Tilt, I promise you'll have plenty of chances to get it back :).

Fuckin' Monday

"At this point, the worst part is that she's about to go through this thing, this ordeal, and at the end of it, she'll probably be dead before me."

That's what a friend of mine told me on the phone a couple minutes ago when I called to see if there's anything I could do for him as he heads off to California to be with his daughter as she starts treatment for colon cancer that has already metastasized. He knows she's fucked. She knows she's fucked. And it's not fair.

She's my age. And quite possibly won't see another birthday. I'm a little shaken, to say the least.