Hi.
How’s everyone doing? Here, something to amuse you until I can think up 3 years worth of poker content.
Clue: The Drinking Game
To be played while watching the film “Clue”. Reccomended for 6 players. This is cut down from a much more aggressive version that I found online.
1. Make up 12 cards – One for every main character (Green, Mustard, Peacock, Scarlet, Plum, and White) and one for the six rooms used most commonly mentioned in the movie (Study, Dining Room, Kitchen, Billiards Room, Lounge, Hall).
2. Each Person draws one character and one room. Whenever they are mentioned in the movie by name, you take a drink.
3. All players drink whenever:
- Thunder or Lightning occurs
- The cook is seen
- A Gun goes off
- Green says “I didn’t do it!”
- Someone is killed
4. If you are still coherent at the end of the movie, you are doing it wrong.
Sports: Pardon the Extremely Long Interruption
Will someone wake me when Tony Kornheiser returns to Pardon the Interruption? I’m freakin’ sick of the substitute hosts and this summer hiatus has gone on so long that Brett Favre will have retired and unretired 4 times over before the A-squad is back on TV.
Also, Rob Stone is half decent on Around the Horn, but his soft image with the journalists lets them ramble on forever and the show isn’t nearly as entertaining.
As of today, I’m unsubscribing from their podcast feeds until everyone’s back. I’ve probably only got another week to wait, but that’s what I said *last* Monday.
Poker: The Allegorical Toe Dip
Somewhere between my long hours job, my performing, and my duties as a husband, I managed to catch the poker bug again. None of this should be that surprising considering my normal patterns in hobbies and interests. It comes in waves. I suppose if you’re another poker player reading this, you could call it another form of variance.
For Chris Hanel vs. the Poker World (Round Umpteen), I decided that I wanted some actual coaching or study besides running to people with random hand histories or attempting to read another book. I also don’t happen to inhabit a company with ringers for co-workers anymore, so it wasn’t going to come from the bracelet winner sitting in the cubicle down the hallway from me.
After lurking on 2+2 for awhile and listening to every single freakin’ episode of the 2+2 Pokercast in the office while working, I had heard enough about CardRunners to want to dip my toe in the water. However, I wasn’t crazy about spending money just yet. I know enough about my own habits to forsee the possibility that I hit a bad swing off the bat and give it up just as quick. With my limited time budget, it’s very easy for me to say “I don’t have time for this break-even crap” and move on to whatever else should fill the late night hour or two that I have before hitting the sack.
However, CardRunners’ partnership with FTP and the ability to purchase a membership with FTP points gave me the excuse I needed to sign up and not feel guilty, so I plunked down the 20k points needed to sign up and started taking in videos.
I will say right now that I have spent very little time on the forums and right now I am watching a very specific series on the site, namely Brystmar’s SSNL video series, a behemoth 7-parter that tackles .25/.50 NL 6-max and has encourages a very specific starting hand selection. Right away, my numbers changed from 23/11 (over 19k hands) to 22/14, with a very sharp decrease in blind defense and limping from the small blind. So while the number isn’t that big of a shift at first glance, digging into my position stats found a large shift into the black while playing the blinds, whereas I was a big loser before.
This is obviously all dealing with just pre-flop selection, and I’m doing a lot more work on assessing hand ranges and then acting on the reads that I make. But it’s all starting to work into my game and Brystmar’s series is paying off in huge dividends. If I had laid down cash for my CardRunners membership, I would have already paid for the first 2 months in the first 1,000 hands.
I think for now what I plan to do is post results 1,000 hands at a time and post a hand or two discussing the thought process. For now, I am a happy poker player.
-Chris
Welcome Back to the Big Show
Yeah, it’s about time I got this online again. I have an addiction to design wishy-washyness.
News
Bad News: The Geekette is no longer my girlfriend.
Good News: The Geekette is now my fiancée.
Discuss.
-Chris
Corrections, Retractions, and Omissions
While I’m sitting in Minneapolis and enjoying the holiday mood, I thought I’d get some things cleared up and share some other notes:
Correction: In a pre-Vegas post, I noted that BG smelled. I apologize for the confusion, as BG thought I was referring to his olfactory abilities. What I meant was, “The eerie haze that surrounds BG as he sits at his computer desk resembles that of dead fish being picked apart by vultures bathed in raw sewage.”
That and I lost money playing his horses… a whopping 7 dollars (or for those keeping track, 49.3% of my bankroll).
Omissions: Yeah, all I really can give you people is a Vegas trip report, and I totally copped out. I officially suck ass. My favorite hate mail for this so far belongs to a non-blogger who I played with at MGM with, who found my blog and sent me this IM:
dude, i am SO disappointed… we share an hour or two at 4/8 half kill at the MGM, argue about KTo UTG and its value in that game, I impress you with my knowledge of the 91 Twins. I complain about Full Tilt poker to you when you obviously don’t care, then you give me this blog. Then I check it religiously to see me chronicled in INFAMY, and I get a philisophical nugget about Disneyland after 3 weeks of waiting.
To add to the notes that weren’t included above, we never had a kill pot that got past pre-flop and the play was as fishy as one would expect in a 4/8 game. I almost felt like I was there killing time and sharing conversation than I was playing poker. My hands pretty much played themselves and never felt the need to get stupid or tricky. I left down two dollars, but we were having a hilarious time trading movie and sports trivia. The writer of the above note kept up with me at a really scary rate and I can take heart that I am *not* the only one that believes the ‘91 Series to be the greatest of all time.
Omission: CJ has been replaced by Dr. Chako as the Pokergeek’s Official Luckbox. Pocket Aces 5 times in the first two hours of the big tournament, knocking out me *and* the Geekette. Well done sir. He got a nice hat for his efforts. I got a lecture for not picking up on his red-flag-IVE-GOT-ACES acting show from the SB.
Correction: Despite earlier sentiment, I do not know how to play poker. But I play one on the internet.
-Chris
My Trip Report
Once again, I find myself throwing out a lot of stuff and deciding that I’m not going to bore everyone with what I did or how much fun I had.
Instead, I challenged myself to consense the experience into one sentence while still accurately conveying my feelings on the event. So, let me just say this:
A WPBT Event is like going to Disneyland for 15 minutes… Sure, you’re at the happiest place on earth, but how can you leave happy when there’s no possible way to take all of it in?
The double edged sword of having so many awesome people to share the weekend with.
-Chris
Greatly Exaggerated
I’m here. Not dead. Trip report is once again proving epic and not really done yet.
Life gets hectic on the holidays.
-Chris