Posts Tagged ‘humor’

It was one year ago today that my girlfriend and I left our apartment in Boston and became officially homeless. For the past year we’ve been without permanent residence, living out of a Subaru Forester, camping, renting garages and spare rooms when we can, and staying in hotels when there’s poker to be played or coached.

It’s been an exciting and eye-opening experience. We’ve visited a lot of cool places including about a dozen national parks, visited some old friends in new places and met two new babies- guess I’m at that age where my peers are starting to pop them out, and gotten a better feel for parts of the country that we barely knew before. I’d never been to the American South or the Pacific Northwest, and I ended up liking the former a lot better than I expected and the latter somewhat less (though I’m just getting to know it).  Read the complete post...

The second installment of my trip report from the main event of the 2010 World Series of Poker, covering Days 3 and 4, has just been published in the September issue of 2+2 Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

I came into Day 4 with a monster stack relative to the field. I had over 500,000 chips, when the average was about 180,000, ranking me 27th among the more than 1,200 players who remained. Day 4 was a particularly good day for this, as it was also the day that would separate the players who would win nothing from those who would take home at least $19,000. With 747 players to be paid, no one wanted to be eliminated in 748th place (or 762nd, for that matter), which meant that most people were playing more conservatively than usual.  Read the complete post...

Their flawless software that is now the best and most secure in the industry apparently produced this little gem in the UBOC O/8 event the other day. The bet sizes were all screwed up, enabling people to limp in for 15 at the 50/100 level, and for the player in the Big Blind to move all in. Their response was to cancel the tournament, refund buy-ins, and offer a freeroll for affected players with about $10,000 in UBOC championship event buy-ins added.

Thanks to TwoPlusTwo poster FreeFalling for this awesome image!

I was telling my girlfriend about the latest online poker gossip/scandal involving an alleged chatlog in which Thorladen and Imperium discuss multi-accounting with the help of services like GoToMyPC that allow you to access other computers remotely from a different computer anywhere in the world. The basic idea, and something that has surely happened dozens of times whether these two actually did it or not, is for a very good tournament player to stake several decent but less-good tournament players in super-profitable online events like the WCOOP or the FTOPS. Should one of the horses start to get deep in the tournament, the better player can take over for the decisions that will have the biggest impact on the team’s EV.

“They’re like poker fluffers,” she quipped without missing a beat. “They get it started, and then the pro comes in to finish it off. You’d have to be a pretty big tool to agree to something like that, not just ethically but like… as a matter of personal respect.”  Read the complete post...

Here’s a sad but humorous exchange I had with FTP support today. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure I would have folded the river anyway, though that’s hardly the point:

I just played a hand in the $1000 NLHE FTOPS event in which I activated my time bank, for what I believe to be the first time in this event, on the river. Within seconds, my hand was folded. Could you help me to understand what happened? I looked back through the chat log and couldn’t find a previous instance of my having used the timebank. Why did i have so little time available. I ended up folding a good hand in a big pot because my time expired, so I’d like t understand what happened. Thank you, Andrew

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for contacting Full Tilt Poker Support.  Read the complete post...

It’s hard to keep track of the proper procedures for encountering various potentially dangerous animals in the wild. With someone you are supposed to wave your arms and appear threatening, with others you are supposed to back away slowly, etc. While hiking in Yellowstone National Park we came across this not very reassuring sign about bears. Note the instructions for “If a Bear Charges”.

This is a very thin river shove to begin with. It’s not that Villain is all that likely to hold better, but it’s also hard to see him paying off with worse. My hand looks very strong here and could easily be a full house. Still, people do talk themselves into bad calls (both players were on the loose side, especially CO).

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $50.00 BB (8 handed) – Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 ($2341)
MP1 ($11912)
Hero (MP2) ($4203)
CO ($2009)
Button ($565)
SB ($2491)
BB ($1000)
UTG ($2797)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with A, 8
2 folds, MP1 bets $100, Hero raises to $250, CO calls $250, Button calls $250, 2 folds, MP1 calls $150

Flop: ($1075) 8, 8, K (4 players)
MP1 checks, Hero checks, CO checks, Button checks

Turn: ($1075) J (4 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets $666, CO calls $666, 1 fold, MP1 calls $666  Read the complete post...

While I was in Germany, my girlfriend was hanging out in Northern Minnesota (long story). One night, she ironically attended a monster truck rally where she ironically purchased this camouflage hat for me. We’ve been camping in the Badlands of South Dakota, and between the hat and the scraggly beard, I’m starting to feel like I fit right in. This might become a new non-ironic look for me!

Apparently rattlesnakes are rather common in this area:

We haven’t seen any rattlers, but we did see a baby rabbit. Emily thought it was adorable, so I insisted on demonstrating what it would look like if a rattlesnake unhinged its jaw and swallowed the rabbit whole:

Sorry, no pictures of rabbit or girlfriend.