Posts Tagged ‘humor’

…since moving to Canada. All because of this hand:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $4.00 BB (6 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Button ($468.50)
SB ($584.05)
BB ($400)
Hero (UTG) ($487)
MP ($400)
CO ($420)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 2♣, 2♦
Hero bets $16, 3 folds, SB calls $14, BB calls $12

Flop: ($48) 2♥, 2♠, 8♦ (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $28.20, 1 fold, BB raises to $72, Hero calls $43.80

Turn: ($192) K♣ (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $66, BB raises to $188, Hero raises to $399 (All-In), BB calls $124 (All-In)

River: ($816) 8♠ (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $816 | Rake: $3

Results:
BB had 8♣, 8♥ (four of a kind, eights).
Hero mucked 2♣, 2♦ (four of a kind, twos).
Outcome: BB won $813

The funniest bit is that even before PokerStars rolled his hand, I knew I was beat when I saw that river.

Part 1 of my trip report from the 2011 WSOP Main Event is now appearing in the August edition of 2+2 Magazine. This covers my first two days and includes everything you could want from the WSOP: big calls, big bluffs, scared money, fearsome Russians, surly Frenchmen, bad beats, and a pretty sweet value bet. Here’s a preview:

After some thought, my opponent moved all in for 36,500. This is another spot that I’d never put myself in online, betting without a plan for what I’d do if my opponent raised. In a live game, though, I have the added option of staring him down. I stared intently at him for a good three minutes not even thinking about anything in particular but just watching him and letting him sweat for a bit and trying to see what kind of a feel I could get from him.

When I decided that he’d basted in his own perspiration for long enough, I reached towards my chips and watched again for a reaction. He blinked and turned towards me a bit. That felt weak, but it wasn’t decisive, so I just made a note of it. Never taking my eyes off of him, I confirmed with the dealer the amount I would need to call. My opponent swallowed. I counted out the appropriate number of chips but held them in my hand, starting to lean towards a call but not having made up my mind yet. He blinked again and looked uncomfortable. I pushed the chips into the pot.  Read the complete post...

Whenever we get a lot of new visitors at Thinking Poker, and probably a lot of people who haven’t read my more monolithic trip reports (understandable), I reprint select stories that are buried in much longer narratives but that I consider among my best. This article is part of that series, so apologies to those who have already seen it. If you have suggestions for other stories that deserve to be reprinted with their own dedicated post, please leave a comment!

Excerpted from my WSOP 2007 Trip Report:

As we are taking our seats on Day 1, there is a lot of commotion, and someone saying he needs two seats. I immediately think of US Airways’ controversial policy requiring overweight passengers to purchase two seats, but it turns out the gentleman who will be sitting two seats to my right is William, a twenty-something missing one arm and almost completely unable to use the other, who plays with his feet and needs the second seat to balance himself. One at a time, he pins his cards to the table with his big toe, slides them up a little wooden ramp, and looks them. He’s adept enough with his toes to take individual chips out of a stack and then push them into the pot. He has an assistant who stacks his chips for him when he wins a pot. Apparently he made it into the money last year, and obviously he is popular with the press, so there are a couple of cameras taping him as he gets set up. Maybe I will be on TV after all!  Read the complete post...

One of my co-workers introduced me to the workplace cliche that “this job wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the customers,” which in my naivete I believed to be both original and uniquely applicable to my job. Today, instead of a single story, I’m going to share a number of brief complaints and observations:

1. I wear a green smock and make minimum wage. Do you really think they let me set or change the prices? If you think it’s expensive, go shop somewhere else. I could give a shit. A woman once came up to the counter with a two-liter bottle of generic soda, which rang up as 89 cents. She pointed out to me that it said 75 cents on the bottle. “That’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price,” I explained.

“So you just choose to charge more than that?”

“Well, I don’t choose it, but yes, that’s what the store charges.”

“Well then I’ll go buy it at the grocery store,” she told me bitchily, leaving it on the counter.

I couldn’t help myself. “You’re going to walk across the parking lot and through the grocery store, then stand in line, to save 14 cents? I mean the gas alone…” but she was already out the door.  Read the complete post...

This is one of those stories that, though amusing, doesn’t have much of a point to it and so didn’t make the cut for “Three Days in Madrid“. I think you’ll get more out of reading this if you’ve already ready that article.

Mitesh and I were leaving the Parque del Buen Retiro with Nico on our first day in Madrid when a good-looking girl, about 18 years old give or take, ran up to Mitesh waving a clipboard. “One sign! One sign!,” she shouted.

Mitesh waved her off and kept walking, but she persisted, thrusting the clipboard and a pen into his chest. “Speak Engish! Please! One sign!”

Laughing, Mitesh attempted again to brush her off gently. “No, no, I’m not signing anything.”

She continued more aggressively, stepping in front of him every time he tried to walk around her. Finally, frustrated but feeling playful, Mitesh did a full-on (American) football rush, faking left and then spinning right to circle around and run past the girl. As Nico and I laughed, he ran a few steps down the sidewalk, spiked an invisible football, and started doing a touchdown dance.

The girl stared angrily after him for a moment, then turned and started to walk away. Hearing our laughing, though, she looked back over her shoulder and shouted “Fuck off! Suck my pussy!” in her broken English, which only caused Nico and me to laugh harder.  Read the complete post...

Part trip report, part sequel to “Gray Friday“, “Three Days in Madrid” is my latest article for the Two Plus Two Poker Magazine:

My heart beat eagerly as my eyes scanned the waiting crowd at Madrid-Barajas Airport. It’s nice to know that, after nine hours of traveling, there is a friendly face seeking out you amidst the anonymous crowd, but there was more to my anxiousness than that. The face I was looking for wasn’t exactly familiar: I’d seen it only once, in a photograph. But if Nico wasn’t here, I was going to be seriously screwed, with little money, even less knowledge of the local language, and no plan for getting to my hotel.

It tells the story of my first three days (though actually most of the best stories are from the nights) in Madrid, including significant hands that I played on Day 1A of the European Poker Tour Grand Final. Of course, I spent more than three days in Madrid, but the article is long enough as it is. I plan to share a few more stories on this blog in the coming days, so if you enjoy the article, keep any eye on this page for bonus material!

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

The camp scheduled field trips one day a week, every week for all of the kids. Mostly they were to educational city attractions like the science center, the zoo, etc. The most ambitious trip we took was to a beach that was more than an hour’s drive from the camp.

For logistical reasons, they scheduled and planned these trips far in advance, so we didn’t have the option of postponing or rescheduling for bad weather. The day that our group went to the beach, it was windy and overcast, not exactly swimming weather. Kids being kids, though, many of them wanted to get in the ocean, and of course that necessitated that most of the chaperons be in the water as well.  Read the complete post...

(Sorry for all the low-content posts lately, I do plan on getting some more poker-related stuff going soon. For now, enjoy the filler!)

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

Most activities at the summer camp were scheduled, either field trips or “classes” like art, library, music, etc. These activities were always led by a specialized member of the staff, and those of us who were just group leaders kind of helped out as needed but weren’t in charge at those times. Most days the kids got at least half an hour for “recess”, which was time for which I as a group leader was primarily responsible for occupying them.  Read the complete post...