Poker

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Amber, but my brain has faded into pure fuzziness the past couple of weeks. I'm missing appointments (both work and personal) and frequently wander from one room to the other wondering why I left the other room in the first place. Hell, I often sit down at the computer and wonder what it was I planned to look up / blog about / game I wanted to play.

Warning: some sappy content ahead...

Had a baby 2.1777 weeks ago, have a cold, had visitors tonight, joined 20 minutes late with my stack blinded down to T1410, jumped into the action, bounced up to T2100 pretty quickly, hung out and watched Wil's JJ fall to CJ's KK, followed shortly by NHL 200X's failed attempt to steal on the turn against a set of sixes.

The WWdN is now pretty much the only poker action that I'm going to see for the foreseeable future; Amber is gasp much more important than poker. But enough people seem to like reading this live blog, and the WWdN is just so much fun, that I'm going to to try to hang in there for one night a week.

Which means that, now that I've cashed out most of my bankroll, if I actually want to play for any amount of time in the future, I'm going to have to make money at the WWdN. Good luck, I know! And if I want to last deep into the tourney, I'm going to have to stop making loose calls like defending my AQo big blind against an 8x BB bet from AlCantHang... maybe if AAQ hit on the flop I would have stuck around for the turn, but 664 meant that I was checking and then folding once Al made his inevitable bet on the flop. Ah well... back to my starting wages, it seems.

As Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers liked to sing:

I'm all hopped up on cough syrup now

It seems it's pollen season, and up here in Sudbury the birch trees have these massively well-hung pollen dispensers:

Well-hung pollen unit

And yours truly has a backyard that's filled with birch trees:

Dan's backyard is full of pollen-dispensing units.

And even though most of my allergies disappeared along with puberty, there is definitely enough pollen to set my sinuses spinning and get my eyes watering. So tonight's WWdN is brought to you by a special, medicated Mr. Scott... good thing that Wil hasn't introduced any anti-doping measures yet.

With that, the live-blog commences...

Hmm... perhaps I played this one (45-player SNG) just a bit too tight:

 During current Hold'em session you were dealt 58 hands and saw flop:
 - 2 out of 7 times while in big blind (28%)
 - 1 out of 9 times while in small blind (11%)
 - 4 out of 42 times in other positions (9%)
 - a total of 7 out of 58 (12%)
 Pots won at showdown - 2 of 4 (50%)
 Pots won without showdown - 4

I ended up busting out in tenth place, just out of the money. My patience is improving, but I probably could have made it into the money had I not over-played Kournikova in EP to try to steal the blinds against a big stack -- who cold-called, then pushed when an ace turned up on the flop. Damn. That cut my stack in half, but at least I've learned enough to get away from that particular danger signal.

The particularly galling bit was that of the final two tables, I had been seated at the little stack table; 7 of the players had M < 2, and I was one of the big stacks just salivating for some cards so I could feed off the weak. Then the evil teleporter sent me to the table of big stacks, and I became an average stack (until that little Kournikova play, which made me a wee wee stack).

Ah well. Poker, I shall have my revenge.