4/04/2008

I wanna play poker, with a man called Doc....

OK....

All the he said/she said and what a douche-bag commentary can stay over at everyone elses place. Let's face it, nothing gets to me when it comes to chat. I mean after all, I am "the easiest $11" and "everyone knows it."

So I choose to take the other side of the equation here. (I usually do by the way) I figured out what I really want for my birthday. I was over HERE and I found out that a man called Doc was on Buddy Dank Radio. For the love of God, I wish I could get some type of medium speed connection now! It's bad enough to miss the show on a regular basis, but to know I missed Dr. Chako is actually a bit heart breaking in some respects. I mean the man has nothing really going for him at all, except for the fact that he has just got to be 'THE' one and only long lost brother from another mother from the South. I've been very fortunate to have made so many friends in the last little while here in our Kuh-myoo-ni-tee. But the Doc is just a tick 'specialer' than ya'll in a few ways.

I won't go into too great of detail about why. Just suffice it to say, if you read here and you read there, you should be able to figure that out for yourselves.

So the Doc had to download FullTilt huh? What a bloody shame. Now he is faced with man's ultimate decision. To 'BAM'....... or not to 'BAM'?

He say's he will need to "resist the itch" and I am sooooo not the guy that is going to help him. I am a degenerate. Therefore, so the hell is he!

Here's the deal. I have offered to buy the Doc into any mookie he wants. I'll sacrifice what surely would have been a pure crap sleep at best AND my hard earned $11. In turn, all the Doc has to do is show up. I'll put an additional buy-in out there for him, as a last longer side bet. If I outlast him, he shoots a buy-in back my way. If he outlasts me.......hahahahahahahahahahahahaha...... (sorry, Waffles moment there!) I'll ship him his buy-in for the next one.

Nothing against all of you that I have had the great pleasure to get to know over the last year or so, but at a time when douche-baggery is apparently the topic at hand, (and post) I can't think of anyone that I'd rather have sitting at a BBT3 event with all of us than, The Doc.

So faithful readers galore, I ask you to go HERE. Help the man ignore "the itch."

Based solely on medical reasons and my personal professional and nowhere near medical opinion, scratching's bad for you. He should play!

NOW THAT, THAT WOULD BE A BIRTHDAY PRESENT!

My sincerest thanks for dropping by....

4/03/2008

The Bam-Bam New Year....

Well……. this kid turns another year older Friday. The ‘older’ part, I seem to be getting down pat. It’s the ‘wiser’ part that I always have to wonder about.

As always at this time of year, I go into great reflection on the year that was #1,000,045.
I do this so that I can go into #1,000,046 with a goal or two in mind, and a fresh look at how I want to live my life.

I break things down into four categories. Loves, Likes, Dislikes & Hates.

Looking back on the year that was, my list goes like this.

Loves :

Pebbles - All that needs to be said here is, I hit the lottery wife wise!
Not-so-mini-Peb’s - What a kid! From her grades to her growth as a person.
Laughter – Hard to believe, but I laughed even more than the year before.
Hugs – Live ones were awesome and the many virtual ones were too!
Winning – Winning my first blogger MTT was a rush.
STUD – Continued to be my bread and butter, funding all of my poker play.
TuckFard poker – Being the first repeat champion and getting a second bracelet. Need I say more?
TuckFard poker on-line - Brudder carson and Nutzy deserve a huge thanks, for getting us up and running with not one, but two Monday night games. Making the 8:00pm game HORSE, stroke of genious. (even if it was Al's idea)
Blogger gatherings – If you want to argue about this being on the “Loves” list, then you’ve just never been to one.
Being a pest – from wanna-B’s to luckboxes, lightweights, whiners and phonebooks. Nothing say’s friends to me like a little shot or two across the interweb, at either my place or yours.

Likes :

New friendships - They ran rampant this year. I can never get enough of them.
Poker – Gave on-line NLHE a serious go. It makes me smile. :o)
Teachers – I have a couple invisible and not so invisible ones and they’ve really helped my on-line and live games.
Team TuckFard – A very strange almost Ryder Cup like feeling, to team up with your biggest competitors and try to crush the rest of the world. I like!! I like a LOT !!

Dislikes

Losing at poker – With learning a new style and game, this comes naturally I say.
The hammer – What a joke! Such a huge waste of time and energy.
Split games – Again, just a learning curve here.
Being busy – I typically try and make time for the things I want to do. This last year however, posed much more of a challenge than I’m used to.

Hates :

Hmmmmmmmmm……… I guess I had a pretty good year.

So looking back in reflection is all done now. Moving forward is important and I need to set a few solid goals going into my next year as a kid. I typically like to break it all down and set a few attainable goals, with a few that are a stretch. Just to keep me motivated and honest in the upcoming year.

So my goals are;

1) I think my on-line NLHE game needs some real improvement. Therefore I challenge myself, to move losing at poker down into the “Hates” category. I think I need to be a little more pissed off about losing than I have been. Not at my opponent or the RnG or anything else. Just at myself for getting into that position in the first place.

2) I will laugh more this year than I did last year. How that can be possible is way beyond me. But I did say a few needed to be a stretch right!

3) I will meet and make another new friend, for every one that I made this past year. Speaking of stretches, WOW ! I made out like a bandit in the friends department last year. But this goes hand in hand with goal #2. My new friends make me laugh, both at them and myself. So making that many new ones, HAS to help me achieve goal #2 right?

4) Another combination here. I will get more live hugs than I did last year from friends. To achieve this goal, I will make it out to more blogger gatherings than I did last year as well. I know, I know. It’s like cheating making a couple of uber-attainable ones. But hey! They’re my damn goals for Pete’s sake!

5) For the split games, I will improve my current status of OMATARD, up to at least OMAPLAYER. I know where the leak is and I should be able to develop the plug. With that, I’ll also work on my limit leak in HE and OMAHA formats. I can’t decide right now if these are in the attainable or stretch categories. I honestly feel that they fall right in the middle. I think it’ll be up to me and the drive I push myself with, to conquer either or both of these goals.

6) I will win another blogger MTT and soon! This is not as much of a stretch as I first thought. I really studied the BBT3 points from the month of March. Considering that I only played in 9 events, finishing up in the top 10 %, ( or 30th in point’s ) is pretty decent if you ask me. The players ahead of me in the standing averaged at least 16 events. Of those behind me, the next 30 or so played in an average of about 14 events. Although I know this will open me up for much deserved BS from some, maybe I’m not quite as bad a player as I thought!

And finally,

7) I will attempt to eliminate “being too busy” from my vocabulary. I’m a kid for crying out loud! I love being a kid and having been a kid my entire life, that means I love to play. Playing keeps me a kid and it’s what keeps me going from day to day. There were far too many instances where, I let something else come before play. Yes I know that there is a time and place for everything in this life and that sometimes, play must come second. I do not for one second want to ignore the seriousness that is real life. But if you ever even come close to learning anything even remotely important from me in our short time together. Please remember this.

A life without play….. isn’t really living at all.

My sincerest thanks for dropping by….

4/02/2008

I may be an OMATARD for sure, but I don't suck so much at MATH....

Yesterday was a complete write off again. Sometimes it just seems like I can’t gain any traction, towards getting caught up on things. That means I missed the Skillz game last night and it was one of the first ones I’d missed in quite some time. Ah well, Cest’ le vie.

So with no Skillz to write about, I might as well talk about my lack of skills from Monday instead. I started the night late for the Tuckfard Open at 7:00pm on FullTilt. That meant that my only options were the TuckFard HORSE game at 8:00pm on FullTilt (P/W for both as always, is Donkey) and Kat’s Birthday Martini game. I managed to get myself into the HORSE event with about 10 minutes to spare, so I started all the things that I like to have going on around me when I play on line.

Tunes, check.
Booze, check.
Notepad, check.
Beautiful wife, check.

It was all systems go and I was ready to be a TuckFard! I love Monday’s! Somewhere along the way as the game got rolling, I actually caught a card or two. I’d even managed to build a decent stack off of some good hands during hold ‘em. Rare for me, but I’ll take it. Then we went straight into Omaha and I apparently, am an Omatard! It was hilarious how many times I’d fold what to me at least, is not exactly a prime Omaha starter, only to have the flop hit exactly what I’d just folded away. This one was my personal favorite.

What do you say out there Oma-Pro’s? Was I supposed to call off the initial bet, raise and call instead of folding there pre?

It was about this time when, I realized that I’d completely forgot to register for the Martini game!!!! Yikes!!!! I chuck, dive, dodge dash and scramble to get myself in there. All to no avail. I missed by four minutes because I wasn’t paying attention to the time.
That was just not going to do! So I open it up, get on Kat’s table and enjoy it the best I could. But it still wasn’t enough. So I grabbed my drink, grabbed my cell phone and made the treck out into the rain, wind and quickly dropping temperatures. I called Kat and sang her Happy Birthday in the rain. It was the least I could do after missing such an important game for her. Oh, and we did dial-a-shot as well.

A little later, Donkette busted my ass out on the bubble when my masterfully disguised pair of 4’s was no match for any card she had in her hand. I lost interest in that hand, after her over pair, made a boat that improved to a bigger boat and then into two four of a kinds I think. I’ll check back later to see if it eventually turned into a Royal as well. ( I kid! ) Everyone knows I ((((heart)))) Donkette and there will never be any ill will between us. After her comment, “play with me long enough, and I’ll double you up.” had been typed in the chat, I took a short stack run at her with a decent starting hand. It just didn’t pay off and I was ready for the MATH.

I played fairly well in the MATH funny enough. I wasn’t lucky enough to stack anyone out of the game all night, but I did my fair share of crippling a player or two. I managed to hang in there around top 20 to 25th. place for most of the first hour. With 65 starters in a $26 buy-in, I somehow thought that the game would be a little tighter than the regular blogger weekly games. Goes to show you what I know! Donkey’s will be Donkeys even at twice the price! I saw and recorded no less than 11 “hammers” being tossed about and proudly displayed for all to see. I folded to one hammer shown by a re-raiser of a small bet I’d made earlier in the action, and had to wonder as I always do. What is it that makes someone so proudly display the idiocy of a raise with crap? I had crap too! Why the hell do you think I folded? The lure of the hammer raise and show, is just about the funniest thing in all of blogger poker to me. It is treated as a proud show of mastery and out-playing your opponent. In reality, it is just about the stupidest thing to do in the game. Sexy to some because of the legend and the lore, can always be fools fodder for the old and the tired. Not that my opinion means anything to anyone but, I would refrain from showing me that you “out-played” me with the hammer. You will never tilt me by trying to show me that you’re an idiot. Maybe it works on some, but I guess I just don’t work that way or something.

The main thing I enjoyed about the MATH this week was, I had a great core table for most of the night. Myself, Waffles, Tuscaloosa John, Astin and Tilt Away seemed to stay together in some form or another for the vast majority of the game. It made for good chat and some pretty good poker on the most part too. Hell, add Fuel and RecessRampage to the mix early, and it was a great starting table for me.

During the latter stages of the game, I was in a pot with wilwonka and we were relatively even stacked. The play I wanted to make with my slow played set of Ladies, was ever so slightly altered after there was a four flush on the board. Both of us damn near froze between the flop and the River and I needed to make a move that I thought would steal me the pot, if in fact wil had missed the flush as well. So after a little bit of thought, I fired 700 chips into a pot of about 3650. I see three reasons for this amount. It had to look suspicious enough to be a value bet for anyone that needed to play the board, and they might be able to let go right there. If I am called and beaten, I have lost a smaller amount than would cripple me. If I am re-raised, I know I can walk away if I feel I need to. Wilwonka decided to call and here was the result.

My comment was “good call.” Which was quickly followed by, “was it? I’m thinking it was a bad call there.” typed in by wil. I think I had the right idea on the bet. Obviously had I decided to show just a little more strength, I might have been able to scoop on a flushed board.

I ended up running card dead near the end and in this format, (6-max) that is going to be the kiss of death for anyone playing. My table was down to 4 or 5 players for the longest time during the 100/400/800 blind level. That turned my stack of about 10,000 into nothing in no time. Eventually while under the gun and with about 1700 left to my name, I found an ugly and very lonely little Ace. The first non 2-6, 3-8, 4-9’ish looking hand, in some time. I needed a double up to have any hope of making final table and seeing if I could get a few bucks for all of my earlier efforts. Fittingly, tilt away only had to call about 875 or something like that and did so. WITH “THE BAMMER” !!!! How ironic that in my one actual shot to get through and double up, that the chat box reads, “I had to call” and I find myself up against 3-9? I knew I was done, as soon as I saw them.

So two MATH events and I have a cash in 6th. place and an almost in 11th. Maybe 6 max. Is a format a little more conducive to my play, as I learn as I go along my way. We’ll take a look at that this weekend. I have a few helpers out there, willing to guide me along the treacherous road that is blogger NLHE. They know who they are and they know how much I appreciate the help and advice. They already also know that I am slowly becoming a little better thanks to them, every single time I play.

Like I always say, there’s nothing better than having some good friends.
The day you think you have enough of them, is the day you’ve officially made your dumbest decision.

My sincerest thanks for dropping by….

3/31/2008

The Challenge...

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(aka : Early BWoP award entry)

There was this list I found my name on. At first, I didn't know what to say or do about it. Being who I am, I was ecstatic to be on it, while at the same time, totally pissed off about being at the bottom as well. (yes I kid! HONESTLY Sean!)

As I was developing my response to this great challenge, I remembered there was a comment about my ability to creatively link friends while writing. I took great pride in that comment for some reason, and decided to challenge myself to an all out version of a post. So with complete and utter disregard for any rhyme or reason, I hope this list finds you well. And I.... well...... hope you find you!

Now, I'm not posting as regularly as I wanted to I know, but that doesn't make me too much of a bad puppy does it? I mean, it's not like I've been out golfing under par or jammin' out a tune to break the bank or anything!

I've been busting my ass playing the game, trying to add a few coins to the roll the entire time. The outcome was always the same though. I'd find myself suited with a big heart, only to find some goofball would SHOVE, SHOVE, SHOVE a crappy 1 outer draw. And of course it always came on the river, so the card rack could scoop the pot.

Poker has been offering no peace, no love for the kid from Bedrock. I think I have it figured out though. I've been needing to find a way to raugh out roud and have some fun. Great writing and great poker may be able to live in harmony, if I can just let myself have fun with it instead of ranting about it all the time.

What I need to do is, get back to being a kid! Not 30 kids or anything, just the kid I love to be. I'll push through this and persevere so that I can get my ass on the D-List once and for all.

I mean, I try to be a nice guy. Even to the point of staying up late, listening to my metal and not making fun of all the hippies out there at the country bars until 3:00am. But what I really should be doing, is surrounding myself with great persons and learning a thing or two about style and class. With that, I could stand to learn a little about making good decisions and being a good friend, the way our original ancestors always tried to be.

I think if I can do some good things, a few more of the bloggers will think of me as yummy. I mean, I could cook for everyone and show that side of me as well. That might help others connect with who I really am. And that's the point of all this right? To make a connection with others like yourself and even better, those that are maybe not so similar at all. But to make the connection just the same. It's probably a lot easier if you have a great rack. But I just have to face the fact, that I just am not in that position. (and thankfully so, I must say) I wouldn't want to do anything too crazy, that's for sure.

In the end I guess, I should be really happy that I've managed to make so many good friends. I just firmly believe, a kid can never have too many good friends is all. So I can't make decisions like North or South, East or West or even this side or the other of a great big pond. I just love having friends is all. So my list is just going to go over 5 and that's all there is to it.

Well, I really need to make a move and get on_thg, I've spent WAY TOO LONG looking for someones blog to link here!
***edit*** Right! The Leaderboard of course!

There, that's done! And WOW!!!!! I didn't even drop the F-Bomb!

I also ask that you do not take it personally if I've managed to leave you out of this little blurbage. My posting/linking little self, has let this get the best of me for the night. I'm exhausted and damn near brain dead to boot.

Many thanks for the friendships we've developed.

and as always,

my sincerest thanks for dropping by...

Just a quickie....

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Things have been nuts around here lately and it's been hard to get a little quiet writing time for myself.

Played the Team TuckFard game yesterday and had to settle for a fourth place finish for myself. Pebbles kept up her great streak of finishes by taking her table down for the big win. WooooooooooT ! DonKaaa managed to get to head's up, but just couldn't quite get the win in the end. Both Nutzy and Brudder Carson ended up with 5th. place finishes on the day. I don't think we built our lead up too much with those results, but I'm pretty sure we didn't give any of it away either.

I have to run again, but I'll leave you with two of my favorite pics from Saturday night. The first one here is a TuckFard Classic!

That's none other than "Shaggy Mc.Matty" himself, making a final table appearance.

For those that think we're still fairly pre-historic out in Bedrock, here's a shot using the new TuckFard "hole" cam. It's just a slight deviation on the ones that they use in the big show.

As you can see, instead of a small camera used to see a couple of cards, The TuckFard cam shows you two "holes" with a couple of cards. The only thing saving this pic of Nutzy watching me check my hole cards? The beauty that is my fav. pair'o'T's TotalTilt, in her dealer's shirt and tie.

My sincerest thanks for dropping by...

3/30/2008

The least spectacular win....

I won the TuckFard final table.

Here's where you can find the story of,

The least spectacular win.


My sincerest thanks for dropping by....