JamesSlusher.com

It’s a YouTube kinda day. Check out this abridged history of American warfare from WWII to the present. Oh yeah, they use food to represent the countries.

I wish Physics was cool twenty years ago.  Or rather, I wish I had known how cool it is.

I should explain about the “profitable” part of my last post. I am a winning player, just not (at this point) a profitable one. How is that, you ask? Good question.

For every tournament there is something called a “rake”. A rake is the fee paid to the site for putting on the tourney that they get to keep. It’s how poker sites make their money on tournaments. So a $1 tournament actually costs $1.25 to buy into. $1 goes to the prize pool and $.25 goes to the house (poker site). The larger the buy-in, the bigger the rake. A $5 tournament usually has a $.50 rake, $10 tourneys have a $1 rake and so on. You may notice that the higher buy-ins have a bigger rake but smaller percentage rake than the $1 tourneys. Most, but definitely not all, of my tourneys have been at the $1 and $2 level. That means for my 970 tournaments I have paid a minimum of $242 in rake. It’s probably much higher, but I haven’t gone through and figured out what the actual number is.

So I’ve won more buy-in than I’ve lost which (in my mind at least) makes me a winning player. Just not profitable, because I have to up my win percentages to the point that I over come the built-in 10% (minimum) loss that the rake gives you.

I’m good enough that I can do it.

Only a day or two before this post, I told my brother what good poker I was playing.  And I was, too.  I had gotten into a groove of beautiful play, in which I kept my opponents off balance by mixing up my passive and aggressive, loose and tight play in such a way that they couldn’t be sure when to press and when to lay back.  Online poker players tend to err towards pressing. My unpredictable play coaxed many a soul into pressing at the wrong moment and getting trapped into pushing all their chips into the middle an then, ultimately, into my stack.

About the same time I told Dave about my good play, I stopped doing that.  I got loose and instead of duplicating the unpredictable play I had been using, I just played.  Everything.  It is easy in poker to forget that there is a time and a place for everything and you start believing that is just your particular brand of awesomeness that is creating your success, not the exploitation of others weaknesses.

All poker success boils down to exploiting other people’s weakness.  Your strength is never all that strong.  Even with the best hand in No Limit Hold ‘Em (which is a pair of Aces), you are still only about a 7 to 1 favorite against any random hand.  So any fool that decides to push all his chips into the middle against you still has a 15% chance of coming out on top.  And there is no way you are going to get AA every hand.  So it only gets worse from there.  All that was to say, the strongest of hands isn’t all that strong and doesn’t win every time.  But a weak player can be beat time and time again if you just figure out what scares him and, just as important, what emboldens him.

So we have established that I have been donking it up for the past few days.  I had told Dave when I was still on my winning high, that by the end of January I wanted to be back to being a profitable player on my Sharkscope rating.  That didn’t look like it was going to happen after the donkfest, I was still roughly -$200 over the course of 950+ tourneys.

I joined a $2 buy-in 180 player Sit N Go on Full Tilt.  Over the course of the next 2.5 hours I did something absolutely wonderful.  I regained my unpredictable play.  I used table position ruthlessly and confused the crap out of a bunch of players.  I made a few mistakes, but only a few and usually against players who couldn’t really hurt me.  I was even the tourney short stack once at the final table, but came back out swinging and quickly regained my position.  Heads up, I got outdrawn one time and ended up being a 10 to 1 (or worse, I can’t exactly recall) underdog, came back out swinging again and beat the snot out of my opponent.  It was beautiful.  Did I get lucky?  Hell, yeah.  You have to if you are going to win a tournament.  Remembering that I was never that weak, nor my opponents that strong, did way for me than winning a few coin flips, though.

So now 179 souls are $2.25 poorer and I’m about $95 dollars richer.  I’m also now halfway to making that profitableness a reality and I’m psyched.

I love the internets.

If you are going to play online poker at any point, let me strongly suggest that you take advantage of any note-taking system that the software that you use allows. It’s amazing how often you run into the same players, even on sites with tens of thousands playing at any given time.

The quickest way to ruin a good poker streak is to brag to your brother about how good you have been playing lately.

You ever manage to mess up everything you did all day long?

Welcome to my day.  I can’t even talk to people right.

An easy way to bailout the ailing auto industry (and America in general) would be to institute a single-payer healthcare system.  GM spends about 5.6 billion dollars a year on healthcare alone.  That $5.6 billion could be spent on retooling and innovating.  I’m just saying.

When we sold the old house we left all of our appliances in it.  They were perfectly fitted for the kitchen they were in and a tad undersized for what we wanted in the future, so we sold them with the house.  this, of course, means we need new appliances in the new house.  I buy all of my appliances from Appliance Land, where my late father used to work.  Whenever I go, I get the obligatory “we still miss your Dad” speech from everyone.

Our appliances for the new house arrived yesterday and the delivery guy (I forget his name, sorry) starts to unload the truck.

“We still miss your Dad out there”, he tells me.

Searching for something witty to say, the best I can come up with is, “I miss him, too.  I sure could use some help around here”.  I waved vaguely at the pile of demolition debris behind me.

He levels a gaze at me.  ”Well, I don’t know how much actual physical help you would have gotten from your Dad…”.

“Dang dude, you knew him pretty good,”  we both laughed.