2008: Grump year in review

I don't feel that I have a magnum opus about to hatch in the next 24 hours, so I feel safe in making a slightly premature year-in-review post. I wrote about 855 posts this year, which just boggles my mind. I have made no effort to whittle the list down to a top ten, but herein I attempt to highlight the ones that I look back on most fondly.

First, for those who have started reading at some point during the year and haven't had the time or energy to slog through the entire archives, early in 2008 I pulled together a list of what I thought were the best posts of my first 14 months of blogging:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/best-of-grump-so-far.html

Now on to the new stuff.

Three times during the year my attention was called to poker publications in which the famous WSOP-ending hand between Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel was described, but with one or more factual errors. I find this almost inexplicable, because you can watch the hand in full on YouTube; there just isn't any reasonable excuse for making the kind of factual errors that seem to keep popping up in print. So I ranted about that thrice:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-many-mistakes-can-you-make-in-one.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/05/two-more-books-get-it-wrong.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/not-again.html


This was one of my most memorable hands ever:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/news-flash-grump-hits-one-outer-on.html


I enjoyed detailing my thoughts through the course of this hand, which I don't attempt very often:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/play-hand-with-me.html


Here I postulate a way of turning poker degenerates into Olympic athletic stars:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/next-olympic-gold-medal-hurdler-could.html


Jerry Yang came into my crosshairs a few times, all for basically the same reason: his strange invocation of supernatural forces at the 2007 WSOP final table. An interview with Gary Wise was the catalyst for my final blast at what I thought was his lying (or, at a minimum, self-deception) about what transpired:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/jerry-yang-and-questions-still.html


One of my better rants, I think, about poker and politics:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/rant-about-poker-and-politics.html


Cheating in poker always gets my dander up, and never more so than here:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/cheating-at-poker.html


I hope that this is one of my most useful contributions to the subject of Vegas poker rooms. While all but a few are ostensibly "smoke-free," that phrase means vastly different things, as a practical matter, from one room to the next. Just as some animals are more equal than others, some poker rooms are more smoke-free than others. In this frequently updated post, I try to pin down which rooms really deserve the label and which don't:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-smoke-free-is-smoke-free.html


Poker players are constantly saying all manner of stupid things at the table. This is a probably typical example of the kind of analysis that such moments prompt from me:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-hope-you-had-it.html


A little-noticed post in another poker blog mentioned that when the Monte Carlo's roof caught on fire, the poker players in the place continued playing even as they watched the live coverage on TV. Not my style, man:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/money-to-burn.html


2008 brought plenty of reason for Hellmuth hating. For example, this:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-hellmuth-hating-yep.html


My public-service announcement on the need for using card protectors:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/card-capsprotectors.html


I do follow poker news avidly, but comment here on current events only occasionally. That's because usually most of what needs to be said gets written by others faster and better than I could do. But once in a while I have a perspective and/or analysis of something in the news that I think is unique (often because I think other commentators are getting it all wrong), and I launch into a big to-do about it. This was one of the best of that genre, I think:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/03/lies-and-confusion-about-imega-case.html


The following is a profile of a woman named Annie, one of the most colorful people I regularly encounter at the Vegas poker tables:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/04/annie.html


One occasionally hears stories about poker jackpots being deliberately foiled. I think I'm the first to identify such stories as a specific form of urban legend, even though the stories are told as if they are the honest-to-goodness literal truth:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/05/poker-urban-legend.html


It irks me no end that complete morons writing absolute garbage can get jobs churning out regular columns in gaming magazines, when far, far better and more thoughtful writers in the poker blogosphere get ignored:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-do-they-get-these-writing-jobs.html


Annie Duke got my ire when she did what I thought was a disingenuous interview defending the company she shills for:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/06/ultimateblecch.html


I found something I didn't like about PokerStars, asked them about it, and got a lame explanation, which is irresistible prime material for a grump:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/unconvincing-response-from-pokerstars.html


One of my favorite poker-table zingers:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/06/dont-tell-me-how-to-play.html


Regular readers can't help but noticing that I have a penchant for poker rules. So when there's a horrible floor decision at our game's premiere event, I just have to complain about it:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/some-people-just-wont-learn.html


Sure, Shannon Elizabeth is beautiful and is becoming a decent poker player, but she's completely looney, too:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/shannon-elizabeth-is-as-delusional-as.html


An uber-rationalist like me just can't take it when presented with evidence of how moronically superstitious poker players can be:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/lucky-charms-are-not-magically.html


One miserable git:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/miserable-git.html


I got seriously annoyed at all of the attention heaped upon Tiffany Michelle simply for being the last remaining contestant in the WSOP main event possessing two X chromosomes. Though I caught a ton of heat for it, I blasted back at this manner of thinking by pointing out how little attention was paid to the "last black standing," when race is every bit as relevant or irrelevant to poker as sex:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/last-black-standing.html


I was fascinated when I looked into what Google searches bring readers to my blog, and learned that far and away the most common thing people were looking for was about Tom Dwan's sexual orientation--a decidedly minor emphasis in the whole history of my posting:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-do-poker-players-really-care-about.html


Another politico-poker rant, one which I keep remembering every time I hear people cavalierly say that they want federal regulation and taxation of online poker:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/lets-not-feed-monster.html


KNPR, the local public radio station, earned my wrath first for getting basic poker facts wrong, then for refusing to own up to the errors:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/knpr-gets-it-wrong-wrong-wrong.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/09/journalistic-integrity.html


This was one of the rare instances in which I knew I had a great blog story the instant it occurred, and I couldn't wait to get home to write it up:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html


I started playing razz and HORSE this year. There were many posts about my learning curve along the way. Probably too many, in fact. But I still like this one:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/thats-why-sir.html


I had my worst-ever losing streak in August this year. I stoically sucked it up without telling readers what was happening, until it finally broke. At that point, I could write about it with a sense of relief, rather than with the dread and fear that were consuming me as it was happening:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/reversal-of-fortune.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-on-reversal-of-fortune.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/losing-streak-comes-to-definitive-end.html


Here's one of the most difficult decisions I was faced with at a table. It pleased me that it generated more reader comments than anything else I've written, and it pleased me even more that I had apparently described the situation in a sufficiently balanced way that readers were almost evenly split over what I should have done. I still think it's an unusually interesting situation:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-should-i-do.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-should-i-do-part-2.html


One of my favorite types of posts is the conglomerate, in which several noteworthy things happen all in one poker sessions (interesting hands, rules questions, colorful characters encountered, stupid things said, etc.) and I can make a big post out of the several small stories. This is probably one of the better of this type:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/hard-rock-stories.html


I don't tend to do a lot of poker book reviews, but I did a four-part analysis of two books I read about how to play razz. It took forever to write them, so listing them here is probably just a way of getting a little more mileage from the investment:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-review-play-razz-poker-to-win.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/razz-book-review-part-2.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-review-ken-warren-teaches-7-card.html
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/ken-warren-book-review-part-2.html


This is a character sketch of an amusingly pathetic figure I ran into at the Venetian:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/08/mr-helpful.html


The most astonishingly horrendous razz hand I've ever seen:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-do-you-ruin-great-razz-hand.html


Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon opened a poker room this year. It is unlike any other in the city because of its ultra-low buy-in (for a no-limit game). It thus attracts clientele of an average level of experience below that of any other poker room. This yields some interesting situations, a whole bunch of which I happened to either witness or participate in one memorable weekend:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/09/crazy-times-at-bills.html


Shortly after that night, I had yet another memorable night at Bill's, though for reasons entirely apart from dealing with ultra-inexperienced opponents:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/09/encounter-with-movie-monster.html


When ESPN first made a glaring error in its new "Poker Facts" feature this year, I thought it would be a one-time thing. But it continued, week after week after week. Fact-checking ESPN became something of a hobby for me during the WSOP broadcasts. This link is to the final one, and you can find the others either by working backwards through the links I included in each one of the series, or just by doing a search of this blog for "ESPN":

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/11/espn-blows-its-last-fact-in-major-way.html


This post is completely out of character with what I usually try to do with this blog, but when I realized that the tenth anniversary of Stu Ungar's death was approaching, I decided to attempt to do something that I hoped would make the occasion more real, both for myself and for readers, most of whom I assume never had the opportunity to meet and/or play with the legend:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/11/poker-history-quiz-answer.html


I inadvertantly stumbled upon one of the insider secrets of tournament poker: the bundles of cash on the table for the winner's photo op are (at least sometimes) FAKE!

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/11/weird-photo-anomaly-in-poker-magazine.html


I do occasionally have a possibly useful thought or two that I try to pass on to readers, when I can write them up in what I think is a manner that will be instructive. This is one such post:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/12/bit-of-poker-advice.html


If you're a poker dealer, don't get on my bad side, as this guy seriously did:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/12/orlando-is-not-blooming.html


This was truly the year of the deuce-four. When I first played it, turned it into a successful all-in bluff, and the story got published in Card Player magazine, at first I wrote it off as a fluke. But as this year has progressed, I have come to understand as few others do the awesome power of this often-overlooked hand. It has become the focus of (or a sidelight in) many posts, which are collected here for posterity:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/search/label/deuce-four


I have saved the best for last. This is my all-time favorite post, even though it's not in the grumpy genre that I initially settled on as the theme for this blog. It is yet another story from Bill's. As Henry Kissinger would say, it has the added advantage of being true. I really do talk to myself in approximately the way I describe here (though naturally I take a bit of literary license for the sake of hopefully being amusing). Yes, I really do struggle with maintaining self-discipline at the table from time to time, and this was certainly such an occasion. I was really proud of myself for taking a stupid play in which I got unjustly lucky and turning it to my advantage in a highly calculated way. I thought it made for my best story ever. Apparently readers thought so, too, because when I encounter them at the real or virtual tables, if they mention one post as their favorite or most memorable, this tends to be the one. I'm delighted that at least some readers enjoyed hearing about the experience as much as I enjoyed writing about it:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/05/me-and-my-brain-story-in-three-parts.html


OK, that's pretty much it for this year. I have a bunch of "guess the casino" posts already written and pre-programmed to deploy at the rate of one a day for the next week or so. Other than that, I am likely to be scarce for a while. I'll soon be taking off for a little trip up to Salt Lake City to visit family for a slightly delayed Christmas get-together. It's likely to be next Tuesday or Wednesday before things get back to normal here, though I may pop in with a short post if something occurs to me.

It's been tremendously fun, interesting, and educational for me to bring you this year of poker blogging. My readership has grown by a factor of more than four, a rate of progression that I can only hope continues in 2009.

Thanks for stopping by. May you run good and play well in the new year.