WSOP controversy

Here's an interesting story of a dispute at the WSOP and how it was resolved (probably badly), from Barny Boatman, whom I would judge to be well above average in reliability in recounting the pertinent facts.

http://pokermob.com/poker-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=240

How could you not love this?

Geico ad I just saw:

PokerNews article #22

Available now:

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/three-ways-of-responding-when-making-mistakes-at-the-poker-t-4710.htm

This is a bit of a departure for me. The subject is how to handle making an embarrassing mistake at the poker table. I say it's a departure because it's more in the nature of advice than nuts-and-bolts "need to know" facts about how poker rooms operate, which has been my main focus. But my previous article had discussed one particular form of common mistake new players make, and it got me thinking about that subject more generally. I thought maybe some people would find the stories and advice worthwhile.

Back to more "nuts-and-bolts" next time.

Look-alikes

Today in a Twitter post from Party Poker, I noticed something peculiar about the image it was using:

The symbol on those chips looks rather familiar. Now, where have I seen it before? Hmmm. Let me think....

Photo quiz

I realize that this is completely out of the blue, but so what?

This is a picture I took this morning of Nina's yard. Her cat, Loki, is in the photo somewhere. Can you find him? It's like "Where's Waldo?" but with a kitty.

Right-click/open in new tab to embiggen.

Give up?

Scroll down for answer.

PokerNews article #21

It's up now, here:

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/you-can-say-these-words-at-the-table-but-be-careful-when-you-4675.htm

Be careful about those action words at the table!

Remember: it's a skill game

I drove out to Harrah's Cherokee today--first time in a couple of months. It was one of the wackiest, up-and-down, roller-coaster sessions I can remember ever having.

I started with $300 in play. Within 30 minutes that was down to $95 because of a nasty one-two punch. One was being on the bad side of AA versus KK. Two was flopping top set (queens), versus the nut flush.

I rallied back to $280 with a few small pots, then trapped a guy for all his chips on a flop of A-Q-x with my A-Q against his A-K.

Lost some with my A-J versus a short stack's A-Q, all in before the flop, flop jack high, looking good for me, but then he rivered a four-flush to beat me.

Lost about $100 more with Kc-Ks on a flop of 5c-6c-10c, versus a young woman's 5d-6d. All-in on the flop when we were both almost exactly 50% to win. I didn't catch.

Just as I was texting Nina to whine about my rotten luck, I had 9-4 offsuit in the big blind, unraised pot. Flop 9-9-4. A guy with a bigger stack and A-9 in his hand called my flop and turn bets, thinking he was trapping me, then raised me all-in on the river, giving me a clean double-up. That put me up to $356. (Flopping a full house is an advanced skill. I've been honing my technique for years now. Please don't try this at home.)

Finally, the same young woman whom I had raced before gave me her whole stack of nearly $200. I had Ac-Kc. Flop had three more clubs. (Yay, crubs!) She check-called my bets on the flop and turn with a straight draw, got there on the river and paid off my all-in bet. Only six river cards win me her stack there--it had to complete her straight but not put a scary fourth club down.

The whole session was just crazy luck, some of it good, some of it bad, but just enough more of the former than the latter that I left with $547, a $247 profit.

Probably the most skillful thing I did was walk away before the roller coaster took another plunge.


Addendum, July 11, 2014 

The flopped full house hand became the jumping-off point for a whole post from Rob: http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2014/07/to-slow-play-or-not-to-slow-play.html 

PokerNews article #20

New article is up. The click-baity (but completely non-deceptive) title: "The One Thing You Can't Talk About at the Poker Table."

Proud (and possibly crazy) cat daddy

Oh, come ON! Just how ridiculously adorable can she get???

Poker miscellany

1. My friend Dominic, of the moribund "No Limit Doc" blog, just won a Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza $400 NLHE event, scoring $25,728. Of course, for me that's pocket change that I wouldn't even notice was missing from my wallet, but for him it's a big deal, so please share with him all due adulation--in comments here, on his blog, or to his Twitter (@nolimitdoc).

Photo stolen, with neither permission nor attribution, from his Facebook page:

2. Oddball story of the week from the WSOP: Player crippled (and shortly thereafter eliminated) by an opponent getting four queens to his aces full--except that the four queens were not one of each suit. There were two queens of hearts on the board. Amazingly, nobody noticed, even though the board was up for long enough for at least one photograph to be taken. As I understand it, the player involved didn't notice the anomaly until the next day, when he posted the bad-beat picture on Facebook, and somebody pointed out to him the fouled deck. Of course by then nothing could be done to remedy the unfortunate situation. You've got to pay attention, folks!

http://f5poker.com/poker-news/2014/6/20/chris-queen-hearts-ruby-might-boycott-wsop-might-notwell-see-/


3. A week or two ago, I saw a link to a new blog dedicated to poker in the movies, and meant to post a link to it, but then got distracted and forgot. So I'm making up for that now. Take a peek if that subject interests you:

http://pokerinmovies.blogspot.com/


4. The always-classy (cough, cough) Brandon Cantu says on camera that when one poker player accuses another of being an angle-shooter, what "should" happen is that the accuser gets punched in the face.

Uh, no.

http://www.pokernews.com/video/wsop-2014-fight-in-the-amazon-8841.htm


The same always-classy (cough, cough) Brandon Cantu followed that little performance with a tweet (apparently later deleted) saying, "WSOP dealers do not deserve to live they are so bad." This according to Linda Johnson's Twitter feed (@firstladypoker).

PokerNews article #19

What the heck are "table stakes" anyway?

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/table-stakes-4462.htm

Bee

Nina and I took a hike in the North Carolina Arboretum again today. I didn't take a lot of pictures, and of the ones I did, I think only two have even a modicum of merit. They are basically the same subject, framed two different ways. Which do you like better?

Refund!

I was just casually checking the status of my bank accounts, as I do every few days, when I noticed this unexpected deposit apparently in the process of going through today:

And it only took 38 months!

PokerNews article #18

This one is all about the various kind of promotions and jackpots one finds in poker rooms these days:

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/free-money-high-hand-bonuses-bad-beat-jackpots-and-more-4407.htm

Poker >>>> Bridge!

I guess MemphisMOJO knows that now, in case he was ever in doubt. He of the poker, bridge, and photography blog just made what I have to assume is his best run ever, getting all the way to 3rd place in the WSOP Seniors event, and walking away with $279,412 in prize money. Not too shabby for three days' work. I wasn't watching the live video, but apparently his other fans were, and they said that he raised a couple of times with The Mighty 2-4 towards the end, winning the pots. He must have flashed the cards for the camera, because the PokerNews hand-for-hand blog does not seem to report them.

Congratulations, sir. Truly superb work. Now you can pay me that $275,000 you owe me for teaching you everything you know about poker, and still have a little party money left over!

PokerNews article #17

It's been a while, but my next article is now up. It's about tables, chairs, and space in a poker room:

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/sharing-space-how-to-sit-at-a-poker-table-4389.htm

Stop and smell the roses

This weekend there was a rose show at the North Carolina Arboretum here in Asheville. I went out there to do as the old advice says. Of course, further experimenting with the new camera was on my mind, too.

As always, right-click/open in new tab to see larger versions.

First I just wandered a while outdoors:

Then I went inside to the star attraction.

Making pretty pictures of roses ought to be child's play. Not here. It wasn't for lack of good material; goodness gracious, they had an amazing assortment of rose varieties and colors. (And the smell in that room was nothing short of heavenly.)

But for nice pictures? It's as if they had a committee work for months devising every possible obstacle to successful floral photography. Most of the roses were single blooms in crystal vases. The lighting was a weird combination of fluorescent bulbs with hot incandescent spotlights. The walls were ugly, and would spoil any photo if not carefully blocked out of the frame or blurred into obscurity. There were people crowding around the display tables. I didn't have a macro lens. Finally, this was the third and last day of the exhibit, and many of the specimens were past their prime, getting wilty. (Is that enough excuses yet?)

The net effect of all of this was that I took 35 rose pictures, but deemed only six of them salvageable:

And now, to cleanse the palate from that surfeit of color, here's a trio of experimental studies of lines and surface textures, rendered in black and white:

Given the post title I chose, I feel compelled to end with a throwback to one of the big hit pop songs from 1974, when I was 13: "Stop and Smell the Roses" by Mac Davis (who, in a different phase of his career, wrote some of Elvis Presley's more unconventional hits, such as "In the Ghetto," and "A Little Less Conversation").

Use it or lose it

I went out for my first real bike ride since moving to Asheville 15 months ago. (I say "real" because I took a quick spin around the block Wednesday just to be sure all the mechanical parts were working after reassembly.) The numbers don't lie: I've completely lost the extremely modest amount of conditioning I had managing to achieve with my riding in Vegas.

As you can see from this screen shot (from a very nice, free site called "Ride With GPS"), my last serious ride in Nevada was in late November of 2012. I wrote about that ride here. It was at the outer limit of my ability, but I could do it: 99 minutes, 18 miles, 1370 feet of climbing.

Today I rode 11 minutes, 1.7 miles, and a measly 153 feet of climbing--and it nearly killed me. The last stretch is about 200 feet of an 11% grade up to the alley behind my house, and I swear that if I had had to go another 10 feet, my heart and lungs would have jumped out of my body to go find a more worthy host. I had to spend five minutes huffing and puffing to recover enough just to pick up my bike and carry it inside, and even then I couldn't carry it up the stairs to my apartment until after I had spent 10 minutes panting on the couch. And 15 minutes after that, sitting at my computer, I was still covered in sweat from head to toe.

Pathetic. Completely, utterly pathetic.

My goodness, it is discouraging to both feel in my bones how much progress I've lost, and see it reduced to cold, hard numbers by a GPS tracker that will not fudge the data to soften the ugly truth.

On the other hand, there is this: I'm better off than the people who slacked off for the past 15 months and then DIDN'T go out for even a short ride today.

Montford Music and Arts Festival

Nina and I went to the Montford Music and Arts Festival in the Montford neighborhood in Asheville today. I'm still getting to know my new camera, so I took it along and tried to remember to be on the lookout for photo opportunities. There were a few interesting things to see, but I mostly wanted to capture the fact that people were enjoying themselves.

Here are the results. Right click/open in new tab to see bigger.

As you can see, a good time was had by all.

Well, except maybe this poor kid, who had the only tear-smeared face I saw all afternoon, and was bawling conspicuously:

I'll leave you with a sampling of the toe-tapping bluegrass music we heard, from a band called "Cat Dragons."

Random thought

I don't know why this just occurred to me, but it did, so I'll put it out there.

If, a couple of years ago, somebody had told me that, between Shane Shleger and Jason Mercier, one of them would out himself as a devout Christian and one would out himself as a drug addict, I probably would have guessed wrong which was which.