As a Redskins fan, and fervent Michael Irvin hater, this is just glorious news. I’ll let the article speak for itself. Bwahahahahaha! Maybe T.O. will post the bail.
I had a great time up in Boston this past weekend. My cousin Matt and his wife Amy were kind enough to host about 20 of us for Thanksgiving dinner. I had a great time, it’s always a blast to visit my family up in Hingham. My (second cousin?) Charlotte (pictured) was cool enough to high-five with me on several occassions.
I was in paradise this past weekend. It was in the 80’s and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Palm trees swayed in a barley perceptible breeze.
I was visiting my buddy Aaron, a current student at the UCLA Anderson School of Business. While there I managed to:
A very refreshing weekend indeed. I really did not want to leave California, and hope I make it back sometime soon.
In honor of the release of Google Base, I thought I’d like to perhaps the funniest variation of the “All Your Base” joke from back in the day. If you don’t fall out of your chair laughing at this, there is something wrong with you.
If it sounds like I rarely discuss poker strategy on this blog, you’d be right. Lately, I haven’t really talked about poker a great deal in general. But after playing in a two-table tournament last week and reading a distressing email from a poker buddy of mine, I have a question to pose to my learned breathren:
Is there ever an appropriate time to show your cards before a hand is over?
For some background, here’s an excerpt from an email I got from a friend of mine. His brother was playing up at a WPT at Foxwoods:
…it was close to midnight when my bro was dealt pocket Ks. someone raised in front of him. my bro re-raised. (they both were about equal in chips) this guy came over the top. (table background: this guy was the mouth at the table. he was also being beaten up on by Dags and Seidel. he saw his chip stack dwindle to about 25k as well.) everything my brother got from this guy was that he was a weak player and was making a move to show his muscle at the table. my bro was the rock at the table. this guy had no clue what he was running into when in all honestly he should have known that my bro wasn’t going to raise then re-raise with anything but a premium hand especially this late in day 1. this guy may have talked about poker a lot but he had no idea what he was doing and paid very little attention. so my brother calls the all-in. my brother says as soon as he saw the A-10 flipped over he had a bad feeling about the A coming on the board. it was the only thing i yelled at my brother all day about when we talked (he thought negative which is unlike him) and sure enough the A comes and my brother is done.
My story is similar. It’s a couple of hours into a two-table home tourney and 3 or 4 players limp into a pot where I end up flopping a straight with 2 hearts on the board. I’m the button. One player raises a medium amount, a few times the BB. The next player to act puts in a monster re-raise of about 5000T, or 1/3 of his stack. I’m convinced he has either a set or a poorly played flush draw. Either way I’m dodging hearts or a paired board.
So, I decide to push and re-raise to 15000T. HERE’S THE DILEMMA. Do I show my cards? At this stage in a tournament, given his re-raise, I think I just want the pot, don’t I? If I illustrate that he’s beat, he’s not too pot-commited. He had 2/3 of his stack left to fight another day.
Anyway, thoughts? I understand the EV math, I’m just wondering if a bird in the hand can be worth two in the bush in the case of a no-rebuy tourney.
After work on Friday, I rolled down to 15 and Q to pick up Alex and Louis before we hit the road for AC. We encountered very little traffic and, soon enough, we were pulling in to the Borgata’s garage.
Alex had booked the room, and some of his buddies were already there: Justin, Brendan and Scott. Those guys were a trip and over the course of the weekend I learned a new word (or phrase): slam pig. I’ll leave its meaning to your imagination. Let’s just say that Jersey has tons of slam pigs.
I spent about 8 hours playing poker Friday night, and about 15 hours (with a 2-hour dinner break) on Saturday. It had been a while since I had played poker at a casino and I was definitely auditioning for amatuer hour. Besides losing two big pots on house vs. bigger house and A-high flush vs. house, I mucked a winning KQ two-pair when the other player showed a pair of Aces. I was making two big mistakes:
1) Playing for fun and not for profit. I guess I was so happy to be playing live that my discipline slipped. And while I enjoyed myself, I forgot that the fun that lasts is the fun of winning. I was too often the kind of player that I regular goof on, which was disappointing.
2) Playing tired. I lost most of my money on the last couple of hands on Friday night. Why? Because I was practically falling asleep at the table. Once again, I was having fun and didn’t want the ride to end. I need to know when to stop. It was telling that once I got up to leave the table on Sunday morning, two players immediately left. They had seen me yawning on several occassions and were eyeing my stack the entire time. I never want to be a mark again.
On the plus side, besides Alex and his boys, I ran into a bunch of people. Anthony, Matt G, and Steve were up from DC. F-Train, Dawn and Joaquin were down from NYC. I was lucky enough to sit down with F-Train for some $1/$2 NL, but he peeled out after deciding to head back to NYC rather than spend the night in AC. We had a great time at the expense of a player at our table who labeled himself “the forclosure king of New York”. He was rather vocal about it. I had a big hand against him where I held the nuts and tried to goad him in to a large call. I told him, from across the table, “I think your hand has been forclosed”. He was this close to calling, but laid down his hand, much to my chagrine.
In any event, it was great to be back in Atlantic City. I forgot what a no-brainer good time it is. I’m eagerly awaiting the next trip up.
So, it seems that a bunch of bloggers are going to be in AC this weekend. Well, add one more to that list. I’ll be driving up this afternoon from DC and staying the night. If you’re going to be around (particularly at the Borgata) give me a holler (202-285-6865).
Over the past day or so, I’ve cobbled together an Amazon Wish List badge for my blog. You’ll see my items listed on the right of this page if you scroll down. I did this using 3 things:
AWS offers a List Lookup operation. You can invoke this operation like so by plugging in your Wish List ID and specifying some additional parameters (see the API for more details).
What’s important to note is that you can format the returned data from AWS by passing a URL to an XSLT stylesheet. In my case, the stylesheet that I wrote outputs Javascript code (I stole this idea from Flickr). So, to print the Wish List to the browser, I simply embed the following Javascript in my sidebar:
That’s it. Just in time for the holidays!
It’s hard to overstate how much the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes meant to me when I was growing up. My memory is hazy, but I know that Calvin and Hobbes was first syndicated in 1985. I would have been 8 years old at the time and in 3rd grade living in Athens, Greece. In any case, it was during this time, thousands of miles away from home and several miles away from my closest school friends, that I became entranced by the comic. I would rabidly devour each strip when my Dad would come home with the newspaper in the evening. I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me the various Calvin and Hobbes collections (Calvin and Hobbes, Something Under the Bed in Drooling, Yukon Ho!, etc). I suppose I relished in the escapism that the comic delivered. It delivered me from a feeling of isolation that I felt while we lived in that big house in Politia, a suburb of Athens.
Honorable mention goes to Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. I learned pretty much everything I know about Ronald Reagan, the War on Drugs, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Donald Trump, and other 80’s pop culture references from this strip.
It’s an odd coincidence that Bill Watterson and Berkeley Breathed ramped-up and shutdown their strips at roughly the same time. I feel fortunate to have enjoyed their writing, and am glad that they went out on their own terms and didn’t drag along like the Beatle Baileys and Garfields of the world.
Update: $150 is a bargain for what you get in return.
Don’t miss the 5th DCist Happy Hour this Friday at 51 State (2512 L St. NW).
