Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Adjustments made...
Yeah, I got way too loose last week but after a good end of week poker check-up, I'm now back on track and have made back about half of what I lost last week. One of the biggest differences between last week and this week has been hitting my draws finally. Sparky was at the 'Wood last night for what seems to be his monthly appearance and I busted him three times. That's always enjoyable and PokerDon got $200 out of him for a phone call. Yes, a phone call.
We're all sitting around and Sparky starts asking some of the guys if they had seen or talked with his son recently because he hadn't been able to get him on the phone. Then he announced that he would give $200 to the person who could get his son on the phone right then and hand it to him. Next thing you know eight cell phones are whipped out and being frantically dialed. JR got through but got hung up on and for some reason Don's call got through next and Richard decided to talk to him. That's how you offset a losing session.
Afterwards JT, Don and I hit up a little early morning Denny's trip to discuss most things poker, Wedding Crashers and/or general ridiculousness. It's no wonder poker players are so often out of shape. Let's see, I sit around for 8 to 100 hours in a row playing poker which requires almost no caloric output. When I'm done, it's usually the middle of the night/early morning so my options are Denny's, Waffle House or if I'm in a casino, the buffet. Then I go to sleep for 6-8 hours in the middle of the day, get up and repeat. I'm quite frankly impressed most poker players don't weigh well over four hondo.
One of my buddies, 2Lock, decided to try and jab at me and this blog endeavor by posting a little tidbit from the SportsGuy on ESPN.com's Page 2. I'll post the section, in incorrect block quote form, as follows:
While we're here, let's make two other poker pacts ...
1. Now that Jackpot Jay has retired, nobody can write any more poker columns. Stop writing them, stop reading them, just stop. We all know how to play at this point. We know that you can get screwed over on the river ... it happens. We know that you can get lucky on the river ... it happens. But if I have to read one more column about how the writer had three jacks, and he thought they would hold up, but then somebody else was going for a straight, and then when he saw that 7 of hearts, he knew it was trouble ... for the love of God, who cares??? It's poker! When you're at a table where everyone knows how to play -- and by the way, just about everyone knows how to play now -- it's 90 percent luck! You might as well write columns giving the play-by-play of a scratch card you scratched off outside a convenience store. Enough. Please stop. I would rather read 200 holier-than-thou columns about Rafael Palmeiro over another poker column.
(And if you're going to keep writing them, at least make fun of everyone else at your table. Your average poker player looks like he should be holding a squeegee at a stoplight in Manhattan, scalping tickets outside of Edison Field, pushing a hot dog truck in Hartford or chain-smoking outside of a VD clinic waiting for his granddaughter to come out. This needs to be mentioned at all times. Repeat: All times.)
2. No more glorifying poker players. For instance, one of the more famous players has the nickname "Jesus," as you might have heard Norm Chad mention 65,234 times on that World Series show (when the guy really looks like Waingro from "Heat"). Should a guy who devotes his life to deceiving other human beings with cards really be called "Jesus"? Shouldn't poker players only be allowed to have nicknames like "Fish Eye" and "Scumball"? Also, how hard can it be to play poker for a living when Jennifer Tilly, Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck have won major tournaments? Even in a sport like golf, when the celebrities play with the pros, they're clearly inferior (just watch HBO's excellent show about Ray Romano and Kevin James trying to make the cut at Pebble Beach). In poker, anyone can become a pro -- you just need enough cash to get started and a ton of time on your hands. I mean, have you seen Jennifer Tilly on a talk show? Not a Mensa threat.
I feel the need to savage the SportsGuy here even though he did just do a phenomenal series with NBA offseason awards and Anchorman quotes. First off, anyone referencing Jackpot Jay as a legitimate poker writer immediately loses any credibility on the topic. No, everyone doesn't know how to play. They know the rules. If people knew how to play, then I, who still has a very basic aptitude for the game wouldn't have been able to make my living at it for the last few months. Yeah, bad beat stories do get old and are vastly overtold, point taken. Next, Norm Chad is an assbag. There are very few things that make me mute commentary but his moronic babbling certainly encourages me to do so anytime I'm watching ESPN's poker coverage. He's adding commentary after the fact and still can't appropriately identify what is going on during a hand. But if we can glorify any of the hundreds of athletes that ESPN does every day, poker players can certainly enjoy the same. How hard can poker be to do for a living? Well, let's see. First off, tournament poker and cash game poker are entirely different animals. Anyone can get lucky and win a tournament by getting hit by the right cards at the right time. Or by making an incredibly awful decision and getting bailed out by a river card thus producing one of the aforementioned overblown bad beat stories. But when you come in to work with a half assed column does ESPN take your money away? "Sorry, nice try and all, but we called your bluff and you lost. No cash this week." Or, on the flip side, you write the best column you've ever put together, but the copy editor gets lucky and finds a punctuation error, slips in the change and ESPN pays him off instead because he got lucky at the end. Coming in each and every day with your own money and making the best informed decisions you can based on all information provided by cards and/or players is not easy. It's about consistency, which is why clowns like Jackpot Jay fail.
But like 99% of the public, I don't expect that you'd actually understand all that you don't know about poker, which is a good thing. That means me and my friends will continue to get paid handsomely for a while to come.
I hate you today, SportsGuy, but Goddammit, I respect you...
We're all sitting around and Sparky starts asking some of the guys if they had seen or talked with his son recently because he hadn't been able to get him on the phone. Then he announced that he would give $200 to the person who could get his son on the phone right then and hand it to him. Next thing you know eight cell phones are whipped out and being frantically dialed. JR got through but got hung up on and for some reason Don's call got through next and Richard decided to talk to him. That's how you offset a losing session.
Afterwards JT, Don and I hit up a little early morning Denny's trip to discuss most things poker, Wedding Crashers and/or general ridiculousness. It's no wonder poker players are so often out of shape. Let's see, I sit around for 8 to 100 hours in a row playing poker which requires almost no caloric output. When I'm done, it's usually the middle of the night/early morning so my options are Denny's, Waffle House or if I'm in a casino, the buffet. Then I go to sleep for 6-8 hours in the middle of the day, get up and repeat. I'm quite frankly impressed most poker players don't weigh well over four hondo.
One of my buddies, 2Lock, decided to try and jab at me and this blog endeavor by posting a little tidbit from the SportsGuy on ESPN.com's Page 2. I'll post the section, in incorrect block quote form, as follows:
While we're here, let's make two other poker pacts ...
1. Now that Jackpot Jay has retired, nobody can write any more poker columns. Stop writing them, stop reading them, just stop. We all know how to play at this point. We know that you can get screwed over on the river ... it happens. We know that you can get lucky on the river ... it happens. But if I have to read one more column about how the writer had three jacks, and he thought they would hold up, but then somebody else was going for a straight, and then when he saw that 7 of hearts, he knew it was trouble ... for the love of God, who cares??? It's poker! When you're at a table where everyone knows how to play -- and by the way, just about everyone knows how to play now -- it's 90 percent luck! You might as well write columns giving the play-by-play of a scratch card you scratched off outside a convenience store. Enough. Please stop. I would rather read 200 holier-than-thou columns about Rafael Palmeiro over another poker column.
(And if you're going to keep writing them, at least make fun of everyone else at your table. Your average poker player looks like he should be holding a squeegee at a stoplight in Manhattan, scalping tickets outside of Edison Field, pushing a hot dog truck in Hartford or chain-smoking outside of a VD clinic waiting for his granddaughter to come out. This needs to be mentioned at all times. Repeat: All times.)
2. No more glorifying poker players. For instance, one of the more famous players has the nickname "Jesus," as you might have heard Norm Chad mention 65,234 times on that World Series show (when the guy really looks like Waingro from "Heat"). Should a guy who devotes his life to deceiving other human beings with cards really be called "Jesus"? Shouldn't poker players only be allowed to have nicknames like "Fish Eye" and "Scumball"? Also, how hard can it be to play poker for a living when Jennifer Tilly, Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck have won major tournaments? Even in a sport like golf, when the celebrities play with the pros, they're clearly inferior (just watch HBO's excellent show about Ray Romano and Kevin James trying to make the cut at Pebble Beach). In poker, anyone can become a pro -- you just need enough cash to get started and a ton of time on your hands. I mean, have you seen Jennifer Tilly on a talk show? Not a Mensa threat.
I feel the need to savage the SportsGuy here even though he did just do a phenomenal series with NBA offseason awards and Anchorman quotes. First off, anyone referencing Jackpot Jay as a legitimate poker writer immediately loses any credibility on the topic. No, everyone doesn't know how to play. They know the rules. If people knew how to play, then I, who still has a very basic aptitude for the game wouldn't have been able to make my living at it for the last few months. Yeah, bad beat stories do get old and are vastly overtold, point taken. Next, Norm Chad is an assbag. There are very few things that make me mute commentary but his moronic babbling certainly encourages me to do so anytime I'm watching ESPN's poker coverage. He's adding commentary after the fact and still can't appropriately identify what is going on during a hand. But if we can glorify any of the hundreds of athletes that ESPN does every day, poker players can certainly enjoy the same. How hard can poker be to do for a living? Well, let's see. First off, tournament poker and cash game poker are entirely different animals. Anyone can get lucky and win a tournament by getting hit by the right cards at the right time. Or by making an incredibly awful decision and getting bailed out by a river card thus producing one of the aforementioned overblown bad beat stories. But when you come in to work with a half assed column does ESPN take your money away? "Sorry, nice try and all, but we called your bluff and you lost. No cash this week." Or, on the flip side, you write the best column you've ever put together, but the copy editor gets lucky and finds a punctuation error, slips in the change and ESPN pays him off instead because he got lucky at the end. Coming in each and every day with your own money and making the best informed decisions you can based on all information provided by cards and/or players is not easy. It's about consistency, which is why clowns like Jackpot Jay fail.
But like 99% of the public, I don't expect that you'd actually understand all that you don't know about poker, which is a good thing. That means me and my friends will continue to get paid handsomely for a while to come.
I hate you today, SportsGuy, but Goddammit, I respect you...
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Fundamental Basis of the Universe
Evolution in this sense is not that which occurs by natural selection over generations of human reproduction but evolution brought about by the application of spiritual knowledge to the conduct of human life. Through the application of such knowledge (traditionally the preserve of the world's great religions) to practical self-management, the awakening and development of faculties dormant in the ordinary human being is achieved.
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Evolution in this sense is not that which occurs by natural selection over generations of human reproduction but evolution brought about by the application of spiritual knowledge to the conduct of human life. Through the application of such knowledge (traditionally the preserve of the world's great religions) to practical self-management, the awakening and development of faculties dormant in the ordinary human being is achieved.
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