Saturday, October 29, 2005

Silly Boy

I had a good time at this morning's WWdN tourney on PokerStars. Didn't make any impressive showing, but for $10 I am happy just to enjoy myself with some familiar names and faces.

I think I played reasonably until the first break or so, then started to get a bit silly, leading to my undoing. The only two hands in particular I recall were:

  • Calling a somewhat short-stacked Iggy's all-in bet with my A-10. He had 2-2, and I managed to catch an ace to bust him. Woo!

  • A bit later, two other players go all-in, and I call with Ad-Qd. One had AJo, the other AQo. A Jack fell but no Queens, so it stung but I survived.

  • I don't remember my bust hand.

    I found Iggy again at the post-tourney ring game, and sat in. Maudie was there, striking fear into the hearts of men. JoeSpeaker as well. I was still feeling silly, and the low stakes lulled me into playing some stupid crap to gambool. Won some, lost some...


    What pushed me over the edge was getting 5-5 on the button. Maudie raises to me and I consider a call, then I notice I am down to $5.55. Weird, that's a lot of 5's. Then it hits me that I this makes five 5s! It's a sign! I must play the hand! I re-raise and Maudie pushes back with... a $5 raise! Another five! Of course I go all in - the stars are aligned!

    I won that hand and quite a few more similarly stupid ones over the next 30 minutes or so, finally finishing up at $24 after buying in for $10. My inner Discordian would never have forgiven me if I had folded all those fives. I had a good time throwing a bit of chaos into the game for a few orbits! I hope it didn't get too annoying for the other players, but if it did... well, you're all big boys and girls, I'm sure you can handle it.

    Monday, October 24, 2005

    Tourney Results

    In case anyone was wondering, I didn't win the PokerStars Blogger Tournament, but I did well enough that I count it as a success.

    The problem was that it started at 5am Monday morning, here in Tokyo. I work early shifts, so I have to get ready for work about 6:30am. After my abysmal showing in the WWdN tourney, where I basically immediately pissed myself, tripped over my own shoelaces turning to flee and impaled myself on an exposed 2 foot spike wrapped in barbed wire, I figured that I might very well be knocked out pretty early in this tourney too. If I could last an hour or two and not be dead, I would call it a moral victory.

    I actually did quite well by these standards. We three live players at the table stole blinds from the Sitting Outers for 10-15 minutes until a couple of them showed up and we started playing seriously. I played fairly solidly, I thought, and wasn't worried or confused about everyone's play (Thank you, Dan Harrington). I flopped the nut heart flush at one point, slowplayed it and let an aggressive player go all in, then took his stack and sent him home. Kept pressing my edge and found myself the second place table chip leader with about 4,000 in chips at the first break, 6am. First had about 6K, the others 1500-3000, so I felt pretty good.

    At the 6am break, about 300 of the 1400+ entries had busted out, so it was clear that this was going to be many more hours of play, so I decided to finish up, blow off my chips, and go to work at my normal hour. I announced to the table that I would be raising every hand preflop by $500, regardless of what I had, so everyone should be aware. I figured this would be less annoying to other players than setting myself Away and being slowly blinded out, but at least a couple people on the table didn't seem to like the idea. One of them said, disapprovingly it seemed to me, "One day you will learn what karma is." I still don't know what the fuck that is supposed to mean. So I just responded, "Yeah, maybe one day."

    I guess karma was at play after all, since I was shifted to another table almost immediately after we came back from break, and the disapprovers at my previous table didn't have to deal with my Raise Every Hand plan. I made my announcement to the new table and they were much more enthusiastic about adding $500 of basically dead money to every pot, so I did as I planned. I put at least $500 into every pot, lost them all, and spread my $4K around several of the the remaining players who seemed to enjoy it.

    I finished up in the 900s, I think it was, which was not bad. I felt like I was doing well and could easily have lasted another hour or two, but you know... real job comes first. It was good fun, and I felt good about my play, so color me a winner. The carribean can wait until next time.

    Saturday, October 22, 2005

    No Way!

    Last night I headed out to the JPPA poker room to play in the Everest Cup. Since they're all freerolls, sponsored by our good friends at Everest Poker (hey, just doing my part), it's a no brainer. Free poker on Friday nights with real prizes, like iPods and PSPs? Gimme a reason to say no to that.

    Last night we had 24 entrants, which is a pretty good turnout for a Friday night. The Saturday games get the biggest number of players, but 24 is not bad at all. The first time I came to the JPPA was a Friday night and I think there were 7 to 8 players there.

    I've been looking forward to this game for the last week, mostly because I've been reading Harrington on Holdem Volume 1 and it has made so many things so much clearer to me. I'll save the fanboy gushing about this book for another post (or maybe think better of it and leave it out altogether) but right now I have to say I haven't been so affected by a book since... say... Steppenwulf.

    I would love to say that with my third eye opened, I sat down and dominated the game, bringing hitherton unseen levels of depth, skill, and subtlety to the JPPA game and trounced them all. Gosh, that would have been nice. But these guys are good players, and they've been doing this a lot longer than I have - many years, most of them. Many can rattle off lists of the casinos they've visited throughout the world to play poker, blackjack, and other games, and they compare notes and stories about the Vegas casinos with the ease and familiarity of Los Angeles locals. Once I asked a couple of them where the nearest casino to Japan that had poker, and they looked at me like I just asked what year it was.

    So it wasn't that easy. I did feel a lot more comfortable with my play and my decisions, but some of them still could pick up when I was weak and betting at a pot anyhow, and reraise strongly to put me on the horns. It was no cake walk, and I didn't put the fear of God into them.

    Which is not to say that I didn't win.

    No one was more surprised than me at my eventual triumph. I was playing a short stack almost the entire game. I played reasonably tight, but took stabs at pots where it looked like no one had hit the board (including me) when my position was right. This worked a few times, and lost me my bets to strong reraises a few times, putting me behind. After that, I backed off and waited for good situations. After that, my playbook simplified to the All-In.

    I got real lucky, in other words.

    I wasn't getting too much in the way of good cards. Most of my all-ins were with Ace or King plus a medium card, suited if I could manage it. Sometimes I would just get the blinds and the first raise if there was one, other times I would get a call from a similar hand and I won the race. I hung in there, and players kept get knocked out around me. When we got down to 12 players left, I started to feel good. I've been knocked out pretty quickly in the tourney's so far, so I was happy with the top half. Then we got to 8 players, and consolidated to the final table - my first final table in a long, long time. Again, my all-ins saved me. My stack was second-smallest at the table, but I knocked out the other small stack, then took a chunk of the chip leader's stack with another all-in win. I waited... took a shot... survived... waited... took a shot... survived.

    Eventually it got down to four players, all with fairly similar stacks although it turned out I was slightly ahead. Most of the players who had been knocked out had started a side game, but the remainder hung out to watch our table finish up. This was a weird feeling to have spectators, since I had never made it this far before.

    The clincher was when the guy ahead of me went all-in, and I checked my cards and found K-K. I had him covered, so I raised all-in to cover the guy behind me as well. He thought.... thought.... counted his chips..... thought.... thought.... then called. First guy flipped over Q-T, I think it was, and the guy behind me had A-Q. No ace fell, so my Kings held up and I knocked out two of the remaining players and took a massive chip lead.

    The only player left was Otonn, a very solid player - in fact, I played heads-up against Otonn to win the first game I ever played at the JPPA room, months ago. But his stack had already been crippled by an earlier run-in with one of the other players, and after my triple-up, I must have had 20 or 30 times the chips he had. He only had enough for a half-dozen orbits' blinds, so I just kept the pressure up and blinded him out. Suddenly it was over and I had won.

    It felt pretty good. It would have felt better if I had won through solid, skillful play instead of a long series of lucky all-ins, but I'll take it for now.

    I had a choice of prizes to select from - Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, a new digital camera, a Japanese beef gift set, etc. I was leaning towards the PSP for a bit, then decided on the iPod 4gig nano. I wanted one, but couldn't justify buying one when my 3rd generation iPod is still running fine, so put it off. But if I win it for free, I don't have to justify it! Perfect!

    I have weekend maintenance to go to this afternoon and evening - I'm actually looking forward to it now. One of my coworkers was dying for a 4gig black iPod nano and had to wait several weeks for the stores to get them into stock. He loves it, and he hated waiting for it.

    At work today, I'm sure he'll ask, "Hey James, how'd the poker game go last night?"

    Friday, October 21, 2005

    Secret Guest

    Bluejay notes in his blog that there just may be a "Secret Guest" coming to the Friday night Everest Poker game on Oct 28. Is this someone new? Tony G wouldn't be a big surprise, since he'll already be showing up the middle of the next week.

    I guess the assumption is that it's another pro poker player, but I might be jumping to conclusions. The special guest is not 100% confirmed yet, Bluejay warns, but it sounds pretty likely. How is he getting all these special guests, anyhow? Damn, the guy must get around.

    I was planning to go next Friday anyhow. ^^

    Thursday, October 20, 2005

    Holy Smokes!

    I haven't been slashdotted, I've been two plus two'ed!

    Unfortunately I can't access the forums from at work (filtering proxy server, you know) so I'll have to wait to get home to see what prompted this sudden traffic. Everyone seems to be going to the Satoh Tamao in the WSOP page, so that should be a hint.

    Fifty People!

    Just checked the JPPA web page, and they've now capped entries into the three games that Tony G will be playing in here, since they've hit 50 people. This is a LOT of people for the JPPA - I don't think the room will even seat that many! They've got four tables, as I recall, so I don't see how everyone is going to be able to play. Damn. I'll absolutely be on time for these, since my space will probably be gone if I'm late!

    This is a pretty big turnout for a guy I had not heard of until this. Also for a guy that most comments I have read have described as kind of an obnoxious jerk. If I'm at his table, I might end up his primary verbal target since most of the JPPA player's can't handle languages other than Japanese too well. But I think I can take it. Since I'm not terribly familiar with the guy, he'll end up being an obnoxious guy at the table who plays good poker. I think I can handle that.

    Monday, October 17, 2005

    Tony G talk

    Checking the web page more closely, Tony G will be giving a talk, answering questions, and doing photos and autographs from 4-6pm on the 3rd, then the tourney will start at 6pm.

    I'll go and take some photos - I might try loading Linux on my ipod and convert it to an audio recorder to record his talk. Might be interesting.

    Sunday, October 16, 2005

    Tony G

    I noticed a new blurb on the JPPA page today - European poker champion Tony G will be coming to Japan early in November, and will be playing in several tournament games at the JPPA Ueno poker room. This should be interesting, so I am planning to go at least one of the days he'll be playing.

    There will be games on Nov 3, 4, and 5. Thursday, Nov 3 is a national holiday, so it should be easy to go then. Friday's game is the Friday night Everest Poker sponsored game, and Saturday is the regular JPPA event. There will be a bounty on Tony G for each event to make things interesting.

    Each person to knock him out in the three games (assuming he is knocked out, I assume) will get an iPod Shuffle and t-shirt from the Japanese translation web page for Poker News. But, if you manage to knock him out in two consecutive games, you win a trip to Las Vegas and free entry into the Five Diamond World Poker Classic $1500 event on December 4, including airfare and 3 nights stay at the Bellagio. Whoa.

    And if you manage to knock him out in all three games, you win a trip to Las Vegas and free entry into the Five Diamond World Poker Classic $15000 event on December 12, including airfare and 3 nights stay at the Bellagio. Count the zeroes there, folks!

    I'm planning on going to at least one of the games and giving it a try. I have almost no chance to win, but the "pot odds" are so rich I have to at least give it a shot. And I imagine Tony G may be giving some poker talks or discussion, and it will be worth it just to meet him and see what he has to say. Should be fun.

    Saturday, October 15, 2005

    Better

    But I don't always suck that badly, really.

    Friday night I had a good time at the JPPA card room, in the Everest Poker sponsered tourney. I think there are another 2 or 3 weeks of the freerolls from the Everest-JPPA liason - a few more attempts to win free stuff! Why not? I'm dense but not crazy.

    I've been reading Volume 1 of Harrington on Holdem this week, which has been excellent. His discussion of different player types and how to play against them is much deeper and thought-provoking that anything else I have read so far. The discussion of table image and how others will perceive your play and respond to it has also given me a lot of food for thought these last days.

    The JPPA card room has mostly been filled with serious poker-playing Japanese men whenever I have been there. These guys are generally pretty good, take the game seriously, and play a tough game. But it does make the room a bit intimidating for newer players, especially women players. Duke, the bar with the regular poker games, has a more relaxed and open environment and has quite a few regular women players. But I'm seeing more women at the JPPA room the last few times I have been there. And I am all in favor of it!

    In fact, one new face I saw at the Ueno room was a new female player. A slim, female player with long legs, nice curves, cute face, and long straight hair. Yes sir, we need more players like this!

    She was pretty new to the game, it looked like - maybe it was the folding of hands after a bad flop but with no bet to her yet that gave it away. But she seemed to have a good time so hopefully we'll see her around again.

    I wonder if it will be easier for Japanese women to take up poker than American women, since they won't have any subliminal images of poker as a seedy game played by men in smoke-filled back rooms. Here's hoping.

    Anyhow... I felt I played pretty well in the tournament but was knocked out pretty early. The player to my left was making fairly aggressive bets often, and based on some of the other player's comments, he seemed to have a reputation for aggression as well. So when I found AQs, I wanted to look him up with it. I made a standard raise, which he called. The flop came J-Q-9, which gave me top pair and top kicker, but disturbing. I checked, fully expecting him to make an aggressive bet, which he did. I reraised him a good amount, enough to put him all-in. I figured he would back down, but he barely paused before calling. He flipped over KK. Ugh. I would have to try this when he actually had a hand. Turn was an 8, and then the river was a 10, which got me excited for a second because I made a straight. It took me a moment to realize he had also made one, and his was King-high.

    I had had him covered by a small amount, so I stuck around a bit longer. I chose a couple spots to open with all-in raises and stole some blinds so keep my hope alive, but was eventually called. It was a fair match at the start, but I missed the flop and he didn't, so I finished up early.

    There was another foreigner player there on Friday, which was a first. His name was Steve, also an English-speaker, American, so we got to talking after I finished up. He had been knocked out on his second hand, when he got dealt pocket aces, made a 3BB raise and was called by someone with 5-7 offsuit. Naturally the flop was 4-6-8, and the guy let Steve bet it up to all-in and then busted him. Ouch. Steve was grinding his teeth for a while, trying to come to grips with that one. He played it all right but was just destined to lose all his chips that time. Best to just accept it.

    After a few more bustouts, we started up a side game. We stuck with Holdem, but decided to play no-limit this time, whereas we have normally played limit holdem in the side games in previous visits. It got... interesting. Everyone buys in for 500 yen (about $5), to get a rack of 100 chips. If you lose them all, you can buy again for the same amount. If you finish the evening with 200 chips or more (doubling up), you receive a JPPA ticket good for a tournament buy-in. (I won a couple of these tickets the first time I showed up at the Ueno room, long time readers may recall.) With the Everest freeroll games going on now, the tickets don't mean much, but will be worth about 1000 yen each when we're back to games with a buy-in fee.

    Maybe it was just because we hadn't played many no-limit sidegames before, but it got pretty wild there shortly after the start. The blinds were 1 and 2, so a reasonable raise should be 6-10... right? Well, we quickly started raising one or two columns of our rack, 20 chips each, instead of bothering with smaller amounts.

    Counting things in Japanese can be frustrating at times. There are counter suffixes for many types of different objects that you add after the number, depending on the type of object it is. If you're just counting from one to ten, you'll count, " ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyuu, juu..." and so on. But if you're counting flat things, like a piece of paper or a poker chip, you'll add the suffix -mai, so it becomes "ichi-mai, ni-mai, san-mai..."

    When announcing your raise, you'll usually say, "Raise 6" or "Raise 6-mai". But we started using the counter -hon, which is used for taller, round things, like bottles or markers or... a column of 20 chips from your rack. So we'd still be saying "Bet one!" or "Bet two!", but saying "Bet ippon!" or "Bet ni-hon!" to note that we weren't making your normal pedestrian flat-thing bets.

    Okay, so it's kind of boring to read about, but we were enjoying it.

    We all go pretty aggressive with our bet sizes and yet were still calling and seeing 3-4 players in a pot that had been raised 20 times the big blind already. Chips were flying, shifting around the board in massive, continent-sized chunks as tectonic drift shifted into overtime.

    A couple of players busted and rebought, so the stacks began to grow. I hit some good cards and filled up a second rack. As I started my third, I remembered what Harrington had written about thinking about how your play style is being perceived by the other players. I realized that I had been playing only a few hands, and generally having a lock on the win before betting big and taking down the pot. Several of the others had been making comments like, "yeah, of course... he obviously has the straight." So I was right - my image was that I was solid and playing only good cards. Time to use that.

    I loosened up a lot, getting into a lot more pots and betting aggressively with a lot less. And I still continued to win! A big bet on the flop or turn with only middle or bottom pair would usually win me the pot, and the few times I got called I got lucky and won the hand anyhow. This continued for so long that I actually began to get worried that I was winning too much! Maybe you shouldn't worry about getting too much respect at the table, but if every time someone called me I managed to win the hand, eventually they'd stop calling me. Finally, finally I got called and took a crap hand to showdown and lost. About goddamn time! Thank god! I thought. I never figured I'd be relieved when I lost a hand, but indeed do many things come to pass.

    I finished up a bit short of 300 chips, and no re-buys for me, so a good showing and a lot of fun play in the side game. Great practice, and a great chance to try some new things, screw around, see what works and what doesn't, and just enjoy. I came home feeling good about the evening and good about my play, and that is a mighty nice feeling.

    (And yet four hours of sleep later I'm a frigging donkey at the WWdN game. Just call me versatile; I can do it all, baby.)

    Ugly

    I was able to wake up early enough to make it to Wil Wheaton's impromptu tourney on PokerStars. All things considered, I would have made a better impression just by staying in bed.

    It began at 5am Saturday morning, Tokyo time. I signed up on Thursday or so, figuring it would be good practice for the upcoming PokerStars blogger tourney. (Both for getting up at an extremely unpleasant hour of the morning, and general tournament practice.)

    Results for take 1: I suck. I think I lasted all of ten minutes.

    I wish I could blame the early hour for not playing my best, but fer crissakes, nothing can excuse my lousy play. Four or five hands in, I get AQs, raise it up and get called. Flop comes with a King and two cards, and I am first to act. I bet out to see where I stand, receive a heavy reraise, and I muck. I look down and half my stack is gone. Damn, how did that happen?

    A few hands later, I limp in with K-8. Actually, I probably don't even need to continue for you to figure out how THAT one turned out. After the flop came with a King, followed by a big raise that would put me all-in, why did I call? Sheesh, if I didn't want to be in the tourney I should have just not signed up.

    Tried to go back to bed afterwards, but couldn't sleep. Probably just disgusted at myself. Apparently I can't even handle sleep now.

    Oh well. At least the followup next week will be three hours later. That should make it 8am Saturday morning, which will be a lot easier to wake up for. I'll do better next time, I promise. I can't do any worse.

    Thursday, October 13, 2005

    Wisconsin

    Someone in or around Madison, Wisconsin seems to be reading my blog every now and then. Whoever you are, thanks!

    Edit: Wait, unless you're one of those comment spammer guys. If so, piss off!

    Tuesday, October 11, 2005

    Yahoo Japan Poker

    Another quick and easy way for Japanese to play poker in Japanese is in the Games section of Yahoo Japan. They have a pretty decent Java-based Holdem Game there, that handles Japanese names and chat, and is pretty accessible to your average Japanese guy on the net who can figure out Yahoo. Seems like a pretty good way for Japanese new to the game to try it out for free, but they have to discover the page and have some interest in the first place.

    Tonight there are about 49 players in the "Beginner" section, but no one on the higher levels. The JPPA was also doing a regular gathering on Yahoo Poker on Monday nights in one of the higher-level rooms, but I've never managed to catch it. Maybe next week.

    Everest Poker

    The JPPA web page has had links up to Everest Poker for a while now, but it wasn't until I saw that Everest Poker was sponsoring a poker tournament for the JPPA, the Everest Poker Cup, that I thought to sign up and give it a try.

    The Everest poker client supports something like 16 different languages, including Japanese! This is pretty impressive, and encouraging for Japanese players. Most Japanese study English in school for several years, but the average Japanese person can handle about as much English as the average you or I can handle spanish or french if we studied it a couple years in high school.

    It's no fun to run applications regularly that are not in your native language. Having a native Japanese language poker client is a big deal - Japanese who are new to poker and need to get comfortable with the game won't have the added discomfort of an application in another language, scrolling English messages that take an effort to comprehend.

    I signed up for Everest, launched the installer, then selected Japanese as the native language. The installation program was all in Japanese after that, and the program itself fired up completely in Japanese. Slick! I jumped in a game and played a few hand - the interface is all right but nothing spectacular. But the client supports Japanese text in the chat windows too, I confirmed. Japanese can chat with each other easily, which is pretty cool. Japanese character sets often don't work well in applications that aren't designed with them in mind.



    I noticed in my game there were players from Chile, France, Canada, and eastern Europe, and they all had something other than English selected as their native language. Also impressive. Everest seems to be in a good position to go after international non-English speaking markets... and that's most of the world, isn't it?

    I haven't tried it out yet, but apparently there are keyboard shortcuts for common phrases ("nice hand," "hello," "good game," etc.) that will automatically show up in everyone's native language. You may not even realize the guy you're chatting with speaks another language for the first few moments.


    I had assumed that the Everest Poker Cup would be an online tournament, kind of like the PokerStars blogger tournament, and the JPPA players would log in to Everest and we would play there. But despite signing up for the tournament on the JPPA page and getting a registration number, I couldn't find the tounament listed in the Everest client. About 30 minutes before the game was set to begin, I called up the JPPA card room, figuring someone would be there, and asked about it. It wasn't an online tournament at all - it was a live game at the JPPA card room in Ueno, just sponsored by Everest!

    I flung on pants and rushed outside to catch a cab to the card room. Made it there 10 or 15 minutes late, but they had saved a spot for me and the blinds hadn't hurt me too much yet.

    I noticed something different as I sat down. The chips! The chips were all new, and had the Everest logo at the top and "Japan Poker Player's Association" at the bottom. Nice! There were also two large Everest Poker posters up on the walls. And they also kicked in several prizes for the JPPA-Everest Cup, including things like iPods, Playstations, etc. The prize for the tourney I entered was just a deck of Everest Poker playing cards, but presumably some of the other games that have been going on have had the juicier loot.

    I got nowhere in the tourney - bled off my chips steadily as I got crap hand after crap hand. The best hand I saw was A-4 suited, which I limped in with just to see a flop with only one of my suit and fold.

    But the games are still going, every Friday and every other Saturday, with no entry fees and free prizes put up by Everest. Hard to go wrong with that. These guys are tossing their hat into the Japan poker market and earning some pretty decent goodwill points with the hardcore poker players here. For an investment of a couple thousand dollars worth of poker gear, it could turn out to be a very lucrative gamble.

    Blogger Tourney

    I'm registered! Checked with support today and they confirmed that I am in. Then I found that it's listed under "Inaugural Poker Stars Blogger Championship," not "PokerStars Blogger Championship" like the web page says...

    Apparently I was the only one dense enough to scroll right down to the P's and not see the thing listed in the I's. If I'm this unobservant, I think my chances in the tournament are about the same as a Nathan's hot dog at Coney Island on July 4th with that skinny Japanese guy out to break his record.

    Friday, October 07, 2005

    Vegas, baby!

    Booked my flights for my trip to Vegas in December, and then back to my hometown in the States to see my family for Christmas. I am really looking forward to a week in Las Vegas! I have usually only been there for 3-4 days, so this will be my longest stretch in the city of sin so far. Maybe a week will be too long?

    I arrive Dec 17 - it would have been nice to get there a week earlier and made the WPBT Winter tourney, but I guess it's not meant to be. Most folks want their Vegas trips earlier in the month so as not to interfere with their Christmas plans. For me, it's the same trip so I want them to be closer. Oh well! I woulda lasted no more than 25 minutes in that game anyhow.

    Maybe no blogger tourney after all?

    I keep logging in to PokerStars to see if the Blogger Tourney is showing up in my Private Tourneys tab, but nothing yet. I am starting to feel concerned. I suppose that it could be:

  • I did something wrong and my entry was not processed

  • They just haven't got to my blog to check it yet. After all, it sounds like there are hundreds of entries so far.

  • Or maybe my poor blog just doesn't measure up. I knew I shoulda been posting more often, but you know, moving and a hell couple weeks at the day job kinda made that hard to do.

    Oh well. I'll keep checking. I'm using PokerStars to practice Omaha and Hi-Lo games for their super-low stakes anyhow. I was pretty pleased when I made about a $10 profit at the $.02/$04 Omaha tables the other night.

    I got a few poker books from Amazon the other day, and I'm nearly finished with Barry Greenstein's Ace On The River. Very enjoyable read, gorgeous photographs. I'm working through the "how do you play this situation?" quizzes at the end slowly, trying to think each one through as best I can. I answered the first four or five very close to BG's recommendations, but sometimes for different reasons. It was still encouraging. I'm not matching up with his plays near so much in the later quizzes, though. I think it must be because:

  • I did the first quizzes immediately after reading the earlier sections of his book, so I was more in the proper mindframe. The later quizzes I have done later, so I open up the book and do another quiz, so maybe the Poker Brain is not warmed up yet.

  • Maybe I just suck.
  • Saturday, October 01, 2005

    Blogger Tourney

    Poker Championship

    I have registered to play in the
    Online Poker Blogger Championship!

    This event is powered by PokerStars.

    Registration code: 1607449



    The annoying part is that this tourney will start at about 4am Monday morning, here in Japan. I normally start work at 7:30am, but I imagine I might not have to worry. What the hell, we shall see! Harrington on Holdem is in the mail!