Soul Searchings

I got a reload bonus at PartyPoker, so yesterday I played about three hours, four-tabling $25NL as I usually do.

I’ve always contended that in general, I have really bad luck, and get more than my fair share of bad beats. I still believe that fully, because for example, I swear I lose about 50% of the time I go all-in preflop with an overpair versus someone with an underpair, whereas the odds state I should be winning 80% of these. I know for a fact I don’t win anywhere close to four out of every five times in these situations.

Whatever the case, yesterday, for once, I can say I had a session where I had really, really good cards.

In that session, I flopped a boat about 5 or 6 times, each time with a pocket pair. For example, having 22 and hitting a TT2 flop. I also flopped quad aces with rockets once. Asides from that, I also hit a bunch of sets and two pairs on the flop, and hit perfect cards often on the turn or river for gutshot straights and all that good stuff.

I can say that in my last ten hours of play before that, I don’t think I flopped a boat even once, or had even a quarter of any other solid hands like those.

My only minor complaint is while I was hitting like crazy… unfortunately most of the time nobody else hit anything. I think I might have only gotten paid off with my flopped boat only once. Every other time, nobody hit their trips or had an overpair or anything like that to give me any action, so even a minimum bet on the turn had everyone folding.

The quad aces one was pretty funny.

I was sitting with about $15. I was in big blind with AA, and someone raised to 75 cents preflop. I reraised to $2.25, and the guy flat calls.

The flop comes AA2.

I’m like thinking… "Okay, now how should I play this… if I bet a reasonable amount like pot size ($4.50), then he’ll think I have an ace, so he won’t call. If I don’t bet at all, he might think I’m slow playing an ace. Ah, okay… I know… I’ll wait a few seconds and make a tiny $1 bet, hoping to make it seem like a weak defensive bet."

He raises me to $3. Nice.

"Hmm, if I reraise him now, he’ll know that I actually have a strong hand, so I better just wait a few seconds and call."

I flat call. Turn comes a blank, and I quickly check.

He bets $9, and I have $9.15 left in front of me.

I guess it was a bit uncourteous, but I couldn’t help but to quickly type in the chat window…

> Gee, you think I should call?
> AA

…before going all-in for 15 cents more. Of course, he paid the extra 15 cents into the almost $30 pot to see… and after the meaningless river came out, he flipped over 77.

I don’t think I could have played this particular hand any better than I did. I worked him over exactly as I wanted to. That felt much sweeter than having rockets or quads in itself. 

All in all, the cards that I got in this session was by FAR the best I had ever had… but because I didn’t get much action for most of them, it wasn’t the best session I’ve had in terms of winnings. Kind of ironic in a way.

I think my usual luck is back now though. Played a short session today, and the first time I get AA, I managed to get someone to call my $10 all-in preflop with 44. Of course, he hits a 4 on the river to dish me the bad beat… not like I wasn’t expecting it.

This past Sunday, I played in the 6FUSE (6 Feet Under Sports & Events) "Back to School" Co-Ed 6’s volleyball tournament, which was held at the Osborne gym at UBC. Our team consisted of Chanh, Clara, Gary, Mimi, Will and myself. There were seven teams participating in total. In the four-game round robin, we played against the two best teams by far, and against the two worst teams by far. As expected, we won two and lost two… but somehow we ended up being seeded 3rd for the playoff.

Sparing the details, we actually did as well as we could have possibly hoped for. We won the first playoff game to find ourselves playing the first seeded team, The StoneCutters, who I’ve got to give props to for having the best uniforms I’ve ever seen. They got brown t-shirts with the StoneCutters logo on the front, the names of Simpsons characters on the sleeve, and the correlating member numbers on the back, mostly or all triple digits. Of course, they were way too much for us to handle, so we dropped down to the losers bracket. We won the next two games, which guaranteed us no worse than third place, and got the opportunity to play for second. The only problem was… it was obvious that the second place team was much better than us, and we really didn’t stand any chance of winning. Despite all of us being very tired and sore, we decided to play anyway… with the decision that if we lost the first set, we would just throw in the towel and concede defeat - which we did.

Alas, the third place finish was very respectable, and realistically the best we could have hoped for. The top two teams were definitely of much higher caliber than the other five teams.

As a side note, UBC has changed so much in the last couple of years, with so many new buildings on campus, and many of the roads changed. I had a hard time just finding my way out to Chancellor Boulevard, since they’ve closed the road at the bookstore. During a break, I walked over to the CICSR building to see if I could get in and take a picture of my graduation class composite photo, but unfortunately there wasn’t anyone around to let me in.

So after writing my last blog entry, I decided to run out of the office and make a trip to the Superstore in Richmond to see if they had the TMX’s available. Lo and behold, they had a display set up right as you walk into the store. There were roughly about 35-40 units there at the time. I decided I was going to buy one for Elaine just for the hell of it, but was pondering whether I should buy any more. In the end, I bought four in total, and at $42.98 each, it rang up to $194.27. I had no idea at the time what I was going to do with them. If they became sold out everywhere, I was thinking maybe I would sell them to friends or coworkers at cost price, or if prices were high on eBay, I’d throw it on there and see what I could get. At worst, if there was no shortage of Elmos, I could always just return them in two weeks.

I watched the prices on eBay over the next couple days, and the average selling price hovered around US$80 each. I don’t know whether the price will continue going up or not between now and Christmas, but I decided to put them up on eBay. I originally put up a 1-day auction with the Buy It Now price set at US$245 for the lot of 3 Elmos, but put the starting bid price at a penny. I forgot that once someone places a bid, the Buy It Now price disappears. I was a little dismayed when someone later that night messages me saying he wanted to buy it for US$245, but couldn’t find the Buy It Now button. D’oh. So I ended up cancelling that auction, and making a new one… this time, with a Buy It Now price of US$275 or Best Offer. I told that guy if he offered US$245, I’ll accept it… but he must have bought enough Elmos from other sellers, because he never did get back to me on it.

So now, the new listing was for 7 days, and there didn’t seem to be much interest in the first five days. The average selling price actually went up to over US$90 each during that time, and numerous other 3-pack Elmos were going for US$300 or more… but there was still not that much interest in my auction for some reason. Finally, earlier today, someone offered me US$265… but since the prices seemed to show no signs of going down, I still held off, and eventually someone decided to Buy It Now for the full US$275 plus US$25 shipping, for US$300 total.

So, in the end, the three Elmos cost me ~$145. The eBay fees were ~$15, the PayPal fee was ~$10, and shipping is going to cost me ~$45, so all in all…

US$300 = CDN$345 - $145 - $15 - $10 - $45 = $130

So I made $130 profit from selling the three Elmos… or alternatively, $80 profit and a free Elmo.

It was pretty fun getting in on this whole Elmo craze. I wish I had taken the chance and bought a lot more of them when I had the opportunity to! I actually went back to Superstore the very next day, but alas they were already all gone. I think the going price of it could still go up some more, but I would be really surprised if it goes beyond US$120. Guess we shall see…

I’m sure many of you remember the Tickle Me Elmo craze that hit ten years ago, in 1996. People went crazy over this toy and fought to buy them in stores for about US$30, and then many resold them, where many fetched several hundred bucks on eBay.

Well… it’s baaaaaaaack. The 10th anniversary Tickle Me Elmo, codenamed TMX, was released yesterday in stores… and people once again have gone crazy over them. I have heard stories of people loading up their carts at Costco with half a pallet of them, at $39.99 a pop. Once again, many have already been sold on eBay, with some of them going for over US$300 yesterday. At the moment, there are over 20000 listings for TMX, so the going price seems to have dropped down to about US$70-80.

The TMX, as one could expect, is more technologically advanced than the original… but most people wouldn’t expect it to be able to function as it does. While the original just says a few lines and vibrates, this new one can fall to the ground, bang its fists on the ground in hysterics, and then pop back up to its feet. You can check out a video of it here.

Pretty cool, huh?

But it’s gotta get pretty annoying after about 10 minutes.

As I’m sure like most others, I can remember 9/11 very vividly, as it serves as one of the most impacting events to happen in our lifetimes.

On that morning in 2001, I was just starting my third year at UBC, and after getting up, I quickly got ready and headed off to catch the bus. I had no idea what was happening in New York City until I went to the Student Rec Center, where I was going to play some drop-in volleyball, and saw the live footage on the TV there. From that point on, I was pretty much glued to the TV for the next several days, absorbing in every detail of what had happened. I don’t know why I was so fixated on it, but I couldn’t pull myself away from it. Maybe it was the awe of seeing the destruction of large passenger planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers, or maybe it was the shock of seeing people desperate enough to jump out of a window 100 stories high to their death, or maybe this was just the most incredible unscripted reality TV that nobody could have ever imagined.

If I ever work in a skyscraper, I’m putting a parachute in my desk. Just in case.

So yesterday, I watched most of the US Open Mens’ Final between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. After Federer won the first set easily 6-2 after breezing to a 5-0 start, Roddick seemed to turn it up a notch and made a game of it, including winning the second set 4-6. They were still going shot for shot in the third set, before Federer finally broke Roddick at the end to win 7-5. After that, it was all but over, as Roddick lost 6-1 in the fourth set, to become just the latest player to be FedEx’ed.

Federer is just too good, a true genius with a racquet. This was his 9th Grand Slam title in the last four years - a truly unprecedented pace of averaging more than two per year. In fact, with this latest win, he is now ahead of Pete Sampras‘ pace in terms of Grand Slam titles. Federer and Sampras are separated by almost exactly 10 years, with their birthdays being just four days apart, August 8th and 12th respectively, which makes comparing their careers very simple. At this point in Sampras’ career, he had 8 Grand Slam titles. Assuming Federer isn’t going to slow down significantly in the next few years - and there is no reason to believe he will - then it’s very possible that he will surpass Sampras’ all-time record of 14 total Grand Slams.

There is debate over who is the GOAT - short for "greatest of all time". Even though Sampras has the most Grand Slam titles, there are those that point out he was never able to win the French Open. In fact, he never even got close, with the best run coming up as a semifinalist one year. His serve and volley game just didn’t suit the slow clay courts. Some people believe that to be considered the GOAT, you must be able to win all four Grand Slams - Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open.

Federer, thus far, has not been able to win the French Open either, but came close this year when he lost in the final to Rafael Nadal. Federer, unlike Sampras, does have a legitimate shot at winning the French Open as well, so if he does manage to accomplish this, plus go on to win more than 14 Grand Slam titles, I don’t think anyone will be able to challenge the claim that he is the GOAT… but only time will tell how his career will end up.

Someone joked on the Tennis Warehouse forums that Federer is so good, he’s the only person only to have defeated a brick wall at tennis.

Inspired by Federer’s performance, I headed out to Burnaby Lake later that night to play a classic doubles game with Ed versus Ken and Gary, a matchup of the first and second boys doubles team from high school. The first set was a tight one, but we grinded it out to take it 7-5. We settled in after that and took the next two sets 6-3, 6-3 for the match victory. It was a fun match, despite the overwhelming number of double faults and terrible volleys.

I’m raring to play more now, but probably won’t get a chance to until at least the weekend.

Anyone game?

The term "robusto" was coined on the 2+2 Forums, the biggest poker forum on the web. When someone went broke, others would proclaim "BUSTO!" in jest… and in response, when someone hit big money, someone made the term "ROBUSTO!"… and now it’s used all the time there. I found the word play pretty funny.

Whatever the case, after the Steelers won 28-17 on Thursday night, both Elaine and I, along with several thousand others, was suddenly robusto - with a cool US grand extra in each of our pockets.

A couple nights previous, I had actually scrambled to get the funds together for Elaine so that she could place the bet too… and it turns out it wasn’t a moment too soon, since they closed the offer just a few hours later. Boy, am I glad I made the effort to do that! I’m also glad I decided to just let the bet ride instead of hedging it.

On game night, I left the house to play some tennis at Gladstone when the score was 14-10 Steelers at halftime. When it got dark, we decided to switch venues and headed to Burnaby Lake. On News1130, which I listen to most of the time while driving, I heard that the score was 21-17 Steelers, late in the fourth quarter. Hmm, okay, could be worse… but with the Steelers only four points up, I was a point shy of having the bet covered, while Elaine was already in the money. I decided to check if the TEAM 1040 would have more updates on the game… and was surprised to discover that they were actually broadcasting the game live. When they announced the score as 28-17, I was just ecstatic. Thank you Daunte Culpepper for throwing up that interception pass and Joey Porter for catching it and returning it for a defensive touchdown. Without that score, a lot of others and I, who got in on the bet early, wouldn’t have cashed in. What’s funny is that before the game, Joey Porter jerseys were going for about $30 on eBay… and suddenly after the game, the same jerseys are going for about $70. Looks like he gained a lot of new fans by scoring that touchdown. When the Dolphins failed to get anywhere on their final ensuing drive, the feeling was great. Felt much better than when I won my HP laptop from AMD.

All fears of the promotion being a scam or having any catches were soon put to a rest. The total US$2100 appeared in people’s accounts within minutes of the game ending, and upon requesting the cashout, the funds were successfully transferred to their online wallets in under an hour. Awesome.

So Mansion ended up paying out $6.6M for this promotion, which is still a drop in the bucket compared to the coin they shelled out for their other ventures recently.

Thank you, Mansion!

LoL! Could it really be pure coincidence that the starting quarterback for the Pittsburg Steelers, "Big Ben" Roethlisberger, suddenly needed to get an emergency appendectomy, which will likely sideline him for just one game, which just happens to be the one versus the Maimi Dolphins? Or did Mansion somehow have something to do with this?

Whatever the case may be, without their QB that led them to win the championship last year in Superbowl XL, the Steelers suddenly seem very unlikely to even win the game, never mind win by five points or more. The betting line has moved drastically to reflect this, from +4.5 to even. The Mansion promotion is still on, however… and those that placed the bet early are screwed with the +4.5 line (Steelers need to win by 5 or more), while those that place the bet now will win the bet if the Steelers win by even a single point.

Now it seems like a damn good idea to have hedged the bet. Basically, a lot of people placed the US$1100 bet on the Steelers, and then went and bet about US$550 on the Dolphins at another sportsbook. This way, they are guaranteed to win about US$450. If the Steelers won by 5 or more, they win US$1000 from Mansion and lose US$550 at the other site. If the Steelers don’t win by 5 or more, they break even at Mansion, and win US$450 at the other site. I had decided not to do that… but now I wish I did. It’s not possible to hedge the bet anymore, since every sportsbook will have them at about even now. So if I tried hedging the bet now and place US$550 on Miami at even, if by chance the Steelers win, but by less than 5 points, I lose the Mansion bet (break even) plus I would lose US$550 on the Miami bet - no good.

I’m expecting to lose the Mansion bet now and just get my money refunded… but I think I may try and help Elaine place a bet as well now with the line at even. At least there’s a slightly better chance of winning something! Well, either way, I won’t end up completely empty-handed. I signed up for Mansion through an affiliate site, and the US$1100 sportsbook bet is more than enough to clear the bonus requirements, which means I get a US$90 bonus for sure. Oh well, better than nothing!

Anyways… back to our regularly scheduled programming.

On Saturday, Elaine and I decided to head down to shop at Bellis Fair. Since it was open until 9pm, we decided to try and avoid the early rush and started the drive down at about 3pm. The wait at the border was still pretty long, so we had to wait about an hour to get through. The shopping itself was fairly uninteresting, until we went to Target towards the end and browsed their pop aisle. We’re suckers for new pop flavours, so when we saw they had the new diet Pepsi Jazz in both "Strawberries & Cream" and "Black Cherry French Vanilla", we just had to get a 12-pack of each. We also picked up a 2L of Cherry 7-Up Plus to try. All of these flavours were decent - drinkable, but not anything too special.

Having lived in Vancouver all my life, it seems universal that pop cans are worth a nickel… but it turns out that isn’t necessarily true. In Washington State, they don’t have the deposit system in place for drink containers. So the 12-pack of Pepsi Jazz that we bought for US$3, ends up being US$3, instead of having an extra 60 cents tacked on for deposit.

Apparently Coca Cola Blak has found it’s way into Canada now. We tried it back in April while we were in Las Vegas, and we thought it tasted pretty awful. I’m surprised they’ve expanded their market with it now.

One flavour I really do want to try, but may not get a chance to, is Coca Cola Raspberry. It was only released in New Zealand, and was available for the second half of 2005.

What happened to AriZona Beverages the last few years? They used to be available everywhere, but then they seemingly just disappeared… only to have re-emerged recently with a vengeance. Once again, their drinks are showing up everywhere… grocery stores, wholesale clubs, gas stations, etc. They seem to have found a good price point for their 700mL cans at 99 cents. Seems like that’s the only container size up here in Canada. Down in the States, we found 1L plastic bottles for US$1 at the dollar store, and someone else said they saw one gallon jugs for US$2.88 at Wal-Mart. Everything is bigger down there! They had these 3L house brand pop for a buck at the dollar store too, and there were gallon sized jugs of Gatorade at Target as well.

So we ended up coming home with some clothing and a whole bunch of junk food. We spent well over a hundred bucks down there, but fortunately we didn’t have to pay any customs when we came back across the border. All day long, the lineup into Canada spanned about 2 hours at the Peace Arch crossing according to the radio, and even when we got back there at about 9:30pm, the lineup was still very, very long. I’m not sure if the customs agents got orders to be more lenient or what, but they must have been letting pretty much every single vehicle through unchecked and waiving customs, because the lineup was moving very, very quickly.

Ken wanted to play some poker at River Rock, so we went straight there afterwards. We sat at different tables, and for the two hours or so, I was very card dead. In the 50 or so hands that I played, I only had three playable hands - AJ, AQ, and QQ, which resulted in post-flop play ONE time. Yes, it really is as boring as it sounds. It was a pretty favourable table too, with there being no preflop raises for many hands. But I wasn’t even getting anything like suited connectors in mid-late position or small/mid pocket pairs to play. Kept getting stuff like K6, T4, 32, etc. Never got any specials in the blinds like hitting two pair with Q7 or anything like that either.

The first hand that I played was after folding everything for the better part of an hour. I got AJo in late position and decided to just limp in along with about four others. The flop came J98 rainbow. I had position, and it was checked around to me, so I bet $10, roughly pot size. Got two callers. Turn was a blank, and they checked to me again. I wasn’t sure whether someone was slowplaying or not, so I put out a modest bet of $15. One caller. River came a T, putting four to a straight. If the guy was more aggressive and bet anything more than $10 or so, I might have had to lay it down… but fortunately he just checked it down. He was drawing for the open ended straight draw with a T. So I won about $40 on the only pot I took part in. Later on, I picked up AQo in early position and just limped. Next person raises 7.5x to $15. Amazingly, six others called before it even got to me! What the heck?! I decided not to join in on the madness and surrendered my two bucks. Wouldn’t have hit on the flop anyways. Lastly, I got QQ in mid position, and a $10 raise often gets multiple callers, so I decided to raise to $15. I guess only playing one hand in an hour and a half gives me a pretty tight image, so I picked up $5 in blinds. In the end, even though I contested just one single pot, I finished ahead $22. Ken finished up $11. Meanwhile, Elaine lost enough at slots to put a self ban on herself from playing anymore until her next birthday.

Played some tennis Monday afternoon and won all the mini matches against Gary and Ken. Many were close, but somehow I just manage to win the crucial points. Looks like the tennis season is coming to an end. Summer is over. Can you believe it’s time for all the kids to go back to school again? I got a taste of what that feels like this morning when I had to get up at 7:30am to get to work by 8am to put some new webpages up. Reminds me of all the times in high school I had to get up before 7am to get to choir practice at 7:30am… or the last year of university when I got stuck with 8am classes for both terms. I still don’t know how I managed to pass CPSC421: Introduction to Theory of Computing with classes at such an ungodly hour. Didn’t have the same luck with CPSC311: Introduction to Programming Languages, where even now I have no idea what the basic concepts of that class are.

Sometimes, I think I wouldn’t mind reliving the high school years all over again… but I would never want to go through the struggle of university a second time.