Soul Searchings

The last couple weeks have been fairly dull in general, as were my last couple blog entries, which had been unusually focused, and thus uninteresting to most people, but now I’m back with an entry that will hopefully be more captivating. =P

Starting with some updates since the last entry, I cleared my remaining $60 in wagering requirements on BetWWTS with the following bets:

$20 on Inter Milan to beat Spartak Moscow to win $6.15: Won
$10 on the New Jersey Devils to beat the Pittsburgh Penguins to win $7.14: Won
$10 on the Detroit Red Wings to beat the Anaheim Ducks to win $10.50: Lost
$10 on the Colorado Avalanche to beat the Ottawa Senators to win $18: Won
$10 on Roger Federer to beat Fernando Gonzalez to win $1: Won

So all in all, I had a very good betting record. I won 83% (10/12) of my bets, and got a 41% return on the $150 that I wagered, winning $61.25. Those numbers are simply not sustainable in sports betting, as professional sports bettors will generally win less than 60% of their picks. So that $211.25 will pad my online bankroll a little bit, although I really haven’t felt like playing much poker in the last little while. I’ve played a few sessions, back down at $25NL and a couple times even down at $10NL in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and in general, I’ve been playing about breakeven poker, and it just hasn’t seemed as fun.

Had a three game losing streak playing in live single table tournaments, before finally making the money by placing second yesterday at Jason’s place. We started with nine players, 25/50 blinds and 6000 chips, with rebuys allowed before the fourth blind level. Frank got crippled early, in level 2 with the blinds at 50/100, and only had a little over 1000 in front of him, and he was the big blind. UTG+2 raised it to 500. I looked down and found pocket aces in the cutoff. I had a strong feeling Frank was just going to push this hand, so I decided to just smooth call the 500. As expected, Frank raised all-in, and UTG+2 called. At this point, I decided to stop playing cute and reraised all in for almost another 5000. UTG+2 thought about it for awhile, but had a gut feeling with his J8 clubs and called. My rockets held, so I doubled up. After that, I went card dead for a very long time. Frank rebought in and went on a crazy tear. He would call raises with stuff like 52o or 62o and hit two pair everytime. It was just ridiculous. A few hands into his heater, the flop came 864 all hearts, the other guy bet, and Frank called. I joked, "Frank already has the straight flush". Well, I was almost right - he had 7c5h for the flopped straight with the gutshot straight flush draw. But… this time, he actually got sucked out when the fourth heart came, and the other guy had the Qh. But still… how do you handle a loose aggressive player willing to call significant raises with junk like 52o, but hits two pair all the time? You just can’t. Anyways, Frank pretty much won everyone else’s money, and I just tried to outlast the last 2-3 players to get into the money, which I managed to do.

It’s already the end of October, so that annual event has come again. No, I don’t mean Hallowe’en… I mean using up the Entertainment Book coupons before they expire. I’ve purchased a book the last three years or so, and come October, I try to make use of all the good coupons before they expire on November 1st. So yesterday, Elaine and I went out to the Fish House at Stanley Park and had a pretty enjoyable lunch, sitting next to the window with a view to the tennis courts just outside. I still want to play, but with how cold it’s gotten lately, it looks like I won’t be swinging the racquet again until next spring. After that, we went to the Aquarium… and it must be the first time I’ve been there since I was a little kid. I totally didn’t remember what it was like there at all. It was fairly interesting looking at all the different water animals, but with the tickets at $18.50 each, I definitely wouldn’t go again without a 2-for-1 coupon.

As for Hallowe’en, looks like Vancouver has banned the sale of Air Bombs and Screecheroos, which is too bad since I loved playing with those. I probably won’t be buying very many fireworks this year, only a few fountains and cones most likely. I still have a little bit of leftover firecrackers from years past, but my supply is running pretty low. Anyone have any hookups for firecrackers? I wouldn’t mind another brick of crackling bombs. =P

I used to be quite the pyro back in elementary school. A couple years ago, I saw these kids who looked about 12 or 13 playing with firecrackers while walking down the street, and I was thinking to myself how young they were… which is truly ironic when I think back to my childhood and remember that I started playing with them back when I was no more than 8 years old, around grade three. My memory is pretty poor, but I moved from near Main and 33rd to my current location near 28th and Fraser before grade four, and I distinctly recall playing with Mighty Mites, Thunderbombs and bottle rockets in my former neighbourhood. That boggles my mind. I think I’d be scared as hell letting my 8 year old kid play with firecrackers. Anyways, by later elementary school, I had graduated into more advanced pyrotechnics. After learning to build model rockets in Mr. Hartney’s grade seven science class, we bought some model rocket engines and a launcher from the hobby shops. Instead of using them for its intended purpose, we emptied out the powder and built our own small pipe bombs. Damn, we were dangerous. I hope we weren’t using a regular metal hammer to flatten the sides of the pipe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we did. We detonated the pipe bombs using the push-button rocket launcher, and it was a blast. Made a nice hole in my neighbours yard where an ant hill was, and also detonated one in the alley that led to us hiding in my basement when we spotted a police car in the neighbourhood shortly after. Fun times. We also played with Molotov cocktails a few times. We would go to the Petro Canada station and fill up a jerry can, claiming it was for our remote control cars, and then filled up beer bottles with it, stuffed a piece of rag in the top, lit it on fire, and hurled it from the McBride playground fort to the gravel field, where it would explode in a ball of fire. Actually, I remember sucking at that, and had a hard time getting my bottles to break, but I digress. It was interesting that with all those surrounding houses by the gravel field, nobody did call the police or fire department to report us. Another time, we threw a Molotov cocktail into the empty cement pool at Gray’s Park late at night, but this time the fire department was called out, even though the fire was completely contained within the pool. We were strictly pyros, not arsonists… but one time, in the middle of the scorching afternoon at Gray’s Park, we lit a small litle patch of short grass on fire in the middle of the field, and it slowly expanded outwards. It never got to be a rip roaring fire or anything like that, but the fire department ended up coming to douse that one out as well.

So that is my brief history of being a pyro. You may have noticed I said "we" a bunch of times. I’ll elaborate on that in my next entry…

Yesterday’s football game between the Chicago Bears and Arizona Cardinals was simply unbelievable.

If I didn’t have any money riding on the game, I wouldn’t have cared less about it… but since I did, it made the game that much more incredible to behold.

To recap, I had three bets riding on this game:

1.) Chicago Bears -11.5 (Chicago wins by 12 or more): $5 to win $4.54
2.) Total points scored over 40: $5 to win $4.54
3.) Chicago Bears win: $10 to win $1.42

After the 1st quarter, Arizona was already leading by two touchdowns, 14-0. After the 2nd quarter, they added two field goals to lead 20-0.

Great. I’m on pace to lose all three bets at this point, with my only real hope being salvaging bet #2.

Chicago finally got on the board with a field goal midway through the 3rd quarter to make the score 20-3, but Arizona countered right back with their own field goal several minutes later to make it 23-3.

Then the miracle started unfolding. First, Chicago returns an Arizona fumble 3 yards for a defensive touchdown with two seconds left in the 3rd quarter to make it 23-10. With exactly 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, Chicago returns another Arizona fumble 40 yards for another defensive touchdown, 23-17. Two minutes later, Chicago returns a punt for 83 yards for yet another defensive touchdown. 24-23 Chicago.

Unbelievable.

With this, I had locked up bet #2, and was winning bet #3, but it wasn’t over yet. There was still almost three minutes left, and Arizona wasn’t set to give up just yet. They marched up the field successfully and got to Chicago 23 yard line to set up for a 40 yard field goal, which is pretty much expected to be good. But Arizona missed. Absolutely unbelievable.

Chicago then just runs out the clock to win the game at 24-23, despite being down 20-0 at halftime and not scoring a single offensive touchdown.

Apparently, at halftime, there was one sportsbook giving 18 to 1 odds for Chicago to win… so placing just $20 on the Bears to come back would have netted a $360 win.

So, in the end…

I lost $5 on bet #1, won $4.54 on bet #2, and won $1.42 on bet #3… for a total of… wait for it… +$0.96!

Haha, it’s all good… more importantly, it’s another $20 that I’ve cleared from my betting requirements, leaving me with $60 to go.

I’ve got to say, sports betting really does make following games a hell of a lot more exciting… but I don’t anticipate continuing on with it after clearing the bonus money.

So it has officially happened. President Bush signed the bill into law Friday morning, and PartyPoker officially closed its doors to the US population, which probably made up for half its traffic and revenue. In several short hours, it lost its claim as the largest online poker room, and they made some drastic changes to their service. They introduced super micro limit games available to everyone, such as 0.02/0.04 NL, hoping to attract some of the very frugal players. I guess when your infrastructure has the capability of handling 40,000 players at a time, and suddenly peak traffic drops to 20,000, you don’t really mind accommodating some new users, even if they don’t generate much rake.

They also cancelled their highly hyped Monster tournament, where the Grand Final pot had already reached $14M and would have continued to grow for another half a year. To compensate the people who already had entries into the Weekly and Monthly tournaments, they issued values of $100 and $350 for each entry, respectively. For the few that already had an entry to the Grand Final, they would receive a $1800 refund for it.

If only I had known that such refunds would be coming! Even winning a $6 single table Sit and Go Monster qualifier yielded a Weekly entry worth $100. Paying $6 to win more than $100? Totally worth it. I would have just kept playing these Sit and Go games… but alas, I will just have to settle with the one Weekly entry that I have. Oh well, another $100 in my pocket, I guess.

In order to retain as much of their remaining player base as possible, they rushed out a fresh round of bonuses that night, and I received a 25% to $100 reload bonus - the highest percentage I’ve ever received from them - while others got varying sums of free no-deposit bonus money to play with.

I wasn’t feeling frisky, so I decided to play it safe, down at the $25NL level that I’m so used to, while clearing the bonus. After 250 raked hands, I was up almost $60. I stopped for a little while, but then decided to continue playing… and in the next 100 hands, I lost back about half of it, a lot of it from bad play, probably because I was too tired. Was willing to go all in with AJ on a jack high flop, and someone else was holding QQ. Not a play I would usually make, and it cost me over ten bucks. Decided I should probably quit playing now while I was still ahead.

In other news, after a quick 2-0-0 start, the Canucks have been brought back to reality. This season is going to be a tough one for them, and just making it to the playoffs will be a big question mark. Sure, our goaltending is now top notch, but the rest of the team is lacking in a huge way. We have one top line and basically three fourth lines. So far, pretty much nobody has been able to produce any offense asides from the IKEA line of Naslund and the Sedin twins. That’s just not going to cut it if they intend to even make the playoffs. Many other teams look much more balanced.

A lot of my players in the hockey pool have been underachieving thus far, so I’ve made quite a few changes already early in the season. As of current, B. Boyes, M. Hejduk, and K. Tkachuk are out, and M. Straka, M. Michalek, and C. Drury are in. Boston, Colorado and St. Louis all seem to be offensively challenged so far, so I’ve decided to go with supporting players on high scoring teams, hoping to benefit from their more skilled linemates. Straka gets to play with Jagr and Shannahan, while Michalek gets Thornton and Cheechoo. So far in the few games since picking them up, they’ve been producing… so hopefully it continues that way. I had picked up Drury last week after dropping Boyes… but then decided to pick up Straka instead. Big mistake, as I missed out on his huge 3 goal and 1 assist performance on Saturday. So far, Buffalo seems to be a high scoring team, so I’ve picked up Drury again, and I’m hoping he’ll continue to produce.

After the $1000 Mansion freebet, the very next week, BetWWTS made a similar offer… but only for $100. Unfortunately, the Steelers didn’t win this game, so I got my $100 refunded. However, I got three accounts to sign up under my referral, and from this, I received $150. The only catch is, I need to roll it over once (bet that amount one time) before I can withdraw it. I had let this sit there untouched for several weeks already, but in the last few days, I decided to start clearing the betting requirement to withdraw it.

At first, I was thinking I would just pick some random NHL games and hope for the best… but then I realized that it wasn’t so much about winning extra money with that $150, it was about not losing money while betting that $150. So instead of making bets that would pay about 2x with a 50% chance of winning, I could make bets that pay only about 1.2x but with a 80% chance of winning.

For example, if I choose a game between two fairly evenly matched teams and put down $20 on one team with 1.9x payout, half the time I would lose $20, and half the time I would win $18. But if I choose a game between one heavy favorite instead with a 1.2x payout, maybe 20% of the time I would lose $20 while 80% of the time I would win $4.

With this strategy, I looked at European soccer games, and found two highly skewed matchups, and I put $25 on each of the favorites. It worked as planned, and I won both bets to roll over $50 and got an extra $10 winnings to boot.

Afterwards, I looked at the one NHL game being played yesterday, between the Dallas Stars and the Anaheim Ducks. I found it strange that even though Dallas was 4-0-0, they were the underdogs to win, and the payout for them to win was 2.4x. Deviating from my strategy, I decided to put down $20 on the Stars, just because the payout was so favourable. I was out later that night, and when I checked the score with my cellphone, it was 3-1 Dallas early in the third period. Sweet. I felt pretty comfortable with that. When I returned home half an hour later and checked again, there was less than 30 seconds left with the score now 3-2 Dallas. Okay, so the Ducks scored one… but no problem, it’s still in the bag. I refreshed it one minute later, and now the score was tied at 3. What the hell… are you kidding me?! I didn’t check into the details of whether my bet was only valid for regulation time or not, so I thought potentially I might have lost the bet already. Fortunately, the Stars prevailed in the shootout… and I found out that my bet did cover that, so I won $28 from that bet. Nice. So now I’m up $38 and I’ve rolled over $80 of the $150.

I looked around at what other bets were available, and saw that there was a lopsided matchup in the NFL tonight with the 5-0 Chicago Bears meeting the 1-4 Arizona Cardinals. I decided to play around with the bets on this one a little bit, and put $5 on Chicago at winning by at least 12 points, $5 on the two teams combining for over 40 points, and $10 on Chicago for just winning the game. The first two bets are standard 50/50 bets, so the payout is about 1.9x. Since Chicago is so heavily favoured, the last bet only pays 1.14x, so I’m risking $10 to win a paltry $1.40. Let’s see how these bets play out tonight.

Yesterday, Elaine and I decided to go to this sample sale that was advertising Mexx clothing and Prada boots among other brands. I’ve previously written about how I really like DKNY gear (Chapter 22), so when we got there, we were delighted to discover that they had unexpectedly brought in a huge load of DKNY stuff. The pricing on the Mexx clothing was quite decent, with sweaters going for about $45, but unfortunately they only seemed to have the samples in large. Conversely, DKNY had a variety of sizes available, but unfortunately, the prices were surprisingly high for a sample sale, with even t-shirts going for over $40. There was a fairly large variety of articles available, and if the prices had been lower, I would have picked up a few more items… but alas, I just settled for a zip-up sweater top for $88. The price is a little higher than what I would usually pay, but I know this is something I will wear enough to get my money’s worth from it, so I don’t mind paying the premium. For anyone that’s interested in checking it out, the sale is located on W.6th Ave, beside the Starbucks between Cambie and Oak. They will be there for another week and a half.

Word has it that the Uncle Willy’s on Kingsway by Metrotown will be closing its doors in about ten days, and another Japanese restaurant will take its place. I mean, the food there isn’t great, and I’ve only been there once in the past several years, but it’s sad in a nostalgic kind of way, only because it’s like another connection to the past being severed. Anyone feel like going there one last time before its demise for old time’s sake?

Anyways, not too much has gone on since last week. Played a couple more sessions of $100NL… and in the first one, I finished up $122, mostly from a single hand. I was already up to $117 on that table from my $50 buy-in when I picked up AA in early position. I decided with $117 at the table, I was either going to play a small pot, or get it all in preflop… so I just limped in for a buck. Cutoff calls, and big blind raises to $3.50. YES! I was hoping someone would raise, so that I could just go all in, which I did. Surprisingly, the cutoff insta-calls with $97, so the big blind folded. Board comes 8232A to give me the full house. The guy that called? He had K8o. What a nut.

The next session, I lost it all back and a little more - $133 in total. Didn’t play for a few days after that… but then I did a change of pace and played some $11 heads up Sit and Go’s. I played five in total, and so far I’m undefeated. A few of them were easy wins that took just several minutes, while a couple tougher opponents took over 15 minutes to put away.

So far, I’m not doing very well in my hockey pool. I’m sitting in dead last at the moment, although I’m not too far behind. Just seems like none of my guys have been performing that well. Oh well, still early in the season, don’t need to panic just yet.

So here I am, sitting here in the boardroom of the office, watching television on the projector at almost 8am. Once again, I’ve been here all night - since about 12:30pm yesterday, actually. Last night marked another major release of our service and software, and we were planning to start the deployment at 6pm, but as always, there are always those last few bugs to fix that delays everything. We didn’t end up starting the upgrading process until after 8pm… and then we ran into some unexpected database problems, which took a few hours to fix. Afterwards, everything still needed to be tested just to make sure it works properly, and that’s a neverending process. Throughout the night, we continued to make slight changes to the software, and the the ever diminishing number of troops soldiered on. The morning is now here, and fortunately everything seems to be running relatively stably now, in time for the CEO to demo the new service on the road. I need to stay around just in case things unexpectedly go south, but hopefully I can leave soon to hit the hay.

So this year, I’m participating in my first ever office hockey pool. There were only six participants, and each of us chose 10 forwards, four defensemen, and 2 goalies. Without going into great detail of how our points system works, the biggest factor is that power play goals and assists are worth an extra point, so I took that into consideration while making my picks. My draft picks consisted of E. Staal, M. Kiprusoff, M. Brodeur, M. Naslund, S. Gonchar, B. McCabe, M. Sundin, B. Richards, T. Bertuzzi, V. Lecavalier, B. Boyes, T. Kaberle, M. Hejduk, M. Svatos, R. Lang, and D. Boyle. I later dumped Lang in favour of K. Tkachuk. I think I have a decent shot of winning the pool. I guess it’s just fun being part of the pool, and having a friendly competition going on that will often be the topic of conversation around the water cooler. No, we don’t actually hang around the water cooler.

Yesterday, I played my second session - a short one - of $100NL and this time, I didn’t fare as well. It started out with promise, as I went up about $30 early, mostly from hitting my set on the flop with 88 two hands in a row on one table… but then things started going south when I picked up KK in the big blind. There were two limpers to me, so I raised it up 8x to $8 and both guys called. Flop came ten high, two diamonds, and the first guy goes all in for $22 or so, which I obviously called right away. The guy had A9 diamonds, and… of course, he hits it. After that, I didn’t get into any major confrontations, but just couldn’t get much of anything going… so I ended up down $47.

A minor setback… but I’m not ready to quit my venture at $100NL just yet!

Yesterday, the US Senate approved the bill that will make it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites, in an attempt to ban online gambling in the US. This includes poker sites as well.

In the next few weeks, the entire online gambling industry is going to be changed. 888, one of the largest online gambling companies has already suspended operations in the US, and many are likely to follow suit. The US contributes about half of their profits, so the impact is enormous.

It is interesting to note that the ban seems to be on making transactions between banks and the gambling sites, and not the actual gambling itself, so it’ll be interesting to see whether any loopholes will be exploited so that people can continue to gamble and play poker online

I’m glad I live in Canada where we still have the freedom to play online poker.

Recently, I was reading about this guy called aba20 on the 2+2 forums… and he is by far the most winning online player there. While there are four or five people who make $100-$200K per month, aba20 won over $700K in August alone, playing in the highest no limit games available online, up to NL ($400)… which is $200/$400 blinds and a max buy-in of $40,000. What’s amazing is that just last December, this guy just started playing no limit online, and was playing in the $50NL games with .25/.50 blinds.

One of the things I learned from him is, you can’t be afraid to move up. If you’re a winning player at the level you’re used to, you need to take a shot at the next level. When your bankroll reaches a certain amount, you should move up. Having 20x the buy-in is more than plenty to contain any downswings, so if your bankroll is at $500, it’s safest to continue playing $25NL. But when your bankroll reaches $1000, you should be moving up to $50NL. My bankroll is sufficient to be playing $200NL, but yet I’m still grinding it out at $25NL.

I’ve been playing it far too safe.

So yesterday, I decided I need to give $100NL a shot. I’ve tried it briefly a couple times, but never really gave it a serious shot. I only committed $43 to it the first time, which is not nearly enough to get a real feel of it.

This time, I decided to try my luck with $200 and see what I could do with it. I used that to sit down with $50 at each of four tables.

It started out very, very well, where on my third hand in on a 5-handed table, I found KK on the button.

UTG raises to $4, CO calls $4. I repop it to $20. The blinds fold, but both those guys call.

Flop comes T53, two hearts. UTG bets $17.33, CO calls $17.33. I only have $28.50 behind me, so obviously I just push. Both call.

UTG only had pocket 8’s, and CO had AT for top pair.

Fortunately, I didn’t get bad beat this time. I scooped the $136.50 pot, which almost tripled me up right away. Sweet… a little extra insurance for my venture into $100NL.

All in all, the one hour session went very well, and I won several more large pots, and only lost one significant pot, which had me ending the session $136 in the black.

I couldn’t be happier with my first real session of $100NL, but I know they won’t all be like this. But at least I’m not nearly as scared playing at this level now.