Soul Searchings

A week and a half ago, got involved in the largest poker pot of my life.

I started with $70 on the .50/$1 table, and built it up to $114 when the following hand went down.

I found KK UTG and decided not to mess around and raised to $8 right away. One player in middle position calls, and a very loose calling station calls from the big blind as well. The flop comes QdTd6s. BB checks, I bet out $25. Both guys call. Hmm, that’s not a good sign. Turn comes Jc. BB checks, I check, and now mid position bets $61 with only $20 left behind him. BB folds. The pot is now $160. I’m basically faced with calling $81 into a pot of $181. It was a very tough decision. I still have the overpair, but it was very possible some donkey had something like QJ. Two other possible hands would be QQ or JJ, but for some reason I didn’t think either had that. In the back of my mind, I was thinking if I really was behind, I still have the open ended straight draw possibility to suck out on.

I made the call. Pot size: $262. It turns out that I did make the right call, but I was definitely not out of the woods. He was holding KdJd, so he had flopped the open-ended royal flush draw, but only got a pair of jacks on the turn. If an ace or ten rivered, then we would split the pot. So I just need to dodge another J or any diamond.

Thank God the river came 7c! Because of that hand, finished the day up about $150.

A few days later, played a marathon five hour session and it was terrible. Couldn’t hit anything. In short, had AJ or better 19 times, and couldn’t hit a pair on the flop 14 of those times. Out of the five times I did hit something, I lost three of them for large pots. A good example would be having AK and raising to $5 and getting called by QJ. The flop comes KKT. I bet, he calls. Turn comes 9. Great. Thanks very much. All in all, the damage could have been much worse than just $100, but playing for five hours and not getting any luck at all takes its toll, so I took a break for a few days.

Things are getting busy at work again. Last few weeks have been pretty hectic. Have ordered about $70K worth of Cisco networking equipment, and $25K worth of Dell servers. Another $60K of Dell servers are being ordered next week. The company secured a new round of financing, so now we’re expanding again, which means lots of new faces and lots of new challenges. Things are likely only going to get busier in the next few months.

Yesterday night, went snowboarding with some coworkers, and it was the first time I’ve hit the slopes in two years. Was expecting the conditions at Cypress to be very good, considering they have a snow base of over 300cm, but we were quite unpleasantly surprised to find the runs to be completely iced over. It goes to show it doesn’t matter how much snow there is accumulated, good slope conditions require that there be NEW snow. At the very least, the weather was fantastic last night, with the visibility being perfect and not a cloud in the sky.

It didn’t help that I haven’t done any maintenance on my board. My heel edge is completely rounded, and going down any icy patches, once I start to turn my board to carve, it starts sliding on its edge instead of biting and grabbing the ice. Not good. Led to some pretty dicey situations, and I hyperextended my left elbow a bit on one of my falls. Overall, it was still a pretty good night.

We grabbed a bite at the bar in the lodge afterwards, and I’ve got to say they have the largest regular burgers around. They are all made with 1/2 pound patties, and they come with a very generous serving of fries as well. Prices are very reasonable, starting at $9. Caught the end of the Canucks game while eating, but unfortunately we lost 3-2 to the Kings in OT.

I’m looking forward to watching the Australian Open final tonight between Roger Federer and Fernando Gonzalez! Federer has just been smoking all his opponents so far, not having lost a single set, and that’s expected. But Gonzalez is playing out of his mind, and has been incredibly impressive in destroying his opponents, including the likes of 5th seeded Blake and 2nd seeded Nadal. I really believe he has a chance against Federer, if he continues playing like he has been. I still think Federer is the favourite, and I prefer him to win, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gonzalez springs the upset.

The match starts at 12:30am, and I’m definitely staying up to watch until the end!

So I hunkered down for some more poker in the last couple days, to mixed results. On Monday, I started by playing two tables on Absolute Poker with $0.50/$1 blinds and $55 on each. Tried to play a good, tight style… but the problem was I was getting nothing to play with. For about two hours, I mostly just got blinded away until I was close to being down $40. Fortunately though, I got lucky one hand where I decided to push preflop with TT but found someone with AA. The board comes J8497 for the nasty suckout. I apologized to the guy, even though this happens to me in reverse ALL the time. With that, I finished close to even and called it quits there. I went over to Party and played my regular game, and had better luck. Won about $30 in less than an hour.

Yesterday, did a similar routine and started on Absolute. Similar result, going pretty card dead for two hours and going down about $40 before quitting and moving on to Party. Continued to run pretty badly there. Every single time I had a good hand, I would get no action. I flopped sets about 7-8 times, and I swear not once was I able to even make a dime, even if I check on the flop and bet 50 cents into a $1.50 pot on the turn with three other players. Come on, are you kidding me? Nobody has ANYTHING? On the flipside, every time I bet aggressively with say AK preflop, I never hit on the flop. Or everytime I flop two pair, someone ends up catching a bigger two pair. Or I have AA and raise it more than 6x BB, and SB calls with A5 and hits a 455 flop. All of that combined to have me down by almost $50 in an hour and a half. During that stretch, there was simply no possible way I could have been in the black. The only question is whether I minimized my losses or not. Patience is the key for poker, and if you have a sound playing strategy, you will reap the rewards in the long run. This was certainly the case for this session, where things finally took a turn for the better. First, I called almost a buck preflop with 55 and got a AT5 flop. I got a loose guy to call large bets with just A2, so I took about $14 from him. A few seconds later on another table, I had 66 and flopped QT6. There was a short-stack with $8, and he had T6, so I easily took all his money. On that same table about two hands later, I had KQ clubs and got an outstanding flop with three clubs for a flush. The small blind made a fairly large bet on the flop, which I flat called. He then checked the turn to me, and I fired out $3. He raises to $6, and I reraise all-in for another $30 or so. He calls… with 54 clubs. Awesome. Won about $36 on that one. So while I had a horrible initial hour and a half and lost $50, I won all of it back and more in a span of five minutes. It only takes one good hand to wipe away an hour’s worth of crappy cards. Patience.

I actually finished up $25 or so on Party, but combined with Absolute, I was still down about $15 on the day. Given how the day started, I’m happy with the result.

In the past couple months, I had stopped frequenting the PSO and 2+2 forums. Well, it turns out that was a very costly mistake. I found out that between December 20th and the 26th, there were unprecedented bonus opportunities on PartyPoker. Generally, if you’re lucky, you might get one 20% up to $100 maximum bonus in a month. For this time period, for some reason, the bonus was 30% up to $200. The most painful part was, there was not only just one of these bonus codes available. Not even two or three. There were FIVE of these bonus codes that were available to EVERYBODY. Some people managed to use a sixth one as well. So that was potentially $1200 in free money that I missed out on. Granted, even if I did know about it, I probably wouldn’t have been able do the full amount, but very possibly I could have cleared about $600 worth. The bonuses all required 12x hands per dollar to clear, so that means each $200 bonus required 2400 hands. Five of the bonuses means 12000 hands in a span of about ten days. You would also require a deposit of $667 per bonus to get the $200 maximum, so that means you would need an available bankroll of $3335. I have just under that in my account, so I would have had enough to do four bonuses for sure. Damnit, missed out on $600 or $800 free money. *Sigh*

I received my 22" widescreen LCD a couple days ago, and have replaced my 21" CRT with it now. It might look a lot nicer, but functionally it’s really not much different at all. I’m not one of those that get the latest technologies just for the heck of it. I like to get them only if they truly are better than what I have currently. If not for my dad wanting a new monitor, there really wasn’t any reason for me to switch.

With the 22" having a resolution of 1680×1050, I gained 80 pixels horizontally, but actually lost 150 pixels vertically from the 1600×1200 resolution I was running previously. After having used it for the last two days, it’s pretty much the same, but with two exceptions.

When I play online poker, nowadays I generally play six tables simultaneously. With the 21" CRT at 1600×1200, I can fit four full size tables with no overlap, or six tables in a two across no overlap, three down with half overlap configuration. With the 22" LCD at 1680×1050, I can’t fit four full size tables without overlap, and for six tables, I can either do the similar two across, three down with a bit more overlap, or a three across, two down configuration with much smaller tables. I tried out the new configuration, and I don’t like it much. I like seeing large tables, so essentially, this new monitor is actually a little bit worse for me in terms of online poker, but I can live with it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice looking monitor and it clears up a lot of desk space, but it’s definitely not all positives. The LCD monitor has a much worse viewing angle than the CRT, and looking at it from anything more of a slight angle reduces the viewability significantly. However, one large positive is the viewing of videos. For regular 4:3 videos or watching TV, this 22" gives basically the same viewing size as the 21", but for widescreen videos, the 22" gives a significantly larger viewing size.

Speaking of online poker, I’ve been on a ridiculous heater since last week. For the longest time, I used to sit down with $15 on every table instead of the maximum buy-in of $25. I decided last week to sit with a full buy-in, and it worked out very, very well. For my first session, I played for about two and a half hours and finished up $90, after being up over $120 at one point. The next day, it got even better, and in about an hour and a half, I won over $160. It was a combination of things that resulted in such great results. I was getting very good cards, making very good plays, and also making very good laydowns. Everything was just going perfectly. Won over $250 in about four hours over a span of half a day. Excellent.

Despite that, I actually didn’t play for the next few days. I played again yesterday, and thought inititally that the doomswitch had been flipped on me when I was getting terrible cards and lost $60 fairly quickly, but I eventually came back to finish the session right at even. One particular hand helped the comeback.

I had pocket nines in late position, and just limped preflop to no raises. I flopped a monster with the board showing 977 and two hearts. Someone in early position bets the 25 cent minimum, and three others call. Even though my hand was so strong that I didn’t fear being outdrawn on the turn or river, I didn’t want to just call… but at the same time, I didn’t want to scare all of them away with a large reraise. If someone was going for a straight draw or a flush draw, I wanted them to stay in and hit it! I decided to do a min-raise to just fifty cents, hoping to get a little value out of all four of them. It worked even better than I had hoped. Someone reraised to $2. After some thinking, I decided to just push with my remaining $20+ and hope he calls. Amazingly, someone else calls the all-in, and then the the $2 raiser does as well!

They were both going for the flush draw, which is just awesome, because both of them were almost drawing completely dead. Only one guy had the slimmest of chances of beating me with runner runner kings, but obviously the odds of that happening are incredibly low. Suffice to say, I scooped up a nice $60+ pot.

So how about those Canucks? Winning seven in a row? That’s unpossible! Their good run, just like mine, must come to an end sometime…