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shield 6 omg…

June 29th, 2007

The creators of this show are freaks. I think Season 6 is the best season so far after Antwone’s escapades in Season 4.

Scriptwriting so tight, characters so awesome, zero good guys. How TV was meant to be.

Vic Mackey: “Looks like you finally found your way to the land of milk and underage honey.”

Shane: “Damn I got leftovers older than you.”

Cute underage girl: “Yeah, but not as tasty.”

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pokerace hud pain for gain…

June 27th, 2007

Gay Perry: “Look up the word ‘idiot’ in the dictionary and you know what you’ll find?”

Harry: “A picture of me?”

Gay Perry: “No, the definition of the word ‘idiot’, which is what you fucken are.”

—–

Inspired by my friend Colin (who only a few months ago was running bad at 2/4 and is now kicking ass at 10/20), I decided to fully embrace PokerAce HUD and start utilising more of the information PT gives me.

I spent most of the day starting to learn what all the various stats meant and their applicable ranges and uses. It felt like I was back at school, taking notes and doing my best to be a teacher’s pet to Colin so that he would continue to help me.

I spent most of the day rearranging Colin’s template layout of 16 overlaid stats to suit the site I play on. After a few hours, with the help of a few sneaky vodka tonics along with my never-say-die attitude, I was able to finally overlay the 16 stats on each of the 10 seats at the table. I then sat down to play, and discovered that the stats I had placed, although looking very pretty, were covering up the hole cards, bet amounts, button, etc…and therefore had to be ingeniously relaid.

I considered throwing the whole project in at this stage, but as I had invested so much emotion in the whole affair, and was by now marginally drunk, I decided to press on.

An hour or so later, I had succeeded in creating what even a cynic would admit was a magnificent feat of jigsaw puzzling. I then sat down to try out the fastastic new layout. Unfortunately, the entire table reminded me of a chaotic race riot and was very distracting, with 170 red, white and italic numbers scattered over each table, jostling each other rudely like hippies in a mosh pit. I decided to scrap the entire affair and admit defeat and resign myself to mediocrity whilst the Colin’s of the world shot on to stardom through their ability to interpret the language of HUD.

Unable to find how to renege back to default settings, I uninstalled and reinstalled PokerAce only to find that, for reasons known only to Buddah and the PokerAce creators, it had now ceased to function. At this stage, I thought it appropriate to just sit there depressed and stare into nothingness, breaking my reverie with the odd curse at random Greek and other gods, but not Buddah (of course).

Time passed slowly as my anger at the gods abated somewhat. I decided, more through a lack of options than any real streak of genius, to uninstall and reinstall PokerAce again. Almost unbelievably, considering the profanities I had hurled at the gods only moments before, PokerAce Mark III worked like a dream.

Flushed with success, and with spirits high, I decided that, rather than admit complete failure and get angry and break things, I would save my peripherals and take one final shot at adding stats to the layout.

I was competely successful, and poker geeks will be interested to know that I settled on the following overlaid stats for each player:
VPIP
PFR
Overall Agg Factor
Total Hands
Folded BB to Steal
Att to Steal
C-bet %
Folds to C-bet %
Calls C-bet
Raises C-bet

Running very good at this stage, I had a crack at the dropdown menus, and settled on the following:
Net Won
BB/100 hands
Went to Showdown
Won $ at Showdown
Folded SB to Steal
Flop Agg
C/R flop
Fold to Flop Bet
Turn Agg
C/R Turn
Fold to Turn Bet
River Agg
C/R River
Fold to River Bet

I can’t wait to keep on losing, but in much better spots!~

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a red letter week…

June 24th, 2007

Had a magnificent week - it all started with a guy pushing on me with the nut low on Monday when I had a set, and things skyrocketed from there on the tables.

My mood went from good to superfunhappykangaroo mode when my copy of The Shield season 5 arrived in the mail (I don’t like the quality of the ones on Torrents). I ordered it about 6 weeks ago, but customs at Philippines decided to spend a month holding it for me, just to increase my level of happiness when I finally did get it. I suppose its possible they thought it might be a very crafty bomb or perhaps a few hundred grams of cocaina in the disguise of DVDs, and had to subject the package to further testing after they crudely opened it and left their ink-stained finger prints all over it, without bothering to repackage it (of course).

It’s also possible that they are morons, and I’m leaning towards this possibility after receiving their customs notice which was scribbled on in the hand of a 3-year old, and totally illegible on a scrap piece of recycled paper. When I say recycled, I don’t mean in the cool hippy recycled toilet paper sense good for the economy, I mean they had already printed a different notice to someone else on the piece of paper. LOFL at that guy. His DVDs or whatever are probably being enjoyed by a Customs officer somewhere.

I thought Season 4 of The Shield could not be topped in terms of pure excellence, and I was right. But Season 5 is almost as good, largely in part to the insanely brilliant move of bringing on Paula Garces as a young trainee officer (see pic below). Like my Dad always says, “With Latin son - you just can’t go wrong.” My mother is Australian.

I decided to get back into running again, not through any real desire to keep fit (I smoke a couple packs a day, and the owner of Absolut Mandarin-flavoured vodka is buying his kids a new yacht thanks to me - frickin Scandinavians get all my $$), but because, well, there is this cute girl who runs at the gym in my building and I’m planning a crafty James Alexander Cox Zero tuning effort on her. Firstly, I need to get to the stage where my treadmill is going faster than hers - this will be no mean feat I realise now after my first tense attempt on the treadmill. The pain is really quite ridiculous. I really don’t know why anyone runs, unless they have a really good reason, like mine.

Buddah heard my prayers and decided my crusade is a holy one, as he sent me past a store selling these shoes (picture below). These shoes are easily the greatest running shoes ever created in history, and the salesman told me they are actually banned in the Olympics for being just too damn good. I ran with them yesterday and its like I was running on fluffy bouncy light cushions of happiness.

If you have an actual proper reason for running like mine, I highly recommend you get these shoes - Aasics Gel-Kinsei. If I marry this girl and we have a son, I am going to name him Aasics.

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change your luck….

June 17th, 2007

I’ve been running really bad last 10 weeks, in live poker, online, sportsbetting, pretty much everything. I put my money in good, I lose. I put my money in bad, I lose, I put my money in on a race, I lose.

I wrote a whining post this morning with a few of the 100 or so hands where I ran pretty bad last 10 weeks, but I got rid of it. It’s boring, and no one cares.

I edit an online casino website for Tony G. and the PokerNews team www.casinopokernews.com and one of my writers submitted an article about luck today which picked me up a little. The article was a simple basic psychological article about luck and the exercise at the end piqued my interest. When you’re running sick bad (60,000 hands of it in my case, the worst I have ever experienced in 1.5mil hands of poker), it can be hard to be objective about your situation. And the exercise at the end of this article (just a mood trick) made me realise that, at the end of the day, I’ve been pretty damn lucky so far and that life is good.

My flatmate in Brisbane before I moved o/s was a big proponent of the “think positive, change your luck” principle but I usually dismissed such logic as bs. But I think there is something to it. At the very least, thinking positive, even if it doesn’t change your tangible “luck”, helps you be objective and realise that there are billions living below the poverty line, and whether we like to admit it or not, just being born in a 1st world country and having access to 21st century education and university loans etc makes us all extremely lucky. I’m even more lucky than most, being able to make a successful living playing mid-stakes NL, and I’ve been able to travel to 15 or so countries in the last couple years in my profession.

Life is good - the cards can fall where they want, I’m going to stop to smell the roses along the way.

End sentiment.

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the long road back…

June 8th, 2007

Swinging like crazy online. Win 7k day before yesterday, lose 7k last night, win 10k today thank buddah.

I think I’m playing ok - finding some soft games - have been running into a lot of sick situations that are making me nauseous like this one:

Texas Hold’em $5-$10 NL (real money), hand #429,021,019
Table “omg so ghey” HE, 7 Jun 2007 11:54 AM ET

Seat 2: BB ($517.40 in chips)
Seat 3: UTG ($1,091.30 in chips)
Seat 8: Hero Button [ 8C,6C ] ($1,014.85 in chips)
Seat 9: SB ($684.00 in chips)

PRE-FLOP
UTG calls $10, Hero calls $10, SB bets $50, BB calls $45, UTG calls $45, Hero calls $45.

FLOP [board cards 3C,7D,9C ]
SB checks, BB checks, UTG checks, Hero bets $149, SB folds, BB folds, UTG calls $149.

TURN [board cards 3C,7D,9C,AD ]
UTG checks, Hero bets $351, UTG calls $351.

RIVER [board cards 3C,7D,9C,AD,AH ]
UTG checks, Hero checks.

SHOWDOWN
UTG shows [ 10S,8D ]
Hero mucks cards [ 8C,6C ]
UTG wins $1,218.

—-

The UTG player here so bad. I shouldn’t have bet the turn, as his call stats were like 70% for turn, it was just a flat out mistake. He calls 90% of rivers, I wish I was tilted and I would have pushed, but I realised my turn mistake and checked behind on river, letting him win with T-high. This kind of stuff happening over and over lately - just nauseating.

Tonight, I got some confidence back for my biggest night in about 2 months or so. Ran pretty good all night and my PT stats on my new computer starting to look a bit less sick. I’ve been playing around 25/18 for the last few weeks and I tightened up to around 21/16 last couple nights and I think I’ll stay around there, as it’s a lot easier to play a bit tighter.

I’ve been check-raising way too many flops in the last few weeks and picking bad spots against the wrong type of players. I toned down the aggression a lot tonight and just played a lot more basic, and it was refreshing to just grind.