The Poker Nerd

This is a test post.

The last three posts I wrote were done in Google Chrome and lost their paragraph breaks.This post is written in Mozilla Firefox. (more…)

2008 was a very fallow year for me and poker. I can’t speak for the pros, but I think this happens to just about every amateur out there from time to time.I’ve been playing poker seriously in one form or another for more than fifteen years now—Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Indian casinos, tiny card rooms, underground card rooms, home games, and online. Conservatively, I’ve logged 12,000 hours over that time, which is roughly the same as six years of a full-time job. I’ve written a prototype for an online poker server and cobbled together a few klocs of other, less ready-for-prime-time code. Last year, it just all seemed to grind to a halt. (more…)

So, some time around the holidays, my life got busy—not busy in the sense of getting a lot of things accomplished, just busy. All of my side projects got pushed farther to the side and I ended up focused on the job and the social life and what little spare time I had went to pursuits requiring a minimum of skull sweat. Playing poker, much less writing about it and programming it came to a grinding halt.

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Normally the message I got in my e-mail just now wouldn’t be cause for comment:

PokerStars Tournament #60481274, No Limit Hold’em
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
1077 players
Total Prize Pool: $10770.00
Tournament started - 2007/09/13 - 21:15:00 (ET)

Dear ThatJekke,

You finished the tournament in 72nd place.
A $21.54 award has been credited to your Real Money account.

You earned 77.77 tournament leader points in this tournament.

But, it’s been three weeks since I placed in a NLTHE tournament (roughly a run of 0-25.) At this point, I’ll happily take McDonald’s money.

1. The Poker Nerd and the COBB-Webb group spent four days over Labor Day weekend in Atlantic City including a trip to the Borgata. We liked the poker room. There was nothing special about the play. I was in the middle of a big dip, so it’s hard to judge whether it’s going to be a profitable room for us. Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to make it back there very often unless somebody builds up some reasonably priced hotels around the casino. The ability to take a nap between sessions is important, but not so important that we’re going to pay US$300 a night for the privilege.

I played badly the first two sessions and would have been down almost US$800 if I hadn’t made up half of it in the last session. Two and a half weeks in Vegas, I did fine (other than the front-loaded US$10,000 loss.) Four days in AC, I fall apart. I guess that’s poker.

2. I continue to have limited success with online NLTHE and remarkable success with all the other tournaments. I won two back to back on PokerStars, something I’ve never done. One was in HORSE, the other in Stud/8. My placement rate in mixed games, stud, and Omaha is absurdly high while still remaining awful in Texas Hold ‘Em.

3. My little sister is descending into moral degeneracy at a remarkable rate. We in the COBB-Webb group have great hope for her continued development.

I have to admit it. I’ve been stalling on the next step in HomeGame. But, I’ve had good reason.

The next step is installing and evaluating Subversion source control. While Subversion is garnering a lot of interest in the source control world, being the most interesting source control service is sort of like being the prettiest girl at ugly camp.

After doing everything genuinely productive to avoid taking on Subversion, I broke down and bought a Logitech Harmony 880 Advanced Universal Remote Control so that I would have something to program.

Actually, I tried to install Subversion and discovered that it’s an Apache plug-in, which means either setting up my laptop running Fedora 7 as a permanent server or trying to get Apache to coexist nicely with IIS on my main development machine if I want to run it locally.

Hopefully, I’ll find a workable solution this weekend and get it set up. But, now that I have the Harmony, I can control my DVD player and I have 300 waiting.

I just spent the last couple of weeks burnt out on poker.

I assume this happens to everyone. In my case, it was predicated by 70+ hours of live poker over a 2.5 week span in Vegas followed by a string of brutal losses in WCOOP qualifiers. I haven’t even logged in to PokerStars or FullTilt in the last week and a half.

I’m coming out of it, though. Labor Day weekend is going to be three solid days of poker in Atlantic City with the COBB-Webb Group, possibly including my first trip to the Borgata. And, I still want to play in as much of the WCOOP (and FTOPS V) as possible.

In the interim, I’ve been working on getting the main (non-blog) portion of the site up and running by building a CSS-based template for the content. You can see the evolving results at the alternative home page.

Wifezuki and I returned from Las Vegas early Sunday morning and have spent the day recovering from the travel, the vacation, and jet lag. Now that I’m settled in and rested, I’m looking forward to getting on with poker, programming, and building up this site to more than just a blog.

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I never gamble.

I…almost never gamble.

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Since this seems to be the detail everyone asks me about, let me start at the end:

KhQh on the button, 100/200 blinds. Middle position raises to T600. I call and see a flop. The flop comes JhTh and a rag. Original raiser betsT800. I raise T2,000 to see where I am. He calls.

Turn come a king. Original raiser checks. I go all in for T10,700. After much agonizing, he calls and turns over pocket tens. The river doesn’t help me. I’m out of the WSOP after just four hours with a loss rate of US$2,500 an hour.

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