Flushdance – Joxums poker blog

The live blog opens in just a matter of minutes!

Once again, there will be nearly full disclosure of every hand played.

Join in and let’s have some fun!

joxum Poker bloggers, WBCOOP

Never mind the non-cash and the rather bland exit when I rammed  7’s right into a pair of Aces. (It was an obvious fold, I can only blame myself).

Never mind, that it was 2:38 A.M. by the time it was over.

Never mind, that it took me another hour to become tired enough to fall asleep.

The biggest thing about last night was Blaargh, Crash (with Swimmer, I think) and bastin (lowercase only) who dropped in to rail. And even more so, actually having real time conversation with all of you.

Why it’s such a big thing, you ask?

Because I suddenly realized that hey! I’m a part of something good. It matters that I’m here. That’s a big realization.

When I first started out with Flushdance, I tried to connect to other bloggers by commenting on their posts. 19 out of 20 times there’d be no response. And it would go on like that for a very, very long time. It was like banging your head against a wall, sans the headaches. Even personal e-mail messages would seemingly get ignored.

I dunno – maybe they were just too tight knit to take newcomers in or something. Maybe there were other reasons, but I eventually had enough of being ignored and left them alone.

You know how it is – everybody starts out by declaring that they write for themselves only and to hell with readers. But in reality, the first thing we do when we log on, is to check for comments. Everybody’s a sucker for being acknowledged in the world. That’s how it is, we all have egos that need to be fed and nourished.

I was close to packing it in, though. Then I noticed that there were people coming by now and then. And now and then there would actually be feedback to something I wrote.

And ever so slowly, the ball began rolling. Dialouges began to happen. Words would go back and forth. I found a foot hold.

Last night was a highlight of sorts. I’m still trying to get over how cool it was to exchange words in the chat box.

There will be more live blogging from event #6 and the Main Event.

See you all (t)here!

/j.

joxum Poker bloggers, Running good, WBCOOP

I finally found my wireless keyboard. It was stoved away in a moving box that hadn’t was packed a year ago, almost to the date. With it comes a stand that holds my laptop and allows me to view the screen like it was a real monitor.

There was meant to be a lot of poker going on tonight. Then Bastin managed to sidetrack that project by misquoting a poem by Charles Bukowski, called “To  the Whore Who Took My Poems“. That had me on Youtube for about an hour. Never realized there was so much Bukowski on Youtube. But there is.

I have been a great fan of Bukowski, ever since I read….uhm…can’t even remember what I read first, but it was damn fine. Probably “Post Office” or “Factotum”, one or the other. Didn’t read “Women” until the third book or so. Whatever. I have a large collection of Bukowski today, thanks to that.

As I was returning to Bastin to reply, it suddenly struck me, that Youtube has a way of making a clip start at a certain spot, like a minute and 34 seconds. That would be rather cool to do, linking straight to where he says the correct words.

I had no idea on how to do it though, so I had to research the proper way, which is to add “#t=01m20s” to the end of the URL for the clip. Of course replace the time code with your own.

So that took another while as well.

Then I somehow wandered into a fairly long 2002 phone interview with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson about the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Hunter Thompson has also been a source of inspiration for over a decade now. I am in fact a professional writer, which is as far as I’m going into job related details here. And that’s partly because of him, but not for the reason of writing like him. Maybe  for a while, but then it occured to me, that it was a stupid idea.

I clearly remember when I was taking the admission test to the school of Journalism. While I was sitting on a bench waiting, along with about a thousand other, to be allowed in to set up my small portable typewriter – electric – I saw this guy who was trying his hardest to look like Hunter Thompson.

I actually passed the exam, but he did not, which I thought was fair, for no other reason than I’ve always had a dislike for people who try to physically emulate their icons.

There are a lot of poker related Dr. Thompson wannabee bloggers around (No names mentioned, but you know who you are, you scum suckers), and I can safely say that the dislike hasn’t gone away. Oh, and don’t try to be like Charles Bukowski either, I’ll hate you just as much…

Which is a totally different story.

I still can’t wander into Hunter S. Thompson without getting lost. This time I ended up watching a BBC documentary from somewhere around 1978: “Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision“, which was still new to me, but took another 45 minutes to go through.

So about three full hours into what should have been my poker evening, I still hadn’t seen one card.

Oh what the hell…I may as well post a blog about it then.

/j.

joxum Poker bloggers, elsewhere, whatever

Cardgrrl took not one but two really nasty beats in consecutive order. So I guess a little cheering up might be in order.

And here:

And finally here:

joxum Cardgrrl, Poker bloggers, Tilt, downswing, pwned

There’s an interesting hand discussion going on at Dawn Summers’ blog: I had outs.

In a live 2-day tournament and average stacked, she decides to limp QQ UTG to trap a drunk opponent who is in the BB. Then all hell breaks loose, with a short stack and an average stack going all in. The button, the Small Blind and the original mark folds. What to do?

I suggested a fold, as did just about every other commenter. I also misread the numbers by a wide margin and got the sequence of events totally mixed up, which Alceste was kind enough to point out without mocking me. Oh well, my original analysis was only posted to the entire intertubes, so now everyone knows why I’m  uh…”running bad”. I guess it’s what you call “slightly embarrassing”.

Here are the real numbers, once again presented to you by PokerStove:

In the Blue Corner, the actual hands: Pound for pound and knowing what we know, Dawn made a terrible preflop fold. (As chance would have it, the case Ace did in fact show up on the Flop).

But we don’t always get to know our opponents hands, so in the Red Corner, I added some range to the two opponents.

The second first opponent backs up his [AQ] with 90K 22K. At this point his M is about 3, so he is desperate. He has limpers ahead of him and bigger stacks behind him, some may call with worse hands. So he does what he has to do.

I decided to put the big stack on a fairly tight range. Tournamentwise, he’s actually average, like Dawn, but in this little microcosmos, he’s the biggest stack.

He does not have to get involved so aggressively unless he sees the situation as profitable. It can only be profitable if he has a reasonable expectation to take the pot, either preflop, or against a single opponent. So he shoves his [TT] to isolate the small stack.

His range may be somewhat tight, but I added [AKs] for the human touch. It’s not an impossible holding in this scenario.

This gives us a fairly different picture: Dawn is not a favorite anymore. In fact she’s a 2:1 dog against two opponents.

In fact, she can’t call here, unless she has [KK+] – that’s the Green Corner of this triangular boxing ring.

At least, that’s what the math says. Like Alceste also pointed out – and I agree – KK may not even be safe to call, if she want’s to be reasonably sure to keep her seat for day 2 of the tournament.

/j.

joxum Poker bloggers, hand analysis, poker tactics

I recently added Black Widow of Poker to my blogroll (what an honour that must be). The other day I was going to add a comment to something she wrote, when the software told me to cool it…

Speaking of blog roll, if you haven’t already noticed: The right hand side bar is full of recent posts from my roll. Dive in!

/j.

joxum Floatsam and Jetsam, Poker bloggers, odd stuff

Sadly, you won’t get the immediate satisfaction that 4-betting and watching him fold brings you (then again, nor will you have to do the figurative walk-of-shame that is folding to a shove). But poker isn’t a game about immediate satisfaction.

Fredrik Paulsson: When your opponents adjust

joxum Fredrick Paulsson, Poker bloggers, Poker quotes

Let me just make sure that ya’ll head on over to Tommy Angelo’s and read his post “Rita wrecks me“.

Nothing to see here anyway…

/j.

joxum Las Vegas, Poker bloggers, Tommy Angelo, elsewhere

I was watching EPT Grand Final from Monte Carlo tonight, and they mention they have a freeroll coming up. So I managed to secure on of the last of the 24.000 seats. Nearly two hours later, I bust out in 675th or so. I had a good run of cards and made some good calls along the way, only to get booted by a set of Queens. But what’s more important is that i made nearly 50 cent in free money!

Here’s the only really interesting hand: We all have a full house, but I manage to walk away with the main pot because…well, I guess I’m just that kind of guy!

Encouraged by that, I looked around, to see who was on, and lo and behold – Cardgrrl in a fixed limit Hi/Lo Omaha. And short handed too. I have almost no idea about what to do in Omaha, but I thought, what the heck, it’s FL, can’t loose too much money there. And I’m happy to report that I managed to book a smallish win there as well. Here’s me winning a hand – probably the only hand I won at all:

Had to leave in a hurry. After a bit of a slow start, Cardgrrl began wrecking havoc at the table, doubling up within four hands…

Anyways, it was only a short game for me, but great to actually interact with someone you kind of know, and not just a screen name.

/j.

Post Scriptum: I totally forgot in all the excitement: I actually had a straight flush in the first hand of that freeroll. And even though the hand was over in the very first minute of the tourney, my double stack wasn’t even close to the chip leader who was well over 7K! How do you do that?

joxum Poker bloggers

Ed Miller was the only to come up with a reply to the two hands I was asking for help to sort out:

“Is anyone out there?” (Echos.) “Am I doing this right?” (Echos.) “Can anybody hear me?” (Echos.) The loneliness is enough to drive poker players totally batty. And its enough to drive their games squarely into the crapper too.

You may want to read his post in it’s entirety. It’s one of his better to date.

/j.

joxum Poker bloggers, analysis, hand analysis