CARDRUNNERS

It seems like Americans are always hating on America today. I'll be honest, I'm often one of them. It can be so easy to take everything we have for granted and complain about the things that our country doesn't do right. We have some major problems, no doubt, but the truth is though we are all insanely lucky to live in a free country. I know it's so easy to lose perspective at times, especially being so ingrained in the poker world where money has a greatly diminished value. I try my best to keep things in focus, but I'm not always successful at it. I saw this clip today and it reminded me of how well I have it. I ask that everyone take 5 minutes to watch this clip. It's a great speech in honor of MLK and It really helps put things in perspective.

Link

We officially hired our new Chicago admin today. Her name is Caroline. It was a very difficult process. It came down to two girls that both would have done a great job. After two interviews with both girls, we just felt that Caroline came across as the better candidate. Caroline is going to get involved in the Cardrunners community and I'm excited to see that happen. It will be very interesting to watch someone with no experience with the poker world try to soak in this very unique culture. I'm sure she will be shocked at some of the things that go on (mostly related to how some people treat money aka prop bets and high stakes games). We are going to have her blog about starting her job for Cardrunners and just her integration into the poker community in general. She starts on Monday. The one downside to her is that when I hear her name it gets the Outkast song in my head. I can't stop singing CaroLIIIIINE!!! I also only know that Caroline line and the one about roses really smelling like poopoo. Catchy song that doesn't get out of your head easily...



I gotta stop lying about posting poker hands. The thing is I usually blog on my work computer and play on my bigass laptop that I typically keep at home. No good, I know. I feel like my frequent blogging will be coming back to me very soon.

I'm a little disappointed with the new season of the Wire. I think it's too early to judge it though. Again, watch that show if you haven't yet. Best show ever, even if the new season is starting a bit slow. Taylor keeps telling me Dexter is the best show ever. I know that's not true, but I think I'll still start watching it soon.

I've caught a few of the new American Idol shows. I always like watching the tryouts. Overall, they haven't been that great. There is one guy that stands out though. He made up his own song and it's catchy as hell and hilarious to boot. It's long, but worth watching. Check it out.

Today I opened up what I thought was a resume from someone. It cleary wasn't a resume, but it looked like a cover letter. That's fine. I appreciated when people included a cover letter. This is how it began,

Honorable Judge X X. X,

I appeared before you about 4 months ago at a status hearing regarding my case for a public intoxication and fleeing law enforcement. Prior to this court date I had fired my lawyer due to my having to be at this hearing for not completing the PACT program, when I was reinstated into the program via judges orders, paid the fifty dollar reinstatement fee, and then received a status hearing letter three weeks later saying that I had a hearing for not completing my program.

LOL can you believe that? This guy is trying to get a job and he accidently attaches a letter to a judge basically pleading to not get slammed with serious criminal charges. It went on for about 5 or 6 paragraphs. I didn't bother reading it all, but I definitely got a kick out of it. Great stuff.

I really felt like putting some money on a game today. I was thinking I'd bet the NYG, but I ended up doing a 180 and betting the packer at -7.5 I'd love to run up a little money on Bodog, so let's hope they have a convincing victory.

I'm about to start playing poker. I'll post some interesting hands later.

I've been keeping really busy with Cardrunners stuff this week. We've got a ton going on with the site in general and in addition we've been working on hiring a new admin/assistant and video manager for the Chicago office. It's been an interesting process to say the least. We first posted a job description on craig's list. We had no idea the type of response we'd get. It was much larger than anything we could have guessed. In the end, we got over 400 replies. It was pretty intimidating to open up the email designated for this and see so many replies. I had no prior experience with trying to hire someone so it was all new to me. I was the main one sifting through the resumes. A lot of them were complete garbage and it was easy to delete them right away. I got pretty good at determining how reasonable resumes were quickly. You have absolutely no idea how clueless most people are about creating resumes and submitting them. My favorite thing I saw (and I saw this multiple times) was people would list "internet" as a skill. Someone else had Windows 95 as a skill. A lot of people made their resumes in Wordpad because the file was .rtf. I'm sorry, but an internet company is not going to hire someone that doesn't use Word.

Interviewing is a lot more fun when you're the one asking the questions. It's still somewhat stressful though. I wanted us to seem as legit as possible since our situation is so unique. Also, it's a little strange interviewing people that are older than I am.  After an interview or two, we got into the swing of things and it went pretty well. We've got a few more interviews this next week. I'm definitely looking forward to having more people work out of this office.

I still haven't had any time to play poker. I'm itching to get back on the tables. Tomorrow I plan on playing all day while I watch football. I'm pretty excited for the football games too. NYG are listed at +7.5 on Bodog. I think that's going to be a pretty close game and I'm considering betting on them. The problem is it's going to be so cold that really anything could happen. I'm looking at the weather now and they are predicting 4 degrees with -10 windchill when the game starts. Completely brutal. By the way, the temp/wind chill is 4/-14 in Chicago right now. Gonna be a cold one if we go out tonight.

Taylor and I have been working out of the CR office today. In the past, I've only come into the office once before on a Saturday. With everything that's going on though, I could see it happening a lot more. That's fine with me. It's a lot more productive than sitting on the couch and watching TV. Another bonus is my gym is right here and I expect to be working out 6 days a week starting on Monday.

I'm about to start a pretty rigorous training routine. CR member, Doug Mills, has been helping me plan it out. It's basically the type of training that sprinters use. As he noted, sprinters are pretty much the most fit people you will ever find. The way this program works is you go nonstop for an hour everyday. There is essentially no resting. It has a lot to do with eating as well. It also incorporates cardio, which is something I've never trained very hard in. I'm looking to get into great shape within the next few months and I'm pretty excited even though I know it's going to be very tough. I've been eating some unhealthy food this week, because I know once I get on this program, I won't be eating that crap anymore.

Gotta start blogging more before Zimba passes me...

Damn. Since I wrote my last blog entry I dropped down a spot to the number 6 slot. Congrats to Verneer on moving up so high. He definitely deserves it more than me. He's got a great blog.

I made the post about how I was going to do a poker blog and avoid general rants and life posts. That's still the plan. The problem is that I haven't played poker in like 10 days (which would take us back to the time of my last post). I was in Aspen for a week and right before and after the trip I was pretty busy with other stuff. Well, afterwords, I was more concerned about recovering from a trip with way too little sleep. Anyway, I don't have any major trips planned until June when I go to Vegas, so it's going to be a long stretch with a solid routine.

Aspen was an amazing time. I had been to CO to ski once before, but it was two years ago. I was with a smaller group of friends that time and I wasn't 21. This time, I traveled with a pretty big group of people and really enjoyed being with all of them. A lof of the people we were with I don't see all that often, so it was a nice change of pace. I also made a few new friends. The last time I went to CO, we went to Telluride. I enjoyed the resort in general, but we caught it at a bad time and the snow was terrible. The slopes were icy, bare and even closed in certain places. This time around the snow was amazing. It snowed the entire time we were there and there was a huge base. We skied Snowmass three of the days and aspen highlands the other day. I much preferred Snowmass. It was bigger and less groomed. I decided on this trip that I definitely prefer ungroomed trails.

We skied with one of my friends, Carrie, who is an expert snowboarder. She pushed us to do hard trails and it really helped me improve over the course of the trip. I was horrible at moguls before this trip, but by the end I could tackle any black diamond without much trouble and even tried a double black (that was over my head). Anyway, I highly recommend Snowmass who anyone likes to ski or snowboard.

I delayed this post a bit, because one of my friends had a number of pictures with me in them. She hasn't put them up on facebook yet, so I'll just go with the few I have.

This is me and my friend, Sean. This run was called Long Shot. It was an interesting run, because it was at the very top of the mountain and you had to hike uphill about 200 yards from the top of the closest lift. It was a brutal hike, especially since we did it at 930am after a pretty heavy night of drinking. When we got to the top I collapsed for about 2 minutes to get my breath back. The run was pretty tough in that it was choppy and I wasn't warmed up yet. I made it down okay though. It was really cool because it was off the beaten pass and went through a bunch of trees. Overall, it was worth the hike. Unfortunately, it was snowing at this point so a lot of the view in the background is killed. We were up very high though.

The last night there, we had a nose cup party. For Christmas, my friend, Lindsay, got a stack of cups cups with noses on the side of them. It made for a good time. You can't quite see the differences in the noses from this picture, but some of them were pretty good. I had the giant nose. We took about 20 different pictures like this. This picture has me, Kristen, Sean and Carrie (the expert snowboarder I mentioned earlier).

Every night we had to take a 30 minute bus ride into Aspen to go out. It kind of sucked dealing with the bus, but Aspen turned out to be a pretty good time. This is Sean, Me and Aimee.

I plan to get back to the tables this week and get some hands posted in the blog. The only problem is I have a lot of Cardrunners stuff to do, so we'll see how much time I actually get in. Although, my directv is broken so anytime at home will probably be spent at the tables.

I hope the new year is going well for everyone.

I don't think I commented on NYE. We were at the Drake in Chicago and had a good time. Honestly, I'm glad I did it, but I probably wouldn't go the hotel route again. It reminded me of Prom. It was just a little too fancy. It also created a pretty awkward time from like 9-11 where people were just kind of standing around. It's always fun to dress up every once in awhile though. Ran into Andy (allreds26) and hung out with him for awhile. Always have a good time shooting the shit with Andy. He also managed to acquire a giant clock necklace by the end of the night. I wish I had a picture of it. In fact, I barely took any pictures, so I wish I had pictures of a lot of things. Below are some recent pics.

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One out of the three pictures I took at our Christmas party. The other two I look like a retarded drunk. I'm still waiting on my buddy to put up his pics on facebook, because I know he has a lot. The background is the non dance floor/less crowded part of the party. Had some nice tables setup.