CARDRUNNERS

"It's too cold." Taylor tends to be sensitive to cold weather and he says that a lot. I always give him shit about it, because it's usually like 75 and sunny when he says that. The tides are turning though because today I was thinking that thought to myself. The weather is finally starting to get cold in Chicago. It was like mid 50s, gloomy and windy today. Fall has arrived. We have about a 10 minute walk to the gym and it was a cold one. I need to get some more warmup pants so that I'm not wearing shorts on this walk.

Things didn't get much better at the gym. When I first got in there, I hopped on the scale. I haven't weighed myself in awhile, so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. I weighed in at a massive 175lbs. ugh. I haven't been eating as much lately and I just got back from abusing my body in aruba with no working out. I gotta focus to get my weight up. Ideally, I want to be at about 190lbs. I need to eat more, eat healthier and put in more time in the gym.

I was working legs today, so I knew it wouldn't be a fun session. I always feel good after leg workouts, but they suck when I'm doing them. I managed to tweak a muscle in my upper quad. It didn't really hurt, but I knew I did something to it. I cut the workout a bit short and headed home.

Been dealing with lawyers a lot lately for CR related stuff. I also have a few friends going through law school. That's definitely not an easy profession to be in. Law school seems like it would be hell on earth.

The number of views thing on the new blogs is cool because it makes me feel some friendly competition. I moved ahead of Daut today to take position #5. Daut's blog is honestly much better than mine, so I'll enjoy being ahead of him while I can. I'm looking to bump into the top 4, so I'll be updating my blog more. I feel like I can take Phil, but it's gonna be close. Obviously, I can't catch CTS, Brian or Taylor, but that's ok with me.

Going home soon and praying that the internet is working again in my place. It's been out since when I got home from Aruba (Friday night) and it's driving me crazy. They were supposed to come fix it today. If not, I'll end up watching a bunch of garbage reality TV on VH1/MTV because as bad as that shit is, there isn't anything better on right now. I miss baseball being on every night...

I was talking to Taylor while in Aruba and he had never seen the GI Joe parody things from ebaums world. They are hysterical, so I'm going to post some in here. I used to love these things like sophmore year of college and I haven't really watched them since. If you aren't familiar with them, they take the old public service announcements from the GI Joe shows and dub over them. Pure genius.

edit: I'm getting very tilted right now because I can't figure out how to embed youtube videos into here. The part that really tilts me is that I see Gambler2k4 figured it out. I'm usually pretty good at this stuff. I'll figure it out later.

BODY MASSAGE! This is what started it all. We were talking about getting massages and I threw out that line and no one knew it. I was shocked and appalled.

What a game last night. The interesting thing was in the promos for the game they were showing clips from the Bears vs. Cardinals game last year. I thought to myself, "why the hell are they showing that?" That game was a total fluke and the Cowboys are going to blowout the Bills. It just seemed like a weird game to compare the upcoming game to. I guess they knew something that I didn't. It's not like the game necessarily played out in a similar fashion, but it was a fluky game that came down to the wire. I mean, who thinks the Cowboys still win after they miss the 2 point conversion? I sure didn't. So many things had to go right. I gotta give the Cowboys credit though. Tony Romo turned over the ball 6 times and they still pulled out a victory. I dislike the Cowboys as much as any team in the NFL so I really hated how that game turned out. It does make me look more forward to the Sunday night game next week (Pats vs Cowboys).

Been quite awhile since I've played any online poker. I was playing a decent amount before Aruba, but I haven't played since I left for the trip (Sept 29th). I wasn't planning on playing any online poker in Aruba and frankly the internet connection was too bad to play on anyway. I've learned to not play on an internet connection that I think is shaky. It can cost you in two major ways. First, you can get disconnected in a large pot. Losing a big pot that you were supposed to win can really mess with your win rate. Also, it will mess up your reads. If your game is lagging every time you need to make a decision it's very hard to get into a rhythm and get reads on your opponents.

I had planned on playing a lot on Sunday, but the internet in my apartment has been down since I got back from Aruba. It's pretty frustrating. It's supposed to get fixed tomorrow, so I don't have too much longer. I'm itching to get back in the games. I might be able to get a session in today at the office. I want to put thew new converter to use in my blog.

I'm going to Iowa this weekend to see the Illini play the Hawkeyes. The Illini should definitely get the best of them. It'll be a fun game I'm sure. My brother just started going to school there this year and my roommates brother is a Junior. I've been to a bunch of big 10 schools, but I never made it up to Iowa. I've heard nothing but good things though so I'm definitely looking forward to finally checking it out.

I finally finished college. It was official today when I went to our website and saw my final grade had been post. You may ask, "Andrew, didn't you graduate in May?" Well, the answer to that is no, not really. I walked, because at U of I you are allowed to walk if you have less than 3 hours to finish. That sounds like a reasonable rule and it is, but it's also a curse. I'm the type of person who likes to leave stuff to the last minute possible. That clause in the graduation rules allowed me to push my graduation to the latest date possible.

It all started on a warm September day in 2006. I realized that a class I needed to take (business writing) was only available at 8am on M/W/F. Hahahaha. No way in hell I'd ever sign up for an 8 o clock class. I tried that freshman year. Let's just say that was my worst semester. I also had Aruba to worry about. The most logical thing to do was to sign up for an online class and just complete it sometime that semester when I had time. Fast forward to February 2007 and I hadn't even touched the class. At that time I figured I'd have to have it done by the end of the semester, so I got going on it. A few weeks before graduation, I learned I didn't need to have it finished. I though to myself, "I'll finish it first thing in the summer. I'll have it done before I go to Vegas." Vegas rolled around and I didn't touch it. When I got home from Vegas I had a letter in the mail telling me I had been removed from the class because I hadn't finished it by the 9 month deadline. Shit! I panicked. I was 95% done with the class. I called them up and they said it wasn't a problem and that for $20 I could get 3 more months. Easiest $20 I've ever spent.

I kind of forgot about the class/put it off until I got a letter in the mail towards the end of August. There were a lot of bold letters and caps telling me if I didn't get it done by 9/10/07, I was out for good. I only had a paper and a test left to do which wasn't too bad, except the paper was 10 or more pages. I promptly got to work. I wrote most of the 10 page paper when I was traveling to San Fran and to the track with my dad. I took the test a week or so later. It was one of the easiest tests I have ever taken. The 3rd section of the class was actually on web design and ebusinesses. It was right up my alley. The questions were easy as hell too. There were 13 essay questions. One of them was, "what are pop up ads and why do people dislike them?" Another was, "what is flash and why is it bad to put in websites?" The funny part was this class taught flash was bad because people on dialup can't use it. I almost answered, "Flash is great, I have a ton of it in my ebusiness." I instead put the right answer and basically killed the test.

Above is what I saw this morning when I finally got around to checking. Not too bad. A's weren't exactly common for me my final semester so it was nice as my final act as a U of I student to boost my GPA a little bit. Too bad I was only .08 away from an A....

Feels good to finally be done with school. Also feels good to be back in the office getting stuff done. I had hoped to be more productive this weekend, but my internet was out at my apartment the entire weekned. Living without internet sucks. The shitty part is I can't get it fixed until Wednesday. I'll survive.

So every year that I go to Aruba, I always think that I'll make blog posts while I'm there. I never do. It's just so difficult to sit down at a computer while you are there. Part of it is the perrenial shotty internet connection. The other part is the amazing beach that is always calling my name. Add in the fact that this year any time I spent on a computer was used to work on CR related issues and you get no new posts. I apologize.

I got home last night. As always, Aruba was great. It's just an amazing place to go to and there are always a ton of fun people there for the poker tournament. The tournament didn't go well for me, but that's ok. I guess I'll just write out some stories from the trip.

The first night we were there we got too drunk (this is a theme throughout the week). My buddy, Denny Lemmuix, and me were stumbling around and came upon Helmuth, P0ker H0 and some others talking about golf. They were talking about playing for money the next day. Denny and I started challenging them. They declined and for whatever reason I took offense to that. I started yelling how I would play for 1k a hole, etc. I called Phil some names that I won't repeat here and eventually I gave up and wandered off. It made for a scene and got a lot of people asking me about it the next day. It was funny looking back on it, but I also felt bad about it. There was no reason to do that and Phil has always been nice to me. Oh well. It's Aruba baby.

The first night I also lost 1k playing 5/10plo (took me about 3 hands to bust the money I had in my pocket. I quit after I got busted) and I also lost 1k in credit card roulette at Bennihanas. I had only brought 5k on the trip so I was down to 3k early. The next night I was playing some 10/20nl. It was a pretty quiet and soft game. I played tight, didn't do much and managed to pick up 1k. You think I'd be happy with that. For reasons beyond me, right after I quit, I walked over to the roulette table and put 1k on red. I should note that I won about 1k in Vegas betting 100 on red whenever I walked through a casino. It's a lock bet for me usually. I guess I just wanted to get back to even here so it seemed like a good idea. The first spin was black. Ok, lets get that back. Red bet again. Black again. Shit, now what? Ok, I'm gonna go 1k on red and 1k on even. In one spin, I can get back to even for roulette and just quit. Black 33. alkd;lkadjfl;adjfd. Somehow in the 2nd night I had already busted my spending money. The only reason I even brought 5k was to play some poker. I almost never gamble. I was clearly tilted and was debating the best way to get the money back. Taylor proposed I borrow 5k from him and play 5 hands of blackjack at once and just hope the dealer busts. Not a bad idea. I opted to go another route. I noticed that the Patriots were playing the Bengals on Monday night. I've watched all of the Pats games this year and they have looked stellar. The Bengals have looked, well, not so stellar. I headed over to Holiday Inn and bet the max on the game. I wasn't crazy about the spread being 7.5, but what the hell. 3k on the Pats please. I've never bet more than $50 on sports in a casion. Wow is the rake bad! I had $500 raked for making that bet. Let's just say I won't be making bets like that again. I will say it made watching the game a blast. The Pats had me a little worried until they made that key interception at the end of the first half. It was all good from there on out. I took it pretty easy on the gambling for the rest of the trip. I managed to have a few good scores playing late night 1/2nl with friends and also did well at blackjack. In the end I left with 4k in cash, which was fine by me. I'll be more careful in the future...

I never won a significant pot in the tournament. I basically just bled chips. I nursed my short stack (2-3kish) for maybe 2 hours and eventually pushed 2200 with 100-200 blinds and ran KQs into AA. GG muddy. It just wasn't to be for me this year.

I gotta admit that this trip made me appreciate live poker a lot more. The thing is that it's normally bad to play during the day. You're much better off playing at night. Next summer in Vegas, I will definitely be playing more live poker. I'll just make sure I do it at the best time.

Jetblue is the shit. I always knew that you had your own TV. I didn't know that you actually could watch live satellite TV.

Cubs look to be done. I was really hoping for a world series 3 blocks from my house. There's always next year...

The Fighting Illini looked awesome today. They are a really exciting team to watch and I have high hopes for the remainder of the year. My only regret is that this had to happen 1 year after I'm out the door. I always wanted a decent football team while I was there. I was supposed to go to the game today but my flight got delayed coming home yesterday and it was just too late to drive down to champaign by the time I got home. I'm going to the Iowa game next week though.

I'll be making more updates this week.

edit: I just read Ezra's blog and it reminded me of a few things. I'll post more about them later. Check out his post.

The last 5 minutest just culminated in giant tilt for good ole muddy. First off, the Cardrunners site has a ton of issues. It's basically out of our hands right now as we wait for our web guys to resolve the issues. It's very frustrating. I hope we can get everyone at least into the site and watching videos by the end of the day today.

We got DirecTV a few months ago. The people on the third floor of our building are the people in charge of the building. We made sure they were around when the dish was installed so that it was put in the correct spot. They were there.  A week later they tell us that the dish is blocking their sun and it must get moved. The problem is that DirecTV doesn't really move dishes. After spending at least an hour or two working on this on the phone, I got them to come out. When they did, they told us they didn't have the right materials and that I'd have to call back. Right now I've been on the phone for at least 30 minutes trying to get this resolved. I'm on hold as we speak.adlpjadfklapjdadfljds. These neighbors are the biggest pain in the ass. They keep trying to fine us $100 everytime the front door is open, even though its typically not us. Two days ago they tried to fine us $300 because the door had been open during the day. No one from my apartment was even there during the day. I really don't get how they can just levy $100 fines on us whenever they want.

I've been playing some fantasy sports on instantfantasysports.com. You can basically play fantasy football for money on a week by week basis. You sign up, draft a team, then play for money for that week alone. Anyway, I wanted to draft a team for the weekend, so I was sitting in a $20 room waiting. Next thing I know, I look at the site and it's on the 2nd to last round. My first pick was Tony fucking Romo. It took Romo over Brady. WTF. It also decided that Lamont Jordan would be a great 2nd pick. Not happy. GG $20.

Still on hold.

I also just realized I have $7,000 debt to the IRS that I haven't paid yet. I thought I was all caught up on taxes for the moment.

While I'm complaining, I'll hit on Nip/Tuck season 4. It's awful. I'm 6 episodes in and I'm pretty sure I'm done with the season. It really isn't even watchable. I mean, every season has been worse than the prior season. That isn't that unusual. Season 3 was still pretty good. It took a huge dropoff for season 4. It takes a lot for me to quit a show midseason. I usually like to tough it out and just finish the season. The only other show I can think of that I just quit was season 6 of 24.

At least the new network shows started this week. Heroes and The Office were good. I'm looking forward to the new 30 Rock next week with Seinfeld on it.

Still on hold.

Yesterday was supposed to be a great day. I was gonna start off 3-0 in my fantasy league with all my friends, bounce back to 1-1-1 in my $500 league and also see the Bears crush the goddamn Cowboys at Soldier Field with my little brother who loves football. None of those happened.

Yesterday was a bad fantasy day for me all around. The biggest mistake I made was playing Jones-Drew over Barber. I thought Barber would get stuffed by the Bears and there wasn't any chance in hell I wanted to be rooting for him at Soldier Field. Barber was stopped in the first half, but busted out in the 2nd half. He had a pretty huge day. MJD didn't do shit. If I had benched MJD the last two weeks id be 2-1-0 in my $500 league. It's my first year playing fantasy football, so I can't get too down on myself. I also don't know a ton about football outside of the Bears. I'm learning though. The nice thing about fantasy baseball is that you have a ton of time to adjust. I was terrible the first month or two and was in 2nd to last place for awhile. I started to figure it out and I had one of the best teams down the stretch. You can't really do that with fooball from what I can tell.

Yesterday was my first NFL game. I really wanted to get out to one and I told my brother I'd take him to one for his birthday. I met up with Taylor and a few of his friends before the game and did some tailgating. It was a great night and the Bears were keeping it close for awhile. They pretty much fell apart in the 2nd half. It was perfect weather though and fun to get out to Soldier Field for a football game (I was there for the first time a few weeks ago to see Brazil beat up on USA).

I listen to a lot Chicago sports radio. Naturally, they have convinced me the sky is falling when it comes to the Bears. I wish I didn't feel that way, but after last night's game, I have a ton of doubts about our team. My biggest concern in the offense. Rex is obviously terrible. Moose is old and slow. Berrian dropped 3 passes one of which would have been a sure TD. I'm pretty sure he dropped a few last week too. Benson isn't getting anything done and he's fumbling at very inopportune times. I'm hoping this was Grossman's last week, but I don't think Griese is going to be much of a solution anyway. I still have faith, just have a lot of doubts too.

I'm hoping to squeeze in a decent amount of poker this week with the end of the month coming. Aruba on Saturday too which will be awesome.

It's been a pretty busy week. We're getting closer and closer to finishing the new site and therefore there is plenty of things to do. I'm really happy with how it's coming out. I think everyone will really be pleased. It's 100x better than the site we have now.

I've been putting in a decent amount of hands. I'm on a somewhat nasty downswing. I think I'm on a 7k downswing and that leaves me at around 14k for the month. I was hoping my hot streak would continue, but I knew it had to stop sooner or later. I was playing too loose, but I wanted to ride the hot streak. I need to focus on tightening up again. I can easily get back to 20k, so I'm still feeling good. I've still played only about 10k hands, so my win rate is solid.


This picture is from a few weeks ago, but this is about $550 of liquor. I honestly thought it would look more impressive, but trust me, it's a ton of booze.

After some pressure from Taylor I decided to join in on the Taylor/Stinger workout bet. Basically, you have to workout 6 days a week. For every day you miss, you gotta toss $100 in a pot. I haven't been in a good routine for awhile, so it's nice to finally get back at it. Also, I've been wanting to get some cardio in my routine. I'm planning on lifting 4 days and doing cardio the other 2. Right now I've worked out 5 days in a row, so it's going well. The only bad thing is that I dropped a 10lb weight on my toe today and it feels like shit.


The only decent picture I took last weekend. I wish we had gotten it from a different angle so you could see the field. We had pretty damn good seats that night.

I've been to a ton of cubs games in the last several days. When I went to STL, I was only planning on going to the game on Friday night. It turned out that my friend had some extra tickets for the game on saturday afternoon, so I went to that game. We didn't really have anything going on later so we decided to scalp some tickets for the night game as well. All of the games were close which kept it exciting. The cubs really should have won all 3 games, but they screwed up a few times in the last game and lost it.

Being there for all those games reminded me how much I dislike the Cardinals. I've always been around a lot of the Cubs Cards rivalry and then on top of that the Cardinals dashed the Tigers WS hopes last fall. I don't like anyone on their team, especially Pujols. I also just think they have an all around bad team and that didn't deserve to win the WS last year because they didn't even deserve to be in the playoffs. The thing now is that I can talk all the trash in the world to Cards fans and all they have to say is "yea, well we won the world series last year." It's pretty frustrating. Needless to say, we got in more than a few arguments with Cards fans while we were there. It's all in good fun though.

Last night I was able to go to my first rooftop game at Wrigley. It was awesome. The view is still very good and you get unlimited food and drinks. It was nice to have a different perspective on the game. To make it even better, the game turned out to be very exciting. The cubs scored 3 in the bottom of the 9th to win 7-6. You can tell that people in Chicago are getting really excited and have high hopes for the cubs in the postseason. I'm still not convinced they will even make the playoffs and if they do, I don't see them getting far. However, I'm rooting for them because I know my neighborhood will go crazy if they are in the playoffs and that sounds good to me.

I caught the 2nd half of Animal House after I got home from the game. I hadn't watched that movie in awhile and I forgot about some of the great scenes. I love this scene.

Yesterday was a crazy day at the tables for me. I started off with things just not going well.

In this hand, I though the villian was very capable of putting a move on me on the flop. The game had been playing pretty fast and I decided to jam with my draw. I'm not really crazy about it because I think we were just too deep to be making a play like this. Not a good turn.

Not crazy about this hand either. He insta pushed over my raise so it must have been obvious I had a straight draw.

I got stuck around 5k pretty quickly. Soon after, things started to turn around. Hands like this started to happen fairly often and I got on a roll.

I even had some strange hands like this one. I'd like to claim that I made the raise on purpose. The truth is that I meant to call and misclicked the minraise. In the end it worked out great, because I got the call from the worse hand and put the guy on pretty nasty tilt.

When all was said and done I went on a 12k upswing from my low point of the day and finished up almost 7k. The month is coming together nicely. I'm running incredibly hot, but I'm playing pretty well for the most part as well.

I'm about to head to the airport to go to STL for the weekend. Normally, I'd drive, but it ended up being just me going and the tickets were only $170 round trip, so I decided to fly. It will be a much easier trip flying than driving for 5 hours. The main reason I'm going is because I wanted to get out to a game at the new busch stadium this summer. I'm going to work on going to as many baseball parks as possible in the near future. This is an easy one to get to. I also have a bunch of friends that live in STL. Most of the guys I lived with in Vegas live there, so I'm going to be staying with them. I'm looking forward to a fun weekend.

I can't seem to figure out my new camera and I don't like it at all. Nikon sucks. I had a nikon before and I didn't like it so I can't understand why I got another one. Hopefully I'll figure it out and get some pictures.

I was an idiot the other day and left the lights on my Neon on overnight. The next day we were going to see a movie and I convinced my roommates that the car could be push started. By that I mean we would push the car and basically drop it into gear and it would start. I have done this before, so I know that it works. Unfortunately, this time we had partaken in some premovie festivities and could not seem to figure it out. We ran behind the neon pushing it as fast as we could about 6 times and never got it started. Not to mention, it took a 5 point turn to get it out of my garage. We basically looked like complete idiots. Eventually someone tried to drive down the alley and had bumper cables and was nice enough to help us. Good times....

I played poker for another hour or so yesterday and continued to run really hot. I was stuck about 1500 early and then just started hitting everything. I ended up 3k or so which puts me at 15k for the month. I hope I can keep running like this...

In my last post I probably should have given more credit to Timbaland. He really is the genius behind JT. I think Timbaland is my favorite guy in pop/hip hop right now, because he just has sick beats.

You're crazy if you don't think Season 3 of the Wire was the best.

I'll probably catch some shit for this, but I don't care.

I remember the days when the late 90s wave of boy bands hit. I pretty much thought those guys were all dbags and even though the girls loved their music, it obviously wasn't too popular with guys. Flash forward almost 10 years and you got Justin Timberlake as a solo artist. Honestly, I've always kind of liked his solo music, but in particular, I've liked the songs that I've heard on the radio off his new album. I had never really listened to the entire album though. A week or so ago, I sat down and watched the JT concert on HBO. Honestly, it was a damn good concert. He is incredibly talented and with the help of timbaland, he makes some great music. Since then, I downloaded his album and I can't get enough of it. It's really a great pop album. I think timbaland is one of the best pop producers out there and he really did an awesome job on this album. If all you have heard is the radio singles, I suggest checking out the rest of the CD. I like almost every song on there.

I started watching season 2 of the wire for the 2nd time. My roommate saw the 1st season over the summer and is now watching the 2nd, so I'm watching it with him. Damn, I love that show. I think the 2nd season was probably my least favorite, but I still like it a lot. They have some great characters in that show.

I'm about halfway through season 3 of Nip/Tuck (I know, I watch way too much TV). It's a good season, but it's not as good as the first two. IMO, most shows peak in either the 2nd or 3rd season. I think this series is just another example of that. I haven't come across a show yet that has the best season past the 3rd season. At times, you could make a case for the first season being the best, but more times than not its the 2nd or 3rd.

I've been putting in some hands. I haven't really played a ton (about 4,000 hands), but enough to show a very nice profit. I'm up about 12k on the month which puts me on pace to make 20k (my goal for the each month left in the year).

I put a beat down on this one guy, GiveMeHell, the other day. Admittedly, I ran very well, but he did start to tilt a bit at the end. Here are some of the hands.

Nasty hand for him. Clear sign of running well. I was a bit concerned he had the 10 on the turn, but I obv wasn't going anywhere. Very nice river for me.

Show me better. He could have had me beat here, but the way he played it, I found that unlikely. In addition, he was starting to tilt.

Bet that flop, son. Pretty standard. Took him to value town. I hate his river call.

YIKES. I had busted him two hands earlier and it was clear he was starting to tilt hard. I decided preflop that I'd probably go with this hand if it was a reasonable flop. I thought there was a very reasonable chance he would bluff off his entire stack to me. Nice flop for him. Nice river for me. It wasn't my best played hand, but what can ya do?

Life is good when these hands hold. Just a standard hand from earlier in the week. I won a few like this when I got back on the tables. It's always a good feeling to win hands like this when you're coming back from a pretty extended break.