CARDRUNNERS

I'm just gonna write about some random shit.

My buddy Stu always posts youtube clips on our fantasy forum. He put up some good ones this week that pertain to the soon to be non existent Seattle Supersonics. They are all worth watching. They seem old as hell but they have the website on them. Who is this guy?

Wesley Snipes got 3 years in prison today. He apparently just stopped paying taxes in 1999. That's just ridiculous. I guess at the last minute he ponied up 5 million, but it was enough to save his ass from going to jail.

I went to a White Sox game the other night and just heckled the shit out a Yankees fan. I hate the Yankees. I have never heckled any fan at a game. It was a blast and I'm glad I could give shit to a fan of my least favorite team in all of sports. One way the fan opted to talk shit was by saying "I bet you go to community college. I go to U of Chicago!" I didn't respond to that except to call him a piece of shit yankees fan, etc.

I saw the Sarah Marshell movie last night. It was hilarious and just a good overall movie. I highly recommend it.

Were having a beer pong tournament tonight. Should be a lot of fun. I plan to win.

Every now and then Cardrunners members will ship us something with the hopes that we use it and pimp it out on the site. Most of it is kind of obscure. This week we actually got something pretty cool. Matt Lasher of Prop clothing sent in a bunch of his gear. I actually like some of it a lot and have been wearing it around. They also donate a portion of their proceeds to charity, so its a win-win. Check it out.

I haven't played poker since Steves beat the shit out of me. I'll get in some sessions this weekend.

Obviously, my last post wasn't the nicest post to stevesbets. But, cmon, it's stevesbets we're talking about! Anyway, karma decided to give me a nice kick in the ass last night when I had a rematch with steves. He crushed me. It wasn't quite as bad as the whopping I put on him, but it was damn close. It wasn't even an interesting match because we just constantly stacked on the flop with 60/40s. When you can't win the 60s or the 40s, you're screwed.

Somehow I hadn't put on my sad face. I should have.

Cole came into town for the weekend. It's always good seeing Cole. He also brought Larissa, his gf. I had never met her before. She was a very cool girl. We went out to dinner Saturday night. Cole had lost his ID the night before, so him and Larissa called it a early night. The next day we met up at my place to catch a cubs game. It was a beautiful day, but the cubs blew the shit out of the pirates so the game wasn't as good as it could have been.

Here are all of us before the game.

I currently rent the apartment I'm in and they are going to kick us out in 2 months because the owner decided he is going to sell it. The more I think about it, the more I think I'm just going to buy it. It's probably about time I get into some real estate. It's an exciting feeling knowing that I might own my own condo in a few months. I'll write more about that as I get more details.

Taylor and I had a weight prop bet that just ended. About 2 months ago I was weighing in at 170lbs and he was pushing 200lbs. I wanted to put on at least 15lbs and he wanted to lose 15lbs. The idea was that if both of us got it done by our set date, neither would owe anything. We both made our goal last week. It felt good to reach my goal. I really want to get above 190 and I think I can do that by summer. I've just been eating a lot of smaller meals and working out on a regular basis. I really feel like I'm in great shape now. I'm going to incorporate some more cardio in. My goal is to be able to say that I'm in the best shape of my life come Vegas. Vegas will wear me down health wise, so I want a good buffer for that.

I've played two crazy HU sessions vs. stevesbets in the past few days. If you don't know stevesbets, hes a long time online player. He basically plays insanely loose and completely disregards position. It's really a pretty amazing style. I've never seen anyone play so loose OOP. I think he plays looser OOP than IP if that's possible... He played at 80/72/1.8 over 1500 hands we've played HU.

The game played fairly aggro/normal when we weren't deep stacked, but it got pretty insane when we were deep. He would 3 bet a lot. I started to 4bet him a good amount. I don't have a ton of experience 4 betting in PLO. The thing was that he would instantly call 100% of my 4 bets. I figured that even with marginal holdings, it MUST be +ev to get him to blindly shove more money in OOP.

Steves is also infamous for having a temper/tilting. I kept that in mind and did what I could to tilt him. That was part of the excessive 3bet/4bet style I was playing. I also used the Wiggins theorem and got it in in a few marginal spots with the hope of getting lucky and turning the tide of the match.

An interesting thing happened in the match last night. He was crushing me fairly good early on. I'd say he was up like 2k on me. My computer freaked out and froze for no particular reason. The computer is only a few months old, but it's never done this before last night. I got pretty worried because I didn't want steves to leave or for someone to steal my seat. It's a good feeling to know that Steves is sitting on two 2k stack at 2/4 HU PLO. I knew it was just a matter of time until the tide turned. The great thing about this short reboot break was it gave me 5 minutes to collect my thoughts. I realized I was getting a little tilted and probably not playing my A game. I cooled down and when I signed back on ftp steves was sitting there with two open tables and big stacks. Phew! No one took my seats! I sat back down and the momentum shifted immediately. I won a few nice sized pots right away and never looked back.

I'm going to post hands below. They won't be in any particular order, but I'll try to give some background/thoughts on them.

There was something about his timing on the river bet. I really thought he was on a spade draw that busted. I guess I wasn't too far off. I didn't make a ton of "huge calls" like this throughout the match. I think I was wrong more times than I was right when I did though. This time I was right. I'll see if I can find some of the bad calls too.

Thin value bet. I think I made the mistake of value betting too thin at times. There were a few hands where I bet very thinnly and he called with hands that barely beat me. The upside was that it made it hard for him to fold any decent hand. That allowed me to get paid off basically every time I had the nuts.

When hands like this come up, you know it's your day. I'm a pretty big favorite here, but there's no way he should be folding his hand. Poor luck for him.

This hand is bad. I think the turn is a pretty clear fold. I mean, what is he doing that with other than the nuts? At the same time, it's stevesbets! At least that's what I was thinking when I pushed. This hand was right before the comp crashed.

Another example of things not going my way precrash. What a monster flop! I hated to see him turn up AA. No spade either! ugh.

GLORIOUS turn. Not much to say here except that this is a pretty loose 4bet. I probably shouldn't be 4betting a garbage hand like that, but hey, it was double suited haha.

I really like my turn check here. I wasn't mixing it up all that much and I felt like if I checked I could make him think I had a club draw (which I did) and rope him in with a weak straight or trips.

Standard hand. Very unlucky river for him.

I was going to represent the straight on the river if it blanked out, which was probably a bad idea. It's not like he was folding a lot. Anyway, the river was perfect.

I have a theory at 2/4 PLO. I say 2/4, because it doesn't work at the higher games. It only works against weaker players who have a high tendacy to tilt. In my experience, I've found that the play at 5/10 HU plo is much better than at 2/4. I'm really pretty surprised at the jump. It sucks for me, because my game matches up VERY well against the typical 2/4 player, but I tend to do quite poorly at 5/10. Back to the theory...

When my opponent has a big stack, I'm willing to take the worst of it in an all in pot for two reasons. First, I can severely outplay the standard 2/4 player in a deepstack HU scenario. I think my favorite form of poker is deepstacked HU PLO and I like to think I'm pretty good at it. The second and possibly more important reason is that I want to tilt my opponent. There is nothing like getting into a deepstacked situation where your opponent is tilted. You can make a lot really quickly in PLO when that is the case. When I'm playing against a guy who has a 2k stack to my 400, I want to do anything to get to 800. As soon as I'm at 800, I'm very close to being at 1600. If I double up to 1600 my opponent now has 800 and is pretty much fucked. There is no doubt they are on tilt at that point and I expect to get their entire stack + a few more buyins. So my theory is that it's +ev to take the worst of it at times when you are facing a deepstacked/weak opponent in HU PLO. Of course, I try to make it like as much as a flip as possible. People always think the beats they take in PLO are much worse than they really are.

Here is an example of a hand I played pretty poorly. I was just splashing trying to double up. I should note that I was only on for like $800, so it's not like I was crazy tilted, but I was probably at least a little bit off. This hand really tilted the guy.

Within about 30 minutes, hands like this were playing out. I'm not crazy about my preflop call there, but it's so hard to fold when you are so deep and playing a bad player, even if you are OOP. FYI: we were playing HA. The point is that he called with ace high! He did this on at least 3 occasions for pretty sizable pots.

In the end, I left with a $4400 stack. I guess my theory played out alright this time.

I got the Directv MLB superfan package. It's like the NFL sunday ticket. You can get every single MLB game and most of them in HD. It's really awesome. Directv is a must if you are a sports fans. These packages are just so damn good. I got to see Vlad hit a monster to deep center two nights ago against the Indians. Yesterday I was finally able to catch a few innings of a Tigers game. It was a relief to see Bonderman get out of a HUGE jam early in the game and then see some runs actually get scored. I'm a Tigers fan and they are the main reason I got the package. I just haven't had the chance to see them play much. Although, I can't say I'm too disappointed, because they have been terrible.

I also watched Michael Clayton last night. I really liked it. The ending is great. I recommend watching it.

I went to both of the Cubs games over the weekend. By definition, I'm not a cubs fan. The more games I go to though, the more I become somewhat of a fan. I'm not a fan at all of the "typical cubs fan" and I don't really want to ever be considered one of those. I do like rooting for them when I'm at wrigley though, so that probably makes me a fan in some capacity. Anyway, the reason for this minor rant is that I just wanted to comment that I think their team is defintiely more likeable this year than last. I really like their catcher, Soto. He is on my fantasy team as is DLee and Marmol. Fukudome is a very likeable guy. I love shouting his name at games. FUUUUUK AAAAA DOMMMM EEEEE!!! You also gotta enjoy seeing Kerry Wood closing. I've always like Kerry.

Both games this weekend were great. The weather was fantastic and we got to see close games that the Cubs managed to win. If you can get two 65 and sunny days in the beginning of April in Chicago, you gotta be pleased.

I haven't taken any pictures lately. I don't ever use my camera because I don't like it. The only pictures that have surfaced are ones of me and my girlfriend, Julia. I wanted to put up some pictures, so here are two with us in them. One is at the cubs game adn the other is from when we saw wicked. I really liked wicked by the way.

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As far as poker, I'm doing well playing a ton of tables of NLHE. I'm getting killed at 5/10 and 10/20 plo. Too bad I love the rush of the bigger games. I think I'll be playing more of the many table NLHE games in the near future.