CARDRUNNERS

 For all you Cowboys haters out there, this blog should be pretty entertaining.  For you Cowboys fans, thanks for sharing my pain.

This past Sunday was Week 17 in the NFL.  It was the most exciting regular season day of football I can remember as the playoff picture was still very foggy entering the day.  My Dallas Cowboys were coming off a disappointing loss to Baltimore but still controlled their own destiny, win against the archrival Eagles and make the playoffs.  Unfortunately, nothing went according to plan and the Boys lost 44-6.  It was brutal to stomach, and especially so for me.  I went with my family over to a family friend's house to watch the game.  The father is a diehard Eagles fan and made sure to show us his Donovan McNabb fathead before the game.  I could not believe how huge this thing was.  I came prepared though with not only a Marion Barber jersey that I bought 2 hours before the game but also one of my most prized possessions - a Cowboys helmet autographed by 30 some players from the '90s Super Bowl teams, including Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, Deion Sanders, Leon Lett, Moose Johnston, and many more, plus coach Jimmy Johnson.  We had some great banter going back and forth before kickoff, and for the first 10 minutes of the game or so when it was still close, but after that it was just painful to watch and to deal with the taunting.  In true Eagles fan fashion, after the game was over he left the postgame show on for like an hour and a half, ugh.  The one funny thing about watching the postgame show was watching Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell offer his analysis.  For those who don't know, Gov. Rendell spends every Sunday during the football season in the studio with former Eagles players and coaches or whoever else discussing football.  He was nowhere to be seen when the Steelers won the Super Bowl a few years ago or when the Phillies won the World Series this year, but he loves his Eagles!  Quite humorous if you ask me.

Aside from the Cowboys game the NFL Sunday was pretty awesome, there were tons of good, meaningful games.  I'm no expert but maybe I'll do a playoff prediction blog in a few days when I have time to think about it some.  I'm sure looking forward to the playoffs even though my team came up short.

Poker's been going pretty poorly the last few days but I'll snap out of it.  I just haven't been playing focused, which is easy to do when I'm at my parents' house and don't have my setup, but I'll fix that.  I'm not too worried about it.  As an aside, the nosebleed action has been awesome to watch lately.  I don't really have any desire to play 500/1k PLO ever unless I have 5 million dollars set aside just for poker or sell off a bunch of my action, but it sure is fun to watch!  The disappointing thing is that games between 25/50 and 500/1k are pretty much dead, but I'm content grinding 25/50 at the moment.

Happy new year!

Following up from last month's success I have started off this month well also- primarily playing 400NL Full Ring. In fact, I'm almost as much as I was all last month combined. I haven't even really ran “great” either as I'm up less than a buyin according to PokerEV on all in luck before the river. With FTOPs coming around, yet again, this bankroll booster couldn't really come at a better time as I can now play in more events without feeling really negative about losing. But I will think more about that when the time comes. Hopefully I didn't jinx myself already.

While I am writing this at around 10:30 P.M., I'm waiting for my friend Justin to call on whether or not he's going out tonight. If he don't it looks like I'll be staying in unfortunately. One of the weekend nights I want to go out and it is looking like a no go. I have a couple ideas on things I could say wherever we go, if the opportunity is right, whether or not I'd actually use it is another question entirely.

UPDATE: It's 10:53PM and appears we are not going. It's not worth it at this time now anyway. Time to get unchanged. One rare night I was in the mood to go out too. I really really don't feel like going to this one place tomorrow night as apparently a crap band is playing there which means you'll need the usual sign language and lipreading to communicate. So I have no idea on what to do now.

Big game this weekend. It's going to be really tough- much more so than last week. One thing that concerned me last week is after moving the ball, we couldn't get it in the endzone. If that happens against the Giants, chances are we won't win. I was hoping to win tickets somehow but that did not come to fruition. As for the other games, I'm thinking Panthers will crush the Cards by at least 20. Titans and Ravens could go either way as I really wouldn't trust Flacco or Collins against either of these defenses. For the sake of not picking all favorites, I'll go with the Ravens. For the Steelers game, I'm always concerned about their line giving up sacks but I don't think that will be much of an issue in this one. I also can't imagine Turner outcoaching someone two weeks in a row.