CARDRUNNERS

So I just read Taylor's blog about the other night when he was in my neighborhood. I guess he got pulled over and the cop told him that it's a nice neighborhood and the people don't like people with shitty cars turning around in their driveways. Well, that reminds me of how much the cops in my area suck at life. Unfortunately, I managed to have a few runins with the law in high school (i got two underage drinking tickets). The 2nd one I got was my graduation night. We had about 10 people chilling in my friends basement. We weren't causing any trouble and we were just hanging out. A few kids were playing video games and I was jamming out on guitar with a few other kids. My friends mom called the police ot tell them we would have some cars parked in the driveway overnight (they give tickets if you don't call them). The cops came out and saw that there were empty beer cans in the recycle bin which was sitting out for the next mornings pickup. My friend's graduation party w/ family and friends had been earlier so there was obviously a lot of empty beer cans. The cops then knocked on the door and demanded entrance. My friends parents of course said no and told them to get a warrant. Warrant, who needs a warrant when you can just arrest the parents? So thats what they did, they arrested both my friends parents and then proceeded to give us all underage drinking tickets. We had hid all the beer by thne, but they made us do a breathalizer. Going back, I would have had some balls and told htem to fuck off ,but I was young and scared by the police back then. The police also had the balls to tell us that they were doing us a favor by only giving us 1 ticket (they claimed there were 2 other things they could have ticketed us for). They also then faxed mug shots ot the local news. My friends parents made the 10oclock chicago news the next day. They turned it into a pretty big deal. All of the chicago radio talk shows were talking aobut the situation. Pretty crazy.

I'm sitting at work right now trying to kill some time. There was a new episode of entourage last night which was a good episode. I love that show. I convinced my dad to let me buy HBO for the house so I could watch it. I have always wanted HBO. My family recently got digital cable wihle i was abroad, but my dad is concerned about my 10 yr brother seeing things on HBO. I told him I would password protect the channel. HBO is badass.

I've decided to hit the books per se and really reinvent my poker game. My numbers for the year are solid, but I'm not where I wanted to be in June when I set goals starting the year. I'm on pace ot make about what I made last year and I was hoping to about double what I made last year. My mtt and sng game has fallen off and when I look at my aggression factor in PT it's not where I want it to be. I look at the players that I consider the best online cash game players (ie. sting, taylor, EM2) and their aggression factor is well over 3. Mine is hovering around 2 lately and thats just not good. So, I want to work on both cash and mtt/sng. I plan on studying a lot of the videos on this site and also on PXF. I think I'll mostly play 5/10 while I work on my game.

I made it very deep in the FTP 200k yesterday. I took 23/~1100 people. I played great teh whole tourny and my hands kept holding up. I ended up losing a massive pot to bust w/ QQ vs KK. I almost sucked out too. If I had caught my flush, I think I would have been in GREAT shape to win. I also gave the hand a lot of thought and I think I should have folded QQ preflop. I had plenty of chips ot make the final table by chipping away at small pots. I should have avoided a big pot where I was gambling at all costs and I didn't. I think my tourny game is coming around, but I'm having trouble closing. I think by years end I can be one of the top mtt players on the net. That is my plan. I won't play nearly as many mtts as a lot of the players, but I just want to get solid at them again.

I've been 8 tabling 2/4 PLO on ftp and doing very well. I've made nearly 8k in the last two days there. I'm loving it. People are just handing me money on a regular basis. After the past few days I decided I'm going to focus on PLO for awhile. It's more interesting and easier to make money. I feel like at 2/4nlhe you really gotta earn your keep. People don't just hand you money like they used to in the old days. That's no good.

I got some HHs saved. I'm hoping they get pokerhand.org back up soon as I don't really like just posting the HHs directly in here.

On another note, there are crickets all over my room. I was sitting in here and playing some poker when I noticed that there were crickets all over the place near my brothers aquarium for his frogs and they were on the outside. I got up and realized that the box they were in wasn't taped completely closed and they were crawling out at a pretty quick pace. My brother and I cleaned up as much as we could, but I've already come in contact with 8 since then. Sweet.

I went out in the city the other night with Taylor, Melissa and a bunch of my friends from high school. We have gone to the city twice in the last week. Since we don't have a place to sleep down there, we have just been crashing at the Cardrunners office. We started renting it in May, but we won't be using it heavily until July. Anyway, we've termed these nights "Office Parties" and they have been really fun so far. The night with Taylor and crew I got way too drunk, but what can you do. I haven't gotten around to looking on chase.com to see what I spent, but I know it's a lot. I also managed to spend all the cash on me but like 8 $1 dollar bills when I know I was charging everything. Not so sure how that happened.

Today I'm going to play poker all day long. I've been playing some mtts lately to try to get my game ready for vegas. I was WAY off at first, but I feel like I'm starting to come around.

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.

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.

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.