CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

Taylor Caby: Poker Blog

February 28, 2009

I haven’t blogged in about ten days. Honestly it’s just been because I’ve been doing stuff and my normal blogging times are at the office when there’s nothing going on or at night when I’m hanging out on my computer. For whatever reason, be it traveling or just having stuff to do, I’ve had no spare time during either of those activities. I guess it’s fine, because when I’m not busy I get extremely bored. It hasn’t been like I’ve been gallivanting about town though, there’s just a lot of crap going on that has been weighing down on me. The funny thing is, there’s been a lot of really good stuff happening, too. Bittersweet times, I suppose.

To start, I suppose I’ll talk about Poker After Dark. First, before I forget, Pokerlistings did an interview with me about Poker After Dark and stuff in general. Clearly Daniel (the writer) knows the online poker industry pretty well, it’s cool to do an interview that isn’t “so, you really did turn $35 into a lot of money?” You can read it here.

Overall I was pretty surprised how many people watched the show or got in touch with me about it. There were quite a few people that I hadn’t talked to in years that told me they watched it and I don’t even know how they knew it was on. Well, maybe because Ezra spammed the whole world about us being on, but that’s neither here nor there. One of the people that got in touch with me was De’mar Hamilton, the drummer of the Plain White T’s. De’mar and I went to high school together and we both played one year of drums in the high school band. I hadn’t seen him much since high school graduation parties but obviously his band is doing really well. He said he came home late one night this week and turned on the TV and saw us on the show. I thought that was pretty cool, De’mar is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet so I’m really happy that the whole music thing is working out well for him and his band. You can read his blog here.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how Poker After Dark went. After watching the hands play out there really wasn’t much I would have done differently. It stinks that we got to play like 100 hands and you are sort of limited to what you can do by the cards and situations you get in. That being said, I think losing 53k given what was dealt my way was actually pretty good. I didn’t see Eli say this because I didn’t watch all of the episodes with sound on, but people told me he said I was the only person playing straightforwardly and the other guys were the only ones he had to worry about (something like that). I thought that was a little funny because he hadn’t yet seen my cards and if you watched the show, every time I made a move someone had a huge hand and every time I had a big hand someone made a bigger hand. It’s easy to say someone is playing straightforwardly when you flop huge in the only significant hand you play with the guy. He did make a nice limp-reraise with 72o and is definitely tough to play against, so I’ll give him that.

Let’s see, what else. CardRunners is undergoing lots of changes these days. As many of you know, Ezra is leaving in 1.5 months and Kevin’s last day was yesterday. I’m really sad to see these guys go. We did a little CR company outing on Thursday that was pretty fun. Ezra is keeping kosher now so we decided to try to go to the nicest kosher restaurant we could find. It was in the suburbs of Chicago so we got a limo, some beers, and headed out there for some dinner and drinks. It was a really nice time to hang out with the guys outside of the office, but a lot of the time I found myself thinking about how it really sucked that Ezra and Kevin were leaving. To me, this is the toughest part about having your own business. If you are hiring the right people, you genuinely grow to enjoy their company and enjoy coming in to the office to work with them. If you have to let them go or if they decide to move on to something else, it’s really tough because it’s almost like a breakup of sorts. Even if you hire the wrong people, it sucks because when you let them go you feel bad because your decision puts quite a bit of a burden on them to find another job. I guess I’ve just been a little stressed out about some of this stuff lately, because it’s proving to be a giant task to replace these guys that are leaving.

I’m going back out to Vegas tomorrow until Friday. I spent a few days there a week ago for work stuff, now I’m going back there because Melissa is on spring break and we wanted to get away somewhere fun. The only thing Vegas doesn’t really have is a beach, but it’s a great place to travel for me because you can get hotel rooms so cheap right now and there’s lots of stuff to do. I’m planning on playing some poker out there, and Melissa is planning on playing some as well. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m anxious to see what she thinks of the grind. If anyone has any tips on how a girl can capitalize on her “image” then leave ‘em here, I need the extra income these sessions could provide.

Poker has been going god awful for me this month. I’ve played hardly any of it at all and it’s almost all PLO when I do play. I seriously am not sure if I’ve booked a winning PLO session all month. I’m playing mostly 5-10 and some 10-20 so I’m not even down more than 15-20k or so, but it’s just depressing to log on and lose session after session. Because it’s PLO, I’m due for a big heater though so hopefully when I move up I’ll run hot and all will be well.

I guess I’ll stop for now. I’ve been sort of down about stuff lately but to be honest I think it’s just because Kevin and Ezra are leaving. Yeah, sure, I wish I could have won on PAD but that’s not a big deal. Thanks for reading, have a nice weekend.

Entry Tags:

Feb 28, 09 13:00:01

When I see a girl at the table, I usually begin to think, tight, straightforward player incapable of bluffing.

Zaitsev

Feb 28, 09 14:29:48

When I see a girl at the table I stare at her boobs.

jeff218

Feb 28, 09 16:12:03

My girlfriend is addicted to live poker. She is the main reason I drive an hour to Foxwwods 3-4 times a week. She is a winning 1-2NL player and a great "horse" for me. People make a lot of moves on her, don't give her credit for buffing and generally don't give her credit for being a competent player. I don't know how much experience your girlfriend has but initially I had my girl buy in for 50 bbs until she got some experience under her belt. Anyways, good luck.

cuervo

Feb 28, 09 17:08:34

Taylor - Any updates on hiring process for Director of Marketing? I'm still interested :)

kiefabs

Feb 28, 09 19:26:44

Good Stuff on PAD

Hey Taylor... I'm sure you don't need me to confirm this, but for what it's worth, CR was represented well by all 3 of you. Though I could pretty much tell from your blogs that there are decent heads on those shoulders, I figured there was a chance the "young guys" might come off "punky" ... Not the case though; glad to see you guys aren't tools.

gqzdaddy

Mar 1, 09 01:49:04

Where is the public apology for open limping the cutoff? =P

navila

Mar 1, 09 15:19:21

Man, I could use a "beach" vacation too. Have fun in Vegas though..

cpar1

Mar 2, 09 13:18:28

Sorry I missed ya today, I am sure you deserve a vacation! Really enjoyed meeting everyone at the office, hopefully we will have a chance to meet soon.

- Chris

GoMukYaSelf

Mar 3, 09 16:45:18

I think that live players play terribly against mixed messages, and a young girl playing tight and acting cheerfully but 3 betting really frequently will induce a load of mistakes. I think that many men would be embarrassed to lightly 4 bet pre-flop or play the flop aggressively, so if she can pick those out she could have free-reign.

Alexdb