Poker and Football

Well we are more or less halfway through the NFL season now that Week 8 officially ended with the Patriots' drubbing of Minnesota on the Vikings' home turf last night, so this is usually the part of the season where I start buckling down and focusing a bit more on what really matters in football -- fantasy football, and NFL pickem. I often find that the first several weeks of the season is really about figuring shit out. Who's good this year, who's not good, who is better than expected and who is likely to finish strong. About halfway through the season, or maybe a bit before the actual midpoint, is where I usually start formulating real opinions about the teams, about who's going to go places this year and about which fantasy teams and players are in good shape for a strong second half.

But first, some real life poker content.

Check out this hand I got to experience in the 20k guaranteed tournament on full tilt last night. We're about 30 minutes in, blinds are 30-60, and I find KK in middle position. What's better, UTG limps in for 60, then a fold, and then third position makes it 180 to go, and 4th position calls the 180, all ahead of my first turn to act preflop:



Now if you know me, you know I'm going to reraise here. I can't put anyone on Aces specifically at this point, so I want to get as much money from as much people into the pot as possible right now with the second-best possible starting holdem hand. So I do a semi-slow-raise like I like to do sometimes with these kinds of hands:



The blinds fold, but the original limper and both the original raiser and the original raise-caller all call my slow-raise. Now I know I'm ahead. No self-respecting individual is going to keep from reraising allin there preflop with Aces, no matter which of the players it was in which position. So I'm ahead, but I will definitely need to be on the lookout for trips if any medium or high cards hit the flop and someone bets it crazy hard. So here comes the flop:



Bingo! The bells are going off loudly in my head. Top trips, the stone nuts on this flop, and now I'm just hoping someone maybe has pocket Aces and will pay me off. After two checks, the third player in the hand, to my immediate right, moves allin for the rest of his chips, about 45% of the pot on the flop:



Of course I call with the nuts, and then to my surprise so does the original preflop raiser two seats to my right. We flip, and check this shizz out:



Have any of you ever seen this before? I know I've seen something similar to this before in the 10 billion hands of poker I've played, but to be honest I don't think I can specifically recall ever seeing three players in the pot, all three of them hitting trips on a relatively uncoordinated flop like this. Is that crazy or what? Almost as crazy as this actually holding up for me through the turn and the river, shooting me up to 4000 chips in the first hour of the 20k last night. But before you get too excited, on the very next hand, I am dealt pocket 9s in middle position, and when UTG just limped and then the shorty to my left moved allin, and UTG just smooth-called, I went for the big move with my likely best hand and pushed it allin to get the UTG to fold since he obviously didn't exactly love his hand given his action preflop. Well, he showed this:



and more than half of my stack was gone just like that. Eventually, the Hammer Baby woke up (she is sick this week) and I lost track of both the 20k and the Hoy for a while, and never got it back in either tournament as a result. Man those girls have cost me a pretty penny over the past couple of months since we moved them in together, haven't they? And hey, I still managed to end in 4th place overall in Mondays at the Hoy -- yes, bubble boy was me last night, for the second time in the MATH tournament -- when I pushed AJ allin against a preflop raise from NewinNov when facing the Hammer Baby's third wakeup of the night already by not even midnight yet. Newin showed me the AK that explained his preflop raise ahead of my action in the hand, and IGH on the edge of the bubble. But congratulations to our final table and especially to our three cash payout winners:



So it was Newin taking down I believe his second Hoy tournament in the last few weeks, with Wannstache taking 2nd place for his first-ever Hoy cash. And third place and the $76 booby prize goes to LOK1 in what is also LOK1's second Hoy cash in a month or so. And I'd also like to welcome a few newcomers to the MATH tournament from last night -- there was wrybagel who showed off some solid poker skills in addition to a good deal of witty banter in the chat box in an impressive first foray into this event, in addition to JJLundy who I also do not recognize from previous MATH tournaments but with whom I enjoyed some good chat and fun time at the final table, albeit a short-lived time at that. As usual a good time was had by all and I look forward to seeing you all next week at Mondays at the Hoy.

OK now back to football. I guess this post has enough content that I won't do my entire NFL weekly coverage today. But I would like to post here the current standings in KJ's blogger fantasy football league, since I know so many of you are interested in knowing what's what in that league:



There it is. Despite having drafted the greatest team I have ever seen in a 12-team league by a significant margin, the fantasy football gods generally like me about as much as the poker gods, and this year has been no exception for me in the blogger league as you can see above. After my crushing this weekend to Chris's Hometown Hornets and their runningback corps of Larry Johnson and old man Fred Taylor, I sit at 4-4 and in 7th place out of 12 teams, with my total fantasy points scored coming in at 8th place out of 12. What an embarrassment. But what can I expect when my first-round pick Larry Fitzgerald has 1 touchdown and has been injured and now out for half the year after leading all wide receivers in fantasy points in 2005, my #2 pick and runningback pick Edge James has only scored a touchdown in two games this entire season, after another dominating year with 14 tds and 1800+ total yards from scrimmage in 2005, Marvin Harrison has only scored a touchdown in one game this entire season after another dominating performance and 12 tds in 2005, and an average of 12.71 tds over the past seven seasons, Joey Galloway lost his starting quarterback after week 2 following up on last year's 10-td performance, and my quarterback pick of Ben Roth has surprised everyone by being one of the worst starting quarterbacks in the league, and has missed three games now due to injury. Heath Miller, my tight end? Just 12 catches and one touchdown through half the season, after last year busting out with 6 touchdowns in basically just the last 8 or 9 games of the season. So with all these effoffs, it's not hard to see why my blogger fantasy team sucks this year. I'm going to try to make a run, but my players are just not producing for me, and frankly I don't have a whole lot of optimism about the last 9 games of the season for me to come back.

That's all for today. I've got a lot more football thoughts, which I will get into later this week. For today, be sure to check out Wil's WWdN poker tournament tonight on pokerstars. "Private" tab under Tournaments, password is "monkey" as always for Wil's big weekly event, every Tuesday night at 8:30pm ET. Hopefully I'll see you there!