Monday Recap

Greetings everyone and I hope you all had a nice weekend. I sure did.

Without further adieu, I am pleased chagrined lazy to announce that Mondays at the Hoy will go off tonight at its regularly scheduled time, in its regularly scheduled location:



So yes, we're still at pokerstars, at least for this week. More on that shortly, but I'll see you on pokerstars tonight at 10pm ET.

Anyways, as I said I had a good weekend as usual, with Sunday evening making me especially happy. Why, you ask? The Patriots finally lost in the playoffs.

Don't get me wrong, I am no kind of Colts fan. While I do find Peyton Manning to be cheerable-for, I don't actually care if he ever wins a Superbowl, or any game for that matter. And it's not like I despise Tom Brady or Teddy Bruschi or anything. I'm just sick of the Patriots. I'm sick of Tom Brady laying ten chicks a night after he wins The Big Game every season. I'm sick of coach Belichik in that fucking grey Pats sweatshirt, throwing cameramen out of the way like he's scything his way through a cornfield, dissing his friends and former coaches for post-game handshakes. I'm sick of that team pulling victory from the jaws of defeat, like they did against Smokkee's Chargers last weekend just to name the latest. I'm just flat out fucking sick of the Patriots, and I for one and thrilled that they are gone. Finally.

Now we can focus on a superbowl that I think should be a pretty good one. Despite all the AFC-lovers claiming all year that the AFC was going to crush whoever the NFC has to offer this season in the Big Game, the reality of the situation is very different from what everyone thought. As I wrote about last week, what we've ended up with here is the (in my view) undisputed best team in the NFC -- best regular season record, best playoff performance so far -- going up against a team that is at best no better than the 3rd best team in the AFC, and arguably more like 4th or even 5th. I have a lot of respect for the Colts, and frankly they seem to have stepped it up a bit on both sides of the ball in alternating games here in the playoffs, but they still don't even hold a candle to this year's Chargers team or to the resurgent Baltimore Ravens. You tell me it's the Chargers and Bears, and I'll quickly pick the Chargers, probably giving the points, and I would do so fairly confidently. But this Colts team has looked very, very beatable through much of the second half of this season, so I think the Superbowl is really up in the air at this point. I'm sure I'll talk a lot more about who I like in this game later over the next couple of weeks, but all I'll say right now is that the opening line on the game appears to be the Bears by 7 points. That line is pure idiocy, and it will almost surely come down between now and two weeks from now when the game kicks off around 6:30pm ET on February 4. If you're picking the Bears by more than 7 points in that game, then either (1) you know something I don't, (2) it's going to be raining snow and ice in Miami, Florida that night, or (3) you're about to lose some money. That is all on that topic for now.

EDIT: OK so it appears I read the line wrong -- it's not the Bears who are favored by 7 points in the big game, it's the Colts who are favored. I'll have plenty more to say about this line between now and game time. But I'm going to leave that statement above up there on the blog, because it was funny and I like it, and it makes me look witty and clever, two things I like to be. Enjoy.

I will point out that I once again went 3-for-4 with my NFL spread picks this past weekend, something I am proud to say as I have not traditionally fared well in spread picks for NFL games, and I really almost completely nailed both games in very accurate fashion. In the first game -- and I watched both games more or less in their entirety, thanks to the wonders of DVR technology -- the Saints played basically exactly like I thought, including the fact that they just couldn't hack it in the end in the snow and ice show that was Solider Field in Chicago. At the beginning of that game, it was barely precipitating at all, and the Saints came out flat nonetheless, while the Bears defense came ready to play and rip-roaring to go. They caused 3 fumbles in I believe just the first quarter, recovering two of them and idiotically failing to fall on the third, and jumped out to an early 16-0 lead before the Saints finally got back on the board with a great-looking touchdown drive to end the first half. Then the Saints came out in the second half and scored again, playing great defense as well as first as they really looked to take advantage of a clear shift in momentum in the game.

Then, with the score sitting at 16-14 Bears, everything changed. The skies opened up, and instead of rain like what the Saints and most of their players would be used to from their homes in New Orleans and where most of the big players have spent their careers, it was the Chicago version of precip, and it wasn't pretty. By the middle of the third quarter, the video feed showed what almost looked like a blizzard of snow and icy drek pouring down from the skies. And almost immediately, everything fell apart for Drew Brees and the Saints. They couldn't hold on to the ball the way they are used to from their dome games and southern location. The players didn't seem comfortable out on the field. Even Coach Payton, the reigning NFL coach of the year, seemed not to be prepared for the cold weather, even as he repeatedly made the exact same faces, the exact same mannerisms, and used much the same (foul) language with his teammates as his mentor Bill Parcells is known to do. Anyways, when the snow started falling, the Bears were completely in their element, and the Saints were completely out of theirs. And it showed. That game went from 16-14 to 18-14 to 25-14 to 32-14 in the span of maybe 10 or 15 minutes of game time, and the Saints' season just slipped away in the drop of a snowflake and the slip of some ice on the field. It was a great, great year for this Saints team, a young team full of big stars on offense who are sure to make a lot of noise for a long time to come in this league, but my pick of the Bears minus the points ended up winning easily in snowy, freezing Chicago, as did my pick of the Over as the Bears really poured it on in the end.

In the other game, the marquee matchup of the weekend, I stated here on Friday that I predicted the Colts would win by just about 3 points, so I took the Colts minus the 2.5 point spread. In the end, the Colts prevailed by 4 points, so I nailed that one. I did pick the Under 47.5, and the game ended up going well over that mark, so that was the one pick I missed for the weekend as the Colts offense really came to life for the first time in weeks and that vaunted Pats defense was basically powerless to stop the Colts' offensive juggernaut, but in the end the game was very close down to the wire just like I thought, and the Colts pulled it out with a late score, just like I thought. Kudos to the Colts for finally besting their playoff nemesis from New England, and good riddance to a team that I will say quickly became, for me, one of the most boring and unrootable-for dynasties around. No pussy for you last night, Tom Brady. Sorry Charlie.

OK so back to poker, yes I admit it, I fucking I went back to pokerstars over the weekend. My first girlfriend. The phucking bitch herself. I guess I'm not really as pissed off anymore as I was last week. Believe me -- I won't be playing that 100k guaranteed tournament again there anytime soon, and hopefully never again in my life. And also, I still think I may move the Hoy to full tilt one of these weeks, as I clearly spend most of my online poker time there these days, a site that is, as I mentioned last week, at least 856 times better than pokerstars when it comes right down to it. But I did go back and play some at pokerstars this weekend, playing in two tournaments and actually playing quite well in both of them. I think my relationship with pokerstars will be ok, at least for now. That whore knows she is on thin ice with me right now, though, so at least this weekend I was able to play my game and not experience anything like I had gone through with that 150k last Wednesday, so that was good. And yes, the Hoy will be back on pokerstars in its usual spot tonight. I should have some announcement(s) shortly about some other exciting private tournaments that I may be involved with setting up, and if those do happen, they will most definitely occur on full tilt, my online poker site of choice. So I am back on the pokerstars bandwagon, at least for now, mainly due to their immense variety and availability of multi-table tournaments. But I will be watching you pokerstars, you phucking bitch. Don't forget it.

OK that's all for now. See you tonight at Mondays at the Hoy!