Too Early to Push? and a Little Non-Poker Rant

A blogger friend and I were chatting over the IM today and the following question was posed. As per usual I may get some of the details a bit wrong but the gist of the facts will be sufficiently accurate to make the point. I didn't have poker tracker set to record the hands I discuss in girly chat, so I'll have to go from memory here, and we all know how accurate that is about hand histories.

So, you're playing Midnight Madness on full tilt. For those of you who don't know, every night at midnight ET there is a $10 buyin mtt that often attracts well over 1000 players. I think of it as all the West Coast donks just logging on for the night at 9pm local time. Anyways, within the first 5 minutes you are dealt pocket 3s. You call an 8x preflop raise of several limpers and then have to fold to three overs on the flop. A few minutes later you pick up pocket Kings and raise, getting one caller, and an Ace flops. You go on to lose a small bet on the turn and another decent sized bet on the river to a guy holding a medium Ace. You are down to 860 chips from the starting stack of 1500, and the blinds have just increased to the 20-40 level about 12 minutes in to the Midnight Madness mtt.

Now you are dealt pocket 7s in the cutoff. The first few players fold, and someone in middle position bumps the 40-chip big blind up to 120, a standard open-raise for this table. Action folds to you in the cutoff with the pocket 7s. What do you do here? Call, Raise or Fold? Why? Is 120 out of your 860 stack so much that you might as well just push now? Or is it too early for a push yet, given stack size and time into the tournament? Can you just call and wait to see if you flop a set, overcards, or rather if an Ace or King flops and you can be pretty sure you're beat? Anybody consider folding in this spot? What's the best play here?

OK that's all for poker today, because I have been itching to say some things since I heard this disgusting bullshit on the radio about Michael Vick and the dog fighting business. Now let me begin by saying I am no kind of animal lover. I don't own a dog, I've never even had a pet in my entire life at any time, not even a hamster or a turtle or something when I was a kid. My daughter M has already made Hammer Wife and I promise that we will give her either a dog or a cat for her 9th birthday (she is 3), but I just wanted to get that out there, as of right now I've never had any pets in my entire life, I've never loved an animal in my life, so I'm not one of these PETA or ASPCA geeks or anything like that.

But that said, I do have respect for life. For life. I don't even know if I believe in God, but that right there is God's greatest miracle if such a thing exists. Life. And what Mike Vick and friends have allegedly been involved with down in Virginia is beyond low class. It's a complete disregard for life itself. Not human life, no, and that fact clearly should be weighed in the case against Vick resulting from the indictment handed down yesterday against him on dog-fighting charges. But it's flagrant disregard for life itself nonetheless. Seriously, for those of you who believe in heaven-if-you're-good-and-hell-if-you're-bad, wouldn't you just have to think that how much respect for life you showed has got to be a big part of that decision of where your soul will spend the rest of eternity? Now that's something I definitely do not believe in, but if you do and you're one of these guys Vick was engaged with on the dog-fighting thing, then I would be seriously preparing for a long eternity. And I mean a looooooooooooong one.

I'm listening to the details of the indictment on the radio on Wednesday night, and I could not believe what I was hearing, the actual stuff that actually goes on with these dog-fighting rings. Of course a lot of these dogs are killed during the dogfights themselves. More than that, even some of the winners end up having to be put down, just from the beating that they take in the ring. And meanwhile, Vick and crew are allegedly training them, breeding and raising them to be fighting dogs, and standing around screaming and cheering and betting largeish sums of money on the outcome of these fights. To the death. I mean, is this ancient Rome, or are we more fucking civilized than that today?

The worst part is what the indictment claims Vick and crew did to the dogs who lost fights or did not perform well but lived. Vick's crew allegedly killed them. Brutally. Coldly. But more than that. They killed these dogs sickly. One of the methods cited for killing off the "worthless" (non-fighting) dogs was death by electrocution. Electrocution? Who the fuck electrocutes a dog? A dog! How do you even electrocute a dog? What do you strap to it, where do you strap it? Is this for real? I mean, these guys must have had to really sit down and plan out how to electrocute a dog, how to build whatever contraption they must've used to get that thing pulled off. Am I wrong or is that fucking sick?

But that's only the first method of killing cited in the indictment. Other dogs were allegedly killed by Vick's crew by hanging. Hanging! A dog! Again I ask, who the fuck even thinks of shit like this? They hung and electrocuted fucking dogs that didn't kill other dogs as well as Vick and crew allegedly trained them to be. These guys lost money betting on these animals to maim and destroy their opponents, and when they lost the money, they took it out on the losing animals with sick torture that you just don't see every year. Forget every day. This shit it sick, once-annually style.

These guys also allegedly killed some of the losing dogs by drowning them. You can just imagine them throwing these animals in water somewhere and holding them down while they thrash around after unknowingly taking their last breaths. That is some sick shit. And the kicker to it all, a number of dogs were also killed by, and this is the way the indictment describes it, "slamming the dogs on the ground". Wow. I don't know the details but you just know they're gonna be throwing the dogs from windows n shit. Un fucking real. An NFL quarterback with all of life set up for him, doing this kind of sickass shit. It's honestly one of the most disgusting and despicable things I've ever heard coming out of a professional athlete, and the NFL has got to be just fucking sick about it.

What a man you are, Michael Vick. If you are truly guilty of being the ringleader of this dog fighting thing, I hope you go to fucking jail and I hope those people there take advantage of you like you have to these dogs you've bred for your sick, demented fucked up ways.

Thank you and goodnight. I fucked up the Mookie last night running overpair 99 into overpair KK on a ragflop, but Mike Maloney did not, taking it all down while last week's winner crazdgamer came up with another impressive 5th place finish. Tonight I hope to be back in the 50-50 and probably some more FTOPS satellites. And sorry to this chica whom I logged in this morning and saw ended up finishing 2nd out of 40-some players in last night's O8 FTOPS satellite, which sadly is winner take all as far as the FTOPS event seat goes. And oh yeah, to those of you in last night's Dookie, I think I made my point. I made the final table in the razz turbo event with what I think was a massive chiplead. And then I fell asleep. I woke up like 25 minutes later or whatever to about 5 IMs asking if I was asleep, and to find that I had just blinded out in 6th place. So thanks to everyone for pilfering those blinds, I hope you enjoyed them. Bastages, all of you.