A Crazy NFL Oddity

Right now the Denver Broncos are averaging 153.1 passing yards per game, and 159.7 rushing yards per game through 11 games in the 2011 regular season. During the six games that Tim Tebow has started -- in which the Broncos have gone an astounding 5-1 -- the discrepancy is even crazier, as the team has averaged 112.5 yards passing, and 208 yards rushing, or almost twice as much yardage on the ground as through the air, in an NFL that is hopelessly weighted in favor of the passing game these days.

By contrast, looking at some of the league's most potent offenses this year, after last night's drubbing of the Giants, the New Orleans Saints are averaging 324 passing yards per game, and just 125 rushing. After wiping up the Eagles this past Sunday, the Cheatriots are gaining 319 yards through the air per game, and just 110 on the ground, for an almost 3-to-1 ratio in favor of passing. Even in the NFL's best rushing team behind the Broncos -- the aforementioned Eagles, who also have started the best running qb in the game for most of the season -- are looking at 260 yards passing, and 160 yards rushing per game.

Can someone tell me when was the last time a team averaged more yards rushing than passing for an entire season? How about a good team -- like the 5-1 record compiled by John Fox and the Broncos during the Tim Tebow era? Has this ever happened before?

I went back and looked at some of the worst-quarterbacked teams to ever win superbowls just for a quick check. For example, that Trent Dilfer-led Ravens team that won the superbowl in 2000 on the strength of basically a cripe offense and the best defense in a generation? 3101 yards passing, and 2199 yards rushing. Not even close. And that was in a league not nearly as weighted by rule changes and qb talent towards the passing game as today's NFL. And what about the Brad Johnson-led 2002 Tampa Bay superbowl squad? 3665 yards passing, and 1557 yards rushing. More than 2-1 in favor of the passing game.

Somebody please tell me if anything like this has ever happened before.

Thoughts From the Borgata Fall Poker Open Part III (Conclusion)

OK so props out to Astin and MorningThunder for coming the closest in guess what the two players had in the biggest fold I made on the day at the Borgata a couple of weeks back.

For those who did not yet read my last post, here is the recap on the hand in question, pasted from my prior post:

For starters, the guy to my immediate right (a different guy from the hand above) had just lost an allin pot from his big blind to a guy across the table who had only about 400 chips fewer than he had, leaving the guy next to me with just that many chips at a time when the blinds were I think 400-800 with a 75 ante. Being that he was also the small blind in the hand in question, this guy was thus allin blind with his last chips in the middle to start the hand. Which meant that his $100 elimination bounty was totally up for grabs. Which meant that everyone around the table would be playing like complete and utter maniacs to try to get his bounty, as always seems to happen whenever a cash bounty is on the line in one of these bounty tournaments. And that's the setup for the biggest pot I saw on the day. Oh, and did I mention that, as this hand began, we had the two largest chip stacks left in the tournament both at my table? One, the actual chip leader at the time, was on my immediate left (I spent pretty much the entire last 8 hours of this tournament with the chip leader on my immediate left, through two different tables in fact), and was sitting on approximately 125,000 in chips, at a time when my paltry stack (as it was most of the day) was around 14,000 (which was really fun for me, in case you're wondering). And another guy across the way had about 120,000 in chips in his stack, good for #2 at the time in the tournament, also seated at our table even though we had about 60 runners left in the event.

So, with the setup out of the way, the small blind was allin with the last of his chips, and his bounty chip in the middle in front of him, and I was the big blind in the hand. The UTG player and tournament chipleader with 125,000 chips started off the action by min-raising, in a weakass, half-hearted attempt to take the guy head-on for his bounty, but the weak minraise to just 1600 chips did nothing of the sort and instead led the UTG+1 player to call, then the guy next to him folded, and then the next 4 players also called the 1600-chip raise. I looked down in the big blind to find 97s, a hand which I would have open-raised with myself and which I would have probably called most small raises with even in a heads-up pot (certainly against the chipleader), so I of course called the raise as well for another 800 chips out of my stack with 97s, and we saw a 7-way flop -- with the small blind and his bounty already allin and up for grabs -- by far the most players to any hand I saw in my entire 13-hour run on the day.

And the flop came down...949 rainbow. My heart jumped to my throat. I mean, of course a nut straight or a flush would be even better flops for me, but in general I had nailed this flop -- far and away the best flop hit over made in the entire day, mind you -- and I was in the big blind to boot, in a hand with two ginormously-stacked players who had been very aggressively pushing people around already to get those huge stacks.

I checked, as I had checked almost every flop I had seen throughout the day and I just didn't see the point of betraying any strength in my hand and possibly chasing anyone out with all these chips available on the table. My thought was that someone would surely bet this flop out of the 7 players in the hand (6 with chips behind), and then I would most likely reraise allin almost any bet from any player and take my chances. The chipleader opened the betting to my immediate left, but with a shocking bet of 20,000 chips. This was about a fifth of his entire monster stack, and more than that, it was enough right out of the gate to basically cover the entire stack or nearly the entire stack of every single other player in the hand at the time, except for the #2 stack across the table. That did not please me to have to call an allin instead of having some fold equity into what was a pot with under 10k in chips in it at the time, but at the same time, this guy was an aggro monster and the size of the bet made him seem more weak than strong to me, so my plan was still to call his allin when the action got around to me.

There was a fold, then another fold, and another, and my plan was really crystallizing in my head. But then a crazy thing happened. The other ginormous stack in the tournament called the 20k bet. He didn't even raise it, mind you, but he just smooth called the bet for 20k, now putting a silly amount of chips into the pot, and then the action folded around to me. As I stared at the obscene action going on in this hand, my plan to get it allin started to crumble right before my eyes. I mean, one guy pushing in a huge bet as an aggro steal play when he had the chips to lose was one thing, but for both of the big stacks to be committing tournament-altering amounts of chips here -- and in particular with the guy across the way only calling and not reraising allin to even try to get the big stack to lay down -- those alarm bells I often write about started going off in my head. Something just did not feel right here. I thought. I analyzed. I agonized. Suddenly, my trips with the 7 kicker were feeling pretty well outkicked. Again, if either one of these guys had alone made a big move at this pot, I'm probably sliding 'em all in there and taking my chances, especially given that I was below average like I was the entire day long in the tournament, and if my 97 is beat, then it's beat. But once the enormity of the pot I was looking at really sunk in, I just sat in disbelief as the fingers on my right hand slid my cards face-down towards the muck in the center of the table. I was behind, I had to be.

The turn card brought an offsuit King, making the board 949K rainbow, and the big stack to my left insta-pushed allin for a gillion chips. And the guy across the way beat him into the pot calling the bet. For his entire 2nd place stack. Against the one and only player in the entire room who had the power to eliminate him. This of course left me all the more sure that I was in fact behind.

I had asked for guesses as to what the two players involved were holding, and the actual answer is that the chipleader to my immediate left flopped the underboat with pocket 4s, and the #2 stack in the tournament across the table from us was sitting on Q9o. MorningThunder technically was closest with his guesses of 44 and K9, but Astin with 44 and A9 was basically right there, too. Although I think both of those guesses highlight my key point with this hand -- I obviously folded 97 because I just did not see how trips with a 7 kicker could be ahead given the two huge bets made and called ahead of me by the two prohibitive chip-leading stacks in the tournament with still some 60 runners remaining. And I did not see much in the comments to my last post to suggest much support for me continuing to play on with the hand that I had given that action, which I think makes sense since (obviously) I folded it, although it was the most painful fold I had made all day for sure.

The point I alluded to above, though, is that I think the big stack across the table made a big mistake in getting all his chips in in this spot, even sitting on Q9 on a 949 flop. I mean, once the chipleader -- and once again, the literal only player left in the tournament that could eliminate him from the event at that point, through more than 75% of the field at the time but still about 45 players away from the money positions -- slid out the 20k bet on the 949 flop, I would have given serious consideration to folding if I were the other big stack. Now, to be honest, that is not to say that I would have been confident that my Q9 was behind -- given the minraise from early position from the chipleader and his incredibly aggressive play since he had become the chipleader -- but rather, as a reflection of the fact that (1) I could be behind, (2) the huge bet requires me to commit a significant portion of the large stack I've built up thus far, and leaves me in terrible position facing potentially larger bets on later streets, and (3) even though I may likely be ahead, my stack is so large at this point that be folding here I can basically maintain my huge chiplead over almost every other player remaining and ensure that I live to fight another day, instead of taking what may even have amounted to only a 20% chance of being behind.

In any event, even if I had chosen to smooth call the chipleader's 20k bet on the 949 flop with my Q9 and the second-largest stack in the tournament at the time, I would almost certainly have folded the Q9 to the insta allin bet from the chipleader on the turn. I mean, what does the #2 stack put the chipleader on, to be making that kind of an allin push against this other huge stack that had the ability to cripple his chipleading stack if he is wrong? Why would the chipleader be pushing that hard, without some huge hand? Basically, in my view, by the #2 stack instacalling the instapush on the turn, the #2 stack is basically saying that he thinks the chipleader is an idiot. There's just no other way of saying it. I mean, to instacall that allin with a Q9 on the 949K board means that he thinks there is little to no chance that the chipleader has 44, KK, A9 or K9, the four possible hands that beat the #2 stack's Q9. But when you really look at the action, the chipleader -- unless he is, in fact, a poker idiot, which I can assure you he was not playing like on this day in any way, shape or form -- almost has to have exactly one of those four hands by the time he pushed allin on the turn. He is already the chipleader in the tournament, with around 150 big blinds in his stack even before this hand begins. Why on earth would be put that entire huge stack at risk against the #2 stack in the tournament, with a hand like AA, or J9 ot T9? I can only assume that the #2 guy put the chipleader on a hand like AA, but even that makes just no sense to me given the way he played the hand. The preflop early position minraise could definitely be AA, but when you see a 7-handed flop with a middling pair like 9s on the board, isn't almost all but certain that at least one other player in there flopped trips? Again, unless the chipleader is an idiot, he's not risking his entire massive stack with just a pocket pair against a mass of 7 players on a paired flop. No way. And is he really going to insta-push there on the turn with just trips and a middling kicker like J9 or T9? Come on, second stack. That was a terrible play, and while again I can accept the possibility of him calling the 20k on the flop and seeing what happened on the turn, the instapush on the turn that required the #2 stack to put in the rest of his chips with trips and a Queen kicker, should have been a very loud and clear signal that he was beat.

OK well there you have it. I had some more to say about my run at the Borgata, but as is usually the case with my deep runs, give it a week or two to sit around and it all just seems less important and less relevant than it did when it first happened. Will I get down to play some more poker again before this year is out, and maybe create some new live tournament stories to regale my readers with here at the blog? It's possible. I just found out today that I still have three vacation days left that I carried over from 2010 and which will expire per my employer's policy if I do not use them by the end of this year. And, while normally I would just throw those three days in in that week between Christmas and New Years and spend some more quality time with the Hammer Family, my group at work has a policy that any time off during that heavy-vacation-volume week must be pre-approved by the powers that be, and suffice it to say that all the lazybones already got in their requests months ago, leaving it impossible for me to get any time off myself during that week at this point in time.

So, will I use one of these three vacation days that I have to take in December to head back down to AC or up to Foxwoods for some more like poker action? Only time will tell.

Thoughts From the Borgata Fall Poker Open (Part II) -- The Big Hand

Yesterday I wrote about my fairly deep run in the Borgata Fall Poker Open black-chip bounty event, where I ended up busting just short of the final table at the hands of a vicious suckout. I was fortunate enough to have played in the tournament with two fellow fun poker bloggers, Edgie and the beautiful Josie. Although I had read his blog before and seen some comments on my own and others' blogs, this was my first time meeting Edgie (Jeff), which I managed to do over a quick bite during dinner break at the Borgata's food court just below the poker room. Jeff was a super nice guy, and more than that, a very solid poker player as well as he followed up a $9100 score earlier this month on bodog by final tabling the very same tournament that I played in. Despite us both outlasting more than 98% of the field in this event, Jeff and I never got to play at the same table, but Josie was kind enough to give me updates on Jeff's progress throughout the afternoon, and it sounded like Jeff was off to a nice big stack early, and that within minutes after the dinner break, his stack multiplied several times and set him up nicely for a final table run.

I should mention as well that Josie, who busted shortly before the first break in this tournament, came into the event flush in the pocketbook as she had managed to win not, not two but three buyins at the 2-5 nl cash tables the night before at the Borgata's always-active cash tables. I can honestly say that I have never won anything close to $1500 in cash poker of any level at any one sitting, and Josie having been able to pull that feat off is a testament to her abilities as a cash player in addition to her known tournament prowess which includes her own final table the last time I played at a live tournament with her, at Foxwoods a few months back. There is definitely something awesome about a woman who can kill you in both cash and tournament poker, and even though Josie was done in early by pocket Kings in the Borgata black-chip bounty tournament this time around, she cleared well into the four figures overall for her three-day trip to Atlantic City last week thanks largely to the cash tables, a result any of us would envy, and I have to say Josie was a great resource for me last week to discuss hands, to listen to my many complaints from bad cards to bad seat position through the tournament, and generally just to take a break from the stress of hand after hand of increasingly crucial situations.

Anyways, a belated congratulations to Edgie for his Borgata final table in what I can personally attest was a grueling field, and to Josie for destroying the cash tables at a level higher than her normal 1-2 cash play also at the Borgata last week.

OK, so back to the tournament. When I left you yesterday, I had referenced that, although my poker instincts were fairly far from sharp in the tournament, I did make a couple of big folds that, like mostly ever deep mtt run I have ever had, did more to keep me in the tournament than basically any hand I did play throughout the day. Despite not getting many strong hands for several hours to begin the tournament, I did have to fold AQs about four hours in, in the only time I saw this hand on the day, to a raise and a reraise in front of me before the flop. I have simply found that I have done well folding AQ -- sooted or otherwise -- to almost any preflop reraise, which generally speaking indicates either AK or a pair of Queens through Aces in the pocket probably a good 75% of the time or more in my experience.

An even bigger preflop fold, albeit also something which I have learned over the years the discipline to do with some regularity, was when I also laid down JJ preflop, about which happened several hours in, about 2/3 of the way through the field. In that hand, I was getting fairly short, back down to around 15 big blinds (where frankly I spent most of the day's action), and I hadn't played a hand in about an hour, so I was getting antsy to make some kind of play. You can imagine my excitement when I looked down to find pocket Jacks in the big blind, and even moreso when the action folded halfway around before the flop, and then a fairly aggressive stealer open-raised it up a few seats to my right. I had already decided I was going to reraise allin any preflop raiser from any position with my shortish stack and pocket Jacks, and when half the players folded and then the pot was opened by a guy with a weak image already, that all but sealed it. But then to my dismay and disappointment, a very tight player who was also sitting on a big stack reraised on the button, after also not playing a hand in the past hour or so, and that really changed the whole calculus for me. I mean, I needed the chips bad, but as much as I wanted to get some action with my pocket Jacks, I was not about to call for 2/3 of my stack or push allin against a tight preflop reraiser with pocket Jacks. Especially given the reraiser's large stack, my perception was that he would not risk all of those chips with a few players still to act behind him without a very strong holding, and so, after a minute or so of thought, I grudgingly but confidently laid the JJ down. The guy to my right went on to show AA when the original stealer also folded to his preflop reraise. Much later, the guy to my right would go on to win the entire tournament.

But my biggest fold on the day was not before the flop, but on the flop, and it also happened to be the biggest pot I saw in the entire 13 hours I played in the tournament. Here's how the action went:

For starters, the guy to my immediate right (a different guy from the hand above) had just lost an allin pot from his big blind to a guy across the table who had only about 400 chips fewer than he had, leaving the guy next to me with just that many chips at a time when the blinds were I think 400-800 with a 75 ante. Being that he was also the small blind in the hand in question, this guy was thus allin blind with his last chips in the middle to start the hand. Which meant that his $100 elimination bounty was totally up for grabs. Which meant that everyone around the table would be playing like complete and utter maniacs to try to get his bounty, as always seems to happen whenever a cash bounty is on the line in one of these bounty tournaments. And that's the setup for the biggest pot I saw on the day. Oh, and did I mention that, as this hand began, we had the two largest chip stacks left in the tournament both at my table? One, the actual chip leader at the time, was on my immediate left (I spent pretty much the entire last 8 hours of this tournament with the chip leader on my immediate left, through two different tables in fact), and was sitting on approximately 125,000 in chips, at a time when my paltry stack (as it was most of the day) was around 14,000 (which was really fun for me, in case you're wondering). And another guy across the way had about 120,000 in chips in his stack, good for #2 at the time in the tournament, also seated at our table even though we had about 60 runners left in the event.

So, with the setup out of the way, the small blind was allin with the last of his chips, and his bounty chip in the middle in front of him, and I was the big blind in the hand. The UTG player and tournament chipleader with 125,000 chips started off the action by min-raising, in a weakass, half-hearted attempt to take the guy head-on for his bounty, but the weak minraise to just 1600 chips did nothing of the sort and instead led the UTG+1 player to call, then the guy next to him folded, and then the next 4 players also called the 1600-chip raise. I looked down in the big blind to find 97s, a hand which I would have open-raised with myself and which I would have probably called most small raises with even in a heads-up pot (certainly against the chipleader), so I of course called the raise as well for another 800 chips out of my stack with 97s, and we saw a 7-way flop -- with the small blind and his bounty already allin and up for grabs -- by far the most players to any hand I saw in my entire 13-hour run on the day.

And the flop came down...949 rainbow. My heart jumped to my throat. I mean, of course a nut straight or a flush would be even better flops for me, but in general I had nailed this flop -- far and away the best flop hit over made in the entire day, mind you -- and I was in the big blind to boot, in a hand with two ginormously-stacked players who had been very aggressively pushing people around already to get those huge stacks.

I checked, as I had checked almost every flop I had seen throughout the day and I just didn't see the point of betraying any strength in my hand and possibly chasing anyone out with all these chips available on the table. My thought was that someone would surely bet this flop out of the 7 players in the hand (6 with chips behind), and then I would most likely reraise allin almost any bet from any player and take my chances. The chipleader opened the betting to my immediate left, but with a shocking bet of 20,000 chips. This was about a fifth of his entire monster stack, and more than that, it was enough right out of the gate to basically cover the entire stack or nearly the entire stack of every single other player in the hand at the time, except for the #2 stack across the table. That did not please me to have to call an allin instead of having some fold equity into what was a pot with under 10k in chips in it at the time, but at the same time, this guy was an aggro monster and the size of the bet made him seem more weak than strong to me, so my plan was still to call his allin when the action got around to me.

There was a fold, then another fold, and another, and my plan was really crystallizing in my head. But then a crazy thing happened. The other ginormous stack in the tournament called the 20k bet. He didn't even raise it, mind you, but he just smooth called the bet for 20k, now putting a silly amount of chips into the pot, and then the action folded around to me. As I stared at the obscene action going on in this hand, my plan to get it allin started to crumble right before my eyes. I mean, one guy pushing in a huge bet as an aggro steal play when he had the chips to lose was one thing, but for both of the big stacks to be committing tournament-altering amounts of chips here -- and in particular with the guy across the way only calling and not reraising allin to even try to get the big stack to lay down -- those alarm bells I often write about started going off in my head. Something just did not feel right here. I thought. I analyzed. I agonized. Suddenly, my trips with the 7 kicker were feeling pretty well outkicked. Again, if either one of these guys had alone made a big move at this pot, I'm probably sliding 'em all in there and taking my chances, especially given that I was below average like I was the entire day long in the tournament, and if my 97 is beat, then it's beat. But once the enormity of the pot I was looking at really sunk in, I just sat in disbelief as the fingers on my right hand slid my cards face-down towards the muck in the center of the table. I was behind, I had to be.

The turn card brought an offsuit King, making the board 949K rainbow, and the big stack to my left insta-pushed allin for a gillion chips. And the guy across the way beat him into the pot calling the bet. For his entire 2nd place stack. Against the one and only player in the entire room who had the power to eliminate him. This of course left me all the more sure that I was in fact behind.

Anybody care to guess what the two players had? I can post the results on Wednesday but will give some time for people to get in their guesses if they want to.

Suffice it to say, the winner of this pot went on to be such a massive chipleader and hold more than 300 big blinds at this point in the tournament, which is something I have never even seen before in my entire life of live or online tournament play.

Let me know your guesses, and I will post the results tomorrow. Also, I would like to understand if anyone thinks I should have called the action here and taken my chances with my 97s, and if so, based on what reasoning.

Thoughts From the Borgata Fall Poker Open -- Part I

That's right -- an actual poker post ahead!!

So I went and played in the Borgata Fall Poker Open last week. Long story short, I made a nice run, played about 13 hours in a one-day event, and lasted through more than 98% of the field before being eliminated just short of the final table. The event I played was a bounty event, and I managed to pick up 6 elimination bounties -- more than covering my full buyin for the event as it was -- plus a small four-figure cash for finishing in 11th place on the day. Although I lost the vast majority of my stack on a dominated suckout that took me out of the tournament instead of vaulting me into the top half of the final table, for reasons I will describe below, I did not and do not feel I had much right to complain about that, and complain about that suckout I will not.

The interesting thing was, I really did not play very well in this tournament. It's not all that usual, but I've definitely had a number of these sorts of runs over my career back in the online poker days, days where I never really get it together, my reads are not really all that perfect, I make some mistakes, but somehow manage to survive through them and make a nice run. But I really did not play very well in this event, and my total lack of current experience playing the game really showed in my opinion, in a lot of different ways.

For starters, I got very little in the way of cards for the first several hours in this tournament, but I handled that fact much more poorly than is necessary for any aspiring successful poker tournament player. Like, I got no good starting cards. At. All. My first six hands of the tournament all had a 2 in them, and 9 out of my first 10. I could not believe it. That's about as bad of a beginning run as one could ever imagine for sure (what are the odds? 2/13 of having a 2 in any given hand, right? so 6 in a row to start is 2/13 to the 6th power, right? For those keeping score, that is 0.0000136, or 13 in a million for those less math-inclined), and that's not even counting that the next three hands after my 7th hand did not include a 2, also had 2s in them again. But aside from the astonishing math behind this occurrence, I handled this horrific string of starting cards as poorly as could be imagined. I mean, here i was having driven two hours to play this tournament with some blogger friends, and here I was completely tilted out of my mind after what, 30 minutes of play? And I hadn't even gotten sucked out on, or even lost a pot yet for that matter. But you should have seen me. I was complaining to my fellow players, showing my cards after every fold to players already out of the hand, and just generally driving myself crazy over what was, albeit a mathematical freak show, just 10 bad starting hands to start a tournament. That's all. But I literally had to get up and take a walk around the luxurious Borgata poker room after the 10th hand was dealt to me, that's how out of my mind I was just from seeing all those 2s in my pocket cards. Clearly, I was out of the right mindset and out of experience in playing mtt's, and it really showed.

Similarly, after months and months generally away from the game, my instincts were no more in no-limit form than one would expect them to be. After managing to calm myself down once the 2s stopped flowing almost exclusively to my hands, I proceeded to bet or raise a few times with total garbage either before or on the flop -- I had to try to play with something, didn't I? -- based largely on what I perceived to be weakness among the players in front of me, and I was generally wrong about as often as I was right. Almost every time I tried to open-steal in the earlygoing from middle or late position, some clown behind me who I had been sure was looking like he would fold, would instead reraise, and I would end up sheepishly folding. Around the three- or four-hour mark, I was getting to be around half the average stack (I was never really above average in this entire 13-hour run, it would turn out), and I made two different flop raises against guys I had read as tight and weak, and on both instances was forced to fold when my opponent surprised me by reraising me allin. Yes, I made the good fold in each case, but both folds -- in particular the second one -- were crippling to my already weakened stack. Although I obviously made a number of good reads as well to have lasted as long as I did, I simply could not count on my instincts to carry me very well in this tournament, something which I know stems from a total lack of experience playing the game over the past seven months time.

Lastly, I sucked out not once but twice with almost all of my chips in the middle just to last as far as I did. After the second big flop fold on my bluff that I mentioned above, I was down to around 4000 chips (starting stack had been 12,000) and a good 20-25% of the average stack. I was basically done. The action folded to me in middle position on the very first hand of the 5th hour, and I insta-pushed with A9s. I support this move of course, being as totally short and desperate as I was, and what I really wanted (within the realm of reason) was a hand like 66 or 88 to call me and give me a fighter's chance for a double-up. But unfortunately for me, the big blind woke up with AQs, instacalled my short ass of course, and I started to pack up my stuff when a 9 fell on the flop, which amazingly held and I was back at least to around half of average, and more than 15 big blinds which at least gave me some room to move. But I had gotten it in totally dominated, and had won a 1-in-4 chance just to be able to survive.

I made an even worse read later in the tournament, after picking up some more chips when I made my first two playable starting hands of the entire day, both during Hour 6, when I was dealt JJ and AK in two out of three hands. That was a long-ass time to wait for a freaking starting hand to play, and I had to suck out once allin preflop just to even be around to see these cards dealt to me, but at one point after accumulating some chips from those two hands, I started just plain beating on the guy two seats to my left, who was always the big blind to my button. He had shown himself to be totally and openly tight as hell, and so I had started raising his c-bets with abandon, and just generally constantly putting his entire stack at risk in situations where I simply did not think he had the fortitude to gamble it up without a very strong hand that I did not think he had. And it had been working. I had made him fold three separate times on three stone bluffs from me, and he was getting pizz-nizzed with me and made no bones about it with his facial expressions and mannerisms. This guy was just fixing to mix it up with me, and I knew it because I could read his emotions like a book. But, I let my lack of sharp poker instincts get the best of me by falling into the worst kind of trap with these tight players. I think it was Tommy Angelo's book where I saw this excellent tidbit about playing against tight players -- when you pound on these pussies enough and make them fold over and over again because they're too afraid to play a big pot without the nuts, these guys absolutely are fixing to play a pot against you. But they're tightass pussies, so they're not fixing to take a big bluff up against you. They're just waiting, holding on and praying for a hand like pocket Aces. That's the kind of hand these guys are praying to mix it up with you with. They're generally not the types to try to take you on with a big bluff, because that's not their game.

Well, about 7 hours in, I forgot all about that and made a dumb call against this tightass in my big blind, and I nearly lost my chance for a score as a result. At this point there were probably around 60 players left out of the 251 who started in the $350 buyin event plus the $100 bounties, and I open-raised from the button for the umpteenth time against his big blind, this time with me holding A9s. The tight big blind just called, so I knew he wasn't super strong (because no tightwad just calls with AA or KK in that spot, take it from me, they're too afraid of getting sucked out on and they're too angry and disbelieving that I have any hand after I try to steal from them for the 15th time over just a few hours time), but I figured he had to have something. The flop came down K94 rainbow, giving me middle pair top kicker, and knowing that the guy had to strongly suspect me of stealing from him again, I figured I was actually in pretty good shape here so I went ahead with a standard c-bet of around 2/3 the pot. Well, Mr. Tighty finally grew himself some balls and pushed allin, which for me represented about 90% of my remaining stack. I would still be alive if I called and lost, but only in theory as I would have had just a few big blinds left to play with. Effectively, this was an allin push against me, and as I sat there replaying the hand, his expressions and mannerisms, and just running through the history I had built up over a couple of hours of play abusing this guy over and over again, I think I let my instincts convince me of what I at first knew to be true -- this guy had top pair. I don't think his tight ass would have played TT, JJ or QQ with just a call of my stealy-looking raise preflop, and I did not think he was loose or aggressive enough to throw away a chance at even min-cashing (the top 27 finishers would get paid in this event) by moving in here with pocket 8s or lower given the two overcards on the board. So I stared at the K94 on the board, and I even noted that absolute lack of real draws available (thus giving more credence to his bet representing a made hand of some kind), but as I kept thinking things through, I could feel myself convincing myself that I should call. "This guy is furious at me", I told myself (which was undeniably true). He's just been waiting to push back at me and get some of his chips back for hours, I said inside my own head (also obviously true). And yet, even though at first I clearly saw him for having some kind of a middling King in his hand -- because, after all, a la Tommy Angelo, the tightwad player isn't waiting to bluff me with nothing, but rather to push 'em in when he honestly believes he has the best hand -- the more I stared at the board, the more my fuzzy and out-of-practice poker instincts chipped away at what was clearly the right inclination -- to fold. I distinctly remember asking myself "Come on, what are the chances that this guy happens to hold one of the other three Kings in the deck, in the big blind no less?" Ahhh, the favorite move of the guy convincing himself to make the wrong play. The answer to that question, of course, was that the odds of him holding a King were pretty damn high, given his action in the hand and what I knew about his play over the previous few hours. I also distinctly remember telling myself that, given my A9, I beat all hands but top pair, so if he was in there with a hand like J9 or 89 or A4s or something, I was well ahead and in great shape. All true mathematical points, mind you, but simply inappropriate attempts to get myself to make a big call with second pair top kicker against a super tight player who would not have been in there without a good hand himself. Now, you throw in a couple of draws on the board, and my second pair top kicker starts to look a little better, even against a tight player like him, but the rough texture of that board should have told me all I needed to know, and the right move was to fold there, for sho.

But instead, after agonizing for some time, I made the call, slowly flipping up my A9 semi-confidently after all the self-convincing I had done, but of course I was deep down not surprised to see the tight guy table KJs. It's the perfect hand for him to have called my stealy-looking preflop raise with, and to push allin with on the K94 flop. It was obvious even, in retrospect. I mean, I should have been able to predict his exact hand more or less down to either KT or KJ with that action and what I knew about this player. But again, my less-than-honed poker instincts took over and convinced me to make the play that I started off the flop knowing to be wrong. Basically, almost any time in my entire poker career when I have actively convinced myself to turn a fold into a call, I've been wrong, and it's something that I almost never used to do when I was playing poker regularly. But take half a year off from the game with any regularity, and here I was, screwing up and making the ultimate rookie mistake against a guy whose play was so awful that a child could have known my second pair was behind. I asked how much his stack was and cut out the chips, lamenting the tiny pile I would have left to toss in on the very next hand and clear out of dodge, and as a result I didn't even see the Ace fall on the river to give me the hand and a new lease on life in the tournament. I made "the face" to the guy I had just eliminated, taking his $100 bounty chip for my third bounty on the day in the process -- you know that face, the one that any guy who's played a million poker tournaments gives when he knows how pissed and disappointed the other guy is because he himself has been sucked out on and outplayed someone only to get beat by dumb luck more times than he can count. To his credit, my opponent gave me back the "it's ok, it happens" face -- a look I have still not even close to perfected, myself -- and from there I was able for the very first time all day to play with at least a little bit of chip utility in my stack.

All this is to say, I made a nice deep run in the tournament last week, but I got my usual dearth of playable starting cards, and my instincts were about as off as they ever get. I simply did not play great poker on this day, but I was lucky enough and played just well enough to survive and actually manage to win some decent cash despite my poor instincts at the tables. Despite all of this, however, one thing I did do in the tournament was make a number of solid laydowns -- despite the one stupid screwup against Mr. Tightie that I described above -- including one pretty big laydown in what turned out to be by far the biggest pot I saw all day. More on "the pot" in tomorrow's post. And yes, that will mean two poker posts in two days, so just deal with it.

Did You Ever Wonder About Joe Paterno?

Tell the truth now....Didn't you ever wonder how in the fike Joe Paterno has managed to keep his job as the head coach of Penn State, when the team hasn't really been great for going on a decade now, and hasn't been a true national championship contender since before the turn of the millennium. Oh, and while the guy has slowly marched on to what is now 85 years old? When the guy can hardly move anymore, when he hasn't really been able to speak even for a decade? When you know nobody on that team can understand what he is even saying? When he has basically been suffering from senility for the past several years? The guy is 85 years old man, and his team has totally dropped off the national radar from what it once was when Paterno was a younger man (in his mid seventies)?

Well, now we know. It's going to come out that Paterno has been able to keep his job because he knows about this incredibly disgusting business with longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and his penchant for, you know, butt-fucking 10-year-old boys against their will in the Penn State locker room. Jo Pa might not even have had to have affirmatively threatened to blackmail the Penn State Athletic Director -- although I bet you he did, when the school tried to get rid of him four or five years ago -- but that doesn't matter. The implicit threat has always been there, ever since Joe Pa was first alerted to his assistant coach's dalliances with underage penises back in 1998/1999 timeframe. Once the administration (and Joe Pa) chose to do nothing and not even go public with the allegations, Paterno's career was set in stone at Penn State, for as long as he wanted to stay.

Penn State, I hope you got what you wanted. Some of these people are going to go to jail for a loooong time. Probably not Joe Pa -- probably unfairly -- but as I guy with young kids, I have precisely zero sympathy for anyone guilty of covering up this kind of sordid criminal behavior. And if Joe Paterno is not forced to resign over this whole mess, then Penn State will probably never recover anything close to the glory it once had as a proud institution of higher learning.

The Fix Was In

Man it is good seeing the Chiefs find a way to pull that game out of their asses on Monday night against the Chargers. I mean, I'm no kind of Chiefs fan, although I'll freely admit that I have no clue why there is so much animosity and lack of faith in relatively new head coach Todd Haley there, with whom I think the inescapable conclusion is that he has done a pretty damn good job with what I would not consider to be a plethora of talent or anything. But the reason I was so happy to see the Chiefs take that game down was not at all because I like the Chiefs.

It's because I like fucking fairness.

Did you watch that game? Let's see. First, the Chiefs guy intercepts Philip Rivers for the first of what, 15 times on the night, there in the first quarter? He makes a small return, gets tackled from behind, and after sitting squarely on the ground for a few seconds, taking some time to shave, say his daily prayers, and have a convo or two on his cell phone, the ball finally gets stripped out of his hands. Of course the refs ruled him down by contact on the field -- because it wasn't even close -- but then Norv Turner, raging idiot that he is, decides to challenge the ruling on the field even though there isn't any possible way in shit that any single human being could ever rule that a fumble. I mean, don't assholes like Norv have a guy sitting up in the booth somewhere, with access to the replay, a DVR, something? Just somebody who can tell him, "Don't waste your time, you boob, that play wasn't even fucking close to a fumble, you'll just look like a horse's ass if you waste a timeout challenging that very clear tackle." Is it possible that they don't?

So while the network takes a commercial break, both before and after the break they're showing the replay, and even the dickhead announcers -- who generally speaking interpret what they see incorrectly in terms of missed calls at least 66% of the time, much to the fans' enragement -- had already dismissed this as the worst challenge ever, that even if the call on the field had been a fumble, you would have to reverse it based on this very, very, plainly obvious replay. And then of course what happens, since this is the NFL, Roger Goodell's minions the refs walk out from under "the box" and announce that the call on the field is being reversed, it's a fumble and the ball goes back to the Chargers, instead of to the Chiefs who already had a 7-0 lead and would have been very close to making it 14-0 in gaining possession there deep in Chargers territory. It was without a doubt the single worst blown replay call I can ever recall -- and this is the NFL, where there are inexplicably obvious missed calls with a regularity greater than my daily bowel movements, and to think that anybody on the fucking earth had seen the clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn the call on the field, there are just no words, and just like that, boom the NFL darling Chargers were gifted pretty much a 10-point swing in the score early on.

But it didn't stop there. Later in the second quarter, Chief's quarterback Matt Cassel is hit as he goes to throw the ball, and this time the call on the field is that he threw an incomplete pass, that his arm was just starting to move forward when he got hit and lost the ball, so thus not a fumble and thus it is still Chiefs ball (the Chargers had picked up the incompletion on the field). The Chargers challenge again -- they shouldn't even have had another challenge to call there, but thanks to the early blowjob for the Chargers, they still had that challenge left in the first half -- and this time, lo and behold, this time the moron refs saw clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn and -- shocker of shockers -- give the ball back to the Chargers. Again. Personally, unlike the first fumble play which was the worst call I've ever seen in any professional sport in the history of mankind, this one was very close, and I could have seen it going either way. Give me an unbiased, even choice and I would probably have called it in an incompletion, but his arm was very close to either about to start moving forward or just started moving forward, and I can handle that call going either way. But what there clear evidence to overturn there? Not on your shitkicking life there was not. But hey, the decision got the easily-sellable Chargers offense the ball again, so Roger Goodell got to keep his boner for another few minutes there and that's all that matters.

Fast forward to the second half, as the game is really coming down to the wire, and the Chargers have to score two late touchdowns, including a 2-point conversion on one of them, just to tie the game up at the end, and first the refs award a touchdown to the Chargers after reviewing a play where the Charger player basically got the ball just barely over the end line before having it stripped out of his hands for a fumble that would have -- for the third or fourth time on the night now -- all but won the game for the Chiefs. On that one I tend to agree with the call that it was a Chargers touchdown, but lord knows I've seen that call go the opposite way at least 5000 times over the past five years in the NFL. And then came yet another stunning F-off to the Chiefs, when the Chargers player attempts to run in the 2-point conversion after catching a pass around the 2 yard line, where he was nailed by a fabulous defensive play by the Chiefs' gritty defense, and the fucking refs motherfucking again awarded the Chargers the score -- a crucial score to tie up the game with just a few minutes left to play -- based on a replay that maybe, possibly just showed the nose of the ball accidentally graze the plane of the end line as the receiver was unthinkably running sideways instead of just trying to punch it in there. I mean, this Chargers guy did everything in his power to give the refs a reason not to award him a touchdown, and I still cannot believe as I look at the replay that the Chargers got that call in their favor as well, but they did.

Suddenly it is 20-20, and after a short possession by the Chiefs, the Chargers march down the field, and they're just lining up on the Chiefs' 16-yard line when Rivers unimaginably muffs the snap, and the Chiefs clearly recover the fumble. I could just picture Goodell's tiny little limpy dick shriveling up like a prune when it happened too, because there was simply no fucking way they could find to award that ball back to the Chargers. And I'm sure they tried to, too, don't get me wrong. I bet you Goodell had every guy he knows rifling through the rulebook to try to find some reason why a fumbled snap by the road team in a tie game does not lead to a change in possession if in the final minute of a regular season game, you name it, the stupider and less substantiable the better. But they couldn't, and we went to overtime, where the Chiefs won it in "amazing comeback" fashion.

The only thing amazing about the Chiefs win last night is how badly they outplayed the Chargers from the first whistle to the last, and yet how close the game was because, if the referees are willing to be big enough assholes, it can be almost impossible to overcome a fix like the one that was clearly in last night.

Go ahead, I dare anyone reading this to tell me in the comments that I am mischaracterizing what happened with the calls last night. The first person to comment that I am mischaracterizing what happened has no penis. Sure I've included some factual inaccuracies in this post to give the tinydicks something to complain about in the comments, but I triple dog dare anyone out there to tell me the Chargers did not get the most ridiculous dicksucking treatment by the refs last night anywhere this side of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Fuck you, Roger Goodell. Karma's a bitch, ain't it, you piece of shit.