More Flags, More Fun

I had the pleasure of taking my kids to the local Six Flags, a ginormous amusement park in the area during vacation this week, and we had an absolute raging blast. Although I keep getting older and my life continues to build up more old-sounding things like two kids in full-day school, well more than a decade practicing in my field and more than my share of gray hair on the sides, I have to admit I still love a good roller coaster. And it's important to me that my girls don't grow up to be pussies when it comes to a good thrill ride. I mean, who wants to hang out with someone who's afraid to ride a roller coaster when they're a teenager? Just like I want my girls to learn how to throw a baseball and a football, I want them to learn not to be afraid to test their limits in relatively safe, controlled environments like an amusement park.

In our case, we had incredible luck that I imagine was not intended when Six Flags decided to add a huge new water park called Hurricane Harbor right on the adjacent property about a decade ago. We had hand-picked the day to head out to the park well in advance, assuming that right up against the end of August was likely to be a bit cooler and thus attract a bit fewer visitors than might otherwise be heading out to 6 Flags right before school starts up again. But then of course, the day arrived at it turned out to be well over 95 degrees and far and away the hottest day of the entire month of August in NYC metro. Not only did that make slogging through the day with a few young kids a lot harder, but we figured we were really going to be in for it when we showed up at the park to lines roughly ten million people deep for all the big rides. Instead, however, what we found upon our early morning arrival was significant traffic buildup even before opening for the water park on this top-ten hottest day of the summer, but next to nobody fool enough to spend the day outside at the main park on roller coasters in what my car said was 101 degrees in the shade during the peak mid-afternoon temperatures.

What ensued was literally the most fun two or three hours in my childrens' entire lives up to this point. I immediately took the group to the log flume, an old standby that I knew would be sure to please this group of girls (my two and an old friend of theirs also from nyc) who had never before really even ridden a real roller coaster or ever felt that feeling of their stomach rising up to their throats as the bottom falls away beneath you. And again, thanks to the attraction of Hurricane Harbor right next door, there was absolutely no line. So much so, that when we were done with our first run, the attendants didn't even make us get out of our faux log before just letting us ride right on again. We did the log flume maybe 5 or 6 times in rapid succession at the childrens' insistence, then the runaway mine train which the girls were all just tall enough to ride on with a parent, which was the first real coaster these kids had ever been on. It was so rough and fast that I was feeling awful all the way through, knowing the kids would be upset by it, and I was particularly concerned about my four-year-old, who is timid and reserved as it is and seems much less of a badass if you know her than her older sister. But I have to tell you, my girl K is absolutely fearless. These girls loved the coaster more than I could have ever imagined, and again with no lines, we were able to take advantage and re-ride as much as the girls wanted before moving on to the regular standards like the carousel, the tea cups, and of course the flying swings that I used to love to ride at Six Flags when I was a kid. By the time we hit the Buccaneer and Skull Mountain (a relatively new indoor-in-the-dark roller coaster), the kids were hot and thirsty and tired and actually didn't even put up a fight leaving, and we closed the books on what was like I said without a doubt one of the most amazing and consciousness-altering days of the girls' young lives thus far. Score one for the amusement park in being able to provide an unmatched day of fun and wonder for young, impressionable minds.

Seriously though, can somebody tell me why they would ever bother continuing to make new roller coasters anymore now that they've got this?



I mean, the coaster actually goes straight up, and then turns straight down for a 90 degree plunge directly to the ground. When I was a kid we always used to debate whether the Loch Ness Monster at Kings Dominion or that ride at Busch Gardens had the steepest drop in the world, but at this point we're kind of at straight-up 90 degrees here so it's hard to beat that. Although actually this new Kingda Ka ride at Six Flags is even more than 90 degrees, as if you're up close you can see that it actually plunges ever so slightly in towards the inside at the very beginning of that sickening drop, such that it's actually something more like 91 or 92 degrees. I mean, you're plunging even steeper than straight down. And did I mention it's also the tallest and the fastest roller coaster in the world today?

One sure sign I am indeed getting old: I am not sure I'll be taking the girls on this one once they achieve the 54 inches required to risk one's life on this thing. Straight down maybe, but I just don't think I see the point of suffering a 470-foot high drop of more than 90 degrees, do you?

The Vacation That Wasn't

I may have failed to mention this last week, but I figure by now you guys are used to the routine, as the Hammer Family has gone to the beach for the July 4 holiday at least ten straight years and hopefully will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So that's where I've been for the past few days, although under different circumstances I probably would have posted a few times during the vacation, or at least mentioned here that I would be disappearing for a few days. In reality, however, my wife and I had a very sad thing happen in the family where a very, very close relative suffered a life-altering injury out of nowhere around the middle of last week.

I got the word when Hammer Wife called me in tears at my office, having heard the news via an emergency voicemail left by a friend of the family. Although (of course) my work made it impossible for me to extricate myself a day earlier than the vacation I already had planned, we basically dropped everything and left for the beach a day early (where the accident also coincidentally occurred). As I look back, I guess I didn't have time to post before breaking my balls at work for 24 hours straight and then jumping in the car for the solo ride down to the beach to meet my family who had arrived the day before.

In a nutshell, we spent the week in and out of the hospital, visiting, worrying and just generally helping out where we could, but it really made the normally festive and relaxing July 4 week not a fun one for anyone this time around. One interesting aspect of the weekend was how we handled it with the Hammer kids. M and K are at interesting ages with respect to this, as K, like the baby obviously, is just barely too young to really understand that the person may never be exactly the same again after the emergency last week. But M is pretty much just old enough to start to get it. Hammer Wife and I really went out of our way to keep the gory details from both kids, and even though they had to join us at the hospital on two separate days because of circumstances this week, in the end we decided not to bring them upstairs to the room, preferring for them not to experience the image of this person so different from how they have always seen them in the past. Only time will tell just how much M really understands and appreciates what exactly happened this week with one of her favorite people in the world.

So innocence was spared for some at least this weekend. But what about our feelings? The grown-ups, I mean, and not necessarily just the old ones. I mean, to be honest, the fact that this happened to a formerly-no-real-medical-problems, trim, incredibly healthy-eating person of course freaks all of us out. How could it not? I eat generally like crap and for sure don't have even one-tenth of the fake food that this person keeps at the house almost exclusively -- imitation butter, egg beaters, fake tofu cream cheese, fake turkey lite sausage, extra special light peanut butter that has literally zero taste at all, etc. -- and although I may be a bit younger, I don't exactly consider myself a spring chicken at this point in my life by a long shot. If this person can suffer such a horrifying accident, then it seems for sure it could happen to any of us. Myself? Without question. Probably, even.

Instead of a real vacation and a time to get away from the things that weigh on me, this past week turned out to be one of the first times I've been literally forced to sit and ponder my own mortality while also being deeply concerned about the mortality of a close family member. I always knew I've been lucky to be able to say I've gone this long and gotten this old without ever having to deal with something quite like this before, but now having been through just the beginning of this situation I realize for the first time just how incredibly lucky that is. Maybe it's ok that I must be about 50 or 60 percent below my long-term expected value results at poker -- between my family, my health, and the life I've been privileged to lead so far in my time on the earth, I'm still running way way good in the end.

2009 in Review

So much to get to after a week away from it all, it's hard to know where to begin. I played a decent amount of online poker over the break, several runs of which would probably merit their own post in another time. The football season came and went, and I have my preseason predictions to review and laugh at myself over. College basketball has started up in force yet again as well. I saw some movies over the break and spent a ton of awesome time with my family. Shit, I even managed to play live poker not once but twice, something which I do plan to run a post about in the coming days as well. But I guess this first post of 2010 can serve as my 2009 Year in Review post, as I've done each of the past several years, focusing of course on this blog, my poker game and anything else of import to me as each new year rolls in.

I usually begin these posts by taking a look at my Goals post at the beginning of the year and seeing how I think I fared in each of those goals.

My #1 goal for 2009 as of this post was to withdraw more money from online poker. On this front I would rate myself a solid A, as I succeeded in keeping my balances at all the online sites I play at in the triple-digits throughout most of 2009. Despite several nice wins and a couple of gigantic ones during the year, I did not let myself get tempted by the dark side and start playing online with the won money, usually way above my comfort limit from right before the win at that. I regularly withdrew funds from my most active online accounts whenever the balance got noticeably above 1k, and my bank account really shows the difference which is something I am extremely pleased about for sure. And, at least as importantly, by keeping my account balances low, I am sure I also positively impacted my poker game, as I was not tempted to play recklessly with my funds due to having so much immediately available and viewable right on my cashier screen.

My second goal for 2009 was to continue my focus on multi-table tournaments, and build on my success from 2008. On this one I also scored a major A grade, as I generally stayed away from satellite tournaments in their own right and focused instead primarily on mtt's as an end unto themselves. Although for a lot of different reasons I did not end up playing nearly as much poker as I have in the past few years, and I generally did not focus on my recent standbys like the nightly 50-50 and 32k tournaments on full tilt, I did take my shots regularly at large-field tournaments like the $100 and $30 rebuy events on full tilt, the nightly 100k on pokerstars and several other of the larger-buyin events.

Along these same lines, my #3 2009 goal was to increase my focus at mtt final tables, and make the required adjustments to get me into the top 3 with a greater frequency. In 2008 I recall I had something like ten final-table mtt finishes where I ended up between 4th and 9th place on the final leaderboard, which is just not going to work if you are an mtt grinder and therefore need to get into those coveted top three spots where the real money is with as much regularity as possible. In 2009, although I am sure I had fewer large-field final tables in general due to playing far fewer large-field mtts in general, my top-3 percentage was far greater, in particular in the absolute biggest events I played in. In the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza this summer I rode a massive chip lead all throughout Day Two, entered the final table as the chip leader, and this time I made sure to focus and retain that chip stack long enough to make it into the final four-way chop of some $213,000 in tournament payouts. Similarly, in two rebuy mtt final tables on full tilt in 2009, I managed a top-3 finish in both, including a runner-up suckout elimination to nab over 5k in cash just a month or two ago. And of course then there was the big Mini FTOPS win just last month, where once again I rode a short stack early in the final table all the way down to 3 players remaining and a bad suckout to again ensure a nice payout. Focus at final tables is an area where I definitely improved during 2009, and once again it is something that really shows in my bank account as I take stock here heading into 2010.

My #4 goal for 2009 was of all things to use the stop-n-go more. On this one I guess I would give myself a C grade. I mean, after really focusing on this late in 2008 -- really only in late-stage mtt play where it's usually just one bet and then someone is all in -- I would say that I have better integrated the stop-n-go move into my regular poker repertoire late in mtts here in 2009. But to be honest with myself, this still is something I should probably focus on more in 2010. In the end, while I am sure I used this strategy more often in big spots than I had previously, the bottom line is that I am still finding myself busting late from mtt's most frequently when I push allin preflop -- either on a raise or a reraise -- and get called by someone, and then I go on to lose whether by being dominated, getting sucked out on, or most commonly, by racing. I still think I have room to improve on this score heading into 2010.

My 5th goal for 2009 was to write more about non-poker topics here at the blog, another area where I clearly succeeded during the past year. Surprisingly, the biggest area of this ended up being my sports predictions, as I found early in the year that one thing I really wanted to use the blog for was to track the performance of my sports picks, and more specifically, my long-term sports predictions, like over-under totals for the baseball and football seasons, NCAA predictions, etc. While some people may have been frustrated at the amount of posting I did this year about the Phillies, or the NFL, etc., I always remind myself these days that this is my blog -- my online diary, really -- and thus I get to write in it whatever I want about whatever or whoever I want, and by definition no one else's criticism of that decision has any meaning. I mean, can you imagine critizing someone for writing too much about topic X in their own diary? The whole notion is silly, really. So you can look for more of the same on this front for 2010, albeit still with my primary focus remaining all things poker and poker-related.

Funny enough, my last goal for 2009 was to bury the hatchest on some stoopid feuds with other bloggers that I have historically been all too happy to fuel here on the blog in the past. As you all know if you've read here with any regularity, I am not one to pull punches with people, and when I see someone make a horrible poker play, justify it with the worst poker analysis in history, go off on someone else's play without a good basis to do so, or otherwise generally be a cheat, or a dickhead in connection with this game, I tend to just say it. I have done a near-flawless job of keeping the focus away from personal comments in this blog, really over the past two or three years moreso than just during 2009, and in the end that's the only thing I can affect in any meaningful way.

So overall it seems like for once I did a fairly good job at attaining my poker- and blog-related goals for 2009. Generally speaking, 2009 was a banner year for me poker-wise, one that saw me record my biggest-ever live cash in the summer at the Venetian to the tune of just over $50,000, and then follow that up in December with my largest-ever online cash, my 27k takedown in the Mini FTOPS $30 rebuy event with 3500+ runners and over 10,000 total buyins to the tournament. Those two cashes along with several other nice mtt scores as well as a strong year in turbo sitngos -- the new-baby-daddy's poker structure of choice, believe you me -- also helped me to post far and away my best annual ROI since I've been playing this game, which combines with my best-ever total profit to make 2009 a really, really awesome year in poker for me.

And let us not forget, the one thing that I did not include in my goals for 2009 for the first time in at least three years but which I was able to attain finally in 2009 -- winning the Mookie. I won it twice last year, in fact. Once was just a couple of months ago, with under 30 runners as we were well into the post-BBT swoon in blogger tournament participation, which barely even counts as a real Mookie win. But I also won the Mook right smack dab in the middle of the BBT early in 2009, a tournament that I imagine had somewhere in the 60+ range of players, and even though I am straight up too lazy to go and look up the post, my lasting memory really is of pushmonkey72 seriously donating me the title, a couple of different times even as I recall. So thanks, Rich, I guess I owe you something for your performance in 2008.

Most interestingly to me about my positive tournament results in 2009 is that I played decidedly less poker throughout this year than I have in any of the past several years. I started off the year at a new job, with the economy collapsing around me and with a new president coming into office who seemed hell-bent on spend-spend-spending his way through his first term in office, and all of this combined to leave me feeling particularly vulnerable and just generally wanting to curtail my poker habit in favor of holding onto more of my money for the inevitable rainy day that I felt could easily be coming for me and my family. Later in the year, as the economy seemed to recover or at least cease its freefall from late 2008 and early 2009, that feeling of financial vulnerability subsided, but was soon replaced with a different kind of hindrance to my poker play, in the form of a bouncing baby boy. Now, with multiple kids already I won't even try to spin the new baby as the kind of life-altering, all-time-consuming debacle that a first child can be, but let's just say that life with an infant is not exactly conducive to mtt play and leave it at that. So I would not be surprised to learn that I played somewhere between a third and a half as many true mtts in 2009 as I did in, say, 2007 or 2008, and yet my results skyrocketed, both in total amounts won and in terms of my ROI. What does that say about my poker play going forward? I'm not sure, but I doubt it can be chalked up purely to circumstance or luck that my profits increased as the frequency of my play decreased. I will take some time this week thinking about what specifically that means or why specifically that may have happened, but it seems that the inescapable conclusion that I will bring with me heading into 2010 is that playing more and more tournaments does not necessarily correlate with increasing my ROI or my total profits won from the game.

I will look to do another post later in the week about my goals for 2010, assuming I can think some up between now and then. Tomorrow look for a post probably about the NFL, or perhaps a review of my two separate live poker sessions from over the break.

Catchup

Whoa. A week sure flew by in a hurry. I meant to say something about this in advance, but I have been pretty much out of pocket and not even online much for the past couple of weeks. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest one pretty much includes Hammer Wife and I having another baby a couple of days ago. So I haven't really been working, and I really haven't even been on the grid at all for the most part.

But I've still been keeping in touch with what's going on in the world, and frankly I would've probably had a ton to write about if this had been a normal past week for me. So with that I will leave you today with some random thoughts on the things that have happened in the world of sports since last we spoke. As always, in no particular order.

For starters, Plaxico Burress has got to have the worst big-time lawyer in the world. This guy somehow managed to get two years in real-life prison, out in 20 months for good behavior (fat chance), simply for carrying a weapon into a New York nightclub without it having been registered in New York. Now, the gun was registered in the state Plax purchased it in, mind you, and he had been through the interview process and answered all the questions associated with registration of such a gun, but the law in New York says that all concealed handguns must be registered in the State of New York in order to be possessed in the state.

Now don't get me wrong -- what Plaxico did was bad, and more importantly, it was clearly a crime under the laws of the State of New York. All that law requires is possession of a gun, and that gun not to be registered in New York, and you are guilty of violating the law. Period. And Plax clearly satisfied both elements of this relatively clear crime. Yet Plax's "lawyer to the stars", Ben Brathman, first decided to take the unusual step of Plax testifying as part of the grand jury hearing to determine whether or not Plaxico would be indicted for illegal possession of a handgun. Normally a defendant is not at all involved in the grand jury process, but I guess Ben Brathman thought he might be able to win some leniency from the grand jury in some form by presenting the mitigating circumstances of Plaxico's situation. Unfortunately, all the mitigation in the world doesn't change the fact that Plax carried a gun not registered in New York into a nightclub in New York, and the grand jury quickly voted to indict as seemed obvious to everyone but Plax's big-money lawyer. Brathman's follow-up strategy of talking tough on beating the charges and in plea negotiations with the Manhattan DA also totally failed, as Brathman again tried to deny the fact that violation of New York's unregistered gun law carries a mandatory statutory prison term of 3 1/2 years. So why is the DA going to agree to Plax doing no jail time when it is clear as a bell that Plax violated a state law, and that law clearly stipulates a 3 1/2 year minimum jail term for any violation?

In the end, Plax will serve two years in NY state prison. All because he bought a gun, registered it in the state of purchase, and then carried it with him into a nightclub in New York City one night. He never intended to use the gun and certainly had not intent to harm or injure anyone in any way, and again he had registered the gun he was charged for. And yet he's getting two years in jail.

I certainly hope he didn't pay Benjamin Brathman too much up front for his "expertise". If I'm rich and famous and I'm charged with a crime in the future, I wouldn't even consider talking to Brathman about my case.

Staying in the NFL for a minute, there's always Brett Favre. What can you even say at this point? I mean, clearly he is a selfish, self-centered individual who cannot see what others can see about him. Favre hasn't been a good quarterback for years, literally, and the havoc he has caused for three or four different NFL teams over the past several seasons with his complete unwillingness to decide on his future by any deadlines he or potential suitor teams have set is nearing legendary levels at this point. But you know what? At this point I am through being pissed about Favre and his magical ego tour. I'm actually interested and excited to watch how he plays this year, especially on a team that I consider to be pretty mediocre overall in Minnesota. They're not bad by any means, but Favre has really made his bed at this point, and now the whole country is going to be watching him weekly, with most of them probably rooting for him to fall flat on his pretty face.

And speaking of people who fans will love to hate this year, my Eagles' acquisition of Mike Vick is still in the forefront of my mind. In the end, I think I have a similar feeling to the Vick situation as I do about the whole Favre debacle -- as I have discussed previously, what Vick did is reprehensible to be sure. And I'm still embarrassed as all getout that it's going to be my team -- my Eagles -- who Vick will be suiting up for all through this season. But as I wrote about previously, I don't really have any problem with Vick getting signed by somebody, and in my heart I know Vick deserves the second chance after 23 months in prison and 32+ games suspended if an NFL team is willing to put up with all the shit that will surely go along with employing him. And, as with the Favre situation, at this point I am more excited than anything else about seeing just what the crazy mind of Andy Reid comes up with as far as where and how to play someone of Mike Vick's athletic caliber. Will McNabb and Vick both line up behind the line and make defenders guess who will get the snap from center? Will Vick line up as a wide receiver or tight end as has been rumored of late? Will Vick even have set plays run for him to come out of the backfield with the potential to bust through some holes? There are just a whole lot of ways Vick can be integrated into this offense, and I can foresee people tuning in just to see what the Eagles do next with him on the roster.

Before I go today, I would be remiss if I did not mention Your World Champion Philadelphia Phillies, who have continued trucking along and at this moment sit at a season-high 22 games over .500, thanks in no small part to what has become at this point an indisputably strong starting pitching rotation. The first nice surprise has been Pedro Martinez, although if you've followed P-Mart's career along then I suppose his performance thus far for the Champs hasn't been that out of character. Basically, just as I've been saying here for over a month now, P-Mart has become a decently solid 5- or 6-inning starter. He will probably never sniff the 7th inning again in his major league pitching career, but he's usually good for 5 or 6 innings, getting himself into trouble maybe twice and giving up 2-4 earned runs. But he seems to have sufficient stuff to avoid the big meltdown innings and getting rocked early most of the time, which has been helpful for the Phillies at the bottom of the rotation and hopefully will continue to do so.

But the real story with the Phillies success this year, and in particular in the second half, lies in two other pitchers, both of whom were tangentially involved in the possible trade talks for Roy Halladay just before the trading deadline. First, you've got J.A. Happ, the 26-year-old phenom making his first attempt at being a starter in this, the third season where he made at least one appearance for the major league club. Happ is you recall was required by the Blue Jays as part of any trade for their ace Roy Halladay, and Phillies' GM Ruben Amaro had even offered up Happ as part of a 4-player proposal, which Blue Jays' GM J.P. Ricciardi rejected because it did not also include #1 Phillies pitching prospect Kyle Drabek. Well, the rest is GM legend history as Amaro then opted to keep both Drabek and Happ, and to trade a few other lesser prospects for Indians' starter Cliff Lee instead. More on Lee in a minute, but Happ has continued on being just tremendous since narrowly missing being traded thanks to the Jays' GM being outmaneuvered by Amaro. Since the Phillies kept Happ and acquired Cliff Lee on July 29, J. Happ is 4-0 for the Phils, three of those wins on the road including wins at wildcard-fighting Atlanta and Chicago plus a 7-0 shutout win at home against the wildcard-leading Rockies. In those four starts, Happ has pitched 29.2 innings, or well into the 8th inning on average per start. And in those 29.2 innings? Just one home run and four total runs allowed, for an awesome 1.26 ERA this month. Simply put, the guy has been a total pimp for us and this is why myself and so many other Phillies fans were thrilled with Amaro's move keeping Happ and not giving in to the Blue Jays' ludicrous demands for Halladay instead.

Meanwhile, Cliff Lee's performance since he came to Philly instead of Roy Halladay on July 29 makes J. Happ seem like Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams in the 1993 World Series. If there was any doubt about Ruben Amaro's genius in this, just his first year as a General Manager of a major league baseball team, after letting Pat Burrell and his 12 home runs so far in 2009 go to the Rays and picking up Raul Ibanez in the offseason, picking up an effective Pedro Martinez for peanuts a couple of months back, and then managing to keep both J. Happ and Kyle Drabek in making a big trade before the trading deadline, then what Cliff Lee has done in Philly has got to ice it. Now in five starts for the World Champions, Cliff Lee is 5-0 with a 0.68 ERA. No that's not a typo. Lee has pitched 7, 7, 8, 9 and 9 innings in his five starts so far for the Phils, giving up a total of 26 hits in those 40 innings -- none of them home runs -- and a grand total of three earned runs. In 40 innings. He's also pitched 39 strikeouts compared to just six walks during that time period, so this is a guy with the total package of impeccable control and awesome power across the board. And you know what the best part is? During this same time period (since July 29), Roy Hallday has gone 2-4 with an ERA of 4.40, giving up 8 home runs and allowing opposing batters to hit .324 against him. I knew this whole thing was going to blow up in Ricciardi's face, toying with his ace's emotions like he did by publicly broadcasting his desire to trade the starter to a contender, and then turning down some very powerful offers including top prospects plus guys like J. Happ and leaving Halladay high and dry with a losing team for the second half of the season, but it's good to see someone's ineptitude come home to roost once in a while. But hey I'm not complaining -- Ricciardi's big gaffe was Ruben Amaro's gain, and I have to admit as a Philly sports fan it feels good for once in a long while to be the team that took advantage of someone else's ineptitude instead of the team getting taken advantage of.

OK that's all for now. I may have some more this week but next week on Monday I should be back and better than ever on my regular posting schedule as things begin to return a little bit back to normal in my home and in my life.

V Minus One Day

Well, I made it.

For a while there it looked like work might try to wreck some of my big weekend plans, but in the end I wasn't having any of that. Nope, my 36 hours came and went, and somehow I was even able to finagle a Wednesday afternoon official beginning to my vacation and simply stopped working around mid-afternoon, though it wasn't easy. In the end it was late nights working instead of pokering, sleeping or just chillaxing both on Monday and Tuesday evening that enabled me to bust out everything I needed to get out before I left by just after 2pm ET, and then I was off.

Now, while I still technically have one more day until my trip to Vegas -- in exactly 24 hours as I type this, I will be somewhere over the airspace of the good state of Virginia from whence Hammer Wife was spawned on my way to Charlotte and then to Sin City -- really, vacation starts now in the Hammer household. Work is done for a while, and in a few minutes we pile into the new car for our first annual beach trek. Get in around midnight, I will stay up extra late to enact my plan as described yesterday for full night sleeping between Charlotte and Las Vegas, and then tomorrow the weather is finally supposed to break on the east coast, just in time for me to head to the 115-degree heat of the desert. Oh well, if I get a little beach time with the kids on Thursday before my four-day Vegas blast, I think I'll live.

I will try to get up on here tomorrow as I prepare for my trip to the desert, but those of you who have been longtime readers here will note that I tend to make the time to blog while in Vegas as much as I can. I'm bringing my damn laptop even though I'll have to remove it and have it scanned separately at the airport four different times over the next five days, so I better have something good to write about. I'm in town from Thursday night to Monday morning, so anyone who's around who wants to stop by, most of you have my cell number, and you certainly know what casino I'll be in on Saturday as I make my run to try not to humble myself in front of some of these incredible bloggers and their incredible performances so far in the2009 World Series of Poker.

Vacation

It's vacation time again for the Hammer Family. This week we are packing up and taking the girls on their first real vacation since they are both what I would consider "grown up", at least to some degree. And by that I mean at least that they will remember this trip for more than a few weeks after we return home. I mean, we took a trip to the Southwest a couple of years ago -- I actually remember watching the very end of the Mookie at night from our living room -- but my little one was just a mere babe, sleeping in the crib in the bathroom as I recall while we tiptoed around desperately trying to avoid waking her up. This week, we're going tropical on their asses, heading to the Caribbean for a week to get away from it all, relax and show the girls a good time in the islands as it has gotten effing cold in a hurry here in New York.

"Getting away from it all" has really taken on new meaning this year. I've written quite a bit about this over the past several months, but from a stress perspective and just generally considering all the things I have had to worry about in 2008, this is easily the worst year I've had since, well, since I don't know. High school maybe? The year I was born was tough too, come to think of it. I mean, I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I didn't even know where I was or who I was. 0 was definitely a rough year. But 2008 is right up there with the worst of 'em. I am definitely one of the lucky ones who has a solid family situation with a great family and a bunch of A+ friends who have been there for me all through this year. And lord knows it could have been much worse, with me narrowly escaping the Lehman Brothers situation just weeks before the bankruptcy declaration, and I probably could have easily lost my job a couple of times over the past several months if things didn't go the right way. But between having it out with my boss to start off calendar year 2008, interviewing and getting job offers from two companies whose stocks have absolutey gone into the toilet this year thanks to the hammering of the financial services sector, before turning them both down for a big promotion at Lehman, and then having to sit and watch the slow-motion taking apart of that firm over the following several months from the inside, it was quite a first half of the year already.

And little did I know, things hadn't even started to really go downhill yet.

Throughout the summer, Lehman's stock tumbmled to fresh low after fresh low. There were many days when the stock price was so all anyone was looking at that we couldn't even consider doing any actual work. Sadly, there were so many of those days that it almost lost its effect, inuring us to that feeling of fear, of panic really, of total hopelessness. Eventually I gave up and started looking for another job again, which brought with it even more stress to go along with dealing with the day-to-day grind at Lehman. Then Hammer Wife and I decided it was time to move the family out of the city, adding yet another huge layer of difficulty to what was already a real pressure-cooker of a life I had going on.

In the end it all worked out, as we managed to get a great house just four days before the school year started, also four days before I started at my new job, which turned out to be fortuitous as it was exactly six days into my new job when Lehman Brothers went under, sparing off this sick plunge for stock prices that is still yet to reach its bottom. That said, a new job and a new house and all of course have brought with them their own new stresses that most of you out there are more than familiar with. And now the massive economic slowdown, I feel like I'm fighting for my job all over again. It has just been one thing after another after another for me almost since the minute that 2008 began.

And again, don't get me wrong -- I am well aware of how many people out there are grappling with things far worse than I. Millions of Americans are flat-out unemployed. People are sick, or worse yet, their families. Family problems, personal and emotional problems. Shit, just from a job perspective, guys like mutual fund managers and hedge fund managers have had it far worse than me this year, I freely understand that. But it's not a competition, and I'm not trying to say I have it worse or better than anyone else. All I'm saying is, I've been feeling for a long time like I need to just get the fawk away, from everything. Hopefully this week will bring me the quantum of solace I am looking for.

So as usual when I'm away, I don't know for sure just how much I'll be blogging while I'm gone. It looks like I will be bringing my laptop on our trip, and I learned this weekend that our hotel does in fact have high-speed internet in every room. So I may be totally off the grid for a few days, or I may be totally blogging every day like usual. Or it could be something in the middle, which I've done before, where I just link up some old posts or some posts in a certain category that I'm thinking about this week. We'll just have to wait and see. But either way, this is a week about relaxing and winding down for me, about adding to the huge list of awesome memories with my family, and giving my incredible girls a whole bunch of experiences they've never come close to taking in before. And no matter what happens with the blog this week, I will be back and better than ever next week with more of the same blogdonkery you've been getting here day in, day out for nearly four years.

Have a great week everyone, and an awesome Thanksgiving if I'm not around.

Moving Day

Well, this is it. Just more than a week after saying goodbye to the company I've worked for for the past three years, today I bid adieu to the apartment I've lived in for the past five years and the city I've lived in for the last seven. In fact, right now I've got three guys frantically taping up, stacking ansd storing away all of my worldly possessions all around me while I toil away at the 1-2 nl tables on full tilt and watch CNBC until they take my precious flat screen away to be crated and loaded on the truck. I know my posting has been sparse to say the least of late, but that should get back to normal over the next week or so after the holiday as I transition to life in my new house, in a new city and at a new job. I haven't gone anywhere, but I've just been so dam busy over the past month or so that it's easily been the craziest month I've ever lived.

If I don't get around to posting on Friday, have a great Labor Day weekend everyone and here's hoping for nice weather, good friends and a healthy life for everyone out there.

Monday Quickie and Nice MTT Score

This is gonna have to be a quick one since I am technically still on vacation until the end of Monday. Well, technically I am back to work today, but I've got some shit going on for most of the day that will keep me otherwise occupied and away from the pc where I spin my clever little yarns for you all on a daily basis.

So here goes:

First, tonight is once again Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt, and tonight we're going to start for the first time with the Shootout format for the tournament. Same time of 10pm ET as always, same buyin of $24 + $2, and the same password of "hammer", but the game this week will be a shorthanded shootout structure as we explore how shootouts work for our private blogger tournaments for the first time. So come on out and be among the first to play a blogger shootout and experience all the fun and excitement for yourself. There has already been a rare Tripjax sighting on the early registration list for this week's Hoy, and of course first-timers are always welcome, encouraged and lucky as ballz in this thing. See you then!

I should also make brief mention of a few other items around the world of the other poker blogs and bloggers out there that I have taken note of over the past week or so but have not been able yet to blog about. PLO expert and overall good guy Bayne recently busted out with yet another big score which can be read about over at his blog. Of course everyone knows about Lucko and LJ's recent online tournament successes, but Bayne has quietly watched his tournament game improve, pretty much right in line with an increased focus on tight, smart poker. It's always a thrill for me to watch anyone in our group evolving their tournament game and seeing the results they are looking for, and Bayne is no exception here so if you haven't been keeping up with that, head over to Bayne's blog and catch yourself up.

And speaking of some great blog posts, I have been remiss in not mentioning until now the spate of great strategy posts that once again have been regularly populating the space over at Emptyman's blog. Empty is a somewhat recent blogger and an excellent player in all the poker games, and he has had a whole host of great posts over the past year or so detailing various strategy points relating to holdem and most of the HORSE variants. Take it from me, if you are looking to improve your HORSE game, do yourself a personal favor and read through the recent archives as well as the older stuff at Emptyman's blog and you will not be disappointed.

And speaking of Lucko and LJ btw, it appears that both sides of the happy couple are busto from the World Series of Poker Main Event, both on Day One during the second round of the tournament. Loretta did make it through to Day Two, to be played later this week, and is sitting on a stack of around 35k after starting with 20k in chips. And the big story has got to be everyone's favorite poker dwarf Iggy himself, who has also survived through to Day Two with a stack of just under 38,000 chips. With the incredibly slow structure of the WSOP ME, lasting to the second day having nearly doubled the starting chip stack is a great outcome in my book, and I continue to think that Iggy has just the kind of patient, smart game to make a real run in a tournamemt like this. I'm sure you can keep up with all the Vegas happenings for these guys on their own blogs and of course on Pauly and the other media outlets covering the WSOP this year.

Well this is really all the time I have for today. Let me just reiterate that if I have any say in it, this week is going to be perhaps the biggest mtt bender of my entire life, an effort that I got off to a great start with over the weekend upon my late night Saturday return to New York City sans Hammer Girls and sans Hammer Wife, who again remain at the beach for one more week until I head down to pick them up next weekend. I played a bunch of tournaments for the first time ever over the weekend, including the donkorific phenomena known as the Turbo Fiddy and the Turbo Hundo, including a 14th place cash in the Hundo after losing a race that would have left me atop the leaderboard with a little luck. I also played my first ever Sunday Brawl as well as the 750k this week, neither of which worked out as I had been hoping although I made a decent run in each.

One thing that did work out on Sunday night / Monday morning was this:





A 4th place finish is nothing to go nuts about, but it's the first big score I've had since getting sick as I have pretty much stayed away from the mtt scene for a few months, so in that sense this felt great. I had been in 2nd place of four left before pushing into the chip leader when his top pair had mine beat, but in the end I'll take the cash and try to duplicate it again in my bender that has started off about as good as could reasonably be hoped. The most interesting aspect of this thing I think is that here I am final-tabling the 5050 again right here during the exact same week-after-July-4th when I first final-tabled it on back to back nights last year. As I mentioned last week, something about being free to play all night without disturbing anyone or anyone else being around is very liberating to me and has historically led to good results for my game. Here's hoping that this can continue tonight and into the rest of the week with my own mtt play.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy -- Shootout style -- on full tilt!

MATH Recap, and Vacation Time Once Again

We had 11 runners come out for Mondays at the Hoy this week, setting up payouts to the top three finishers in the last week before we move to a Shootout format. I died around the middle of the pack but short of the final table when I I think lost a race to the eventual tournament winner -- who also won the Mookie this past week btw -- and then I spent much of the rest of the night away from the pc as I packed for the Hammer family's annual July 4 pilgrimage to the beach.

Here are this week's cashers for Mondays at the Hoy:

1. Numbbono $132
2. AGuda $79.20
3. HighOnPoker $52.80

So Numbbono wins the Mookie and then the Hoy in succession -- probably only the second time that has ever been accomplished before -- while Jordan adds to his impressive number of MATH cashes so far in 2008 and AGuda continues his beginners' luck streak with his second consecutive runner-up finish out of two career attempts in Mondays at the Hoy.

So as I mentioned, today commences my family's annual trip to the beach. Longtime readers here know that every year around Independence Day, I am blessed to have married into a family who happens to own a beach house right up on the beach at some of the most prime real estate on the East Coast, and I have spent pretty much every year of this millenium out there for the mid-summer holidays with my girlfriend, now wife, and my kids as well. This year the trip could not come at a better time, as the drudgery and bullshit of working where I work has never been worse and morale around my office has never been lower. So I am really looking forward to the break, and it is unclear how much I will be blogging during the balance of this week heading into the holiday weekend. I may post some shit if it tickles my fancy, as I'll be hanging around at the beach with nothing to do but relax for portions of the day, although lately the blog has seemed more like an obligation and less like a welcome diversion than I am accustomed to, so who knows what wil happen.

Either way, I will be back and better thean ezra on Monday, refreshed from the time away and just rip roaring ready to roll with a return to my mtt roots. For those who don't know, I have basically completely avoided the mtt game ever since I got mono a few months back now. It's like the illness's abilty to sap my strength and prevent me from being able to stay up late has never really gone away, and at some point I'm going to have to prove to myself that I've still got it. I've probably played fewer than 10 real life mtt's in the past ten weeks or so is my guess, something which seems weird to me but at the same time I have to admit I have had a great time beating down on the 1-2 6max pot limit O8 cash tables on full tilt and pokerstars, in addition to the sngs, in particular the turbo (and even super turbo) sngs on full tilt. Well all that I plan to change next week, as Hammer Wife and the Hammer Girls will be staying the week at the beach while I come back to the city to work work work before heading back down to the beach to pick them up the following weekend. This was the week last year when I first final tabled the 50-50 tournament on full tilt on back to back nights, posting if I recall a 4th place and a 6th place finish in what was unbeknownst to me a pretty cool harbinger of things to come. Something about knowing I wasn't keeping anyone awake or playing while anyone else was sleeping agreed with me back then, and next week we will see if I can make magic happen once again as I try to get back on track with the mtts.

In the meantime, I understand from Chip that the Skillz game has been brought back to the poker bloggers starting tonight at 9:30pm ET on full tilt. Buyin is the same at $12 + $1, it remains a knockout tournament, and tonight's poison will be O8. I will not be there as we will be en route to la plage, but don't forget to register when you can for Skills -- The Return. Password as always is "skillz".

Have a great holiday everyone. I hope you all final table "the" 40k sometime this week. Hahahahahaha!

Skills, Mookie and Smooth Calling with Draws on the Flop

Another holiday weekend, another awesome time with the family. We headed out to the same indoor waterpark for the weekend that we went to last fall, and the kids went nuts for it once again. It was great. And I got to see how much they had each grown during the just seven months or so since we were last there. You out there reading this, and me, we all know how little time seven months really is. It's nothing. You don't change over seven months, I don't change over that period of time. But for these kids, seven months is sick. My youngest daughter, K, is 2 1/2 now, so compared to when we went to this waterpark last year, K is now basically 25% older than she was then. Even my older one, who is 4 1/2, is a good 12% older today than when we were out there last year. So I got both girls moved up to the next level of waterslides which was great, and on top of that, my oldest M is now a swimming fool. Throw one of those kid-life-jacket things on her and she will just tread water and doggie paddle in the middle of the pool for 15 minutes straight. Good, good times.

And, I played no poker for a few days there either, which was also all good as far as I am concerned. Ever since I got sick a couple of months ago and was basically unable to play poker at all for a few weeks, not playing on a given night has taken on a whole new meaning for me. I still play most nights, don't get me wrong. But I also skip a night entirely with much more frequency than I had been previously, which used to happen almost never. Now, I am not playing a whole lot if at all on most weekends, and while I used to be a regular Iron Man on full tilt, I'm sure these days I am nowhere close. And I don't even care. Although I don't have a whole lot more than a few sng wins to show for it, I am liking my game over the past couple of weeks since getting back into the poker rotation after my recovery, and I'm sure the good results will come in time.

The good results were nowhere to be found in this week's Skills Series game for me, however. I did manage to play very solid for the first couple hours or so of this thing, maintaining and even growing my starting stack, but eventually I got called by pocket Kings or something and IGH around the middle of the field. Other than my one big BBT3 win in the Stud-8 Skills event a few weeks back, I have just not performed well overall in the Skills games for whatever reason. I have won blonkaments this year in nlh, rebuy nlh, O8, PLO and Stud-8, so it's not like I don't know how to play these games and play them well. I'm just not playing them right, for whatever reason. I think I have finally solved my issues with playing too loose early in these events, but I still seem to be missing something with my middle game now, where I still think in the end I am opening up and taking double-up chances with more marginal hands than I probably should be for that point in the tournament.

I saw in the a.m. that blonkament killer Surflexus managed to win his second BBT3 title in the Skills PLH tournament on Tuesday, succeeding not only in adding to his already very impressive resume of blogger tournament victories but also in further shrinking the series-ending BBT3 Tournament of Champions in a refrain that has become more and more common as the BBT3 has rolled on towards its conclusion this coming Sunday evening with the Big Game. What are we down to now? 47 seats maximum in the ToC? This thing is so much sicker than I ever thought it would be, as we march on towards basically better than 1-in-12 odds of every player in the ToC of walking away with at least 2k in cash to be used at the World Series of Poker event of your choice. Surf's winning a second event this week only serves to further ease the burden on the rest of us tournament winners in the upcoming ToC, and that I think is all good.

Speaking of the Skills game, I was on the girly chat last night with a fellow blogger, and we had an interesting exchange about a hand at our table where my IM chatter's opponent bet out for about 25% of this blogger's remaining stack into a large pot on a flop of something like AT9 with two suits, and this blogger ended up pushing allin on a raise on the flop with a king-high flush draw and an inside straight draw for what he figured to be 12 or 13 outs. He got instacalled on his allin flop raise, with his opponent holding top pair and the nut flush draw, which filled on the turn and sent my blogger friend home also somewhere in mid-field.

What followed was some on-the-spot analysis of the hand between he and I, where this blogger opened the conversation on the particular point of his flop raise by pointing out that if he had just called on the flop, with a bet that large he would basically be declaring himself to be on a drawing hand with such a move. Not wanting to be so obvious about his holding, he figured an allin raise was better since he planned to get it allin anyways with a likely 13 outs on straight and flush draws on the flop.

The more I thought about it, though, and the more I think about it here now, I am really not sure I like this logic. I mean, let's assume for argument's sake that you truly are basically telegraphing that you're on a draw on an AT9 flop with two to a suit. I don't think this is necessarily true, with an Ace on the flop especially you could easily have some kind of a medium-high Ace here, an AJ or A8-type of holding, but again for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that you will basically telegraph the fact that you are on a drawing hand if you smooth call an opponent's flop bet at these blind and bet levels and with these pot sizes at this point in the tournament. My answer is: so what?

Sure, it is an obvious poker truth that the less you give away about your own hand, the better you will perform overall in this game. As a general poker maxim, there is no doubt about the veracity of this point. But, in this case, does it really matter if you betray the true drawing nature of your hand at this point, on this flop? My answer I think is no, and here's why. It's one thing when I am only on a 7- or 8-out draw, something that I would like to stay in for cheaply, but which I'm not about to call off my entire stack chasing after given my only roughly 1/3 chance of filling by the river. I think this is an especially important interest on a particular kind of flop, one that has only one kinda obvious draw on it -- say a K72 flop with two clubs, or a rainbow flop of T93 or something where your opponent generally can reliably put you on a particular draw, and will therefore be likely to know if you hit your draw on the turn or river.

But in the Skills hand from last night, remember the flop in question was AT9, with two suits. So first and foremost, given the bias towards high-card and Ace-having starting hands, the opponent in this hand likely had some kind of top pair hand as opposed to hidden two pairs or something like that. The likelihood of one's opponent having precisely one pair is one factor that I think weighs in favor of just making the smooth call in this spot. With a likely 13 outs working for my blogger friend, I worry much less about telegraphing that I might be on a draw, because the player with just one pair on the flop is not likely to go too crazy on the turn once I have smooth called his normal-sized bet on the flop.

But the bigger reason I don't mind the smooth call on the AT9 two-suited flop, even if you are sure your opponent will know you are on a draw by your smooth call, is that the two suits on the flop, combined with the two consecutive cards on the flop, and the fact that the two connected cards happen to be high cards as well, the bottom line is that I just don't think my opponent has any way of knowing if I've hit my draw even if it does fill. For example, if an offsuit King hits on the turn, I see it as a solid betting opportunity -- especially if I can reliably put my opponent on just top pair or some kind -- because he reasonably has to fear that I hold QJ for the oesd that just hit its mark on the turn. Similarly, if a 6 falls, he once again has to worry that I have just made a straight with an 87 in the hole. Technically, even if a Queen or a 7 falls, I can bet out and there has to be some chance in my opponent's mind that I have hit some kind of an oesd with semi-connected cards. Or how about if any flush card falls, and once again I can lead out with a good chance of successfully getting my opponent to fold based on the scare card.

So in this case, on an Ace-high board and one with several possible draws on both the flush side of things as well as several possible straights, I really don't mind as a rule if my opponent can sense from my actions on the flop (usually a smooth call) that I am in fact drawing. There are just too many possible draws I could be on on this particular kind of a flop for me to be too concerned if my opponent knows I am drawing. Let him know I'm drawing. On the AT9 two-club flop we've been discussing here, any 6, 7, 8, Jack, Queen, King or club give me a hand that could have filled on my draw. That is over half the deck that can have hit my draw on the very next card. So let him know I'm drawing on the flop, I don't really mind because I don't think it hurts me much with so many possible "hit" cards for me on the turn or river. Sometimes I prefer to smooth call on the flop with big draws -- in this case, an expected 12 or 13 outs -- and see if I can either hit one of my draw cards on the turn, or at least hit a card that is sufficiently scary to my opponent to enable me to win the pot. Sure, as a rule I am not a big fan of smooth calling a whole lot in no-limit poker, and I think a strategy that minimizes smooth calling in general other than in slow-play situations is probably a more profitable one than most people, say, in the blonkaments, tend to pursue. But sometimes, in just the right situations where there are lots of outs, lots of possible draws I can be on, and a higher than usual likelihood that my opponent has just one pair, I think the circumstances can line up to make smooth calling the flop on a draw a perfectly acceptable move, at least as a variation play if not as a downright good chance to get into a position to win the pot with big bets on the turn and/or river.

Hopefully that all makes sense to you. It was just one of the many poker conversations I have with girly friends on a nightly basis while we're out playing together in our regular private blogger tournaments. And speaking of which, don't forget the Mookie tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "vegas1"). This will be the third-to-last event in the BBT3, so everyone should be out in force to take one of their last shots at winning their way into the Tournament of Champions like I did. And since it's the Mookie, all the cockfonkeys especially should be chomping at the bit this evening to be the latest loser to wear the weekly Mookie belt. I have cashed in I think three consecutive Mookie tournaments though -- clearly a first time for that situation -- so who knows, maybe tonight I can make it four in a row. See you there, I wouldn't miss it for the world.

MATH Recap

Wow, it seems like I picked a terrible day to completely miss out on Mondays at the Hoy. Four of the top 8 finishers (and ITM players) came out of the massive BBT3 prop bet going on here as the 3-month challenge rolls on to a close, and it looks like once again LJ ended as a bridesmaid and not a bride. That has got to be at least three second place finishes over the past couple of BBT series for LJ, who has yet to win a Tournament of Champions seat like I did in Stud 8 a few weeks back, and definitely a good 4 or 5 if not more top-5 finishes just in the BBT3 running right now. Hopefully she can bust out with a victory here in the final four BBT tournaments coming up this week, culminating in this coming Sunday night's BBT3-ending Big Game.

Here is the list of the top 8 finishers who comprised the cashers in this week's Mondays at the Hoy, which sported 63 runners and a $1512 prize pool:

8. RecessRampage $52.92
7. MiamiDon $52.92
6. Pirate Wes $83.16
5. PokerBrian322 $120.96
4. lucko21 $166.32
3. jeciimd $219.24
2. LJ $317.52
1. Bone_Daddy84 $498.96

Congratulations to Eric, a guy I met in person last summer out in Vegas, for finally winning his BBT3 ToC seat here in the last week and getting some much-needed prop bet points in the contest, as well as to PokerBrian322 whom I would be remiss if I did not mention is utterly and completely and totally crushing the MATH over these past couple of weeks.

That's all for today as the Hammer Family is still on vacation today, returning on Wednesday to our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you to everyone who came out and played in Mondays at the Hoy over the past three months, where I would guess we probably generated somewhere around $20,000 in prize pool just from this event since the BBT3 began. I hope everyone who wants to win a ToC seat will be in a position to do so in the final four events this week. Especially LJ who deserves it as much as anyone after the run she has had.

Don't forget, Skills PLH tonight at 9:30pm ET as the 4th-to-last chance to join me in winning your way in to the Tournament of Champions. See you there!

Memorial Day Quickie, and MATH Pimp

Quick post for a holiday Monday. This feels like the tenth time I've posted on Memorial Day, partly because I'm a sicko about updating my blog and partly because I'm always coming on here to clarify for everyone that the Memorial Day Mondays at the Hoy tournament is on on ON!



Normally on a Memorial Day night, I would expect the MATH participation to be awfully slow. But instead, this time around here we are at the beginning of the very last week of the BBT3. So, with a grand total of just five events left in the BBT3, and therefore five more chances to qualify to win your seat in the June 7 BBT3 Tournament of Champions like I did a few weeks ago in a Stud-8 Skills tournament, I am guessing we will get a good turnout tonight for the last MATH of the BBT3. Personally, I will be there but in buyin only, as I most likely will not be free to play. But far be it from me not to donate to my own hosted tournament, so my buyin will be there and be up for grabs tonight as the BBT3 rolls into its last week on full tilt poker. Password as always is "hammer", so get in there early and reserve your spot.

One other quick "highlight" for your viewing pleasure today:



Yeah, that's me winning new Sunday Heads-Up tournament this week. Sure there were only six runners, which sucked, but it was a holiday weekend and I for one was remiss in pimping it this week in only its second week of existence. But despite the small-looking crowd, I stayed in there and ended up battling it out with five other brave souls for the second weekly SHU title on a holiday weekend, and eventually I emerged victorious. So yeah, there were only a total of three rounds of matches in order to take down this week's title. But I did have to come back from starting with 1500 chips to my opponent's 3000 chips in my 2nd round matchup, before facing RaisingCayne with 4500 chips apiece in the final. I dominated both of my matches and never fell significantly behind in either tournament, playing as patient and solid a game as I think I possibly could, including some well-timed bluffs in large pots and a couple of times where I hit my hand on the later streets. On the last hand of the tournament, I got it all in with flopped trips on an all-club board, and of course Cayne flipped up the made 6-high flush, but in what will forever be known as the "Memorial Day miracle", I rivered my 10-outer for the boat to take down the title. It's a very, very small win obviously, but with the redonkulous fields in these blonkaments lately, and with my lofty goal of 15 blonkament wins in 2008, I'm counting it. This one basically gets me halfway to my blonkament victory goal for the year here, and I've done that in just under 45% of the year so far. I'll take it.

OK that's all I've got for you today. As I mentioned, the Hammer Family is on vacation on Monday and Tuesday at a giant indoor waterpark in Pennsylvania, so I might or might not get around to posting on Tuesday, depending on exactly where I'm at and exactly what I'm doing. But either way, I should be back and better than ever on Wednesday, hopefully with some of those good old-fashioned hand analysis posts I've promised. Until then, you've got the Hoy tonight to hold you over and try to either win your way in to the BBT3 ToC like I did, or try to further shrink the ToC field if you're one of those lucky enough to already have secured yourself a seat. Either way, see you tonight at 10pm ET for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

Labor Day MATH is ON!

As far as I'm concerned, Labor Day has always meant it's a new season, a season where I can no longer dress like the rest of you on casual Fridays, a season where it will be getting (even) colder for the next several months, and a season where traditionally the participation in our blonkaments tends to rise along with the falling temperatures on the thermometers. So, with a new season I figured it is time to go with a new banner this week for Mondays at the Hoy, which is tonight as always at 10pm ET on full tilt:



Word out to DuggleBogey for making up this kickass banner, sans request from me. How he got that picture of Hammer Wife I will never know, but thanks for the great work and I'm happy to be using it this week. So come out tonight for a special Labor Day MATH tournament, 10pm ET on full tilt, with a password of "hammer" as always. I know some people will be traveling or with family on Monday night for the holiday, but if you're around and you're online and want to play with the greatest poker players on the planet, you know where to find us under the Tournaments -- Private tab on full tilt poker.

I hope everyone had a great weekend and a fun holiday with family, friends or whomever you are with these past few days. See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!!

Monday Recap, Math Pimp, and New Poker Books

Another Monday, and another Mondays at the Hoy tonight on full tilt:



Come one and come all tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt (password is "hammer" as always) to the par-tay known as Mondays at the Hoy, where we suddenly have a 3-way virtual tie for first place between Bayne, Columbo and myself for domination atop the 2007 Hoy moneyboard, with the three of us separated by just $13 total won during all of 2007 from my weekly Monday night tournament. At this point, the first one of the three of us to cash at all in the MATH will take the new moneyboard lead, and a tournament win at this point will be deadly to the competition as we head out of summer and into fall in much of the country for this year. So come out tonight and beat down on Bayne and Columbo, my closest competitors in the MATH this year. Good times.

So what else? Well I did fail to mention this on Thursday, but the Hammer family was away on a mini-vacation this weekend, first to Sesame Place on Friday, and then to my parents' place for the weekend for our annual trip to celebrate their anniversary (and really to swim in the pool in the backyard as the last days of summer are upon us). In our case that included a beautiful, 96-degree day on Saturday that ended with anniversary dinner and then I even got to show my two girls the stars for the first time in their short life. Living in Manhattan there is not much to see in the way of celestial objects other than the sun and moon, and even what few stars you can see are pretty much out of reach of my kids, who generally go to sleep long before it is dark in the summertime. That said, on Saturday we got back from a late dinner, well past the Hammer Girls' normal bedtime, and when we got back to my parents' home it was brilliantly clear out and I laid down in the grass is the side yard and just had the girls look up at the night sky for a bit. And let me tell you, there is nothing to compare to hearing the wonder and awe in my older daughter M's voice when I informed her that that bright "star" up over my parents' neighbors' tree was actually not a star at all, but was actually Jupiter. "You mean the real life planet Jupiter, Daddy?" "That's right, M. The real Jupiter." "Wooooooooooowwww". It was pretty awesome, and if M ends up having a lifelong interest in astronomy like her old man, I will probably never forget that night as when it all started for her. We've done tons of puzzles and read tons of stories about the planets, the stars, etc., but Saturday night out on my parents' lawn was the first time that it really clicked for M, the whole thing that those planets in the puzzles are real life things that you could actually see or even fly to if given enough time, and it was a thrill to be there just to see that epiphany in a bright young girl's mind for the first time.

In the poker world, I did wake up on Monday morning to a text message from Don that he, Chad (note new blog link there) and LJ played the $340 mtt at the Venetian this weekend, and that our favorite female blogger busted out with a 3rd place finish for $3200 and change. Wow is all I can say. Following up on her recent 3rd place finish in the 32k on full tilt a couple of weeks back, this is another huge score for LJ, so go stop by and congratulate her at her blog when you get the chance.

Otherwise, I realize I have been truly remiss in talking about some of the latest poker literature that has grabbed my fancy over the past couple of months. I recently completed the Full Tilt Poker Tournament Strategy Guide, which overall I would say was very good poker reading, even if I was familiar already with the majority of the concepts discussed in the book. Some articles, such as the no-limit section by Howard Lederer, annoyed the crap out of me as they clearly indicate Howard's unwillingness to actually give away any of his secrets regarding poker's most complex game. Other sections seemed just too esoteric to me to be truly helpful, and in this area I would include Andy Bloch's numbers-oriented focus on preflop nlh play as well as Richard "I cheated Bally's video poker machines but won't admit it" Brody's over-generalized freeflow conversation about online poker tournaments. But many of the sections, however, were really informative and detailed and complete, with some of the better ones including Chris Ferguson's preflop and postflop nlh chapters (top notch stuff from a top notch player IMO), Howard Lederer's limit holdem topic which was basically just a rehash of his previously-released lhe DVDs, and a surprisingly good chapter on O8 tournaments by Mike "The Mouth" Matusow, whom I never figured to have much good to say but who consistently surprised me with good, specific and smart strategy offerings in O8, the donkiest of the major poker variants.

I also recently completed a book I mentioned here a week or two ago, Winning in Tough Hold'em Games by Geoff Herzog and Nick Grudzien. This is a book that I recommend reading for all serious holdem players -- even though the text is geared specifically towards limit holdem, the concepts, and the general aggressive strategy advocated throughout the book are extremely valuable for anyone who takes their poker play seriously, especially if you play a lot in shorthanded or high-limit games, or if you make a lot of final tables and constantly find yourself in situations where everyone has to be aggressive if you expect to hang on to the end. This book was technical in places, but it never gets too technical and I never glazed over entire mathy sections as I have in some other texts on occasion. Just the last 50 pages or so of this book alone, where author Grudizen takes you through a number of actual lhe hands he has played, and describes his thought process and analysis in each, is worth the price of the book, as just reading and absorbing the author's thought process on these hands is IMO invaluable again to anyone who thinks seriously of poker and poker concepts. I heartily recommend this book if you are such a person or such a poker player, and I find it highly unlikely that anyone would not see the value in such book once you have read through it all, and I commend the two authors for a very strong first effort in the world of poker texts.

Lastly, I have just started a brand new poker book that, despite some initial trepidation, I am already quite positive I will enjoy after reading just the first 20 or 30 pages. That book is The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman. Although the book looks as you glance through it like a way-too-mathy text, just reading the foreword and the introduction has me excited to delve more into this text, and specifically for the discussion of game theory included in the book.

In the Introduction to The Mathematics of Poker, the authors suggest that their book is different from other poker texts because, rather than breaking down the game into sections like "preflop play", "flop play" and "turn and river play", it will instead take a more wholistic view to each individual hand, and to a generalized strategy that represents the intimate connection between preflop, flop, turn and river strategy in each specific hand. I am a big, big fan of this approach, and the general thought got me thinking about something, which I would love to get some people's thoughts on. When I play, say, one of the regular blonkaments, most of the hands I go in to, I do not have an entire plan formulated for how I'm going to play the hand right from the getgo. This does happen on occasion, but most of the time, I may make a really loose call from the button preflop just based on my position, and I don't know yet whether I'm going to fold to action on the flop, call to float and try to steal the pot on the turn, or whether I intend to bet/raise the flop and lead the turn to try to take the pot down by brute force. I tend to make a lot of moves, in particular earlier in the hands when the betting is generally cheaper, as just initial steps, to which I plan to react based on my opponents' reactions, their bets or checks, and of course the cards that hit the board, and without some larger generalized plan for how I can win the hand right from before the flop is even out. Is that how the rest of you play most of the time, just running blindly into a lot of cheap flops without a plan for how to win or maximize my profit or minimize my loss with the hand? Sometimes I wonder if others play the game the same way that I do, and I am usually surprised and my poker game is usually enriched by the answers I receive.

That's it for today, other than to say that the Phillies are the worst team to be a fan of of all time. Now come by tonight to Mondays at the Hoy, and knock out Columbo and Bayne to help give me a chance to take back what is rightfully mine -- the top spot on the Hoy moneyboard for the year. See you then!

MATH Recap, Weekend Update and Bad Decision / Good Decision

On Monday night I made a really bad decision in my attempt to satellite in to the evening's FTOPS Event #7, the $1000 buyin 6-max nlh event, and in doing so I broke basically my #1 cardinal rule of playing poker: I made it personal. I took the game personally, and as usually happens when you do that, your own game goes south as a result. At the cash tables this is bad enough, but playing this way in a tournament is, in a word, suicide. Unless you get really lucky, you're going to get chased down one too many times if you continually target a specific individual at the table, rather than just playing optimal, winning poker across the board. This one guy sucked out on me early in the FTOPS #7 satellite, and then he instacalled two rereraises in front of him preflop with AK. Of course he hit a K on the turn to beat my pocket Jacks, and for some reason I was furious. I haven't tilted much recently, as I've been winning for the most part, but for whatever reason I was really annoyed at losing all those chips early. So I decided to make it my sole purpose in that satellite to bust the Ak guy, the very first chance I got.

I got my chance soon enough. I find AQ in middle position, I open raise it 3x, and he reraises me 3x more from late position. Now, I know I'm beat here. Is he reraising me with AJ or AT here? Come on. It's either a pair or it's AK (again, second time against a good hand of mine in 25 minutes of this tournament), and wherever it falls on that spectrum, I am behind with AQ, possibly very behind if it's QQ, KK, AA or AK. Nonetheless, I donkishly move allin. I want this guy to call me with his (hopefully) underpair. I want to be racing against him early. I actually am trying to get into a race early on for all my chips in a $200 buyin tournament against a donkey when I know I am slightly behind as it is! Who the F is this guy and where did he come from? I laugh at you when you make this move, but I don't do that myself. Do I? Well, there's the rub. I got pissed off at a specific individual, and I dedicated my play to "getting my chips back". Nice move, Hoy. That's the donkiest thing you can do at the table, and usually I'm the guy laughing at the fonkey who makes poker into a personal game. In tournaments especially, that guy can never win. And as I've written about here several times in the past, once you're in that mentality, even if you do succeed in knocking out your nemesis and getting back into contention it is exceedingly hard (harder than anyone ever realizes at the time, for sure) to suddenly ratchet your game back down to proper play from that point on. Almost nobody I know can pull that off, and I've seen countless examples like that both inside and outside of the blonkaments where someone jumps out to an early lead playing crazy but simply can't hold on and ends up well short of the final table, even in a small event.

So you never, ever make it personal in poker. Personal play = suboptimal play. Period. In that split second on Monday night, the only split second that actually matters, I was actually ready, willing and able to take a guarantee at less than a 50-50 chance, including potential domination, for a small chance to bust a guy who I had perceived as pissing me the hell off. I let it get personal. And it cost me, as I called allin with AQ against AK, and IGH very early in the sat to FTOPS #7.

This is one of the cardinal rules of poker, just like in New Jack City. It is always business, and it's never personal. If you let it get personal, if you start letting personal feelings and desires for "revenge" against someone who "screwed" you dictate your decisions at the table, you not only are taking the game too seriously, but you are by definition playing suboptimally. It's one thing to focus on attacking the weak players at your table. But it's a whole other thing to take on bad bets and call raises with poor equity just because of a personal vendetta, especially one against a guy who played bad but sucked out on you.

All this talk about my bad decision in the FTOPS #7 satellite leads me as well to my good decision from last night. So I failed in my couple of attempts to qualify for FTOPS 7. There it was, $1060 to buy in, Monday night at 9pm ET. I could have bought in for cash. It so happens that my roll is close to the biggst it's been in months, thanks to a nice long run of good cash game and tournament play, resulting in several nice wins for me of late. I even won a $1016 pot in 2-4 6max nlh cash hand over the weekend from the beach, when I flopped bottom set with 33 on a JT3 board, I bet out, got raised by AA and then allin by AJ, which I called (expecting fully to be set-over-setted, make no mistake) and so did the AA. Turn is a T, giving me a boat, and I win! Anyways, I turned the idea of just buying in directly over and over in my head, and Hammer Wife was even encouraging me to just buy in after seeing how pissed I was about losing quick in the sat. I thought about it. Do I really want to drop a grand on a big buyin mtt? Yes I am confident I can cash in the tournament -- 6max is probably my best overall game, I just cashed in the 6max event at the WSOP which wasa bigger buyin than this, and I have been on fire lately at both the cash and tournament tables.

But in the end it just comes down to bankroll management. Although my roll at full tilt is fairly flush right now, it ain't so flush that $1060 doesn't put a nice, noticeable dent in it. If I'm going to continue playing this game, I need to be ever vigilant about bankroll management. Now, while I do think that KOD's recent post on this topic is probably a bit rosy in recommending 100 buyins for every mtt you enter, there is no doubt that BR management is a key skill for any successful poker player. Any one of 'em. And now let's take an honest look at ourselves here. Yes I am good at poker, and yes I'm on an awesome streak lately. But what really are my odds of cashing in the $1000 buyin FTOPS event on Monday night? 5%? 10%? 20%? 25%? You can't realistically go higher than that, and I would argue that even in the 20s is just not factually accurate (though I appreciate it if anyone out there does think that about me). So how do I justify dropping a large on a tournament that I have probably a 5-15% chance of cashing in at all, and much lower than that of a chance of a truly meaningful cash (i.e., at least 3 or 4 times the buyin at the 1k level)?

Answer: I can't. I can't justify that kind of a buyin, even from a bankroll on full tilt alone that would support me buying in directly and not having the rest of my ability to play hindered in any meaninful way, at least not immediately. Anyways, long story short, I resisted the tempation, I did not play in FTOPS #7 on Monday, and the way I see it, I am $1060 richer today as a result. One bad decision in the satellite, and one good decision from a bankroll management perspective not to buy in directly to what would have been by far the largest individual tournament buyin I have ever made for any online event. Bad for me, good for me, and I can live with the results overall.

OK real quick, last night we had 25 runners come out for the weekly MATH tournament, making for a nice round $600 prize pool, and payouts to the top 3 spots of $300, $180 and $120 respectively. Nice and easy with the amounts for a change. The donkeys were out in force for sure in this week's Hoy, as I personally lost to the JackAce allin preflop twice, to QJ allin preflop once, all with better hands of course, and I lost KQs and 99 twice as well allin preflop in various circumstances. Hard to survive when you're up against this kind of stuff again and again and again, night after night, blonkament after blonkament. With how successful I've been outside of the blogger events, sometimes I wonder why the eff I keep playing these things two or three times a week. Who knows? I guess I enjoy the camaraderie, the bragging rights, whatever it is. But my lord, when I have to outrun AJ and KT and QJ and 66 and 88 and 33 all night long, even if I am in ahead every single time, there's just too much opportunity to get donked to be able to persist for the 3+ hours it takes to win one of these things.

In the end it was swimmom95, who knocked me out when I ran my AT into her pocket Aces in the big blind at the final table, taking third place for $120 cash. Islandbum1 took 2nd place and the $180 cash prize, and first place and this week's MATH title goes to Pirate Wes, who also captured the $300 first prize after playing his typical solid, close-to-the-vest game early on, and ramping up the aggression where needed to take the tournament down as well as bragging rights for the next week. Congratulations to all of our cashers this week, and following is the updated 2007 MATH moneyboard standings, including this week's event:

1. Bayne_s $1175
2. Columbo $1168
3. Hoyazo $849
4. VinNay $775
5. cmitch $774
6. Iggy $745
7. NewinNov $677
8. Pirate Wes $672
9. Lucko21 $665
10. Waffles $650
11. Astin $616
12. Tripjax $561
13. IslandBum1 $527
14. RaisingCayne $522
15. Julius Goat $507
16. bartonf $492
16. mtnrider81 $492
18. PokerBrian322 $490
19. Chad $485
20. scots_chris $474
21. Fuel55 $458
22. Mike_Maloney $456
23. RecessRampage $434
24. Otis $429
25. Miami Don $402
26. jeciimd $382
26. Jordan $382
28. Blinders $379
29. lightning36 $371
30. ChapelncHill $353
31. Zeem $330
32 oossuuu754 $312
33. leftylu $295
34. Emptyman $288
34. Wigginx $288
36. ScottMc $282
37. Fishy McDonk $277
38. Irongirl $252
38. Manik79 $252
40. Wippy1313 $248
40. Byron $234
42. wwonka69 $216
43. Omega_man_99 $210
44. Pushmonkey72 $208
45. Buddydank $197
46. 23Skidoo $176
47. Santa Clauss $170
48. Iakaris $162
48. Smokkee $162
50. cemfredmd $156
50. NumbBono $156
52. lester000 $147
53. LJ $146
54. Heffmike $145
55. brdweb $143
56. DDionysus $137
57. Patchmaster $135
58. InstantTragedy $129
59. swimmom95 $120
60. Ganton516 $114
61. Fluxer $110
62. hoops15mt $95
63. Gracie $94
63. Scurvydog $94
65. Shag0103 $84
66. crazdgamer $82
67. PhinCity $80
68. maf212 $78
69. Alceste $71
69. dbirider $71
71. Easycure $67
72. Rake Feeder $53

Quickly, in other news, I lost with KK to AA twice now over the weekend. Once was in FTOPS #3 on Friday night, first hour, and then again in Monday night's 14k 6max at 11pm ET, that one in the third hour. Sucks. In FTOPS #3 on Friday, I knew it too! He put in the third raise preflop, and I immediately knew my KK was no good. I was so sure in fact that I opted to just smooth call that third preflop raise, willing to give myself an opportunity to not go broke if an Ace fell on the flop as it always seems to do when I can't get someone to lay down when I have a pair of Kings preflop. But then the flop came JT3, and suddenly I couldn't beat AA, JJ or even TT anymore. This guy basically would have had to have exactly QQ or else I was beat as far as my preflop range I put him on. But even seeing this shitass flop I still didnt listen to myself and I moved allin anyways. He instacalled with AA and IGH. Nice play, Shakespeare!

I did win another token frenzy this weekend at least, on Saturday night I believe. That gives me now five $75 tokens sitting in my account in addition to some decent cash. I haven't been on a run like this in the frenzy since they first started running it several months ago.

What else? The beach as always was awesome. Even better than previous times I've been out there. There is just something about seeing your young children at the beach that just cannot be beat. We took my 3-year-old M. to an amusement park to ride some kiddie rides, to an arcade where I played some racing game with her that bored her to tears. But then I put her on that dancing game where it tells you which steps to take and you do them, and she was freakin out. Again, seeing a young child when they first discover the wonders of something like an amusement part or an arcade is like the Matrix -- it's a feeling that you just have to experience for yourself, and it simply cannot be explained or understood through anything other than first-hand experience. All the fun times even more that made up for M barfing all over my car during the ride home, after complaining for an hour that her stomach was bothering her, and me ordering her to just close her eyes and go to sleep all that time and her stomach would feel better. Good times I tell ya.

Tonight I may or may not buy in directly to the FTOPS Event #8 in Omaha 8 or Better. I have failed to qualify for this event out of probably 6 satellites, final tabling 4 of them but never managing to win the winner-take-all FTOPS seat prize, which is the first time out of the last three FTOPS series that I have not qualified for the O8 event. I guess I'll see how I feel at the time, and maybe buy in and maybe not. Either way I should be online at some point this evening to hopefully resume my hot streak after a pretty much fruitless night at the virtual tables on Monday at full tilt.

Late MATH Pimp

Just back from a weekend at the beach, and what a time it was. Getting away and really disconnecting from everything cannot be overvalued.

Anyways, I wanted to make sure everyone knows that I am back now, and tonight's Mondays at the Hoy tournament is ON!!!



See you then! Hoping to avoid bad beats and setup hands tonight like running KK into AA early in FTOPS #3 Pot-Limit Holdem on Friday. Talk about a downer. Tonight I hope to be able to play in the 6:30pm ET satellite into FTOPS #7, the $1000 buyin 6-max nlh tournament Monday night at 9pm ET. Either way I will be in the MATH at 10pm this evening, so I'll see you then!

MATH Recap, MATH Pimp and an Interesting Cash Hand Question

Howdy pardners! I can honestly say that I'm always happy to be back after a few days away from here at the blog, especially after a weekend full of poker-related degeneracy at the Hammer household. There is just so much to get to, I think I can actually feel the sides of my head swelling every time I try to wrap my brain around all the different topics I have buzzing through my head right now, so I'm resorting to something I almost never do as I write this post: little shorthand notes at the bottom of the text editor to remind me of all the topics I want to get to today. It feels kinda ghey to me, but it gets the job done and that after all is what I'm all about.

So it's been a long time since my last post. I thought I might post while on my vacay, and on the good news front, I did write some or most of about four different posts, which means lots of pokery content on its way here over the next few days. But in the end as I've written about before, a vacation just doesn't seem like a real vacation when I'm still a slave to the blog every day at some point. It was bad enough that I had to do a fair amount of work reading a thick contract we have in preparation for a Monday morning conference call to begin negotiating it with some bastages from one of the big sweatshop New York City law firms. I already know that will mean way-way-too-many sessions of back and forth fighting over a bunch of minutiae that these law firm jagoffs already know is not reasonable, not standard, and not something they're going to end up getting from us in this contract, but they'll be more than happy (insistent, even) to drag these idiotic discussions out for weeks on end, all to eventually give in on them just minutes before our mutual deadline for the negotiations to be completed, probably in exchange for some other more meaningful point that they actually feel is important to get included in our agreement with them. And all the while these law firm clowns will have done their best to have dragged out and extended the time and the difficulty with this negotiation, thereby ensuring that they individually can make their billable hours targets for the year at their law firm, so that they individually can have a better shot at getting a bigger bonus this year, or at making partner in a few years, etc. So what if they hurt their own clients and the deal as a whole by purposely dragging out a week's worth of talks over 20 phone calls and more than a month, creating considerable ill will between the parties that will now have to work closely together for the next several years, generating legal costs to their client several times what they should have been and would have been if this deal were being negotiated in-house on both sides. It's all just to pad their own billable hours with the out-house donkeylawyers, and their complete lack of "just get it done" mentality -- in fact their completely opposite interest to that approach -- makes deals harder for everyone to just sign up and let the business teams of our companies actually do their jobs.

What I just described is the roadmap to my next 30 days of work. Plus those other three full time jobs I am working these days. Good times. Anyways, all this is to say that I had to work enough already as it is over the weekend with this big deal I'm doing, and as a result I just didn't find the time to blog as well. But like I said you will make up for it this week with an overflow of content. As a teaser, I have a couple of BBT review-type of posts coming which I think will have some interesting stuff for those of you who like to read here on a regular basis. I also had my first live home game in several years at my place over the weekend, which was attended by several bloggers, friends, and friends of friends. Profitable, too, but all that too is for a later post this week, other than to say that I had a fuckin great time and really wish I could do this more often. Hey, maybe it's time for us New York bloggers to get a weekly game together? That would be badass. We should be playing weekly $.50 - $1 cash for $100 buyins. I would make the time in the evenings for that, and if I could make the time then anyone could. I say that with confidence.

I would be remiss if I did not also mention that the New York metro area's own SoxLover (you may know him better as Fishiswa) won Saturday night's 28k. That's right -- going right after the KOD himself, on KOD's own stomping ground. This is Sox's first major online tournament score, so I say to you, Sox, "Welcome to the club!". It's still a fairly small club among our group of players who have ever outright won a major mtt on one of the big online poker sites, but the great thing is that it's a club that is constantly growing, never remaining constant. Despite all my serious joking aside, the overall poker skill of the "average" poker blogger is actually increasing, and that is something that makes me very happy to know, to observe from the inside, and in fact to be a part of. Although obviously it's morphed into much more than this, one of the main reasons I ever started the blog was to try to help other people, in my own unique ways, to become better players by highlighting my mistakes, highlighting their mistakes, and fostering discussion on these points that would be helpful to a bunch of players who might stumble upon my site some day. To be someone who others credit with helping their game from time to time is something I always love to hear, and while I'm certainly not saying that SoxLover specifically has ever learned anything from me, to be just a small part of the machine that helps good players become better players in some miniscule way is a role that I relish given the amount of time and effort I typically put into this whole blogging thing.

OK this Monday post has gone on long enough without the requisite self-promotion:



Back from the holiday week it is time for the next Mondays at the Hoy tournament, for the foreseeable future remaining at full tilt poker at 10pm ET, password as always of "hammer". I cannot tell you how psyched I am looking at a week of the Hoy, the Mookie, and Riverchasers, all without the pressure of the scoring system of the BBT looming over a good half the players' minds and influencing everyone's play across the board. Getting together, playing hard, taking some chances without worrying about anything external to the tournament itself, pushing with just that oesd on the flop in the first hour on an allin reraise, that my friends is what the blonkaments are all about, at least in my book, and this will be our first 3-blonkament week on that front in a long time. So come on out and join the festivities tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt!

Now before I forget, since I stopped posting for my vacation with my post from last Monday, I never got to review the results of last week's MATH tournament. As this is kind of old news now I don't plan to spend any real amount of time covering the event. Let's just say that we had 23 runners in the first post-BBT MATH, and the tournament featured surprisingly slow and tight play most of the way through, with only three players busting out in the first hour of the tournament. But for the first time in a long time, there were no "points" to shoot for, no recognition or happiness for finishing in 12th place of 23 players, and no reason to aim for that goal at any point in the event. I have to say, I really liked it. I missed this. BBT dominator Bayne was the third player out once the BBT wasn't there to kick around anymore, and Maudie showed up for her first MATH in a long time as the BBT rolled out of town.

In the end, the top 3 spots paid in last week's MATH tournament, with our very own fluxer coming in third place and capturing $110.40 for his efforts, which included calling every single time I raised before the flop without exception through the entire time at my table. And I do mean every single time. That was fun for me, but eventually I ran my JackAce on a J96 flop into Jordan 66 and my night ended somewhere in the early-middle of the tournament but before fluxer could get his claws onto my chips.

In second place for $165.60 in last week's MATH was lightning36, making his second or third appearance of the year on the Hoy moneyboard but his first in several weeks. I wasn't there to see the end so I can't comment on how it went down, but knowing who the champion was it is probably some luckbox move.

And speaking of the most recent MATH champion, for his second Hoy title in three weeks, was Lucko, who I understand is out in Vegas right now as you read this playing in Day 1d of the WSOP Main Event on Monday. So best of lucko to Lucko, and congratulations to the man who moves up into the top 10 on the 2007 MATH moneyboard with his $276 payout for another first prize:

1. Bayne_s $1175
2. Hoyazo $849
3. Columbo $801
4. VinNay $775
5. cmitch $774
6. Iggy $745
7. NewinNov $677
8. Lucko21 $665
9. Astin $616
10. Tripjax $561
11. Julius Goat $507
12. mtnrider81 $492
13. Chad $485
14. scots_chris $474
15. Fuel55 $458
16. Otis $429
17. Miami Don $402
18. Jordan $382
19. Blinders $379
20. Pirate Wes $372
21. lightning36 $371
22. IslandBum1 $357
23. ChapelncHill $353
24. Zeem $330
25. Mike_Maloney $326
26 oossuuu754 $312
27. leftylu $295
28. Waffles $294
29. Wigginx $288
30. ScottMc $282
31. Fishy McDonk $277
32. Manik79 $252
33. Wippy1313 $248
34. Byron $234
35. RecessRampage $224
36. wwonka69 $216
37. Omega_man_99 $210
38. Pushmonkey72 $208
39. Buddydank $197
40. bartonfa $180
41. 23Skidoo $176
42. Santa Clauss $170
43. Iakaris $162
43. Smokkee $162
45. cemfredmd $156
45. NumbBono $156
47. lester000 $147
48. Heffmike $145
49. brdweb $143
50. DDionysus $137
51. Patchmaster $135
52. InstantTragedy $129
53. Ganton516 $114
54. Fluxer $110
55. Gracie $94
55. Scurvydog $94
57. Shag0103 $84
58. PhinCity $80
58. jeciimd $80
60. maf212 $78
61. Alceste $71
61. dbirider $71
63. Easycure $67
64. Rake Feeder $53

Maybe tonight will be the night that you finally enter the moneyboard! Come out and play and let's find out.

Now in some other, more ranty poker-related news, I was thinking this weekend about where my poker bankroll currently resides. And then a question occurred to me. When the fuck is Neteller going to follow through with its fucking plan and let me go to their website -- as if I should have to do this again, having already registered and received a confirmation for my withdrawal many months ago now -- and re-request my fucking money back from that little segregated "trust" account they claim to have set up to house my funds specifically? They got all this positive press from the announcement back in early June about people being able to get their money back soon, and now here I am going on the middle of July, and still not a fucking peep. Dear Neteller: On behalf of all of us in the poker blogging community, give us our fucking money back and do it NOW!!!

And while I'm on the topic of rant-worthy poker-related moves, did you all out there happen to catch the David Singer interview, and just hear about the whole David Singer incident, at the WSOP Main Event? I originally found it on Pauly's top-notch one-of-a-kind WSOP coverage here, and if you haven't read it I encourage you to do so. Now I'm sure others out there will have different opinions on this issue than I do, but what can I say. I have been out in Vegas during, and have actually played in the Rio in both of, the last two World Series of Poker tournaments. I've heard the announcements, I've seen a million guys' cell phones ringing during WSOP tournaments there. David Singer's complaint essentially comes down to moving allin on Day 1 with just a primary draw -- at a time when he still had 9800 chips so there was no extreme urgency or anything -- and then getting called by (and eventually losing to) a guy with top pair whose cell phone buzzed during the hand. The player took a quick look at his phone, pushed one button (obviously silencing or diverting the call since he was playing at the poker table at the time), and then that was it. David Singer, who was eliminated on the hand with his, if I may say it, idiotic move for Day 1 of the WSOP with just 8 outs working for him, now contends that since this player "touched" his phone at all during a live hand, that his hand must be dead, and therefore the player must fold to David Singer's allin push with just a primary draw. And again, the guy did not answer his phone. He wasn't texting with anybody. His phone buzzed, he pushed a button to silence it so he could keep playing his hand. Now Singer wants his hand to have been declared dead. In a particularly brilliant suggestion, Singer has asked for the overall director of the WSOP at Harrah's to either refund his $10,000 buyin, or preferably, to simply allow Singer to play again on one of the Main Event's other later Day 1's. So now he wants to get two entries into the WSOP Main Event? I love it. All because a guy didn't answer his cell phone when it rang. Imagine what Singer would be entitled to if the guy actually did answer that phone then! Maybe a lifetime exemption from having to buy in to the Main Event ever again in his lifetime? Maybe a refund of his buyin, plus the cash that was set to be awarded to the bottom 10 cashers in this year's tournament? What a fucknut. And as is often the case with some of these superwusses in the poker world, I truly hope that the most shit that David Singer gets for this loser move is from his own colleagues, the poker tournament pros and grinders who are out there with him every week trying to find their way to, or find their way back, to a major poker championship. Personally I find it laughable what Singer is complaining about, and as always pokernews did a great job covering the event, and Tiffany Michelle kicked some serious ass in getting the story in the interview with him.

OK now that the public service announcements are done for the day, check out this screenshot I've been wanting to share with you for some time, but I've just been waiting for the right moment. I think now is finally that right time:



Go click on that link and make sure you take in what I'm showing you here. These are my stats on poker tracker, for the lifetime that I have used the product, which is about 3 months and around 10,000 hands of cash game play at 9 different levels overall. You can see there, I have been dealt pocket Aces precisely 30 times.

And I have won with them all 30 times.

Yep, you read that right. I have been dealt AA in cash games since I got my poker tracker 30 times, and I've gone on to win that hand all 30 times. 30 for 30 with pocket Aces. 30 for effin 30 guys. Forget having 'em cracked for a minute. I haven't even folded without going to showdown because I found 5 raise-callers preflop and then the flop came down TJQ all-soooted or anything. I've won the hand every single time I've found pocket Aces since I've started using poker tracker, and if you read here then you know that's going on 3 months now.

And don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that the mere act of posting this graphic here will immediately mean the certain death of this streak in my cash play. I relish that too. Bring it. I'm like Cal Ripken at this point. It's gone on so long over so many pocket Aces hands that every time I see 'em at this point, it's like "Is this the time my streak comes to an end?" "Is today Jimmy Shaker day?" It's become too much. So I know the poker gods will not let this brazen posting go unrewarded. So the least you can do is enjoy it for now, while the beatiful streak is alive and kicking at 30, knowing that no matter how horrible of a streak any of you are going on right now with your big cards -- remember for example that streak I had of AA losing to KK allin preflop, just to remind you of how low it's been for me as detailed right here on the blog -- that it can and will, eventually turn itself around. And don't get me wrong, I am playing those AA hands just right, all of them, and I haven't sucked out once in those 30 hands when I've won. I'm raising and reraising preflop and taking many of them down without a fight as a result, which is fine. But take a look at my average pot won with the Aces: over $83. $83. Over 20 big bets at 400 nl, and over 40 big bets at 200 nl, and even more BBs at the lower limits reserved for blogger games. It averages out to nearly 11 big bets per hand. 11 big bets moved to my stack every time I get pocket Aces dealt to me, and I've won 30 out of 30 times so far. Read that n weep, Aces Man!

Hey I heard a few rumblings this weekend about some fucking fun-sounding cash games at the donkey parlor known as the MGM poker room out in Vegas including some of my personal favorites Chad, Lucko, Fuel and superstoner, who got all together to donk it up at the 1-2 tables over the weekend while the guys are in town waiting for their respective WSOP Main Event performances to begin. I know that Chad and Lucko utterly killed the games, each requiring extra chip racks just to cash out of there in one trip, but more than that, I just think how much I would have loved, loved to have been out there to see that game. Sheeeeit, forget seeing the game. I wish I could have been playing in that game. Talk about a loose aggro donkfest for the ages with that crowd. Do any of them even know how to fold before the flop (or in some cases, on the flop)? Dam does that sound fun. My homegame this weekend was a blast -- see a later post this week on the topic -- but I don't know that it can hold a candle to that much aggrodonkery all congregating at the same low-stakes live cash table at the same time. Kudos to all you guys who are in the Main Event and best of luck to you all, and really to anyone who lives in Vegas or who has their life set up so they can get out there a few times a year without too much trouble. You are all better men (and women) than I am, and I salute you.

Before I go today and resume this little thing I like to call my job, I wanted to post about the biggest cash hand I was involved in since my last post, which actually occurred sometime on Thursday or Friday night when I logged in for a little cash game action on full tilt for a relatively short session during some down time at the beach. There were a couple of haters bloggers on the rail who actually saw this hand go down live, so to those of you who were there I ask respectfully that you do not give away what you know about the hand, though I don't mind if you comment without giving away any knowledge you have. But I'm going to present to you the story of this cash hand, which occurred at the 1-2 6-max nlh tables on full tilt, and I would like you to rate for me the play of the three players involved, from who played this hand the best to who played it the worst.

So here's the setup. As I mentioned this is 1-2 nlh, 6-max table on full tilt. You are observing the table when you see the following hand go down. The blinds of $1 and $2 are posted, and then utg puts in a standard pot-raise to $7. Utg+1 responds by reraising to $24. the cutoff in the next seat decides to call the $24 reraise cold. The button and the blinds all fold, and action is to the utg player, who has to call $17 into a pot that already contains $58. He mulls for a few seconds and then makes the call as well, so we see a flop three-handed with $75 in the pot.

The flop comes down 876 with two diamonds. The utg player leads out for $66 into the $75 pot. Utg+1 thinks for a few seconds and then moves allin over the top for his last $150.

The cutoff instantly pushes allin himself, for a total of about $180, once again bringing the action back to the utg player who has now led out and been raised and seen that raise called behind him on both streets. He is facing an allin call of his last $105 or so into the pot, which now contains $471. Once again utg mulls for a short time, and then he pushes the rest of his stack in as well, so the three players flip up their cards. This is what it looked like:



In the above graph, the utg player was the guy in the middle with the sooted JackAce, and utg+1 had the pocket Aces. The cutoff had pocket 5s.

Now my question for you is, what do you think of how this hand was played by all three players? Who do you think played it the best, and who played it the worst in your view? What would you change with how each of these guys played out the hand?

One other bonus question: check out that screenshot above again, and try to estimate what you think the likely odds for each of the three players was of winning the hand in a showdown since everyone was already allin at this point in the hand. When you have your estimates, if you want to see the actual odds for each hand, click here to see how close you were.

Anyways I am really interested in everyone's opinions on this hand in particular, and I suspect there will be some varied opinions of at least one or two of the players' strategies with the hand. I can also tell you how it ended up if anyone is interested after we discuss it a bit here first.

OK so I'm going to end this here for today. Once again I am thrilled to be back at the blog after a few much-needed days away (from this job, anyways), and as promised I will have lots more pokery content coming for you later in the week as well just like I have gotten used to spewing out daily for the past couple of years. Until then, best of luck and I'll see you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!