Workin the Wii

Congratulations to Chippy McStacks for taking down this week's Skills Series event. In what, 9 or 10 Skill Series tournaments this year, yours truly still has yet to pick up even one measly bounty. That's right. I haven't eliminated nary a soul from the entire Skill Series, with no exceptions. Between that and the BBT3 in general, I am absolutely donking the shit out of the world of blonkaments, one of my worst performances ever. And last night was no different, with me busting in the first quintile or so when my split Kings went up against someone else's split 7s -- both of which were very obvious, mind you -- when the 7s declared he was allin and going home right from 3rd street. We got all the money in by 5th, and BOooooooooom there was 7s over 3s at the river for my opponent to not only keep me out of the top 5 in chips but to eliminate me entirely from the tournament. Awesome.

I wanted to write today about something related to all the 5050 final tables I made in the past month. It's something that I spoke about on buddydank radio on at least one occasion, but from some of the emails and IMs I have gotten lately it reminds me that I never really mentioned it here at all even though far more people read here than have been listening on BDR on the one or two nights where this came up. So the question is, was there anything tangible that I did differently on the nights when I made the deep mtt runs, from how I otherwise handle myself on other nights I am playing online poker? And the answer is:

The Nintendo Wii.

Yep, the Wii. See, early in the evenings, most of you who have ever searched for me online will know that I am a notorious multi-tabler. I am basically always in 2 or 3 tournaments or at 2 or 3 tables at the same time when I play 95% of my online poker. While I did not start off that way, it quickly became apparent to me that, for my particular mindset and style of play, a few tables actually is easier for me to play my game and stay focused on my style at all three. With just one table open I tend to get bored and lose focus, start playing too many hands, get awfuckitty, whatever the vice. So I'm usually at between 2 and 4 tables at all times early in the evening, say before midnight ET or so, in most cases. Nowadays with me playing at a few different poker sites again I may not always been at multiple tables on full tilt, but trust me I've got it goin on back at the Hammer House with at least 2 or 3 other tables even if I'm sitting in a blonkament or something with you.

But later in the evening, this all changes. When I'm getting decently into the money in an mtt, #1 it is very late and I am always loathe to start a new mtt or other tournament that could involve a substantial time commitment even if I bust from the 5050 or whatever tournament I am ITM in one second later. But #2, as these games move into the late stages, as I have written about previously, my game morphs from a generally tight-aggressive style, waiting for good cards in good situations and then trying to get maximum value from them while losing as little as possible when I miss, to a more purely instinctual approach, where I am basically reading my opponents for strength or weakness, and trying to use maximal pressure to take down pots before the flop except where I happen to hold a monster starting hand. This kind of game requires much more work and much more focus, and generally speaking I try not to play any other tables for this highly read-dependent, highly instinctual brand of poker that I only really crack out during what I call Push Time once down to the last 5% or so of the field in the big mtt's. I end up being fairly tense and very painstakingly involved in all the action at the table, and as a result the feeling can be highly intense and frankly, very draining on the person who does it.

And this is where the Wii comes in. During the 5-minute hourly breaks from the big mtt's earlier in the evenings, I am always playing at a few other tables at the same time, and they never all have the exact same starting times or break times. So when the 5050 takes it first, second or third hourly breaks of the night at approximately 10:30pm, 11:35pm and 12:40am ET every night, I sit right at my computer and play through whatever other sng or mtt or cash table I have open at the time. But come those 4th, 5th and 6th breaks starting in the 1 and 2am timeframe New York time, I try not to have any other tables working, so when breaktime hits, I am left with a quandary. What to do?

Now, a wise man once told me that he recommends people always get up, stretch your legs and take a short time off during your breaks, especially as we get later into an mtt, and even though much of that wise man's advice has proven to be laughable, this one has always stuck for me. Again it's not something that I worry about early in the night for the first few breaks, but I have had much success over the past several weeks by getting myself away from the computer screen for 5 minutes every hour in these deep mtt runs. I would be interested in hearing if anyone takes a different approach, but for me I find that getting away from the laptop for a bit is a helpful diversion for me, and in some ways can actually be affirmatively beneficial to some of the skills I am relying on at these deep ITM mtt stages of play. And lately, during my 5-minute breaks in the wee hours of the morning, I've been playing the Nintendo Wii to a great deal of success. So far, I've played the Wii four times during the break of a 5050 type of tournament, and I have final tabled all four times.

And I'm not just playing any old Wii game either. It's been all Wii baseball for me late at night in the midst of big mtt runs, all the time. In fact, it's not even regular Wii baseball. It's been purely the home run hitting contest under the Wii Training tab on the main menu. The 5 minutes is perfect for this. It gives me just enough time to maybe make a quick trip to the head, especially good if it's a "drinking night" in the Hammer House as usual, and then still leaves me with enough time to get through one if not two rounds of 10 pitches and try to take my swings for the fences. And given my four-for-four final tables when hitting home runs on the Wii during my breaks, I have spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what it is about the Wii that might be helping me in my poker performance late into the night. I've come up with a few explanations.

First and foremost, there is a lot of self-selection going on here, and the 4-for-4 is not really as impressive as it seems. In other words, I've only been playing the Wii in those 4th and 5th and 6th hourly breaks, which itself has only happened just a small handful of times. It's not like I've been playing the Wii after the first break in the 5050 every time I last for an hour, and then I'm going and final tabling every time I do that. Rather, I'm only hitting the Wii when I'm down to, say, the final 100 or fewer players in the big mtts, so me final tabling every time I've done it is not nearly the big feat that it may otherwise seem. And yet it still seems significant to me.

One other major point to make here is that it may just be getting my mind off of poker for 5 minutes at a time has a real impact on my ability to return to the laptop 5 minutes later and start deeply focusing once again. Like, maybe if I was exercising or something instead of hitting Wii home runs "Out of the Park!", I would be seeing the 100% identical results. That could easily be. I also am sure to stretch my legs, I sit back in my highly comfortable rocking chair while I play the Wii, and just generally I am doing something that makes me feel comfortable and might reasonably realistically work to prepare me to get back into the grind a few minutes later, almost like a 5-minute pitstop for these Nascar donks in their wifebeaters and with their mullets blazing.

But I have another theory. For those of you with the Wii and especially those of you who are familiar with the home run hitting contest, what that thing really comes down to in my mind is instinct. I mean, you see the pitch coming in, but you still need to time it and swing it just right if you want to hit that home run. A lot of it is about reaction time, and about early recognition of the location and type of pitch hurtling at you at 75 miles per hour. In the end, swinging for the fences like this is very much instinctual above all else, and my theory is that taking 5 minutes to hone my instincts like this during my break is really helping me to play a fine-tuned brand of instinctual poker in the very late stages of Push Time, and heading right up to the final table. In fact, this theory might also help explain why, after probably 500 separate attempts to take on the home run hitting contest, I today have officially one time and one time only when I actually hit home runs in all 10 at-bats I had. And that time was? The break immediately before I went on to win the 50-50 outright a couple of weeks back. That was it. Now isn't that awfully coincidental, if there is no relation at all between the quality of my Wii hitting and the quality of my poker play? I find it too coincidental to believe.

So I definitely think there is something to my Wii playing during the hourly breaks in my late mtt runs. Like I said, I spent a good deal of time talking about this during a couple of appearances I had on Buddydank radio since those few final tables, but I don't believe I have mentioned here at all yet and I wanted the rest of you to hear what one thing more than anything else I have done differently on those days than basically on all other days I am ever sitting in my place and playing online poker. Somehow, some way, trying to time and whack ten consecutive pitches out of the stadium in the Wii home run hitting contest really seems to help my poker game in real time. Working on my timing and my reactions and my recognition of situations for just 5 minutes out of every hour has seemingly shown a noticeable good effect on my late-stage mtt game generally. So take that for what you will, and if I can help any of you in your own mtt performances with what I've said here today, then that's all gravy as far as I'm concerned.

Don't forget the Mookie tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt. It's the latest BBT3 tournament and the latest chance to win a BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat to play for the four WSOP packages at the end of the 3-month BBT3 challenge, and the buyin is a mere $11, making it an affordable play for most of you out there. The Mookie password as always is "vegas1", and I will be there to donate since I couldn't win a Mookie tournament even if my life depended on it. The past few weeks I have played the Mookie fine but gotten sucked out on in redonkulous fashion, so I look for more of the same tonight, while Lucko will probably have a monstrous stack at some point along the way if things hold as they have been in the blonkaments lately in general. And I guess I should mention, my Mookie buyin is being paid for courtesy of another blogger who I helped make some money this week -- this is the second time now in a month where this has been the case, strangely -- in this case on some call options in a very juicy and very volatile stock market earlier this week. So will that $11 transfer I received yesterday prove to be my good luck charm for the Mookie?

Not. See you then though for the donation, 10pm ET on full tilt.

Wii, the Mookie and the NFL

Well it's back to work on the most Sunday-feeling Friday I've had in some time. Thursday was the Jewish new year so I took some time away from the office (and from the blog) to be with my family and had a great day. My younger daughter K turns two years old today which is a special thing, so we've been having fun with that, and my days at home with the family are always worth about 84 times as much as anything I ever do at work, so I never lose sight of that in my daily comings and goings.

Speaking of which, I have been remiss in mentioning this here, but you would not believe how much fun my entire family has been having with the Nintendo Wii. That's right, the very same Wii that I won for my come-from-behind 4th place finish in the Battle of the Blogger Tournaments this past spring. The Wii is just incredible. The gameplay is so realistic for some of the games it is almost hard to believe the thing is even real. Take bowling, for example, on Wii Sports that came bundled with the Wii system itself when it was sent to me. Other than not having the tremendous weight of the ball to hold in your hand (a good change, as far as I'm concerned), that bowling game is without a doubt the most realistic sports game I've ever played on any computer or game system. You hold the thing just like a real bowling ball, you walk up to the line just like you're really bowling, and you swing your arm and release your fingers from the holes at the end of your swing just like IRL. And you can put spin on the ball just by flicking your wrist, again just like in real life bowling. It's incredible.

My older daughter M and I have had hours of fun hitting and pitching in the baseball game that came with the system as well. I've tinkered with golf, but the putting mechanism is IMO too tough, especially when it comes to very short putts, but again it is unreal how lifelike you have to swing the club -- both in direction and form as well as in the strength of your swing or your follow-through -- and the boxing game has been fun for me as well, but the thing with that game is that it is just too tiring if you really start kicking the other guys' asses. But my real love so far has got to be Tennis. The tennis is doubles-only against the computer, but the cool thing is it lets you control both the back guy and the net guy for your side, depending on where the ball is at the time of your swing. The swing is so lifelike, and just like in the other sports, you can put spin on the ball by flicking your wrist in a certain direction when you make contact, more or less exactly like in real tennis. It's like a constant high-adrenaline, high-activity festival of fun in our living room, and it has brought my daughters and I closer together more than I ever thought possible. And I owe it all to poker. :)

But that is the truly amazing thing about playing the Wii. Unlike any other game system ever created, I can honestly say that, after just half an hour of playing tennis against the computer, I am not just sweaty but downright drenched. Some nights lately I have even opted to skip my cardio workout at the gym entirely, and instead spend an hour raising my rank above Pro level by beating down on and learning how to get better and better at Wii Tennis. Anyways, gone are the days of your kids sitting home all day and getting fat while they play their Sega 1993 hockey (Jeremy Roenick scores!!) and sit on their asses. Give me less than 30 minutes with the Wii, and I am sweating. It's really an amazing experience, and not having played any kind of video games whatever since college, I am amazed at how much I myself have gotten into just the Wii Sports games that came with the system. I bought a carnival games disc for my kids which I played on Thursday afternoon with M and went well, but we have more to learn about how to maximize our performance in those games so I'll give it some time. Anybody else out there have a Wii and have a recommendations for cool games to get? I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts if you got 'em.

Before I forget, let me congratulate my good friend Julius Goat for two great accomplishments this week. First, the minor feat was the birth of Goat's third child, and I think his first girl, so go congratulate Goat on that. But the much, much bigger news for Goat this week is of course his win in the Mookie on Wednesday night. Now for starters how someone is playing in a 3-hour Mookie tournament like 24 hours after his wife had a baby is beyond me. That man obviously keeps his pimp-hand strong, and on behalf of all of us married guys out here, let me just say Wow! to him. But Goat not only played in the Mookie, but he wiped it up. Yes sure I was in the chip lead with 17 players remaining on Wednesday. At this point, that's no big deal anymore, I'm leading that thing with less than 20 players left every week nowadays. But after I admittedly donkey-called off my stack with A8s, failing to hit any of my 12 outs twice to get eliminated in I think 12th or 13th place this week, Goat built up a nice chip lead and he simply never gave it up. He had a huge lead at the final table, kept it more or less throughout, and went into 3-handed play with nearly 3 times as many chips as 2nd place. The lead never faltered and Goat made short work of his last few competitors on his way to victory. Since I can never win the Mookie (although I did finish second in another Dookie this week, a tournament that I think just ended finally due to its surprising non-turbo nature), I have to resort to living vicariously through my blogger friends, so when someone like Don or now Goat takes it down, I am always extra happy for them. So congratulations out to Goat, for winning the latest Mookie, and...wasn't there something else this week as well for him? Oh yeah, the new baby. Wow what a week! Won the Mookie and everything! Impressive.

So, it's a Friday which means NFL is coming up again this weekend. Without delving too deeply into fantasy football, let me just say that I already have one of those leagues this year where there is this one pussy guy who keeps making totally one-sided trade offers to everyone, and then gets truly angry and insulting in emails, in the message board, etc. when people refuse to accept his silly offers. You give me Cedric Benson and I give you Steve Smith? No thanks, ass. Jon Kitna for Antonio Gates? I no think so. God how I tire of people like that.

Anyways, after going 1-0 in my posted picks for you in Week 1, I've got two more picks coming at you ahead of this weekend's full slate of NFL action, which includes my beloved Philadelphia Eagles in action on Monday night, looking to get some revenge after last week's recockulous giveaway of the Green Bay game. Interestingly, as I look at the lines on the NFL games this week, I see three lines that look to me to be "too good to be true". Now, often when this happens as I've written about and as someone like Don can and I imagine will get into more detail on in his blog, the "too good to be true" lines end up being just that, and the team nobody expected to win comes up with the big upset, and Vegas is happy as a result. In fact this happened just last week with my Eagles, who despite being favored to come out of the NFC once again and despite playing the utterly, embarrassingly hapless Green Bay Packers, were only giving 3 points against a team we should have rightfully beaten by 20 or 25 points. So what happens with that ridiculously low line? The Eagles suck up the joint and end up losing on a last-second field goal to give the Packers the 3 point lead, and to pay off all the few people with the insight to put their money on the Packers despite the only 3 points they were getting in Vegas on the game.

Well, this week I see three games that appear "too good to be true", and of course the key is in figuring out which of those are the setup games like last week's Eagles-Packers matchup, and which of those lines, if any, are actually just way off from what they should be. For me, the three wacky lines this week are Cincy only -7 at Cleveland, New Orleans only -3 at Tampa Bay, and Dallas only -3.5 at Miami. In each case, we are looking at a team near the top of their conference, playing on the road at a team that is really going to be bad this year, and in each case the numbers seem to me to be just too low for the road favorites. So how do I deal with each of those? Here's my answer: I'm sticking with the teams that I have high confidence are good this year, even here in Week 2. So that means that in the case of Dallas, I would stay away from that game, because at the end of the day I still do not see them as a truly great team this year, and I am wary of such a small line in favor of a team that I don't have a high confidence in like Dallas, to the point that I would not be surprised to see the horrid Dolphins somehow cover that paltry 3-point spread.

With the Saints, their performance in Week 1 injected a few doubts into my head about what I had been convinced was going to be a powerhouse team in 2007-08. With all of zero offensive touchdowns scored against the not-incredible Chargers defense last week, I think the proper move is to just avoid betting the Saints in that game, even though again the line seems awfully low at just 3 points over Tampa, another bad team in this year's NFL. Which leaves Cincinatti, who takes their "greatest show on turf" to Cleveland this week and is favored by 7 points. On this one, even though the 7 points seems low to me against who is probably the worst team in the NFL this season in the Browns, who will start a new quarterback this Sunday after trading away their Week 1 starter to the Seahawks a few days ago. I think Cincy wins this game and wins it big, and the line is not nearly as "too good to be true" at 7 points as it could be at 3 or so, so in the end I'm just not as worried about that one as I am about the others.

So Cincy -7 at Cleveland is my first pick for NFL Week 2. My other pick is going to be my Eagles, who should beat the horrific Redskins easily at home, and who will hopefully get a much stronger performance out of the offense this week to enable them to win this game by more than the one-touchdown line of 7 points. I will take the Eagles -7 points at home on Monday night after a tough and angering loss last week. So to review, my two NFL picks this week are:

1. Cincinatti -7 at Cleveland and
2. Philadelphia -7 vs. Washington

Two big favorite this week that I'm picking to win by more than a touchdown. That's not going to be usual for me, but I'm looking to extend my unbeaten NFL streak this year here in the earlygoing of the season, where the picks will be fewer than they will be later in the year when we have more information and more experience with all the teams in the league and how they really look so far in 2007.

OK that's all for me for today. Sorry not much poker content, but I've stored up about 1.5 billion hands which I plan to get to starting on Monday of next week in a return to my roots with some good old-fashioned hand analysis, replete with screenshots and my pompous, witty banter to go along with it. Mmmmmmm...delicious just thinking about all that, isn't it? Anyways as usual I will try to get in on Kat's Donkament tonight at 9pm ET on full tilt (password is "donkarama") for some $1 rebuy action, which I highly recommend especially to guys like me who've been taking it on the chin lately from the full tilt supposed random number generator. At $1 rebuys, you can do quite a bit of therapeutic donkery and still not drop too much in this thing, so I highly recommend it to those of you in need of letting off some steam in your online poker play.

Have a great weekend everyone, and I'll see you on the virtual felt I'm sure. And best of luck to your NFL teams and with your NFL picks.