Turns out that “HermWarfare” was Pauly’s brother Derek. Bastard! Had I known that I might not have pushed with 44. Well…yeah, I would have. Especially since my wife had just gotten home after another 12-hour day (she’s helping launch a new life-saving drug, which means she no longer has a life herself) and I figured…
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Knocked out in 79th place. Shit. I played a lot of hands early, won a few small pots, lost everything I won on one hand, and then I got moved to another table with Iggy and DonkeyPuncher and the bastard HermWarfare. No limping at this table, so when I’m dealt the Hammer, I raise it…
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In case this is the only poker blog you read (unlikely, or it should be unlikely) the latest WPBT tournament is at 9PM tonight at PokerStars. $20+2 to play and the password is “thehammer”. There were only 26 signups when I ponied up last night, but I think that can partially be explained by the…
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In the March 27th issue of the Los Angeles Times a reporter and critic named David Shaw wrote a piece titled “Do Bloggers Deserve Basic Journalistic Protections?”. His answer to this question (a resounding NO) is another example of how various elites have taken it upon themselves to decide where and when those pesky provisions…
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If I’ve learned anything about playing poker in the past year or so, it is this: as soon as you think you’ve “figured things out”, you will quickly learn that you were badly mistaken. You may gain insight, you may experience an epiphany, you may have a lightbulb appear above your head and cry out…
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My apologies for anyone bewildered by my previous post. One starts typing and before one knows it one has a monster post about one’s personal theology and one begins speaking about oneself in the third person impersonal. So let’s return to our previously scheduled program. I did practical work last night and then logged on…
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Tuesday I downloaded an Adobe Acrobat update, figured out how to get my computer to shake hands with it, and opened up my copy of the biggest thing to hit online poker since the 4-color deck, the Poker Tracker Guide. And, amazingly, it worked, graphics and all. Now for the tricky part–printing it out. Printing…
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In his highly-promoted but rarely-quoted book Play Poker Like the Pros, Phil Hellmuth splits players into five categories based, for some reason, on animals. These categories are: The Mouse, who plays very conservatively The Jackal, who plays a crazy and unpredictable game The Elephant, who plays too many hands The Lion, skilled and tough to…
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Dear readers, if I can leave you with just one piece of advice to guide you through life, it is this–never buy an egg-salad sandwich out of a vending machine. No matter how much you love egg salad, or how much your stomach is growling because you didn’t eat a full dinner last night. It…
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Which is the title of a book by the novelist John Barth, who was teaching at Penn State when he wrote it, by the way. Much of Barth’s work, according to the Lit professor I had a crush on back then (ah, Ginny Smyth, you feminist temptress you) can be described as self-reflexive, which means…
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