The holiday weekend really screwed with my sleep schedule. I’ve not been getting to sleep until 4 or 5 in the morning lately, just lying in bed for hours wide awake. As a result, I’m waking up late, even for me. Maybe I can fix the problem with another three day weekend.

I’ve still been playing a whole ton of poker. Pauly has got me hooked on PLO, even if he did bust me once with a straight flush against my nut flush. I played a little bit of shorthanded 3/6 on FullTilt, and pretty much broke even. I think I’m going to have to start seriously playing limit again. Playing in Vegas, and the .50/1 blogger games, have made me actually enjoy it again. Not shorthanded, though. I love shorthanded NLHE, but shorthanded LHE doesn’t seem as much fun.

Last night, I had my first ever dial-a-shot, with Al and April. Ahh, soco. They were both playing razz on FT, Al on wireless from the bar, of course. I joined in, and lost a few dollars when I kept getting (A3)5 and bricking out. Other bloggers played, too. drizz, maigrey, change100, and others were there.

In the chat window, there was a message about a $10+1 razz MTT that Andy Bloch was going to play in, so I joined it. Also playing in it were drizz, maigrey, Wes, and Derek, who was at my starting table. I expected to play for a little while and bust out.

I didn’t see fourth street for the first 25 minutes, at least. I was getting awful cards, but not playing stupid and just folding. Finally, I starting getting some decent starters, and not completely bricking out, and all of a sudden, I had made the first break with a decent stack. I got a little short again, but then won a few nice pots (including doubling up with a 9 low against a T low), and then again shortly after when I made a monster. All of a sudden, I was the chip leader!

I played pretty solid after that, and got enough good hands to keep going. A little while after we made the money, I played one hand poorly, and then limped along and finally finished in 11th place (out of 131). Not bad. I think I need to play this game some more.

I also think my tournament luck might finally be changing (of course now that I said that… [attempt at mean gene‘s patented antijinx; does it not work because I said that?] ). First cashing in the 180sng at Stars, and now the Razz tourney at FullTilt. I think sweating Gamecock and JoeSpeaker has been helping. And they think I’m doing it for them. 😉

Tomorrow, if I’m not lazy (so probably won’t happen), I’m going to try to post a list of some poker goals for 2006.

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PokerStars Tournament #17224210, No Limit Hold’em
Buy-In: $20.00/$2.00
180 players
Total Prize Pool: $3600.00
Tournament started – 2005/12/29 – 17:26:39 (ET)

Dear penner42,

You finished the tournament in 15th place.
A $43.20 award has been credited to your Real Money account.

You earned 79.90 tournament leader points in this tournament.
For information about our tournament leader board, see our web site at
http://www.pokerstars.com/tlb_tournament_rankings.html

Congratulations!
Thank you for participating.

I finally broke through in one of these things. I won THREE races in a row! After losing last night with AK vs 33 and AK vs 44…

I had a 5% (of net) swap with both maigrey and -EV, so I sent them both $1.06.

Tonight:
The game formerly known as the West Coast Warmup has been created at PokerStars.

Tourney#: 17214575
Buy-in: $10+1
Time: 7PM Pacific (2200 in the lobby clock) tonight
Password: monkey

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In three hours, on Stars.

http://tripjax.blogspot.com/2005/12/donkeys-always-draw-invitational.html

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My hole cards. All 81 hands.

Q4o, K5o, 73o, 55 (won!), 84o, T7o, 95o, T6s, 76o, 73s, Q8o, 62o, Q5o, 55, J9o, T8s, 62o, J8o, J7o, 44, 52o, Q2o, A3o, Q7o, KTo, AKo (outflopped by AQo), AJs (folded preflop to all-in), Q5o, K4o, A7o, 43s, 75s, J9o (won! checked down in the blinds), ATo, T9s, 72o, 98s, T9s, 73s, J9o, J6o, 86s, 83o, 63s, 54o, Q8o, T9s, A7s, 22, J9o, QJo, 62o, JTo, Q5o, J9o, AQo (won! the blinds), 82o, J4o, 42o, JTs, A9o, 83o, J9o, 86o, K5o, T7s, J4o, Q5o, 72o, 65o, T3s, 93o, 54o, T5o, 57o, T6s, J6o, 54o, 94s, 32o, J8s (pushed, ran into KK).

Wow. Fun tournament. 😉

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Well, my little poker hiatus failed miserably. I pretty much didn’t do anything but play online poker over the holiday weekend. I don’t really feel bad about it, though, because my reason for taking a break was that I was losing, and that stopped. I had a great run at the .50/1 6max NL tables on Stars, and even made around $100 playing .50/1 limit at FT. I also turned a small profit playing $25 PLO.

I played far too much to even talk about any of the hands or sessions at this point. It’s all such a blur. I also sweated JoeSpeaker and Drizz kick ass in a couple of tournaments each, and Gamecock finish well in one, too.

Here’s my attempt at a list of bloggers I played with: April, helixx, xennor (welcome!), Pauly, Heather, Marty, Shelly, April, Derek, Scott, factgirl, Drizz…

Sorry if I left anyone out. There are a lot of you.

I also had some fun with the bot in IRC, making it do useful poker things.

pokenum -h Th Ts – Jc 9c — 2c 8s Tc
<_hammer72> Holdem Hi: 990 enumerated boards containing 8s Tc 2c
<_hammer72> cards win %win lose %lose tie %tie EV
<_hammer72> Ts Th 591 59.70 399 40.30 0 0.00 0.597
<_hammer72> Jc 9c 399 40.30 591 59.70 0 0.00 0.403

harrington 500/1000/125 22595 8
<_hammer72> your m is: 9

_hammer72 rules.

In a little over a half hour, the Obie34 Invitational at Stars.

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I did it again.

I played some online poker. But it wasn’t real online poker, honest (it was .50/1 limit, and the fishiest I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t remember the low limits being that bad when I started). And I wasn’t playing it to play poker, I was playing it to test out wine. I swear.

I was chatting with helixx in IRC, and he said he was playing at FullTilt. They just released a Mac (beta) client, but sadly nothing for Linux. Not that I’m surprised. That market is probably all of a couple dozen people, if that. 🙂 Anyway, it got me playing with wine and really banging on it until I could get things to work.

Then of course, once it was up and running, I had to actually test it. I successfully played at FullTilt on my Linux desktop for two hours. It crashed once, but that computer has other issues and other things (Firefox, for one) crash on it, too. There are some graphics and drawing issues, but for the most part it is very playable. I ended up losing a little bit of money, but the side chat about the other players at the table was hilarious and worth it. April also sat down at the table for a bit while we were there.

I got Party and Stars going, too. UB is sort of halfway working, but I don’t really plan to play there much in the near future anyway. I’m seriously considering setting up a “Poker on Linux” website with instructions on how to do all of this (complete with affiliate links to all the poker sites, of course). Here’s a nice little screenshot of me not actually playing poker:

On a totally unrelated topic, I took some more pictures of my house. They’re up in the gallery.

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My break from online poker didn’t even last a day.

To be fair, I didn’t actually want to play poker. The bloggers and Party Poker conspired against me. The bloggers by sitting at a 2/4 BBJ table there, and Party by disabling observer chat. All I wanted to do was chat, dammit, and I ended up dropping $30 playing 2/4.

Thanks a lot, guys. It was fun playing with iggy, maigrey, pauly, helixx, -EV, trumpjosh, scott, veneno, and reader Dohpee. Sorry if I left anyone out.

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