After seeing the doctor on monday, we decided to continue ahead with the plan I discussed in my last blog and cut off the final drug I was on to control the ulcerative colitis.  It’s been years since a major episode, but going medication free is still a risk.  I’m obviously hoping to not fall into a flare, but we have plans in place if I do.  I’m excited, yet feeling a little trepidation over going drug-free.    I’m worried things will fall apart, but being that I have no real control over my digestive system – besides what I eat, and I’m very good with that – there seems little point worrying too much about it.  I need to know if I can survive without the meds, since living without it would be miles better in many ways.  Seems like a gamble I have to take.  I’m hoping all the various negative health problems I was blaming on the drug’s side effects fall to the wayside over the next week or so.

Today was my first pill-free day in 5 years.  It’s a very odd feeling not to have to take anything.  I’m going to have to stow all the pills I have strewn around the house because I keep compulsively reaching for them out of habit, haha.  Finally being free of the pills has put me in a pretty good mood, certainly buoyed by the great week for me online, a series of wins like which I haven’t had in some time.  I felt I played pretty good throughout on sunday (I mean, 60% of what I won was in a turbo.  I ran hot as hell, obviously) and am feeling pretty good about my game.  Hopefully the results (read:heater) will continue (and maybe spill over into PLO).

I sent my latest video series over to PokerVT the other day.  I’ve been told they’ll be released next week.  It’s some of my best stuff yet in my opinion, a review of a $.5-$1 NL cash game played by one of my students.  It’ll be my first cash video for PVT and I hope it’ll be well-received.  Make sure to watch it and send me all your comments/questions, I love getting feedback from members on videos…don’t be shy.  I’ve been trying to post more on the forums so be sure to fire away anything you want to ask me over there.

In addition to all of this cool stuff going on, I’ve got a project under way this week that should make things work smoother around here if it’s successful.  I have a lot of faith right now that it’ll work out, but it’s kind of taking my attentions away from poker for a couple of days.  It’s a secret for now   I really want to play poker though, and I’ll be getting back to it asap.  Will be back to grinding this weekend if not before then.

Speaking of grinding, I finished Oz the other day.  God what a disaster that show turned into as the seasons went on.  After season 3 the plotlines were just consistently riddled with unfathomable logic.  Anyone who has seen the show knows what I mean, it’s not really something you can argue.  It was a good show, but by the end, I was so glad to be done with it.  Not sure what’s next but I’ve been meaning to get around to Big Love for only about 6 months now so probably that.

There’s a good chance I’ll be blogging more because of a prop bet I was offered by Leo/Pechorin.  He offered some sort of blogging-last longer thing that I think will be a good motivator for us to keep our blogs current.  I for one want to hear the thoughts of the world champion of HUNL and I’m pretty sure the internet does too. 

November was pretty damn good to me.  A lot of aspects of life are “progressing nicely” at the moment – I’ve got a rekindled desire to play online MTTs again, I’ve been successful at cash games, my coaching group is plugging along nicely, I’ve spent a ton of time working on my own game, and I’ve made a “life gamble” that hopefully will net gain happiness EV.  What a tease of me to put that last.

I’ve always loved tournaments.  Even in the old days when I was 18-19 and a MSNL cash player I’d enjoy the thrill and “challenge” of tournaments, even though I was making huuuuge mtt mistakes and basically donating (as much as a winning cash player could “donate” in 2006) week after week on sundays, never really winning any money.  Obviously my life changed once I started listening to Vivek and his hocus pocus aka “reasons for doing things” and started making sense of proper tournament strategy.  Mixed with a little bit of hijacked brown magic and you get a pretty ill 2007.  My affinity for the online variety of MTTs comes and goes; it’s not nearly as interesting as live tournaments are, and aren’t really played for large amounts of money, and structures tend to be pretty shallow and boring.  That being said, I’m back into them for the meantime, and the past few weeks have made 5 top-9 finishes (but 0 wins ) and it feels pretty good to be “back”.

In my last post that didn’t have anything to do with almonds, I mention that I’ve started dabbling in cash again and was looking to make a full transition back to it.  Well, de-rusting operation: success.   I’ve come back to the 3-6 games and put in a bunch of hands (without playing too much higher somehow!  well, at least not TOO often).  I’m very comfortable with my NL game right now and feel like it’s probably better than it’s ever been.  I’m putting a ton of hours every week into working on my game in watching videos or reading material, and reaping the benefits from all the coaching work I’ve been doing too.  My coaching experiment that I started a few months ago has been working on so many levels – it’s not what I exactly envisioned it would be, but it “works” much better than I imagined.  It’s obviously a good experience for the students, but it’s very very good for me as well as a player.  It’s an awesome motivator to keep current with videos, put in hours, and make sure all my reasoning is solid.  I’m very glad I did it and hopefully it’ll keep being successful.  I am still accepting students on a very limited basis, however, you need to have a minimum bankroll of 6k, some sort of reference (I have to know who you are or have someone I know vouch for you) and above all you have to have a passion and a ton of time to dedicate.  If you think you fit…well…message me.  Note even if you are the man I’ve been waiting all my life for you might not get in, though, since we’re pretty full at the moment, but you never know.

A few weeks ago, I played a guy at 2-4 HU plo.  In not too many hands, I was stuck 2.2K.  I felt like I wasn’t getting horribly outplayed but I really had no idea what was correct in so many spots.  I never really learned PLO or spent any time on the game (although I have HHs of playing 25-50 PLO from 2006, lol), and that loss although tiny financially kind of motivated me to unbury myself from my lifetime -70k cashgame PLO hole and really learn the game properly.  I’ve spent a dozen hours watching videos, about half that reading stuff, and about 25 playing the past week.  That is a lot of PLO.  I’m trying not to play above 3-6 (which can be a tough game sometimes), and so far so good – I’ve won about 5k at an avg stake of 2-4 and feel pretty comfortable.  My vpip has even sunk below 30 !!!!  I know, I didn’t believe it was possible either.  The first time I clicked fold facing a raise with I kinda tensed up for a moment sensing I was going to get smited from above for my sin, but I never did, so…maybe tight(ish) is right after all.  We’ll see.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis a few years ago, but outside of the 4-5 months of hellish misery a few years ago, I’ve been mostly fine and in remission.  I’ve decided though that the side effects of the colazal, the only medication I’m currently on to maintain remission, are just becoming too much on a day-to-day basis and I’m going to try to get off it entirely.  Rare is the day where I feel 100%; far more often I feel 80% and have some collection of headaches, pains, nausea, fatigue, tired from trouble sleeping, etc.  The hair thinning is annoying as hell too for a 22 year old.  I used to blame all the aches/pains/problems on the colitis itself, but it appears my maladies seem at least somewhat likely to be a side effect of the pills.  I wasn’t even able to swallow a pill until I was 17, and once I got sick, I haven’t had a day go by since then where I wasn’t taking something.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I know how bad some people with UC have it, and I’m very appreciative to be in remission and all, but I have to see if I can live better with less meds/no meds/different meds.  As my awesome doctor says, we can do whatever I want medication-wise, since I’m the one risking the misery of a flareup.  More gambling.

In PokerVT news, I’ve recently finished a 2.5 hour video that I truly think is my one of my best ever.  It came out really, really good, and I think it’ll be very well received.  It’s certainly not a beginner video, but I think I explain myself pretty well and obviously I’ll be available for questions after the videos are posted.  There’s also several ridiculously cool series in the works that I’m going to be involved in that will make for some awesome content….look for that in early of next year.  And maybe a blog post before then.  Promises, promises…

a few days ago I found a package on my porch. it was pretty large – the side of the box informed me that it weighed almost 35 pounds. I was worried that I’d have to call some burly friends to help me move it, but I remembered a trick I had learned in my youth and successfully moved the box inside. Here is a short clip of the operation:

But what is it??? I hadn’t ordered anything lately, and was quite curious what fantastic item could be contained in such a high available content container. But look! On the side!

WOW! I’m rich! If you haven’t seen it, during the last bellagio $15K I made all the requisite bold moves necessary to land the biggest achievement of my career, the BOLD DIAMONDS BLUE PLAYER OF THE DAY, scoring me a YEAR SUPPLY of almonds (also that video finally motivated me to have none other than phil ivey’s barber cut my hair). By the end of the tournament, I hadn’t just won almonds but I also won weeks of recurring nightmares after being chip lead going into day 3 and bubbling on day 4 (sigh). Anyway, back to the box.

One might suggest another item for scale purposes; however, I don’t think I’ve done anything besides play call of duty and eat spaghetti in about a month and it seems like a tragedy to put spaghetti on the floor, so controller it is.

Upon opening up the packaging, I see five “cases” of almonds, all of a quite wonderful variety.

If you can’t quite make it out, the flavors are jalapeno smokehouse, lime+chili, wasabi+soy sauce, habanero bbq, and bold salt + vinegar. If you know me at all, you know that these flavors suite my taste palette PERFECTLY. Or, well, not. Not that I’d necessarily even eat plain almonds, but still, habanero, wasabi, and jalapeno? I might as well drink ground up glass for what it’ll do to my colon. I do like salt though (but I’ve never had bold salt) and vinegar is always good on a salad (as long as its specifically red wine). Upon looking at all these, I pause for a moment and wistfully think about what could have been, that perhaps there could have been a Kraft-y Bluffer of the Day instead for potential macaroni riches or some such instead, but it is what it is. But if I’m not going to eat them, what do I do with them?

The answer seemed pretty obvious….

Yes, I’m a whore. But I’m a whore with almonds. After spending an embarrassingly long time trying to stack these almonds in other configurations (spirals are TOUGH), my mind started to wonder : just how long would these last an adult with normal ish eating habits? These are supposed to be a year’s supply, yet they expire in 3 years. That’s kind of them to give some wiggle room there.

There’s 60 almond cans, each claiming to contain 6 servings, each serving size being 28 almonds. That’s a total of 360 servings, 10,080 almonds, and a grand total of 61,200 calories (170 per serving,*6,*60). If you ate 2 servings, or 56 almonds a day, it would last you 180 days. Apparently, they suggest you eat only 1 serving a day if you want to make this last you a a year.

Real blog post coming again soon, some quick good news for PokerVT subscribers though – I’ll be making a few new series to be released in December, alongside a cool one I did with Pearljammer that’s finished and going to be released soon as well.

I planned to spend today at work (yes, at work!) on various projects and can report a pretty varying degree of successes:

1. I planned to finally get officially started with a workout program/diet regimen with Alfalfa from SA. He operates a company called PetraFitness where he creates customized plans for training/nutrition. I was active pretty much all throughout my life up til the past few years when poker and traveling kind of put a stop to it all – but hopefully this program works out and gets me back on the good health wagon. I got in touch with David earlier and it seems we’re good to get started, so mission accomplished here.

2. I planned on playing some cash this morning. Not much was running when I wanted to start, so I ended up putting in a shorter session since there wasn’t too much action. I’ve really been committed to playing a bunch of hands at 3/6 before moving up and have been mostly successful in this ‘mandate’. There’s no real reason for it – I’m a winner at everything up to 50-100 – I just haven’t played cash in awhile and wanted to put in a bunch of hands to get the rust off before letting my inner degen out to play 500-1k. I’m pretty happy with how it’s been going, although I’ve certainly been running pretty well. There was a hand today – co raises, btn calls, I call bb w KQ w/ the K of clubs, flop comes JcTc9c and get it in 3 ways vs JJ and Ac2c. Equity looks pretty dismal…until we river the ol queen of clubs for the scoop. Yeah, I’d say I’m running well. Anyway, I ended up playing for about 90 minutes or so and won about $1500. I was going to play longer, but I wanted to get to the loftiest goal of the day…

3. FIX THE FUCKING DESKTOP. I pretty much knew starting the day that this was going to be the worst task ahead of me, likely meaning sitting on the phone with Dell for hours on end. After spending at least 30 minutes trying to find the “right” number (XPS ‘premier’ support might be the biggest inside joke in Dell company history) I got hold of a woman who clearly had no idea what to do with me and my fairly complex issue. After a 105 minute phone call, about 60 minutes of those with me sitting on hold, and literally 0 progress, the phone call disconnects – without me having been given a case number. Sigh.

I call back a few hours later, this time to a different number. Energized by what might have been the most unique meal I’ve ever made for myself – baked tilapia with string beans (yes, you are still reading a jcarver post!) – I prepared myself for another war of attrition with support.

This time I spoke to a guy who had a much better grasp of “computers” than the first woman. I was put on hold for very short periods of time, a case was officially detailed, and we actually did things that might result in a solution. In the end, it seems like Dell is going to have to ship a bunch of new components – hopefully that’ll fix whatever the issue was.

I feel like I’ve been pretty productive so far today – compared to my usual definitions of productive being “get out of bed” and all, this is like building the golden gate bridge in a day – but there’s one thing left that I’d like to get straightened out. The prop bet that’s been proposed to me seems to be falling through mostly due to the fact that I’m having trouble quantifying the very hard-to-define edge that my competitor has. In short, it’s a profit race; the first one to $X in income wins an additional (large) sum.

The sticking point in getting this off the ground is that I’d be restricted to mid-stakes cash (no higher than 10-20), where I’m a proven winner, versus his mid-stakes PLO + SNG play, where he’s not a proven winner. I’d certainly be a favorite straight up, but he wants some silly amount of edges (rakeback, etc) to balance my perceived edge, complicating things. I’d like to do the bet but I’m not going to do some huge prop bet if there’s a chance of hustlage…we’ll see. The other thing is that this is a “volume bet”, meant to get both of us to play more than he currently does. I, for one, am happy with my amount of play, and I kind of like the idea of being free to do other things if for some reason I wanted to in the next 4 months. If I took this bet, I wouldn’t have that freedom, so…meh at the spot.

I’m playing the PLO and 2-7TD wcoops tonight. I’m not particularly good at PLO, but I’ve been watching a lot of jman’s videos lately trying to improve my understanding of the game, with mixed results. I want to play a bunch of plo hands at $3-$6 or $2-$4 to try to get more experience at some point – I enjoy the game a ton, but there’s just so much I don’t know about it…gotta get some more experience. 2-7TD I’m even more inexperienced at – Daniel’s been trying to teach me but I still make rather silly mistakes. Mind you, I’ve been playing fairly high stakes 8game – 40-80 on average – where my mistakes are amplified and exploited more often than not – but in a $300 tournament, I think I have a (tiny) edge on the field. I probably should get to focusing to this moon poker, so let me just say there’s a little PokerVT news and maybe a little more poker conversation to come in the next few blogs…

I’ve spent the past few weeks in kind of an odd cycle; for me, that means something, considering my definitions of “normal”. I’ve been feeling kind of strange, sleeping consistently oddly short durations, and ontop of all this I’ve had some weird computer issues come up lately.

I’ve been having computer problems for a few weeks now, maybe a month. My computer was freezing up every 30 minutes or so for a duration of anything from 5 to 45 seconds – 5 being ok, but 45 certainly not, especially when facing river bets with the nuts, resulting in costly timeouts (these cost me about $3000 in the last week of August alone). I took some steps to fix it (I thought), identifying the supposed problem as a HD error, repairing then disabling said HD, all to no avail. The new HD is having a similar issue only worse with different symptoms; the main problem is that the freeze now is telegraphed by sound failures, and it seems to be permanent and only fixable by restart, not lasting 5-45 seconds and recovering as it was. These freezes only seems to happen while I’m playing poker.

I’m not really sure what the cause is now – my jury-rigged setup of disabled components and the like haven’t solved any problems or helped to clarify what they even are. The setup is under warranty, but I just don’t have time during WCOOP to sit for hours with dell support while they go through all the tests only to tell me they have no clue and have to send someone/parts/have the machine sent back. So far, the only thing I’ve been able to do to prevent freezes is to restart every 90 minutes or so. If the restart button was replaced with an entry console requiring entry of 4-8-15-16-23-42 I believe I’d be able to legally change my name to Desmond…so I guess there’s one upside to this.

WCOOP is underway, likely the slowest, deepest tournament series in terms of real-dollar value in the world (even (somehow!!) better than any of the DEEPSTACK/MEGASTACK/other appropriately capitalized tournaments). At this point in my career, $200 tournaments with super long levels and a zillion bbs strikes me a little bit as structure overkill. Don’t get me wrong – I love a good slow structure, especially a deep one… I just think doing it on $200 events is a tad silly, especially when compared with similar live tournaments. Here’s a quick, highlight comparison between the $500 WCOOP event and the $5k WSOP event:

The two events are pretty damn competitive – I’d even give the nod for better structure to the $500 WCOOP for early stages, and probably mid-stages too – especially when taking hands/hr into account. The 5K WSOP event is probably a better-structured tournament deep (due to having 3 days to finish the tournament and all), but the fact that the two are so competitive strikes me as…wrong. Maybe I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth – maybe I should be thanking Pokerstars for developing these great structures and instead write angry posts about live events being too fast (”look how this “PRESTIGIOUS” event’s structure compares to this online (SNEER here) tournament!”).

Be that as it may, I think the WCOOP events should be on average a tad faster ($200 on Sunday going 1pm-8am?). The WCOOP sunday prize pools are huge and deserving of a very good structure – which this certainly is, if not great – I just think they might be a little TOO good considering the buy-in. However, I understand Stars’ view that this is meant to be truly prestigious, a “championship”-caliber event with a “championship”-caliber structure, and that all who enter know what they’re getting into – and frankly, the huge fields suggest Stars might be onto something here. In the end, if the option is to have it this way or not to have it, I’ll gladly take it – I just wish the buyins were a notch or two higher. But, Stars’ll say, don’t worry, JCarver! We’ve got just the cure for your deep-stack slow-structure high-roller degen needs. Oh really?

This leads me to my so-far-biggest gripe I have had with WCOOP thus far. If you don’t know, Pokerstars made a bit of an inexplicable decision in regard to the $10K WCOOP to use the same structure as the 2-day $500 WCOOP event taking place on the same day. Same starting stack, same structure, same level length…that is, until it removed the 25-50 level the day or so before, leaving it to start at 30-60, making it FASTER than the $500 WCOOP. Huh?

3 hours in, 210 players remained of the starting 300. In a $10K. Full disclosure : I myself was out in 40 minutes, my fastest-ever departure from a 10k (so clearly the structure was SHIT !!), but the fact is, the structure was just inappropriate for a $10K tournament. You really can’t add more levels (besides 25-50), so unless you want to increase time of levels (doubt stars does), the last option is to increase starting stack to 15 or 20k. I’ve yet to hear an explanation for NOT making it deeper/slower – in a WCOOP series defended as a “championship” I can’t understand why PS would make such a big event paced this way. The players don’t want it, it doesn’t benefit PS in any way (probably no rake gain either way, if anything they’d get more people for a better tournament)… I just don’t get it, and hope Stars corrects this for future high roller events.

In a final stars gripe, in yesterday’s 4-max WCOOP, I faced several tough decisions early on (something that’ll happen quite often in a structure like this, effectively a 200bb+ deep shorthanded poker game for at least the whole time I was in) and used most of my time bank up early. By about the 6 hour mark I had 0 timebank remaining. I knew this was going to be a problem as I’m fairly deliberate (in my defense, burning 180sec of timebank over 8 hrs of super-deep 4max poker is hardly unreasonable). The non-regenerating timebank issues have been called out by the community as something that must be fixed – that’s pretty well known, and I’m not going to hash the argument out here.

The silly thing is when this pairs with another fairly unknown not-understandable decision by stars to have the default action when facing no action and timing out to be a fold. That’s right, if you are first to act postflop facing no action, have no timebank, and are thinking about what to do and don’t act in time, your hand is FOLDED. This happened yesterday:

PokerStars Game #32578277718: Tournament #200909012, $200+$15 USD Hold’em No Limit – Level XVII (400/800) – 2009/09/07 20:52:38 ET
Table ‘200909012 100′ 4-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: Taknapotin (207131 in chips)
Seat 2: Giant_kill (182236 in chips)
Seat 3: ArbahChamesh (66092 in chips)
Seat 4: lordhuttyx (80973 in chips)
Taknapotin: posts the ante 100
Giant_kill: posts the ante 100
ArbahChamesh: posts the ante 100
lordhuttyx: posts the ante 100
Taknapotin: posts small blind 400
Giant_kill: posts big blind 800
*** HOLE CARDS ***
ArbahChamesh: raises 1200 to 2000
lordhuttyx: calls 2000
Taknapotin: raises 6800 to 8800
Giant_kill: folds
ArbahChamesh: folds
lordhuttyx: calls 6800
*** FLOP ***
Taknapotin: bets 9500
lordhuttyx: calls 9500
*** TURN ***
Taknapotin has timed out
Taknapotin: folds
Taknapotin is sitting out
Taknapotin has returned
lordhuttyx collected 39800 from pot

I mean, really? This isn’t a new policy – just one I’ve never really experienced before firsthand. Why not just check? I absolutely don’t understand this “rule”, especially when there’s not even a countdown timer a la FTP’s where you can see your time about to run out and know you have to make a decision NOW (FTP’s system default, fwiw, is to check). On stars, though, there’s just one 14 second warning and then nothing else to indicate a pending timeout. Seems pretty dumb to me.

In other news, I finally finished the West Wing in its entirety this morning. What a great show and a refreshingly awesome final season to close it out. Between that and having caught up on Burn Notice, I don’t think I have any shows that I’m in the process of watching that aren’t live. Can’t remember when the last time that was. I have a few new shows sitting around to be watched when I get around to it – Big Love, Californication, and Oz.

For now, I’ll be shelving TV and the like to continue focusing on poker for the next few weeks, and maybe beyond that. More on that in the next post – I’ve been challenged to a pretty huge prop bet – my biggest ever, by far – a fun, tough, high stakes challenge that I just might end up taking. We’ll see. Good luck to all for the rest of WCOOP.

edit: thanks to cory dowd (!!) for catching errors in the wcoop/wsop comparison table.