Poker already

The other night I started playing some .10-.20 limit on Cake poker. Not exactly enamored of the Cake interface but it’s a site that my online leagues use so I play it every now and then. Somewhere along the line I must have cashed a league freeroll because a couple of weeks ago, when signing up for a league game, I found 20 bucks sitting there. Thanks to a combination of the live play I had been doing and the funk I had been in I hadn’t played too many league games so who knows how long that money was there. Point is, it was and the other night I was bored and so decided to go looking for a place to play. Decided to check out Cake and found, to my surprise, there were actually some limit games running.

Yes, I know, all you hot shot players look down your nose at limit. It’s NL for hold em and PL for Omaha. Can’t make money at limit. Can’t bet people off their draws in limit, get too many people chasing. Yup, you’re right, got those problems with limit. Of course they are considered problems only because most players view limit poker with a no limit mentality. Limit can be a gold mine if approached the right way, at least at lower levels. The NL mentality combined with the propensity of people not only to chase but to chase bad draws can make it profitable. People think I’m lying when I’ve said I’ve cashed out $500-600 after a night of 2-4 or 3-6 limit but I’ve done it on more than one occasion. It’s not common but it’s happened. A trip to Vegas a few years back I was up $1500 my first two days playing between 2-4 and 4-8 limit and $200 to $300 is not uncommon after a night of 3-6 in AC. I’ve been asked why even play NL if I can do so well playing limit. Hey, I like all the games, except maybe Badugi, and need to keep my hand in. Besides, never said NL was unprofitable. Maybe more on my limit philosophy another time. Back to Cake.

As I said, I saw the limit games and decided, what the hell, let’s see how they are. Was going to sit at a penny table and decided, why bother, if I lose my money here it’s not a great site for me anywho so who cares and went to a .10-.20 table and realized I walked in to a limit player’s dream. There was a character there who raised almost every hand preflop, rarely folding, and who would just keep firing bullets after the flop. No one gets that many good hands which usually means they think they scare people out or they just don’t give a damn. Works for them a lot of times but it also means that you can pull some money in on decent hands and really get paid off on your monsters, which is where it’s at in limit. You need those big pots on monsters to offset those payoffs on the suckouts and these are the kind of people who make sure those big pots are there. Watched the action for awhile and noticed some really weak hands winning on fairly strong boards even though there were pre and post flop raises and very little checking. The one guy was pushing the action and one or two people had caught on to him and would call him down to the river if they caught a pair even if it wasn’t all that big. Many times it was big enough. So I jump in to the action but my luck at the beginning ain’t so hot. I catch a number of hands of the kind I like to play in limit but the flops are unkind and those preflop raises are making the bite a bit bigger than it normally would be. I finally start to catch some cards and now it’s worth playing. Another crazy has sat down and between the two of them willing to bet with nothing and the natural calling stations that gravitate to limit games I wind up over 3 times my buy in. I like this. Returned the next night and did even better since a couple of the same people were sitting at the tables. Looking things over it seems they people are also multi tabling. Considering the way they are playing and the money they are tossing around you would think they would just play a more solid game at better stakes but who am I to argue if they want to hand over their money. It ain’t a whole lot but it will keep me in league buy in games, around 3 or 5 dollars a pop, for a month or so. It was interesting to note that one of the crazies eventually wised up a bit. I started noticing some checks and folds from him, at least the hands I was in, instead of the constant firing. Sat down for a third time later that day but the crazies weren’t there and the table was considerably tighter. Dropped a few bucks there as the cards sucked and there was no one paying off the decent hands and the monsters weren’t bringing the payouts to offset the suckouts. Left fairly quickly as soon as I realized that it wasn’t the kind of table to suit my play. I’m not looking for action the way some of these folks seem to be, I’m just looking for a way to relieve the boredom while adding some funds to the bankroll. Sitting here playing some as I type this. Table not to my total liking but cards are hitting when I play and enough calling stations to keep my head above water so far. Won’t be hard to leave if things go south however. Can’t stay at it too long anyway as have to do some running around shortly.

Well, ran my errands. Left the table after tripling the buy in. Might have stayed longer but one of the places I had to get to closes early today and since I was getting dinner fixins couldn’t afford to get there too late. After 3 days I’ve doubled the bankroll on Cake. Now that I’ve stated that fact I’ll probably donk it all off in the next few days. In regards to donking someone left me a text about a PLO game last night with a possible NLHE table going also. Too bad my phone was on charge and I didn’t see it until I picked it up before I went out today. PLO is always good for donking off some chips and I’ve been dying for some live play. Been 2 months since I’ve hit AC and even longer since we had a local game.

Speaking of poker and Cake in particular, it seems the staff of the poker forum I frequent has voted me to the forum team that plays in the forum wars sponsored by the Gaming Forum Network. It’s a monthly series of 4 games, a freeroll and 3 small buy ins in which the members of GFN put up a team of about 15 players each. In addition to the prizes for the game there are individual prizes for cumulative best showing and the winning forum gets a freeroll for its members. Of course the March games are being played at Power Poker, where I currently have no account and no money. That’s not a big problem as I already said that I would play if I made the team and would sign up if so. The problem with the situation is that Power is part of the Cake network. Problem with networked sites is that everyone has different rules on joining sister sites and no one ever seems to put these rules where they are readily available. Some networks want you to use the same account logon but different screen names. Some do it in reverse. Others tell you to open up brand new accounts from the word go. Of course nothing usually comes of violating these rules except every so often you hear the horror stories of someone hitting big and trying to cash and then find their account locked because they violated the rules by having 2 accounts on the same network. Does make you wonder if there is a reason the network rules are not positioned front and center. They make it sound so easy to sign up and no where, at least in all those sign up instructions, is there any clue as to what to do if you already have an account on the network. Might be buried somewhere in the TOS but that ain’t exactly front and center, more like the fine print. And it is not just the Cake network, it’s most of them. So caveat emptor for those signing on to new sites, check to see if they are part of a network and then find the network rules.

Damn, look at this. Said I wasn’t going to talk as much poker and here I am doing it on my 3rd post back. Of course discussing online poker is a lot easier for me as I can type while playing rather than trying to remember my live sessions after I get back from AC. So we wind up boring you about poker once again and it ain’t really about decent money either. Oh well, Thanks for the listen anyhow.

Should I open a library

Been spending the last couple weeks cataloging the personal library. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years and occasionally actually started but never continued with. Lets face it data entry is boring as hell but with time on my hands I decided to use such time to start practice working with Access, when I thought I might still be able to reenter the IT world, and to try and get a listing of my books as I lose track of what I have at times. I also hope to use it as a stepping stone to inventorying all items of value in the house in case of disaster striking the premises. My movie collection is almost as big as my book one though not as valuable. Need to design some new tables and forms for that though,

Always been a reader and discovered the world of paperbacks in a big way in my high school years. Still have a lot of those books around, though a number of them wound up destroyed during a move back home after college. In college I discovered that hardbacks last longer and book club editions weren’t that expensive. Somewhere along the line though I started collecting and found out that book club editions or BCE as they can be termed don’t really have much value except as reading material, so I moved into acquiring American first editions of the authors I liked, mainly in sf and mystery. All this is to explain the cataloging job. One, I have a lot of books and two, I need to keep track because I don’t really need to spend money on copies of something that is already in the collection or, if I am going to buy another copy, to make sure it is an upgrade to the one I have. Hence my brand new database and my project.

So far I’ve entered 380 books and haven’t really even started on the shelves yet. These are the ones just lying around in the den or the living room or wherever. The bedroom has yielded over 100 volumes alone. When the weather breaks and allows me to enter and sort through my shed I know there are 3-4 Rubbermaid containers out there containing paperbacks. Ever since the debacle of my return from college I no longer use cardboard to store books. Looking at some of the prices my old paperbacks from back in my high school days are fetching these days (no remarks about sheer age adding to the value either) that episode cost me a pretty penny in investment value in addition to the reading material. Not that I ever thought in terms of paperbacks becoming worth money. Just found that out as I was cataloging and decided to see what it would take to replace some missing volumes in the series I once collected. Found one sf/fantasy series I used to read in high school and college selling for $800 to $1000 for the complete 26 book set in firsts. This for a bunch of paperbacks that cost from $.75 to $2.95 when they came out. Guess what I’m sitting on? Yup, all 26 of them, first printings and most in mint condition. Problem is can I bear to part with them? Collectors just hate to sell unless it’s a duplicate copy of something.

Another reason for the cataloging is that I have been thinking of opening up an e store dealing in books. As I’m not going to be able to return to work in the foreseeable future, if ever, I’m going to need something to give me some income so it’s either enhance my poker skills tremendously or think of something else. Since books and computers are the things I know best the e store seems to be the path to investigate. Anyone with any knowledge or insights to this endeavor please feel free to comment. Any and all advice highly appreciated. We’ll see how this works out. Actually owning a bookstore always had been a dream of mine but in those days it was the B&M type. Who knows, there is still a chance. Would love to have something to pass on to my daughter as her love of books rivals mine.

Speaking of books and my daughter, I was digging around in an old magazine rack last night and came across a book whose disappearance has puzzled me for at least 10 years. It’s a copy of H. Beam Piper’s The Fuzzy Papers that I got through the Science Fiction Book Club way back in my college years. I have always enjoyed Piper’s work and I went looking for this one way back when. It interested me at the time as it works on many levels. It’s a nice, good read which is the main thing. Piper was a good story teller and his tales are good even if you don’t like material with messages in them. It can be cute enough for kids, in fact I think they have brought out an illustrated kid’s version of the story. I mean with a character called Little Fuzzy with all its connotations how can it not appeal to kids? This is the reason I went searching for it years ago. I came across the dust jacket lying in a drawer and thought that it would have been an interesting story to read to my daughter when she was younger. I went searching, figuring that book had to be somewhere but never could find it even though I would go looking every couple of months. Finally it works on the adult level of being a story involving an issue that might not be exactly black and white and that how one sees something may depend entirely on where one is standing and how shifting one’s viewpoint can help understand where the other guy is coming from and possibly reach an accord with them rather than bashing each other’s brains out. Daughter is now too old to sit in my lap and have me read to her but hopefully she’ll read and enjoy it on her own now that I’ve unearthed it. Now I just have to figure out where I put the damned dust jacket.

Well we’ve gotten wordy as usual but we have nothing but time on our hands these days so it don’t bother me and hope it doesn’t bother you either. Of course if it does you’ll probably just ignore me anyway. Enjoy or not but Thanks for the visit

What the hell

Hello folks, been awhile. Number of issues have kept me away and may do so again but some folks persuaded me to write again so I thought I might try. We’ll see what happens.

Snowing out there right now, it’s been that kind of winter, and the snow has just highlighted one of the reasons I’ve been gone. It just rubs my face in to the fact I fell helpless at times. Though I’ve recovered some use of my arm after the stroke it’s still weaker than I thought it would be now. Add in some lingering weakness in my leg and just some general all around lousy conditioning thanks to a couple of other problems that have kept me from the gym the last few months and I can’t do a frikkin thing about all this snow on the ground. Hell I can’t even lace up my boots properly without a struggle. While never the most ambitious of persons I never had to rely on others to do my work for me. It’s enough to drive anyone into a blue funk. We’ll see if we can keep from diving back in.

Speaking of work I finally convinced myself that I wasn’t going to make it back into the workforce in any foreseeable future. I knew I was out of back up options due to the fact I can’t really walk for more than a block at one time, and still need my cane, nor even stand up for any extended period. Always thought that I could get myself back in the IT field however, no great need for physical labor there as long as you can get someone to carry the equipment when needed. My hand however, has decided to disabuse me of those notions. When I first started getting the use of it back it came along so fast that I thought that I’d be up and running by January. Last January that is. Then I figured maybe by October that made it a year. Well, October has come and gone and I’m still typing one handed. Don’t get me wrong, it has improved, slowly, but it’s still not nimble enough to work a keyboard the way it needs to be massaged nor to work with the small bits and connectors that make up the hardware of a computer. Adding insult to injury my arthritis, a bane for over 30 years, has finally decided to start playing hell with my good hand. Basically what all this adds up to is that I finally let myself be convinced to file for disability. It’s not something I really wanted to do. Not only does the government put you through hell, or so I’m told, to qualify but it forces on you a realization that you are no longer a productive member of society. You can’t even support yourself let alone those that depend on you. You now depend on others. . Unemployment was bad enough. There’s always the feeling that you’ll get back in there on day, just need a break. Disability is permanent. It’s a scary feeling.

So, we’re back and we’ll see where it goes. Will probably be less poker discussed, though still some, as when I’m in poker playing moods I kind of forget about other things and so I can never really get to the keyboard while things are fresh in my memory. Probably be more on books, movies, my doings in the garden (right now I have two willow trees that I forgot to get in the ground last fall growing in pots in my basement) and other assorted things. I am reading at a greater rate than I had been as the arm has gotten strong enough to hold up a hardback for a decent length of time though nothing compared to my former days. Turning pages can still be a bitch though with my recalcitrant fingers. I may have to go looking for my old keyboards also for my desktop computers as the split boards I have come to love so much over the last few years just aren’t made for one handed work. Well it feels good to be back, now at least, and we’ll try and keep you informed of my trials and tribulations with good old Uncle as I wind my way through the disability tango.

Thanks for those of you who have come back to read this and Thanks to those of you who encouraged me to return.