... and for once it's not mine!

Full Tilt is running a promo called "Biggest Bonus Ever". Not sure why, but really who cares. I think it's a no-deposit bonus up to $100 for anyone who has earned a Full Tilt Point prior to July 28. You have to "accept" the offer in order to claim the bonus.

I have no idea what the playthru requirements are, but if you're going to play anyway you might as well get free money for doing so. Visit the FTP website for more details.

Hi. I'm not a Luddite, but sometimes I play one on the internets. It's not always by choice.

If you watch television or get a lot of junk mail, you'd believe that we're in this glorious era of infinite electronic communication. Phones! Wireless! Wi-fi! 9thG internet! iPhones! Twitter! Eight gazillion channels of crystal clear television! I suppose that we are in that era, but since there's (usually) no such thing as a free lunch, you have to pay to play.

I've been slowly dropping off the grid for years now. A home telephone line was the first to go. Other than missing the very occasional "OMG I'm in jail" call on the weekends, there have been no negatives. I would say my quality of life actually improved, since I get 99% fewer telemarketing calls with just a cell phone. Cable TV went a few years ago and except for selected sporting events I don't miss that either. Sure, the whole "I'll have a bunch more time to do stuff around the house" plan hasn't worked out as intended - any time saved has been sucked up by the internets - but thanks largely to the 'net I haven't missed anything important.

It may be that the internet is the next to go, and the thought of that has me antsy. I've been less than 100% thrilled with my provider, but most of the time they've offered acceptable service. But as of any day now they're switching over to a new technology, one which would require completely different hardware and a physical installation that I'm not keen on. And the cost of service would increase ... by about 60% per month over what I've been paying.

The alternatives aren't promising - dialup or DSL would require a home phone line, and the last time I checked the cable company required that you at least pay for basic TV on top of their internet service charge. Obviously I will check again, but ... sigh.

Change is hard. On a personal level, just letting it go would probably be a good thing - about 99% of all time spent on the internet at home is wasted, maybe a few ticks lower than that if you factor in the couple things I do to bring in a dollar here and there. There just isn't a real reason that I couldn't do those things at work during off hours. It's not like it's that far away.

Time will tell what I end up doing, but I do know this - if I drop the home internet any online (play chip) poker play will quickly drop to zero.

Or maybe it's just Thursday and I'm annoyed with being at work.

This post will be mostly content-free, as usual.

Played in the special Saturdays With Dr. Pauly event. Fun as always, nothing like a little four card bingo. Ran up a huge stack but ended up in fourth after making one lousy mistake, messing with Dr. Chako when he was on a heater. Oh, well.

I put my computer to the test by also playing several tables of "cash" PLO on Full Tilt and playing music via Youtube while the tournament was going on. There were times I thought I was running a first gen IBM PC, but I made it through without a major crash. Lucky. Some day I really need to get a new 'puter. And real internet service while I'm at it.

I'm starting to jones for a little live action. I don't know if I can scrounge up a charity room sized buyin at the moment, so I may have to make some discreet inquiries about nickel-dime-quarter level home games.

Speaking of charity rooms, I see that the Charitable Gaming division nixed some of the ideas that the Holland Poker Zone had to spice up the games - paying for quads, high hands and a bad beat jackpot. While I'm not a big fan of an extra drop to fund that stuff, it does juice the action a bit. Too bad.

I half expect that they're going to drop the hammer on the whole charity poker thing any day now. Nothing to base that on ... just a suspicion that the jokers that control such things won't be able to resist the temptation to deprive people of honest fun.

With the end of the World Serious Of Poker, there doesn't seem to be much going on out there. The dog days of summer appear to coincide nicely with a dead zone in the poker calendar.

I've been playing a bit, mostly play chip PLO at Full Tilt. I win some, I have a bad session. Rinse, repeat. My hypothetical bankroll hasn't moved much in months, which leads me to believe that I'm pretty break even. I'm starting to mix in more lower level games with good results thus far.

One thing I've been puzzling over is the optimal number of tables to be playing. I know that for me, playing PLO, the number is more than 1. If I'm 1-tabling, I get bored and press. I'm also pretty sure that the number is less than 6. When I fire up that many tables or more I tend to make less than optimal decisions. As it stands right now, I think the ideal number is 4 - which is hard enough to reach given the relative dearth of full ring PLO games on FTP.

Anyway, that is what's happening. I'm certainly devoting much much more time to the golf course than the felt. Once football season starts I'll be devoting a bunch of time to that. I may have no life, but at least it's a balanced no life.

I think I've discovered the problem.

Well, yes, sucking at poker is part of the problem. Thank you for pointing that out.

The rest appears to be playing too high.

I opened up a 10 PLO table and after an early stacking have run it up to over 70.

I don't need to play better, I just need more retarted opponents!

Which has made more donkeys into "ballas":

1. Luckboxing of multi-table tournament(s)

or

2. Running hotter than the sun at cash games?

Curious mind wants to know.


This probably belongs in a Facebook update, but I'm temporarily running good at lifegolf. Poker is a frustrating series of up and down always stuck in the same range.

... and the RNG taketh away.

Great session last night, started out on fire. Got a nice 10% boost to the play chip roll when it was all said and done.

And then, just when I think tonight is going well again, I ran into your stock omatard and took a standard retard beat:

I flop the nut straight, 3 in the pot. Idiot bets out 4, I call to control pot size and see what the turn brings. Turn is harmless. Idiot pots it, 12. I re-pot, raising to 48. Idiot has to call 36 into a 71 pot, so he's getting 2 to 1 on his call. I only have 5 behind. He calls. River pairs the board, rewarding idiot who shows that he flopped middle set.

Let me get this straight. You call getting 2 to 1 with middle set, into strength, on an obvious straight board, with no implied odds and nothing to back it up but a prayer for the board to pair or that your eight high frush redraw might be good? When you're at least a 4-1 dog?

Sorry, I forgot myself for a moment there. This is omadraw, where it's call call call and fold the river if you miss. I should WANT opponents like this. And I would, but for the fact that they get rewarded for stupid plays while I get stacked when I screw up.

Okay. Vent over. Feel better. Now I have go earn that dollar I owe you for the bad beat story.

I've been feeling disconnected lately, in more ways than one.

The main event at the World Series of Poker starts Friday. Yay, I guess. I've paid nearly zero attention to the spectacle this year, checking PokerNews once or twice when a blogger has made a run in one of the preliminary events. Some folks have had nice scores, and I guess that Hoyazo's $51k win in the Venetian series is pretty darned impressive as well. And - pending trip reports - it looks like there were some winners at Binions too. Well done.

While y'all are out there winning the big bucks, I actually found myself playing online four days in a row for the first time in ages. Actually, I should change that - I played three days in a row and on the fourth day gave back most of the winnings thanks to Full Tilt disconnecting me. Repeated disconnecting. It's really annoying to have that happen when you're holding the nuts and you have an omatard betting into you - and then you come back and half your stack is gone.

It's hard to muster up a whole lot of enthusiasm anymore for online play chip nano stakes. I stupidly play way above my LOLroll now - mostly the play chip equivalent of 50PLO and 100PLO. I even played the (fake) 200PLO for a while the other day, which is SUPER retarded when I have barely three buyins for that game accumulated.


On a different subject, Smokkee has been teasing the return of the Bodog Blogger Blonkament series. If you haven't bookmarked his new site, you might want to do that so that you don't miss out. I think I might have to fire up the software and see if I have any kind of balance.