Ivy update:

Our daughter just got back from her two month weigh-in.  It confirmed what we suspected:  she’s fat.  She’s in the 50th percentile for height and the 97th percentile for weight.  My favorite names for her are Chubb Rock and ChubNugget (Janeen prefers ChunkyMonkey).  She is the youngest human in recorded history with a muffin top.  I ought to call Guinness.

She’s also quite adorable.  It’s been a great pleasure to witness the development of the earliest stages of cognition.  Ivy now recognizes Mommy and Daddy, as evidenced by the various grunts, coos and smiles she emits when we look (and make funny faces) at her.

this is how we blog!

Online Poker update:

Now that football season has sadly concluded, the ongoing saga of Sugar D vs. Online Poker is back in full swing.  On Sunday, I forced myself to play a full schedule (relative term, read:  “full for me”) of online tournaments.  At 2:00 EST I registered for everything that was going on at that time.  This included a $10 event on Pokerstars with a $40,000 guarantee.  Over 12,300 players ended up participating, creating a $120,000 prize pool with over $13,000 being awarded to the first place finisher.  Somehow, eight hours later I was the chip leader with eleven players remaining.  My ten opponents were all much worse at tournament poker than me, in varying degrees.

I’m still second-guessing myself over the following hand:

Eleven players remained.  I held the chip lead by a narrow margin with two other players trailing me very closely.  I was at a five-handed table and had been opening almost every time the action was folded to me.  The player to my direct left was timebomb crazy, seemed totally unafraid of bubbling the final table and was, in general terms, ready to rock.  He/she had 20 big blinds and I had something like 35 big blinds.

On my small blind I picked up AJhh and the action folded to me.  This left me with two choices:  jam all in, a play that would fold out many worse hands but safely allow me to chip up without showdown most of the time, OR raise small to induce a shove from my opponent—a shove I’d call with what is likely to be the best hand.

It was a close enough decision that I actually used some of my time bank deciding.  In a higher-stakes tournament with players of higher caliber, this would not be a difficult decision:  I would raise to induce a shove 100% of the time.  In this tournament, my edge over the field and the ICM-here-come-the-pay-jumps considerations dictated that I should give some thought to making the lower-variance play, which would allow me to cruise to the final table without needlessly risking over 50% of my stack.

In the end (play to win!) I raised smallish.  As expected the timebomb jammed.  I snapped, he had K8o, and of course I lost the pot.  I went to the final table in 7th place out of 9 remaining, picked up AK on the button and found myself all in against KK, and that was that.  I was out 9th for something like $850.00.  Yippee.

I have an iron jaw when it comes to live beats.  I take them like a man.  Online though… online’s another story.  For some reason, I am far less adept at handling online bullshit.  There’s something about the sequential blip, blip blip of an unfortunate electronic  flop, turn and river that I find very disagreeable.  To be honest, it makes me want to cut someone.  As my precious $10, twelve-gazillion player tournament washed itself down the drain, I groaned and reeled back in my chair.  I then arose, possessed with rage.  I briefly considered throwing my monitor out my window and was about to let loose a blood-curdling scream when I realized my pudgy little Ivy was sleeping in the next room.  So I gathered up my coat, threw on my shoes, stumbled down the stairs and paced in circles around Carroll Gardens for the next half hour, mumbling profanities to no one.

I’m Goin Up The Country:

Among the weirdest (and worst) songs to get regular airplay on the now-defunct “classic rock” radio format!

Janeen and I are traveling to Chicago so that Ivy can meet her Midwest family.  I am using this as an opportunity to play tournaments in a couple of new venues.  First, I am going to fly to Los Angeles and play a few LA Poker Classic prelims, and after that I am going to play a couple of tournaments in Hammond, Indiana which are part of the Chicago Poker Classic.

It may seem remarkable that I’ve never played a single tournament in California during my now-lengthy pro career.  The reason for this is simple:  I’ve been there many times and I don’t like LA very much.  Some people call Los Angeles a city, I see a collection of discreet neighborhoods that people in the Northeast would call suburbs, connected by freeway.  Everything’s far away from everything else, which might be nice if you live out there, but that’s kind of inconvenient for me.  The neighborhood that has all the poker (Bell Gardens) is completely uninteresting.  LA has a soul, but you need a good tour guide to locate it.  You won’t find it driving around aimlessly from one antiseptic area to the next—in fact that would probably rank as one of the worst imaginable ways to spend a day of one’s life.  I know I’m going to feel trapped at Commerce, but it’s a shorter flight from Chicago, I’ve arranged for a rental car, I’ll know where the nearest In-N-Out is, and I’m only going for four days.

The fact that I’m busting my Hammond cherry is less newsworthy.  You’ve gotta be pretty diehard to travel from the East Coast to Hammond for poker alone.  You’ve gotta have something else lined up in Chicago.  And I do:  all of my in-laws!