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I’ve been incommunicado/off the grid lately because all the Deucescracked Executive Producers flew out to meet with the brains of the operation to discuss the future of the company. I flew to DC’s supersecret West Coast location (imagine a mountain bunker compound but with lots of computers) and promptly got down to business. That is to say that Danzasmack, sthief, and I started drinking the second we all got to the hotel and proceeded to get hammered. The DC meetings would have to wait.The next day we continued with some serious business as everybody in the company went to play whirlyball (http://www.whirlyball.com/home/index.php for all you noobs). My team consistently got destroyed by our fslexcduck/sthief-led opponents and only won one of the ten matches we played. It was obviously pretty tilted but at least I realized after the first match how bad our team (and I) suck at whirlyball and only bet with whitelime on the first game.

Anyway, the next couple of days were serious business. The DC braintrust gave us a presentation of their plans for the future of the company and it’s some very very exciting stuff. I don’t want to pull a typical “watch out for exciting developments” because a lot of the improvements we discussed are pretty long-term in scope so it might take a while, but I’m incredibly optimistic that DC is going to become a unique and great company.After talks of the future of the company commenced we all went to out to dinner. We went to a nice tapas restaurant and arrived for our reservation at 9:45. The combination of poker players indifferent to money, a bunch of alcohol, and a tapas menu with a wide variety of delicious snack-sized food led to constant ordering of more food.

Our waitress was very accommodating and even though the restaurant was supposed to close at 10:30 she kept on putting in food orders past that time. Now obviously we were very appreciative of the fact that the restaurant was basically being kept open for us so even though the bill ended up being very big with a built-in 18% gratuity, whitelime and I decided to throw in $50 each on top as a thank you. But then I had a mini stroke of genius and upon realizing that we had a deck of cards decided to test our waitress’ risk aversion. I told her that we were going to give her $100 OR we would let her play one hand of poker where if she gets the best hand we tip her $200 and if my hand is better she doesn’t get anything on top of the 18%. She practically instantaneously said “let’s play poker!” Danzasmack suggested giving her the $200 straight up for having such a surprisingly lax approach to flipping for $100, but I obviously had to stay true to the nature of the flip and let her earn the extra hundo.

So with that said we dealt out the cards face down for a hand of PLO and dealt out the board.The board came down AK552 with no possible flushes. The way you flip your cards over in these flips is one person flips a card and the other keeps flipping cards until he/she can beat the opponent’s hand, then the opponent does the same until somebody can’t have the best hand. I flipped over a 9 and she had to beat it. She flipped over a 7 which wouldn’t be good enough so she flipped over another card and it was another 7. At this point I had to flip a card over and I flipped over a 3. Obviously not good enough so I flipped over a 4. Now I was drunk enough that I went to flip over my last card thinking I needed to pair the ace, king, or hit a 5 to beat her pair of sevens but as I reached for the card I stared at the board really intently and pieced together the fact that I had a straight. I just reluctantly announced that I had a straight and everybody else lamented the fact that I noticed (nobody wanted to see the waitress lose, myself included).So with 2 cards remaining the waitress had to beat a straight on AK552. She rolled a K and as Danzasmack explains to the waitress (who probably doesn’t know the rules of PLO even though I tried explaining the difference between PLO and Hold’em) that she has 4 outs to win she flips over her last card and sure enough it was a 5! She runner-runnered me for a boat and everybody went crazy as the underdog waitress was rewarded by the poker gods for her immediate willingness to flip for her tip. It’s been a while since I’ve been happy to lose a gamble, but it was a serious feel-good moment. I wonder if I’d have given her $100 anyway just because I’d have felt bad, but fortunately she won so it didn’t come up.

On the poker front I’ve finally gotten back to playing (no more $1k-stomachpunch alert). I lost 60k 1/2 stacking PLO at 200/400 the other day and today I played some 200/400 NL and won 30k or so. I lost a flip in NLHE against prtctyaneck but then called a small reraise in position vs David B with KQ and jammed over his c-bet on Qd4s8s and sucked out on his AA. I played a few other interesting pots but I’m on a new laptop that doesn’t have Windows yet (and no PT) so no hand histories for now. I also took a piece of a friend and won some money so I’m up something like 15k on the last few days which is nice considering I’d been losing 30k every time I’d been playing. I was definitely playing very well and I think the break has been good for me. I’m going to be putting in a lot of hands in the next few weeks so hopefully I’ll get back to crushing.Anyway, it’s 3:00 a.m. and I have to get some sleep, so that’s it for now.

I’m not positive, but I’m 95% sure Krantz logged in on my account (he knows my password because I had him log in to register me for the FTOPS main event the other day when it was looking like I wouldn’t make it home in time to register) and sat in at some 200/400 tables.  This does not count and Krantz does not get to punch me in the stomach as a result of posting “FIRST!” in comments. I have changed my password and the punch-in-stomach offer is still on the table.

When 3 of a kind was a good hand in online no-limit hold’em.  Obviously my vow to quit poker for a week lasted just a couple hours until I saw patatino sitting in at 2 200/400 tables.  A few hours and a few cold-decks later I was down another 240k, making this by far my biggest losing day ever (yeah yeah sold action, still had a huge piece of the loss).  I haven’t done the full accounting but my losses on the day are pretty close to 200k.  So now, after having been punished for breaking my vow, I make this pledge to you, my readers:

If anybody catches me playing online poker between now and the 25th, I will pay that person $1000 to punch me in the stomach as hard as you want. You can’t collect the 1k and fail to punch me, it’s a package deal  to make sure I actually suffer.  This bounty will be redeemable at any point in time in the future so if you don’t live in NYC but you’re the first person to post in comments here that you saw me playing, you still win the grand prize.

Taking a break from poker, I notice David Benyamine in a 200/400 game.  I decide to play and promptly lose 3 buy-ins (KK<AK aipf, then won a flip, then lost 2 big hands, then ran KK into QT on QTx fd HU vs durrrr while waiting for David to sit back in).  I had a big piece of that and then lost another 30k in a Stars 100-200 game.  So basically while taking a break I just lost enough money to make me want to take an even longer break.  No poker for another week and then I’m going to grind 10/20 and 25/50 because any further downswing at nosebleeds on top of my 250kish downswing is just going to be too tilting.

The problem of course is not that the thought of grinding 25/50 while climbing out of a downswing will be too hard because I’m stuck in “100/200+” mentality.  It’s the thought of waiting around all day for games to start.  I’ve been studying for my LSAT and was going to plan on matriculating somewhere in 2010, but the more I think about how dead the NLHE economy is becoming the more I think that I should just get out ASAP and matriculate in 2009.  Maybe that’s just the downswing in me talking but at this point I’m just not particularly feeling waiting around all day for games and getting to play in 2 or 3 tough games if I’m lucky.

By now everybody knows that guacamole is extra.  Please inform your employees that they no longer have to pause, give us an uneasy “you sure about this” look, and inform us that guac costs $1.50 extra.  It’s demeaning to all involved.

Here’s an interview I did with pokerlistings the other day.  This is part 1, part 2 will be up tomorrow.  It’s all text, which I imagine is more convenient for my 9-5 friends

http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/online-poker/microphone-fiend-daevils-interview-part-1

I slipped up a bit from my poker break because I had an hour between getting back to my apartment and meeting up with a friend and I saw a juicy 100/200 game (some guy named John Duthie, some PLO player, and a few regs) so I jumped in to kill some time and made 20k.  So that was nice.  Today I got back from the gym and sat in at a 100/200 game to play tsifknits HU but my internet’s spotty at the moment and I realized there’s no reason to play when I’m trying to take a break so I quit him.  I also shortstacked some 200/40 PLO the other day but that doesn’t count because I was in the middle of a business meeting for Deucescracked so I was forced to be doing poker stuff anyway.  I made about 30k with fslexcduck sweating (I gave her a piece obviously, good karma).  It’s been hard to take a break because lately whenever I open up FTP I see at least one reg playing some total fish at 50/100 or higher but then I remember that I probably wouldn’t have got the fish’ action anyway (for some reason, despite my FTOPS avatar, I don’t seem to be the fish’s opponent of choice, this despite the fact I give more action than do most regs).  On top of that stevesbets has been in action, playing 200/400 PLO and 100/200 NLHE.  I feel like it’s only a matter of time before he loses all his money (I saw he had at least 250k spread across 3 tables on FTP and he seems to have a stars roll now so he’s got plenty of money to give away), but I remembered when playing yesterday how little I enjoy 1-tabling and how I’m just not in the mood to play poker so far.

Anyway, so far the break’s been  very relaxing.  My sublet to my brother finally ended so I’m sleeping on my own bed for the first time in months, but obviously putting away all the junk I’d accumulated while living out of a suitcase while making a few different laundry and drycleaning runs took up most of my day on Tuesday.  I also went to the Apple Store and got the new iPhone, which I’m pretty happy with.  The only downside to it is that I bought the Shure 530 sound-isolating headphones which are ideal for iPod usage but are not ideal for talking with your mom (imagine talking with your parents and having their voices practically inside your head with no background noise. it’s pretty disconcerting (dissociative even?)).  I’m also worried that I’m going to go broke now that I have constant access to iTunes and get the songs straight onto my computer.  I might need to end my poker break a bit early just to cover the costs of my iTunes addiction.

Wednesday I didn’t do too much. I did Yoga in the morning and then  went out to lunch with a friend.  We walked down to Soho and went shopping for a bit, and then I met up with a few high-school friends for happy hour. I finished up Mad Men Season I (which I wholeheartedly recommend you watch if you’re in the mood for a very well-done t.v. show about a bunch of characters you don’t really care about).

Yesterday I did some more Yoga, walked around Manhattan for a couple hours, went to Tompkins Square Park and read for a bit and then got a haircut.  I’m reading Leonard Mlodinow’s “The Drunkard’s Walk,” which is a pretty interesting pop-math book on the evolution of probability theory.  A lot of the material in it early on isn’t that new for a poker player, but it does get interesting later on and it’s pretty easy to get through.  I met up with a few friends for dinner and drinks and ended up coming back to the apartment and debating the merits of utilitarianism with one of my roommates (long story short, I was a bit drunk and tried to argue that utilitarianism is appealing most of the time but has its exceptions, he argued that I’m wrong, he was probably right and kind of owned me but I’m going to think on it when sober and get back to him).

Today I woke up at 9:00 to go work out and now I’m killing time until 2:30, when I’m meeting with the producers of the reality t.v. show that Team Israel is going to be on (no details until I’m sure it’s okay for me to blog about this).  I’ve got a fantasy football draft on Sunday that I’m not at all prepared for so I need to start doing some research.  Today I’m hoping to finish Drunkard’s Walk, write the first chapter of my poker-centric autobiography, get some fantasy research done, and start practicing for the LSAT.

So I’ve been keeping busy for the most part; I’m trying to force myself to only be in the apartment for an hour total each day until my roommates get back from work so that I can keep doing interesting stuff and not just sit around wasting my time thinking “Well, nothing else to do; guess I’ll play some poker.”

All right, now to make up for this mundane post I’ll leave you with a paradox that my roommate found on Scott Aaronson’s blog that I think is pretty cool (if I’ve already told you this, don’t bitch about it: you don’t have to read on):

A madman plays a game where he kidnaps a person and rolls two dice. If he rolls snake-eyes (two “ones”), he kills the guy. If he rolls anything else he lets the guy go and kidnaps a group of 10 people and plays the same game; snake-eyes he kills them, otherwise he lets them go and kidnaps 100 people and plays again. Every group is 10 times as big as the group before it and has no people in it who have already been kidnapped.  He keeps doing this until he rolls snake-eyes and kills the group (imagine that there are enough people in the world for him to keep getting a bigger group until he rolls snake-eyes, even if that requires a population of like 700 trillion or something).  You wake up in the middle of the night to find yourself blindfolded and tied up in a warehouse. The mad man tells you that you’ve been kidnapped and explains to you the rules of the game. He hasn’t rolled the dice yet.  How concerned should you be that you’re going to die (or better yet, how likely do you think it is that you are going to die)?

The first and obvious answer most people give would be that you have a 1/36 chance of dying because those are the odds that he rolls snake-eyes and kills you.  However, unless the game ends after the first roll and he kills just one person, it’s going to be the case that ~90% of people who get kidnapped end up dying (10/11, 100/111, 1000/1111, etc) since the group that gets killed is always roughly nine times the size of the group of people who have  already been kidnapped and released.  So it seems that since all you know is that you’re in the group “people who have played this game” that there’s a 90% chance you’re going to die.  A way to think about this is imagine that after the game ends the madman releases a list of everybody who played and notes who he killed and who he let go.  For any name he picks there’s an ~90% chance that name was the name of somebody who got killed.  But there doesn’t appear to be any difference between waking up and finding out you’ve been kidnapped and knowing that your name’s on this list.  Either way you’re just a data point in the game with nothing differentiating you from the other participants.  So which one is it? 1/36 chance of dying or 90%? Both seem correct yet are obviously far far different from each other.  I’ve heard a few attempted resolutions of this paradox and none of them really struck me as that useful.  Hopefully you’ll give this some thought and I’ll read a comment splaying the hell out of this question.

I did an interview last night with twoplustwo’s pokercast.  If you want to listen to it go to http://pokercast.twoplustwo.com/index_plus.php and look for the two options of how to listen to the pokercast at the top of the page.  Hope you enjoy it.

Just flew back from Virginia last night.  It was nice being back home and having the family together (which isn’t something that happens very often because my brother’s too busy with law school to make time for the family).  It really is a change of pace to go down to Blacksburg (especially without any Tech students in town because it’s summer).  My first day there I just walked a couple miles downtown, grabbed a sandwich, walked back home and then went to pick up my brother at the airport.  After that my parents made some steaks for dinner and I read the rest of the night.  That was literally all I did the whole day and it was very very relaxing.

My 2nd day there was also pretty slow and just consisted of typical “lounge around the house doing nothing” activity with a little bit of poker mixed in.  After dinner my family and I started watching Season 1 of “Mad Men” which is the new show everybody’s talking about. I think it’s pretty good but slightly overhyped (the Draper character is very well acted but other than that the show’s not spectacular through the 5 episodes I’ve seen).  After that I hit gin while flipping through the channels and seeing that “Dirty Work” was on one of the movie channels.  It’s among my favorite movies ever and my brother and I used to own it and watch it all the time. I hadn’t seen it in a while so my brother and I chilled and watched it.  The production’s obviously awful and the movie’s not well-done but the jokes are great and Norm MacDonald’s my favorite comedian ever, so it was pretty amazing timing.

When it was over we were flipping through the channels and “Under Siege: 2″ was on.  This was basically the best thing I could have asked to stumble on to.  My brother and I watch Under Siege: 2 every time we go back home. Somehow it’s always on TNT when we’re in town and this time we saw the unedited version on “Flicks.”  At this point in time my brother and I have probably seen that movie at least 15 times together so having it on right after Dirty Work was amazing luck.

At this point it was about 1 a.m. and just as Under Siege: 2 was wrapping up I noticed that “Rounders” was on.  I really thought I was dreaming because I just couldn’t ask for a more quintessentially calming “welcome back home” night than to have 3 of my favorite movies from high school to come on back-to-back-to-back.   I know it seems silly but hanging out with my brother and watching those 3 movies was probably the highlight of my trip.

My 3rd day there my dad, my brother and I went whitewater rafting in West Virginia.  It was pretty sick: our guide was this hysterical hillbilly named Steve-O(the self-proclaimed “most hillbilly sonofabitch you’ll ever meet”) who wouldn’t stop talking.  The raft had the Steve-O, the 3 of us, a cute female trainee and a family of 4 (husband, wife, 12 and 10-year-old sons).  Early on Steve-O ordered us to all row 3 times and the mom rowed 4 times. Steve-O said something like, “Damn honey, where’d you learn to count? Hey Dad, I know why you married her. [in falsetto] ‘You swear that’s six inches?”   The dad was obviously not pleased but what could he do about it really? He’s stuck on a raft with the guy for the rest of the day and can’t demand to cancel his family’s rafting vacation just because he’s all pissed at something the guide said about his wife, so he just had to take it or else seem like a whiny overreactor who can’t take a joke. Steve-O was basically just being hysterical in an over-the-top redneck way the whole time which was pretty fun to observe. The actual rafting was sick also: the weather was great and the New River was just amazing.

On Friday we all went out to Claytor Lake and rented a boat which was nice but uneventful (typical day out relaxing and doing nothing).  Going to places where you can do a lot of outdoors stuff makes me realize how much I dislike about New York.  My friends are all here and there’s lots of fun stuff to do but I can’t see myself living in the city much longer.  Eventually I want to be somewhere more relaxed and with more nature.

Anyway, on the poker front things have been going very poorly.  I’ve lost another 35k since the last post due to losing the vast majority of my all-ins the last week and 2 hands in which I stacked off where I definitely played pretty poorly (at 25-50).  This is despite taking 45k off of stevesbets at 100-200 (well really i took 80k off him but I sold off action).  I’m not really getting frustrated because I’ve been running so well but at the same time I’ve been meaning to take a break from poker anyway so this downswing’s as good a time as any.  I’m going to do a lot of coaching in the next few weeks and start looking for things I can do to keep busy.  I think I’m going to try not playing any for the next 10 days.  Normally when I’m planning on taking a break I just end up getting bored and waiting at empties, but this time around I’m going to try very hard to not open up FTP or Stars at all.  Just a nice relaxing 10-day break in which I challenge myself to keep busy and do interesting stuff all day.  I’ll let you guys know how it goes, but for now I’m out.

Thanks Tom!

At dinner with my parents and brother yesterday, somehow I make a joke that you could abbreviate something “LOLITNDB” or something like that, I don’t really remember what I was abbreviating. It doesn’t matter.  My mom tries figuring out what it stands for and says “lots of love…[whatever the rest of the acronym was].”  My brother and I exchange amused glances as we realize that my mom somehow also thought that’s what LOL means  and mom says, “What’s so funny?”  We tell her LOL doesn’t mean lots of love and my dad interrupts, “Yeah, I know this one! It has something to do with later.”

LOL!