Mattazuma's Revenge

The first beer inspired by a video game

Well, this is the strangest name for a beer yet:

Yes, it's Bard's Tale Beer, a beer inspired by a PC role playing game.  I don't care if it is good, it's the lamest idea I've seen in a long time.  What's next, World of Warcraft mead?  Second Life vodka?

Unfortunate Army Mascot at a Basketball Game

I went to the UIC (University of Illinois - Chicago) basketball game on Tuesday.  They played Murray State, it was a great game, UIC came back from a 15 point deficit to beat the Racers.

It was Army night, I guess, they had a soldier who had recently returned from Iraq had the ball to the ref at the beginning of the game.  That was a cool thing to do.

There was a more bizarre thing at halftime.  There was a big blow up Army mascot guy.

He was called something like "Army Dan" and they brought him out to half court and I guess he was supposed to dance or something.  Unfortunately, there was something wrong with the costume and the head was having a hard time staying inflated, so he just stood there at half court.

The UIC mascot, Sparky, was kind of dressed up in a bad Halloween costume version of an Army uniform.  Not long after I took the picture with my cameraphone, the mascot shot the blow up Army guy with his T-Shirt gun, which mas made to look kind of like an M-16.  I guess it was because the UIC mascot didn't like the fact the Army guy wasn't dancing to the music like he was supposed to be.

Here's the Army mascot with the person who had to had to "wrangle" him:

I apologize for the picture quality, I need to take a real camera to these things in the future.

8 Days

So, it's been a pretty good 10 days in poker.  I've cashed in three blogger tournaments and I really annoyed one blogger.  I'm up $250 since my "18 Days" post, which for me is a pretty good haul for 10 days of "work". I've probably only spent 10 hours playing, so $25/hour isn't bad for something I'm doing for fun.

My goals for the next week are to keep up my relatively strong game in advance of the trip.  I'm going to try to win a $75 token so I can enter Miami Don's Blogger "Big Game" on Sunday.

[Start Geek Section]
On the non-poker geeky front, I ordered more memory & a copy of Windows for my Mac.  I did some looking around & couldn't find a PC that I liked more than the Mac that didn't cost $1800.  I'm going to use Boot Camp instead of Parallels because I want the option of running PC games on the MacBook.  Parallels doesn't do 3D at this point.  Also, Vista may not play nice with Parallels.  Once that's done, I'll have to figure out how to make Poker Tracker work on the Mac using the database on my desktop PC.  The super geek thing is to figure out how to get the database to work over the internet using Hamachi.
[End Geek Section]

Just a small-time player looking to go big

That's my favorite dumb line from Miami Vice.  In around half the episodes, Crockett & Tubbs would go undercover posing a small time drug dealers "looking to go big".  Then they go and take down the bad guys.

Well, my life as an online poker player is kind of similar.  I want to be a consistently good player.  But once in a while I do something dumb or not well thought out and most of the time I get bit in the ass, like I deserve, but every once in a while something goes right and I get lucky.

Last night I was playing in Hoyazo's MATH tournament on Poker Stars.  I had some good luck early, and was one of the top 2 or 3 players for the first hour or so of the tournament.  That's when the urge to do dumb things hit. 

In this case, I raise in late position and Hoyazo, in the BB, goes all-in.  I have KJo and for some reason I instacall him & he flips over 6-6.  A jack came on the turn & Hoyazo was out.  As he states in his blog, it was a dumb move, he could have had anything.  I didn't think he had a huge hand because he would have tried to sucker me in by just calling and going after me on the flop.  So it came down to either a smaller pocket pair or AK-AT.  Had I stopped and thought about it for a minute, I hope I would have come to my senses and folded.

The other part of the equation was I was a big stack at 3530 and he had the smallest stack at the table with 925.  Once again, had I been thinking at the time, I would have realized that Hoyazo still had a lot of chips and didn't have to go all-in with mediocre cards.  But since I wasn't thinking clearly, it was "big stack vs. small stack - Hulk smash small stack!".

Hoyazo has a nice little rant about my play.  I'm not complaining - he's 100% right.  I did something stupid, and I profited from it.  I get mad when it happens to me, and he has every right to be annoyed when it happens to him.

Hoy - I promise I will think more the next time I have to call one of your bets. :)

Much of the reason I like to play with poker bloggers is they are all solid players and they are teaching me good habits.  And they are all a hell of a lot of fun to play with.

On Vox: Joining the Cult of Mac

Well, I did it, I went and bought a Mac. A refurbished black MacBook, to be precise. Here it is coming out of its box:I have to reboot to insert the picture, that's what I get for buying a crappy...

» Read more on Vox

18 Days to go

I'm heading off to Vegas in 18 days.  So far, my poker tuneup hasn't been going too well.  I finally won something yesterday, it was only a $20 SNG on Full Tilt, but at least it was something.

I have been playing in blogger tournaments regularly to work on my game.  I haven't made any money, but it is good practice.

On a more personal level, work is going well and it looks like I'm getting something of a promotion.  Since I work for a roughly 20 person company, all it means is I get to leave my cube for a small office in the back of our suite.  Amusingly, I think the cube I'm in now is larger than the office.  I'm looking forward to it only because it will be quieter than where I am now.  I'll miss sitting next to my friends/co-workers and being able to look out our windows into the Hotel Monaco across the street.  One day I'll post a picture of the photo shoot we saw one day.

If you need something good to read, I really like this post from Dr. Pauly.

Getting Back on the Horse

The past couple months have been, for the most part, a poker hiatus.  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, the anti-gambling legislation really turned me off to playing.  I've played in the WPBT tournaments that Biggestron has set up, but that has been about it.

 

Well, it's a new day, and I'm getting back on the poker horse.  The WBPT winter classic is coming up in 4 weeks in Las Vegas and I'd prefer not to suck it up in front of the "real" poker players.  I'm going to try to play as much as possible until I go to Vegas in December.  I also need to reread the Harrington books, so I can remember how I'm supposed to be playing.

How am I doing so far?  Well, the first SNG I played was a disaster, the best hand I had the whole time was K9s and that blew up when the board came down 23K45 and the other guy had an A.  At least I didn't do anything irrational during the game, though it was painful folding 25 straight hands.

We'll see how I do over the next month, hopefully I'll get lucky in Vegas and make the money.  In the summer I won a $100 consolation prize donated by an online poker site that has now left the US market.

On an mostly unrelated note, poker blogfather Iggy is putting his blog Guinness and Poker on hiatus.  He's, so far, not saying what he's going to be doing instead.  Al Can't Hang (another poker blogger) has a hilarious (and long) eulogy for the blog.  I was late to start reading Iggy's uber-posts, but what I did real was always funny, usually insightful, and regularly intelligent. 

A burrito is not a sandwich

At least according to a judge in Massachusetts.

Story here.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

On Vox: Borat Deleted Scenes

Click on this link and watch a bunch of deleted scenes from Borat.Go watch them. Now. They are nice.

» Read more on Vox

K-Fed for Free in Chicago!!!

K-Fed is so popular, the tickets for his show at the House of Blues in Chicago are now (almost) free.  The tickets are free with a $2.25 ticketmaster charge.  Choose the Paperfast offer for the free tickets.

A guy I work with bought 6 and I may go to see the spectacle that is a K-Fed show.

PoaPoaZao!