PT3

I just downloaded the free trial of PokerTracker 3. I have a HUD, now. And fancy graphs. And analysis tools. That kinda sorta makes me a real internet poker player :)

Hazelnut Hot Chocolate Recipe!

My future mother and father-in-laws got me a really great gift: a book of hot chocolate recipes. They are sooooo good. Lucky for you, I've decided to share the wealth and post my favorites on the blog every now and then.

This is one of the easiest, simplest, and most delicious recipes in there.

Ingredients:

2 heaping tablespoons of chocolate-hazelnut spread (Nutella, World Market brand, etc.)
3/4 cup whole milk (Yes, whole milk. More fat, but the creamy richness is essential for a good, hot, hazelnut-chocolatey drink)
Whipped cream

1. Heat the milk in a small saucepan over medium-low heat.
2. Right when it starts to simmer, add the Nutella and stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly blended.
3. Pour into a mug and serve immediately with a dollop of whipped cream. Enjoy!

It makes one serving. You can easily double the recipe if you need to; I suggest using a ladle to portion it out if you make more than one batch at a time.

Make it for your spouse/significant other, too. Trust me. This is some of the best stuff you'll ever drink, and they'll be incredibly impressed. Cooking skills are sexy. ;-)

Definitely the Promised Land

And the hot streak continues! 130 BBs in 115 hands lol. People just can't find the fold button, and I'm doing great at extracting value. My days of inevitable losing may just be over! It seems about right... taking me around 6 months of online play to transition from big loser to smaller loser, marginal loser to marginal winner (Although with the enormous skill level difference between 10NL and 2NL, I just might havae been boosted to solid winner... we'll see.) Honestly, all the talk about all of the micros being the same is a huge sack of lies.

I wonder how long it'll take me to grind back the $150 I've donked off in cash games already... ah well, I'll be taking a shot at moving up to 5NL once I grind back $50 of it or so. Time to get myself PokerTracker.

2 NL- The Promised Land?

Well, well. I think I've finally found the land of the uberfish that even my meager poker skills rate better than. My biggest leak is calling too often when, if I looked at it closely enough, there's really no standard, ABC-played raising hand in large pots that I could possibly beat.

Enter 2 NL. I can peg most of these guys' calling and raising ranges pretty easily, which makes things so, so much easier. Even better, my biggest leak isn't bad at all since most of their continuation ranges are hugely enormous anyways. Half the time the big fish seem to show up with ace high or fourth pair. I love it. I've finally found a limit I can crush. 210 hands: Up 110 BBs. But even more than that, I can actually see all the huge mistakes that they're making and take advantage of them accordingly.

Boo-yah. This must be what a real poker player feels like...

In other news, I got a raise at work today! 4.7% in this economy! Because I rock like that. It's a good day :)

Update! 114 hands in the night time session: +305 BBs!!! Awesomeness. I've definitely found my level for now. Maybe I can start climbing the ladder of the winning player now. So exciting. I know, ridiculously small sample size in the grand scheme of things, but I definitely felt like I was crushing the games at this level. I'm thinking of getting Pokertracker to track my results.

Oh God. Why Chipotle? WHY!?!

I am a man who loves to eat. So much so that my fiancé predicts fatness in my future since I absolutely will NOT stop stuffing my face with food in front of me. I will clean my plate two or three times and still polish off her portion of whatever scrumtious meal we had. A food that I don't like is a verifiably rare commodity; I've run into maybe two or three in my gorging on the craziest fare the North American and Asian continents have to offer.

That's right; I love dog meat and fried locusts. Duck's blood, spam, and fertilized chicken fetuses fresh from the egg. I've even been known to enjoy brussel sprouts.

And so it is with great and terrible sorrow that I seem to have developed a new food allergy to that massively scrumtious, essential part of any American fast food lover: the Chipotle burrito.

I had one for lunch for the first time in a month or so last Thursday, and then started to break out in hives all over my body. I've never gotten hives from anything, ever in my life, and my only three known allergies are all synthetic, man-made pharmaceutical drugs.

So what do I do? I gulp down some Benadryl to help with the hives and take a few puffs of an old asthma inhaler to calm my poor fiancé's worries that I would choke to death in the night on my swollen windpipe, wondered briefly what set it off, and went about my business as usual.

Maybe it was my afternoon run, since I haven't exercised in months. Maybe it was the beautiful spring weather we've had in the DC area lately, with all the pollen and junk that floats about. I hadn't eaten anything even remotely unusual except for the Chipotle, but I've been eating that for four years, so it can't be that, right?

But my Friday morning jog, carefully retracing my steps with Benadryl in my pocket to try and see if I'd get a reaction, produced nothing. I ate all the other foods that I had on Thursday, and still nothing. I even wore the same clothes, just to be sure. Nada. And then I had Chipotle again. Within a half hour I was getting hives again, with a vengeance. My face was puffing up and part of my neck, which finally forced me to begrudgingly accept the fact that it might choke off my windpipe one day if I kept it up.

Then again, "Death by Chipotle" doesn't sound like such a bad way to go, does it?

Free Taxi Rides on St. Patty's Day!

It's a good day. Not only is it St. Patty's Day (My fiancé is Irish, so I have to go big), but I found out that there's a subsidized taxi service today in the Washington DC metro area. Majorly subsidized. We're talking $50 subsidized, so I'll be getting a free drunken cab ride tonight. Even better, they do this for a lot of holidays. Here's the link for any other happy drinkers:

http://www.wrap.org/soberride/

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Note to self: Make sure to stay away from the poker tables when drunk... maybe put a post-it on your computer to make sure. Then again, it is a holiday, and I'll probably spend $20-40 on a bar tab just tonight.... hrm....

Moving Away from Rush Poker

It's time for me to leave the Rush Poker games and head on back to the regular cash tables.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fast pace and the number of hands you can get in per hour. I've probably played as many hands of poker in a few weeks than I have all last year with Rush Poker, and I've learned a lot and closed a lot of leaks by sheer virtue of that fact.

On the other hand, I'm a definite losing player at the Rush Poker tables. With all of the aggro-donks everywhere, it's next to impossible to exploit overaggressive people's play. You don't know if they're usually folding or double and triple barreling with air when they make that pot-sized bet. Add to that the chances that they actually DO have you beat, and you just have to let the hand go.

So tonight I finished off my last few hands of Rush Poker to clear another ten bonus dollars, and headed on over to the normal cash games to try and get a good, old-fashioned "read-and-adjust" edge over my fellow micro-stakes players. I have to say, it went really well. I finished up two buy-ins in about 200 hands, most of it coming from incredible luck.

Highlight of the evening: Having my turned straight making a straight flush on the river vs. villain's rivered nut flush to scoop me up a buy-in.

Hell yeah, I'll take it. I love upswings.

I shall poker until I become a long-term winner, and then I shall poker some more!

Thorn

New blog

While I'm not the greatest poker player in the world yet, I've decided that I like blogging. It's a great way to vent frustration, too, so I've made one to detail my confrontations with our ugly healthcare system. You can check it out at the following link:

battleswithhealthcare.blogspot.com

Hah I'm kind of a blogger. Now to get some actual followers.

Hangover

Slightly hungover this morning. Gah.
No drunken poker last night. Win.

Sober poker results before friends' arrival and storm of beer pong:

+1 buy-in despite getting stacked with a flush vs. a rivered full house; in hindsight, I shouldn't have stacked off there on the KK37A board. AK was definitely a big part of his range there... he ended up having AA. Even better. Could've saved 2/3 of a buy-in on the river, but c'est la vie. I'll remember for next time. Good thing other people make huge mistakes at the micros, too. Muahah... ha.

Now I'm going to go hiccup some more and wonder if my stomach can handle the ultra spicy lunch I just ordered. Wish me luck.

March: A New Month

I've got a long way to go in my Rush Poker transition from TAG to LAG. Mostly, I need to stop pushing things over the edge and know when to just let it go instead of making a move.

Example: Minraising a pot-sized bet on a AK3 rainbow flop (just one club) with JT clubs, in position but in a raised preflop pot.

Why, me, why? That hits an enormous part of the standard Rush Poker raiser's range, and he probably isn't folding the AK/AQ that he's holding so often in this spot. I should've just checked and hoped to hit my gutshot on the turn.

Still, I can't complain on the poker front. A few buddies and I have been tossing around the idea of getting together a regular live poker tournament. I'm positive that I've got a much larger edge over these guys than I would ever find at an online STT these days, so I'd be really happy if it did happen.

Real life? Old high school buddies coming into town tonight!
Quarter keg for Friday.
Burgers... need to pick up some of those plastic red cups. Yesssss.