A winning month, the ugly way

Poker is such a sick game.
For the better part of the last two months, my results have been mediocre overall, and downright atrocious for extended stretches. I barely broke even in August, and as recently as Monday, I was $300 in the hole for September.
Then Wednesday night happened. The only reason I was playing was, I needed to play $150 worth of sit-n-gos to qualify for my monthly VIP level on PokerStars. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have opened the laptop. I was straight-up sick of the game.
Over the previous couple of weeks, I'd run so bad that I'd lost confidence that I was remotely capable of winning any tournament I entered. I made a few mistakes, sure. But I also lost when I did everything right. I lost holding AA vs. QQ, all in preflop. I lost with KK vs. 87o, with the money going in on a J84 flop. I can't count how many times I lost with AK vs. AQ. If I got my money in the pot in that spot, it was a certainty that there would be a queen on the flop.
The above paragraph might sound like a donkey's lament. But I'm not trying to say I played perfect poker. Far from it. Honestly, I did run pretty freaking bad. It's hard to continue to make the correct play when you're not getting rewarded. It's a vicious psychological cycle that can cause your game to deteriorate. It might seem easy to chalk it up to the natural variance of poker, but it's also hard to keep perspective in the middle of a run like that.
But I digress. We were talking about Wednesday night.
My hot streak actually started on Tuesday, when I won a $30 27-player SNG. On Wednesday, I ended up entering five SNGs, winning three and cashing in a fourth. I won two 27-player events - a $10 and a $30 - and also won a single-table $30.
Woot woot, back on track! My beautiful Wednesday allowed me to finish the month of September $300 to the good.
To review, my September looked like this: $300 upswing . . . $600 downswing . . . $200 upswing . . . $200 downswing . . . $600 upswing. Like a freaking yoyo. I'd prefer that my bankroll grew in a more stable fashion, but at least it's growing. It's better than the alternative, for sure.
Obviously, there are a few more days left in September. But I'm booking a $300 win this month, because I'm headed to NYC - that's right, the Big Apple - on vacation until Oct. 1. So no blogging for a couple days, but I'll tell you all about it when I get back. Spoiler alert: I have Yankees-Red Sox tickets. Booya!
Bankroll = $5,000

Insanity in Sask.

Yikes.
It's hard to know what to make of the Saskatchewan Roughriders these days. At the start of the season, they looked like the best team in the CFL in winning their first three games. The offence looked unstoppable, and Darian Durant looked like the best QB in the league.
Looks can be deceiving, for sure, and the Riders crapped the bed on several occasions in dropping four of their next seven games. Inexplicable losses - to the hapless Edmonton Eskimos on Aug. 28, and a brutal 31-2 capitulation against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Sept. 12 - became the norm.
Then came Friday's home game against the Calgary Stampeders, the CFL's best team. The outcome is best described with a paraphrase from that cinema classic, Dumb and Dumber: Just when you think they can't get any stupider, they go and do something like this . . . AND TOTALLY REDEEM THEMSELVES!
Well, total redemption might be putting it a little strong. Durant was in a brutal slump coming in, having thrown three TDs and 10 picks in his previous six games. He put up some crazy numbers on Friday, throwing for 495 yards. But he threw a pick-six on Saskatchewan's first possession, and made a couple head-scratching decisions down the stretch.
Ultimately, Durant got the Riders into position to beat the Stamps in regulation, galloping away on an electrifying scramble to get into field goal range with the score tied 37-37 and just a couple ticks on the clock.
But this is where the game got strange. In what is sure to become a huge talking point in Saskatchewan for the next couple days, Riders coach Ken Miller sent punter Eddie Johnson out to try to boot the ball through the end zone for a single point. His excellent field goal kicker, Luca Congi, is pretty much automatic from 35 yards, which is the kick he would have been looking at. Needless to say, Johnson's punt was short and Calgary ran the ball out of the end zone, forcing OT.
Now, I generally think Miller provides the Riders with above-average coaching. He is one of the CFL's best. But on this call, he must have been smoking some powerful peyote.
Not to worry, though - the Riders won in OT. Sheer madness. Only in the CFL, right?

RANDOM NFL OBSERVATIONS:
Sunday's best highlight was Randy Moss scorching Darrelle Revis for a long TD, on a ridiculous one-handed catch, no less. Who's the slounch now? . . . LaDainian Tomlinson is the best running back on the New York Jets roster . . . Reports of the Indianapolis Colts' demise have been greatly exaggerated . . . The Seattle Seahawks came back to earth, big time, in Game 2 of the Pete Carroll era. I think that's more along the lines of what we can expect from the Seahawks this season . . . Cleveland Browns fans were utterly unsurprised by Derek Anderson's horrendous bed-crapping against Atlanta . . . Hard to tell who's more overrated: the Dallas Cowboys or Tony Romo. It's kind of crazy, but it seems like a lack of discipline is almost part of the culture in Cowboy-land . . . The over-under on Wade Phillips's tenure as Cowboys coach is 3.5 games . . . Aside from Minnesota Vikings fans, the only folks worried about Brett Favre's slow start to the season are fantasy football leaguers who drafted him three rounds too high. The rest of us just think it's funny . . . Speaking of fantasy football, all those "experts" who were horny for Joe Flacco in the preseason better be updating their resumes.

Some of my fantasies involve football

If you'd been sitting beside me on my couch during the NFL Monday nighter between the San Diego Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs, you'd have a perfect understanding of why fantasy football rules.
First, a bit of background. I'm involved in a 14-team fantasy keeper league. It's pretty hardcore - the buy-in is $100 per year, and you get to keep three players from your roster the year before. You play head-to-head with one other team each week, and whoever gets the most points gets the W. Top eight teams make the playoffs, and the post-season champ takes home the bulk of the prize pool. I won the whole enchilada in 2008. It gets kind of intense, but in all the right ways.
Which brings us back to the Monday nighter. Heading into the San Diego-Kansas City game, I held a 10-point lead over my opponent - last year's champ, incidentally. We both had two players involved: I had Chargers TE Antonio Gates and Chiefs RB Thomas Jones, and he had Chargers QB Philip Rivers (pictured above) and the San Diego defence.
It wasn't a promising match-up for me, despite my lead. Our point system is kind of screwed up - quarterbacks are by far the biggest points-generators. So with Rivers going up against the KC defence, I had reason to worry.
But as the game wore on, my optimism grew. The underdog Chiefs built a 21-7 halftime lead, severely denting the fantasy value of my opponent's San Diego D. Rivers did throw one touchdown pass, but it was to Gates - my tight end. Sweeeeeet.
Rivers got things going in the second half, though. I groaned aloud when he threw a 59-yard TD pass to a wide open Legedu Nanee. And I was chewing my fingernails as he drove the Chargers inside KC's 10 yard line with less than a minute remaining.
I should mention that at this point, I held a 55-51 lead. TD throws are worth four points, so if Rivers completed a pass into the end zone, we'd be tied, with a strong possibility of Rivers racking up even more points in OT.
But the Chiefs defence stood firm, and when Rivers's fourth-down pass fell harmlessly to the turf, I was a little more excited than I should have been.
You just gotta love fantasy football. The NFL, more than any other sport, is well-suited to sports-pool gambling - the fact that most games occur on the same day of the week makes it ideal for head-to-head pools, and you only have to set your roster once a week. And NFL football in HD is like watching a good movie. Even my wife enjoys it.

John Updike = The Ted Williams of writing

A couple weeks ago in Colorado, I was giddy with delight when I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" in a bookshop.
"Hub Fans" is a magazine story chronicling Ted Williams's final game at Fenway Park, originally published in 1960 for The New Yorker. The fact it's been released in hardcover hints at its legendary status - it's been called the greatest magazine article in the history of sportswriting. Which is kind of crazy, because Updike wasn't a sportswriter per se. In fact, "Hub Fans" was his one and only foray into the sports genre.
I won't pretend I knew anything about Updike's career before I sat down to read this article, aside from being aware of the legendary nature of this particular piece. (Yes, I am the quintessential dumb jock.) Cliff's Notes on Updike: He's one of just three authors to win two Pulitzers for fiction. If that sort of thing impresses you. Which it should.
To suggest this post is a "review" of Updike's article would be the height of arrogance on my part. Consider it simply an appreciation.
Updike's prose flows. Nearing the climax of the story, the author casually mentions that batting, to Williams, is "his cherished task." Three simple words, and they reveal so much about the Red Sox legend. Watching through Updike's eyes as Williams (SPOILER ALERT!) hits a dramatic home run in the final at-bat of his career might be more fun than having been there in person.
In addition to the insights about Williams's career, Updike taught me something important about writing. In a passage lauding the Splendid Splinter's commitment to excellence every single time he stepped to the plate, Updike wrote the following:
"Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance - since the reference point of most individual contests is remote and statistical - always threatens that interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money."
Those are not the most thrilling sentences in the piece, but they contain the most interesting idea. To Updike, a batter who raises his concentration level in perceived "important" situations is a vulgarity. Striving for excellence in scenarios both thrilling and mundane is not just a matter of character, but the truest form of art.
This notion applies to me. If I intend to truly excel as a writer, I need to write not only for a paycheque, but because it's who I am and how I express myself. That's why it's a good idea for me to write this blog - to develop my voice as I write for recreation. It's a thought I've obviously had in the back of my mind, but Updike - who passed away in January 2009 - expressed it for me. He was a wise man.

Spending my bankroll, in more ways than one

When a winning poker player finds creative non-poker-related ways to nuke his/her bankroll, it's said that player has "a leak." There are plenty of stories floating around concerning famous poker stars who blow through their profits in record time. T.J. Cloutier, for instance, apparently pawned one of his World Series of Poker bracelets last year after (allegedly) bleeding off untold thousands of dollars the craps tables. Crazy to think that someone so proficient at managing a stack of tournament chips could be so poor at managing a bankroll.
I don't have a compulsive, degenerate leak like that. My leak is more like a slow drip. Every once in a while - about once a year - I talk myself into some new poker gear. And since there's no way I could justify spending our household finances on such a frivolity, I dip into the poker bankroll.

The latest expenditure was a sweet new poker table, courtesy of a local B.C. supplier - pokerchipsets.ca out of Maple Ridge. They have some awesome stuff, and I picked up a luscious blue-felted table just in time for the September edition of the monthly poker league I run.
Unfortunately, my stay on the new table was all too brief. After treading water for over an hour, I made a total donkey play, getting my 30xBB stack into the middle on a K64 flop. With six players at the table, I'd raised under the gun with KQ. I had two callers, including a monster-stacked player to my left who had been overbetting the pot all night long when he made huge hands. I felt I probably had the best hand on the flop, and elected to slowplay. Mr. Overbettor made it 3000 to go, which was a little bit more than half my stack. The other player folded, and after a couple seconds' thought, I shipped it. He called and turned over AK - a hand that surprised me, because I would have assumed an aggressive player such as he would have reraised with that hand preflop.
But that's no excuse. I'd watched him overbet with big hands on two prior occasions - it was clearly his M.O. for the evening - but I refused to believe him because he's very capable of making big moves and an overbet reeks so much of a bluff. Additionally, if I'd bet the flop, I could have gotten away if he'd raised. Even after slowplaying, with 30 big blinds in my stack, I could/should have been able to get away after seeing his previous showdown hands.
Terrible play by me. Lesson learned . . . I hope.
Online, I managed to lose back all of my early September profits with some rather inattentive and impatient play. On the bright side, I'm still breaking even this month, but after leaking off some cash buying the table, the bankroll is a fair bit thinner.
Bankroll = $4,700

So hot right now

I'm off to a nice start to the month of September, poker-wise.
Lately I've found a comfort zone in the 27-player sit-n-go tournaments. Playing these events are a bit of a compromise for me - I've really enjoyed playing multi-table tourneys lately, but I rarely have six to eight hours to burn. Thus, the 27-player SNGs are sort of a happy medium.
Anyway, I played a trio of these events on the weekend - buy-ins of $11, $22 and $33. I won the two smaller ones, and finished second in the largest for a total profit of around $500. Subtract a couple of empty MTT buy-ins, and I'm up $300 for the month. Sweet.
Bankroll = $5,300

Behind the scenes with LeBron

So a couple weeks back I bought an issue of GQ. That's something straight guys do, right? RIGHT?
Regardless, I had a good reason: The September issue contained a feature on LeBron James written by J.R. Moehringer. I came across a promo for the story on ESPN.com. Apparently Moehringer had rare access to LeBron around the time he made "The Decision": Two exclusive interviews before, and one interview after.
I was even more intrigued when I realized Moehringer was the dude who wrote an amazing profile of Pete Carroll back in 2007, excellently entitled "23 reasons why a profile of Pete Carroll does not appear in this space." I came across that piece in a sportswriting anthology book, and it simply blew my mind. You can read that story at the following URL: www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=6918. It's well worth the 45 minutes it'll take to read. Trust me - print it out, read it on the can if you have to. Moehringer is wicked talented.
At any rate, the LeBron story doesn't measure up to the Carroll piece, but it was still well worth the $4.99 I paid for the magazine. Here are some of the highlights:
-- Best line: "He sounds like a big kid," Moehringer says of LeBron, recounting their final chat. "Maybe that's why it all unfolded this way. Kids get into all kinds of trouble. Especially during the summer." Bazinga.
-- Worst line: "I arrive in Cleveland at the start of July. James's decision hovers in the humid air. Poland must have felt this way in the summer of 1939. Except it's not an invasion Cleveland fears, but a departure." Point taken. But while LeBron was culturally important to Cleveland, his departure seems somehow less impactful than Poland being invaded by the Nazis. A bit of an exaggeration, J.R.
-- Moehringer was on set for "The Decision" and got all kinds of deadly behind-the-scenes stuff. My favourite part was that James arrived at the shoot with Kanye West. Surreal. Also, the kids who sat in the bleachers behind James, serving as props for TV, had chugged a bunch of free Vitaminwater before the show (the company was one of the sponsors) and were pretty much bursting with pee by the time the show was over. This is the random stuff that makes a story come to life.
-- Moehringer talks to Maverick Carter, one of James's advisors, after the decision, as everybody was ripping James to shreds. "He (Carter) sounds baffled and woozy, like a science buff who was mixing chemicals in the garage and accidentally blew up the neighbourhood. 'How did it get so big?' he asks plaintively." Classic stuff. I'm no genius, but it seemed patently obvious to me that the only way the TV special would go over well was if James was returning to the Cavaliers. Memo to LeBron: Next time, don't listen to a guy named Maverick. Unless he's teaching you how to cheat at cards or dispose of a body.
-- There's a recurring scene where Moehringer negotiates with LeBron's publicist to find a private interview room. "This won't work," the publicist says at one point, evaluating a potential interview location. "LeBron's never been in this room before." Are you kidding me? Classic.
-- In the end, Moehringer more or less concludes that by heading to Miami with his buddies Bosh and Wade, James is trying to recreate the tight-knit vibe of his high school team. Seems logical.
-- A quick word on GQ. In between the pages and pages and pages of ads, there were a lot of interesting features worth reading. I'd buy it again. But I'm not going to become a metrosexual.

A month of mediocre poker

It's been quite a while since I've had time to update this blog, so I'll hit you with a brief August poker overview.
Basically, I spent the month mired in mediocrity. (How's that for alliteration?) I played a ton, perhaps as much as I have in any given month. It was certainly the most I've played at my current stakes. But I ended up turning just a $200 profit - marginal considering how much I played.
Looking back, I think my mentality got a little twisted around the time I wrote my first post of the day on Aug. 13 (entitled "Finally, a nice score"). I was coming off my most successful month ever, profiting $1,300, but I realized that if I earned that amount each month, it would take me 28 years to pay off my mortgage. Which, of course, is the whole point of this exercise.
So I decided I was going to spend more time playing multi-table tournaments in an effort to make a big score. That's not terrible logic, but I got into a frame of mind where if I failed to cash in a couple tournaments, I'd enter an even bigger buy-in tourney to win back my losses all in one shot. Like, if I finished out of the money in three or four $30 SNGs, I'd play a $100 SNG to try to get even again. It was sort of like trying to win a tournament in the first level.
It was not an effective mindset, and I was fortunate to get a couple nice MTT results to turn a profit in August. I ended the month by finishing seventh out of 503 players in a $30 MTT. I was the chip leader with 18 players remaining, but ran into some problems with around 11 players left and settled for a $480 payday. First place was $2,800, but my inexperience in that spot (final table of MTT) showed. Next time I'll take it down.
Bottom line is, I now realize I need to get back to the grinding mentality, rather than trying to get rich quick. I'll still play MTTs - in fact, I think my game sets up really well for that format - but I'm just going to be a little more calm about it. Right now, I feel like I'm in a good place mentally and poised for big things.
Looking forward to a monster month of September.
Bankroll = $5,000