he's recently been spotted playing 75/150 LO8. DrEmo-syndrome? this is his well

In first.

So how does it feel to have your own well?

What's your biggest downswing or break even stretch?

Is LHE dying and should we all learn omaha?

What is your poker story?

would you say the last 5 years have been the most exciting and successful period to be a philly fan (all sports)?

how far do you think the phillies will reach this postseason?

your expectations of the eagles?

Is 6 max lhe dying?
Is lhe dying?
What is the next big game? PLO, mixed games?
Biggest regret in poker?

If someone wanted to get started in O8 what would you recommend?

Cool degen stories like your famous Vegas story please!

About how many hours per week do you spend playing? How many towards improving?

Why doesn't Pokerbob like you?

What kind of music are you into?

Poison of choice?

Career earnings (if you don't mind sharing)?

favorite BOC song?

is T9s over rated?

players you fear?

When are you going to invite me up to party?

Cool, nice batch of questions. I'll get to all of them, first batch of responses shortly.

Turns out shorthanded LO8 is very fun! But I'm going to stay away from the 75 and max out at the 30 for now. The leap in skill seems large, and the 2/3 blind structure is too much for a LO8 beginner like me to handle.

Actually, let's do it skillgambler style. For all of October, the first person to spot me playing 75/150 O8 gets a $500 bounty.

Slightly overwhelming.


Well, I broke even in BBs for the first ~500k hands of my DB. Those are HHs from right around UIGEA when I was playing 24/16 and was certain I'd discovered the perfect style of play for 6max LHE. In my LAGTAG era, my longest breakeven is about 250k, which I'm in the midst of right now :-/

Biggest downswing was the end of last summer/beginning of the fall, I lost 80k and 1100 BBs. The big blow there was a -50k night at 100/200.


I dunno. I think it's inaccurate when people say "LHE is dying!!" There are still lots of great games. There's still plenty of fish, and LHE action on several sites. There are still plenty of people who purport to make a living at LHE who I feel have major leaks/horrible misconceptions about poker concepts.

Were there more plentiful good games in the past? Well, yeah. Most of my experience is in the 5/10 - 30/60 games on Pokerstars, which are certainly not the same quality they were several years ago. But I feel like much of the decrease in quality is due to the VIP club. LHE is a great source of FPP/VPPs. 3 years ago, TPirahna and Zzeigler weren't playing every single game of 15/30 and 30/60 for 12 hours a day, every day. In fact, back then I actually believed there were very few good players AT ALL in the 15s and 30s. Now, it's sometimes difficult to even find 5/10 games with 2+ bona fide fish, and the grinders have gotten more talented, while some of the weaker grinders/TAGs have departed the games. VPP sweet spot + relatively simple game to learn to a style that doesn't bleed off chips like crazy = Good luck keeping up a high winrate. That said, it's still pretty easy to maintain a LHE hourly rate that would make any waiter or unskilled laborer jealous. It's just much more difficult to get rich playing strictly LHE, and probably impossible without being fortunate enough to run good over small samples in big games.

Should we all learn Omaha? I don't think it's a bad idea. More game selection is never a bad thing.


That's gonna be a longer answer, I'll save it for later.


The first half of this decade was better than the second half, for sure. The early McNabb years, Iverson's prime, Primeau's captaincy, and the beginning of competitiveness for the Phillies.

The Eagles, Flyers, and Sixers have all been less competitive in the second half of the decade, while the Phillies have obviously been far more successful. Overall, though, the 2000s were far better than the 1990's. Hopefully the success will continue next decade, though I'm very bearish on the Phillies beyond 2011.

No reason the Phils can't win the WS again, they're certainly the favorites to come out of the NL. But the MLB playoffs are such a crapshoot, I'm more nervous than excited about the upcoming playoffs.

My Eagles expectations aren't very high. Too many depth issues, Vick's not a good enough passer, schedule too difficult. They'll have to run good on injuries and catch some breaks to make the playoffs... But I definitely think Vick is the guy most likely to bring them into the postseason this year.

Why would you only have the ailing grandfather Brett Favre as your only fantasy QB on your team? Will this post insure that I lose embarrassingly this week?

When are you coming to az to visit. Dc is having a Halloween party!

famous vegas story please

LHE dying, see above. I don't think LHE is going to fall off the map anytime soon. The bigger concerns are related to the global economy and legislation that could potentially limit the overall online poker market. People love hold'em for its simplicity, and they love limit poker because it's a slow bleed, and the lossrates for losing players are lower.

Next big game? Your guess is as good as mine. Mixed games will always be the best way to get good action at higher stakes, but obviously that requires proficiency in a variety of games. Gamblers will always love PLO, the swings are wild and I presume there's lot of action. I think the games with the highest gambooooool factors have the best chance of longterm viability.

The word regret sucks. I don't like to regret anything I've done along the ride. I regret some of my game selection decisions, some of the nights I've tilted off large #s. Some of the ways I've spent money have been foolish, but fun has been had and lessons have been learned, so whatever. I wish I had gotten better at poker earlier, but so does literally every other poker player I know. My biggest regret really might be not making SNE in 2008 when I more or less shut my life off for January and February and had 350k VPPs on March 1. But that's not a huge regret, cuz 2008 turned out A-OK in the end.

I'm kind of teaching myself, enlisting the help from some of the better poker players I know, watching some videos on DC, and running situations through twodimes.net. I've always found discussion with good players who are willing to look at situations with an open mind to be a much better way to improve than watching videos. Sometimes you can find such discussion on the 2p2 or DC forums, but the signal:noise ratio can get out of whack, so you need to be able to separate the good from the bad.

All the split pot players say that Ray Zee's book is a must-read. I haven't read it, but I'm sure it's a great way to get started on split pot games. The biggest thing I can express to a LHE player switching to O8 is to always be thinking about scooping. A very strong 1-way draw that's unlikely to scoop is not a powerful hand. Play these hands accordingly.


My degen stories suck now. Vegas was the pinnacle. Now all of my degen stories are related to taking underrolled shots in games I have questionable edges in, and getting drunk at lame dive bars and driving home. I've been keeping the ballin under control, and putting my money into boring, more reasonable places. I probably won't unleash my inner degen again until I quit poker.


The sooner you get hit by a bus, the better.

pepsi or coca cola?

explain your avatar?

biggest aha moment in poker?

But what about my Flyers!?

More of these please. If you haven't read it..look at the LC/NC for June or July 2009.

I usually play quite a bit. I'm at about 1150 hours this year, so I'm guessing that's somewhere around 30 hours a week? I took about 2 months off at the beginning of the summer, so a normal work week is more than that.

Most of my hours spent working on my game just feature me getting high and single-tabling, thinking about individual situations more thoroughly and running stove. I probably do that about 5 hours a week. I definitely think my herbal routine is beneficial to my poker game, although it's definitely not helpful when involved in intense multitabling sessions.


Eh, there's a lot of reasons Bob doesn't like me. I'm a "hotshot online player" who talks **** about live poker. Bob might not be as good at LHE as he believes he is, but he's a perceptive person who has witnessed a lot in the world of live poker. I'm sure he's seen some online superstars come through Commerce and play poorly, playing too loose for full ring and not adapting to the decreased levels of aggression. I think that because of that, his perception is that most online players are idiot spewmonkeys who don't know how to fold, and he takes offense when people like me talk about how LOLsoft the live games are.

He's also a bitter old man who enjoys projecting which players are in for hard times down the road. Since he believes most of my winnings are through running good at high stakes, and I've posted in the past about spending extravagantly, he's projected me as one of the ones who is due to crash and burn.

Now he probably hates me because I follow him around 3/6 games and repeatedly type LOL in the chatbox.


My music is pretty varied. I'd say I listen to music about half the time I'm grinding, and I have different music depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.

When I'm trying to stay off tilt: Belle and Sebastian, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Coldplay, The Xx, Florence + The Machine, New Pornographers, Modest Mouse

When I'm trying to keep my mind racing for multitabling or to ramp up my aggression: System of a Down, Tupac, Dr. Dre, Led Zeppelin, Andrew WK... Basically just loud, non-complicated music that doesn't distract me very much.

I strongly believe that Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time, and that nobody else really comes close.


Poison of choice is definitely smoooooooke. I also go out to bars at least once a week (And sometimes 6). When I want to get really drunk, I slam down gin + diet cokes, a drink that I named the Andy, after myself. Otherwise, I dropped my beer snobbery sometime in the past year or so, and I have no problem just drinking Coors Light. Quitting being a beer snob is one of the best developments in my life, I think.

Career earnings....ehh, not gonna go into details, it's poor form. I definitely made more in 2008 and 2009 than I will in 2010 though.

Favorite BOC song, that's my favorite question so far. I really love most of their album Secret Treaties. If I had to pick one track off of there, it'd probably be "Astronomy". BOC's first 4 albums are all pretty good, but once you get to album #5, Spectres, it gets kinda weird.

T9s is overrated by some, underrated by others. T9o, on the other hand, is underrated by everyone but me.

Not too many guys I fear. Dr_Olson and Heisenb3rg seem to be able to get me to do whatever they want, whenever they want, so I don't play them very often. SpottyDottie also owns me with his totally erratic style. Those 3 are the only ones that immediately come to mind. Special mention goes to SamBowie. He hasn't had very good luck vs me or anyone else on Pokerstars so far, but it's hard to keep a player of his caliber down.

We should go to West Chester or AC or something to party. Wilkes-Barre is the nut low for partying.

Book it. I'm assuming you're paying? Haha.

Glad I get ignored.

Relax Pope, I'm taking them in order

Awesome stuff so far Boc. I had no idea the BOC in your name was for Blue Oyster Cult. This alone makes this well the best!!!

What will you do if online poker goes away via legislation?

Career prognostications for:

DeSean Jackson
Roy Halladay
Evan Turner (although I think you said you weren't much of a basketball fan iirc. If so, replace with Kevin Kolb)

I like this Eagles squad. I don't see why they can't be a playoff team, I think the NFC falls off pretty far after GB/NO.

How bad did you feel when McNabb went to Washington? I'm not even an Eagles fan and I was sad, that guy has been one small step below Manning/Brady for the last decade, and to an outside observer it seems like he got **** on wayyyy too much. I want to know if my opinion is justified.

On Madden 11 Franchise Mode I chose the Colts, picked up TO in free agency, flipped him for Devin Hester, then traded Bob Sanders and Robert Mathis for Adrian Peterson, and then went and got TO back plus a pick for Joe Addai. So my offense is Peyton, AP, Reggie Wayne, Dallas Clark, TO, with Garcon/Hester as 5th option and Hester for kick returns.

My question is: How badly did I just bamboozle my XBox?

Are you planning on going to Vegas/Commerce for live action any time soon?

McNabb got **** on because he is the best quarterback in history at winning all the games that don't matter.