out west no one ever beeps at me or gives me the finger.

on the east coast it happens every ten minutes or so.

who is this person that answers you back mack that you have these conversations with?

so its christmas day. hope everyone is happy and finds something fun to do through the holidays.

and thanks for being here on my blog. i appreciate it.

His name is Peter. He's from the planet Amanjyaku. I have no idea what he looks like but he's a hell of a poker player. I haven't seen him around lately, I think he may be driving around looking at Xmas decorations.

watch out he is going to ask for money. i broke him in a big pot limit omaha game the other day.

i have friends where you live so help to you may be on the way.

Thank god. I've started playing 1-2 nlhe for the first time in over a decade and expect to be sleeping on the sidewalk soon. I'm already looking for the best spots.

ill have an article for you in jan. but hope may be too far off. maybe try tiddly winks.

aw heck ill pm you it.

It's a great article. All these cheap hold'em games are different now, so I'm starting over. There's no real big money on the table because they cap the buy-ins, and the players aren't so much gambooolers as "players" who want to talk about their c-bet frequencies. So it's back to super-tight Mack while I try to figure everything out. I've found a couple of mistakes these guys like to make, but it remains to be seen if there's any real money to be made. Good mental exercise, though.

the biggest mistakes are made in hands when playing out of position. its too hard to make the hand go the way you want it to especially if the opponent is not passive.

so that is the place to tighten up the most. its hard to play too tight in early positions.

The big surprise so far is how badly people play out of position. I'm talking about players who seem to know a little and I think would know better. At first I thought maybe they were trying to exploit having first bluff, but no, they just don't understand what they are doing.

Also, if they build their stack up, they don't change their game at all -- they just sucker themselves out of their chips.

I've played maybe 10 3-hour sessions so far and don't think I've come close to seeing the entire player pool, but I think this is going to be a pretty standard sample. I've gotten lucky a few times, so I'm ahead, but I think I'm on Stage 2 where I'm playing break-even poker. I say this because I'm not extracting the maximum from my good situations, just having people give me too much with their mediocre hands.

The games are time charge, so the money stays on the table, it's just that there's not a lot of it to begin with -- a bunch of 300 - 700 stacks.

those sized stacks are big enough to make 1/2 profitable. make your money in position against bigger stacks or you get run off too many hands when a scare card comes and you must check for a reason.
short stacked it doesnt matter much as you get enough in early its hard to make a major mistake later on.

almost all 1/2 players have so many leaks you can easily spot and torture them with. and most times it takes the best hand to win against them. so your bluffs are concentrated during the small part of the pots early on. if you even must bluff in the game. but thats where you make your bluffs so it looks like you are action but have the winning hand when the pot gets bigger.

It sounds like an exaggeration, but they have so many leaks that it is hard to keep track of them all. It seems every time I'm in a hand I'm against multiple opponents and I'm checking off all their faults from a long mental list.

you bunch them all together and pick a way to play the hand which gives you the best result. its all just a guess.

most times in multiway pots you are playing straight forward in the smaller games. as squeezing out people usually just gets you in a worse spot as they mostly call if they have any chance in their minds of winning.
they dont read hands well or care. so play straight forward and they will just play their hand against the pot without including yours in the mix.

a big play that yields good results is to raise in position to get a free card or bust someone if you hit a big draw when they are more passive. few do this enough.

I love this play. Sooner or later they get wise, but then they forget in a day or two.

crazy year again for weather. montana has been warm as heck. the east coast has gotten blasted and so has the north central, although thats more common. giant firs in Australia where ive been a bunch of times.
so sad over a billion animals have died from the fires.

certainly time to prepare for the large changes that have been happening despite whether you believe what is causing it or not.

I believe it.

This planet is actually very small.

All this business about who or what is causing it has to be misdirection, right? In the long run it only matters how we react to it. Shifting the discussion to who or what is to blame is just an excuse for inaction.

ya gotta blame someone for it dontya.? it really doesnt matter a smidgen anyway what or who dun it. but if it dont get fixed the ship goes down with all hands on board. luckily by the time it gets bad enough i will be with the worms basking in nature where i belong.

About 15 years ago I predicted that because of online tournaments and sit 'n gos, all the small-stakes nlhe players would learn to play big stacks. I was completely wrong, of course, none of them have. It doesn't matter if they have $50 or $1000, if they flop top pair they're off to the races. If I've been woofing on the flop, they don't seem to notice that it's now the river. They're not planning ahead, they're not thinking about how they want the hand to play out.

Perhaps 10% of the human population "plans ahead" in any significant way. Short Term or Long Term. And my ten percent figure is being generous.

Of course your life is never dull if you bounce around with abandon like a rubber ball in a small dog house. I think Ray Zee did that for awhile. It wears you out though, and soon you are just a tattered rag of your former self. That's when you retire to Montana or Oregon and just fish for the remaining years left.

my travels were my best memories in my life. traveled all over the northwest in an airstream for 8 years.

the good poker part of travels all over the world playing, is that i got to see all the different styles and ways players handle things. most only get more of a local flavor or outsiders that come to town but are not then at their usual self.

I spent a couple of years when I was young travelling around the Southwest in an old airstream. I don't think I ever went a day without thinking about how well and smart it was built. I wish I still had it.

it was cool. i had a 23 foot airstream i lived in, towed with a 3/4 ton pickup with a camper shell/alaskan. motorcyle on the front bumper and a canoe on the roof.

Yeah, I had the 23 footer that I pulled with an International Travelall. I'd sometimes carry a Trail 90 or a yamaha AT -- which pound for pound were two of the best bikes I ever owned. They were indestructible and if I got into trouble I could get them over whatever the obstruction was -- pick them up if I had to.

The stuff I had then I understood and could work on. The newer stuff I have now I don't understand and am getting rid of. I don't like having things I can't take care of. I just sold a hybrid RAV4. Nothing wrong with it, I just never had any idea what I was dealing with.