In previous posts, I've talked about how allowing the Mississippi straddle anywhere except for the blinds could lead to a levelling war between regs who are seated next to each other, if the reg on the right always straddles in the Cutoff.

This is because the Mississippi straddler gets to go last preflop, and action then starts on the player to the left of the straddle. A Cutoff straddle means that the Button has to act first, effectively turning the Button into an Under The Gun preflop, which is a very bad thing, EV wise.

The Button has but one recourse in this case, and that is to take the straddle away from the Cutoff, as only one Mississippi straddler is allowed in a hand, and the Button has first priority for it.

I don't like to straddle; I think that an extra $5 blind bet is a leak, even in position, but last night it finally happened. A loose-aggro player transferring from another table sat down on my right with a huge stack. He was a hippy-looking guy in his late-thirties, and at the first opportunity he set about trying to straddle on the Cutoff, when I was on the Button.

Other players have tried this before, on occasion, and I've always thrown on the Button straddle and then asked them, "Not on my button, please." Until this guy, everyone had chosen to honor my request...and to be clear, nobody has to stop just because I ask. It's not an angle or a breach of poker etiquette to straddle whereever you want.

This guy humored me for a few orbits, but then he started losing, and he went back to trying to throw on the straddle from the Cutoff, forcing me to straddle on the Button to take it away.

My preconceived plan for this occasion was to change seats or to transfer tables. Take the easy spots and leave the battling to the egotists. But this guy had riled me up a bit, which is probably what he was trying to do; however, he was also raising my Button straddle nearly every time, and therefore too widely, and I had position on him, so I stuck around, and I won more than a few of my Button straddles, and Villain's stack gradually flowed away; some of it to me, and the rest of it to the other players.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$900.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$49.95

2024 Running Poker Total: 280 hours, +$5010.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 150 hours, +$6137.24

2024 Grand Total: 430 hours, +$11147.24

Doing great the past few sessions, doing great.

Let's go!

+1000.

I did not know this about Mississippi straddles, interesting...

Thanks guys!

Every good thing comes to an end. I lost $600+ last night and ragequit after 5 1/2 hours of getting beat up.

The ragequitting really bothers me. I need to work on that; maybe get up for a long walk instead. Unfortunately, I also have a compulsive and entirely irrational need to not miss my blinds for some reason, so I'll have to work on that before I try walking away for longer than a few hands. If it's not one thing, it's another.

So I missed a 40 hour week by 90 minutes. I'm going back today to finish that last hour and a half, as a sort of atonement for quitting early yesterday.

I talked about straddles with some dealers and players last night. Apparently the Mississippi part means that the straddle can be done from anywhere except for the blinds. The order of action, however, might vary.

When the Flamingo had a poker room, their straddle was Button only, so not Mississippi, and preflop action started on the UTG, then it went around until it actually skipped the Button and went on to the blinds, then it returned to the Button, who went dead last. Non-regs often found this order baffling, and I didn't blame them.

I don't know if there are places that do the Mississippi straddle with the Flamingo turn order, but that's getting deep into the weeds, in any case.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentiment to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride; how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away."

-Abraham Lincoln

I sat down for my short 90 minute session today and found myself stuck $200 before even two orbits had passed. I also played a hand poorly during that time, and my bad play tends to tilt me more than anything. This instance was no exception. I could feel the heat rising around my temples; the figurative steaming sensation.

I really, really wanted to bail, but I'd driven a half hour out to the casino just to play a 90 minute session and by the gods I was going to stay for the duration, come what may.

I didn't go for a walk, but I did burrow down into my phone for 15 minutes to observe close-hand the doings of the Internet, and that proved to be a steadying influence, or at least a numbing one. By the end of the session, I'd clawed back the $200, and I was happy to have weathered the storm without running off.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 7 hours
(-$623.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$61.80

2024 Running Poker Total: 287 hours, +$4387.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 153 hours, +$6199.04

2024 Grand Total: 440 hours, +$10586.04

surprised to hear this Dubn! It exists in many (most?) US markets.

this order of action is still the Vegas norm ime.

down on the Gulf Coast, the Missippi straddle is ubiquitous (pretty much anywhere in TX/LA/MS) and action starts to the left of the straddler without skipping the blinds. So facing a button straddle the SB is at even more of a disadvantage, being forced to act first both pre and post.

Whether the straddle is "good for the game" is, of course, the topic of much debate.

Yes, the Small Blind to the left of the Button straddle becomes a super Small Blind, and needs to have a very nitty opening range.

Sitting to the direct left of a serial Mississippi straddler puts the hero in early position for the entire orbit, and therefore is to be avoided at all costs. Even the best player can't maintain a decent win rate if the hero is constantly stuck in EP.

Conversely, sitting to the direct right of a serial straddler puts the hero in the Cutoff for a good part of the orbit, and without having to put in the $5 blind bet. This is obviously a good spot; however, a serial straddler often inspires others at the table to start straddling, which bolloxes up any of hero's seating schemes.

Damn, those are some big sessions. Being jammed into when you're holding the nuts is one of the best feelings in poker.

Did something go wrong here?

I think he played his last "session" over 2 days.
Day 1: He did rage quit being -$600.
Day 2: He started -$200 (so -$800 total) but climbed back to finish -$623 combined over the 2 days.

I suspect this is a boon to the small blind in that it improves their game by discouraging the "defense" of dead money in the worst position.

Yeah sorry, I could have been more clear. What uberkuber wrote is the case.

That's correct in theory. In $1/$2 practice the super UTG just limps the straddle amount 40% of the time instead of 60%.

A Bug's Life™

Some ongoing gastrointestinal difficulties kept me away from the table today, but this afternoon I felt well enough to walk to the store. On my way back, I was stalked by a deerfly.

I my youth, I had taught myself the trick of trapping and killing deerflies by attaching the bottom of my hands, splay-fingered, to the top of my head on either side, as if my hands were a tiny pair of moose antlers.

The deerflies can't seem to resist landing one of my hands or fingers when I'm in this pose. As soon as I feel the landing, I slap my hands together and crush the deerfly between them.

So I stood on the sidewalk, with my bag of stuff from the store on the ground at my side, next to a busy road, and I did my moose impression for a while, while people drove by in presumable wonder, but no murderous joy this time. The deerfly flew away without landing on the bait.

Perhaps I killed so many with that trick when I was young that I unwittingly helped to breed a strain of smarter deerflies in my local area. That got me thinking about how many insects and spiders I've murdered so far in my lifetime. I'm not talking about simple bugslaughter—all of us have splatted and run over thousands and thousands of bugs with our cars and trucks over the years—I'm talking about deliberate, premeditated killing...Murder 1.

When I was a boy, I was a cruel psychopath to bugs. I used to pull the deerfly trick whenever they were around, which was often if it was summer; I would kill houseflies by clapping my hands together two inches above them, and they could rarely resist hopping straight up into that press of death; I never just brushed off mosquitos, they had to die, and the patio of my childhood home often hosted ants, and I would respond to their presence by taking out a basketball and dribbling it around.

Fortunately, I never graduated in my cruelty on to "higher" animals like cats and dogs. I've always loved cats. Dogs? Eh, the species has shown a little too much willingness to lick the Man's boots and become attack dogs and K-9 drug sniffers and whatnot, but I would never willingly hurt a dog. It would cause me a lot of emotional pain to hear a dog whimper and know that I was the reason for it.

So why are bugs different? What about the thousands of insects I've deliberately murdered in my lifetime? If there's an afterlife, will I be made to atone for all of these malevolent killings? Should insect and arachnid lives be valued the same as all other living creatures?

Those were my thoughts as I walked back from the store. I became so preoccupied with them that I let myself into the wrong apartment building, and I had to turn directly around, walk out, and skulk over to my own building, hoping that no one had seen me.

Proof that the deer flies are controlling your mind. Part of their plan to wreck vengeance. The first sign was their refusal to mistake you for Bullwinkle.

I hate deeflies. Their bite really hurts and is really distinctive. As soon as you feel the sting, you say to yourself, "****ing deerfly!"

Then there's the next level up: horseflies. Those bastards hurt; maybe not as much as a bee sting, but they definitely get your attention.

Rolling Stone's 467th Greatest Album of All Time: BLACKsummers’night by Maxwell (2009)

This album is not to be confused with Maxwell's blackSUMMERS'night from 2016, so I will endeavor to avoid ranting about either of these titles in all-caps.

So oh great, another album from an unknown-to-me R&B crooner from an era when I'd completely stopped paying attention to new music. Well, here I am to atone for that ignorance.



Gerald Maxwell Rivera, aka Maxwell, is a singer, songwriter and producer who is close to my age. He has been very successful in the business for the last 30 years, so he doesn't need me to hype his goods.

And that is a good thing, because I won't. This genre of music is not for me. I don't own a high-fidelity stereo system on which I can put Maxwell's smooth love songs in order to charm various ladies into spending various nights with me in the throes of passionate lovemaking.

But I get it. I was young, once. And anything that brings more love and affection into the world is a welcome addition. So I listened; twice, as is my rule, and I tried to find some things that I liked.

"Bad Habits" is the first track on the album and one of its popular singles, but upon seeing the title, I shuddered to think that I'd be exposing myself to the original version of Ed Sheeran's insipid, massively overplayed, thrice-cussed commercial earworm.



Fortunately, this song is nothing like Sheeran's, so that was nice.

The singing is fine—Maxwell is a talented crooner with excellent pipes—but I enjoyed the jazzy outro more than the crooning. The YouTube video title bears the suffix of "(uncut)", so I might guess that the radio single cuts out the instrumental end of the song, which is the part I like the most.

"Help Somebody" is a nice departure from the other love songs and sexy mood-setters on the album, and it has a soulful old-school 70s horn section and R&B cadence and feel to it that I like a lot.



Rolling Stone Says:

Maxwell was a successful Nineties neo-soul crooner who went on an eight-year hiatus between 2001’s Now and this 2009 release. BLACKSummers’night betrays no anxiety about the time off; in fact, it ranks among the great comeback records. Maxwell sang about post-breakup desperation as he navigated plush, complicated grooves with jazz players like Keyon Harrold and Derrick Hodge giving his arrangements extra zip.

I agree that the music is a step up from the standard modern minimalist R&B fare. And while I'm not the biggest fan of jazz, I can appreciate it in moderate doses.

To me, horsefly bites are as painful as bee stings, but not as bad as yellow jackets. I wonder if kids still play outside. There may be a whole generation that has no idea what we are rambling on about.