If I had to I'd like to think I would. Hopefully I won't be put in that position though because I'd rather not die just yet.

What's not to like about BT2?

Doubtful, but I'd have to weigh the pros and cons if ever I meet a vampire who wants to initiate me.

I'm guessing not, because the sight of blood makes me squeamish and I'm a little too quiet/passive/reluctant to really live the undead life to its fullest.

I didn't used to because I didn't have cable. More of a movie/video game guy myself.

But shows I like(d):

Arrested Development.
The Simpsons.
Seinfeld.
The Office (both American and British).
The Colbert Report.
Star Trek TNG.
I'm just starting in on Twin Peaks which looks promising, even though I'm not a big David Lynch fan.

Yes, I'm aware that a lot of these shows don't air any more.

Any suggestions for current shows I should watch?

This is very classy. Does this describe your wife?

Hey man, thanks for doing this, you're one of my favorite posters here and your sexy avatar obviously makes me excited far beyond what I would expect from a nerdy forum.

Couple of questions:

Biggest winning and losing pot ever?

Lifetime graph.

Fav food and drink.

Fav song? Fav movie? Fav TV show?

Your fav non premium hand?

Best hand you ever played?

Favorite sport?

Favorite poster on 2p2?

Name the 3 toughest players you ever encountered at a poker table.

You seem to be a very intelligent person with various degrees in areas I'm greatly interested in. Would you consider one day becoming my mentor in case I want to dabble in particle physics or anything related to it?


Again, thanks for doing this. Awesome.

Biggest "aha" moment(s) in your poker development?

I'm in a different spot now than I was 5 years ago. Even though I'm not exactly sure what I want to do with grad school, I feel confident that I'm committed enough to it to work hard and get something done. That wasn't the case when I went to grad school before, when I half-assedly doing research I didn't care about in a field that I had no real interest in. I wanted to study gravitation and cosmology but instead ended up measuring branching ratios of D mesons ... blech.

If the Higgs doesn't show up it'll be a pretty big deal. Honestly, it'd be pretty exciting and I think a lot of theorists out there are kind of hoping nothing shows up because it will likely require a major overhaul of the standard model (which isn't really that satisfying as it is -- it just happens to work really well).

I'd be surprised if the Higgs isn't discovered by the LHC, but thrilled nonetheless if they find nothing (partly because of new physics, partly because of "haha billions of dollars and decades of work to find nothing" which would basically be a larger scale version of my own physics experience.)

As an aside, I spent a summer working at CERN as an undergrad. My official project was to build a vacuum system for the ATRAP collaboration's antihydrogen experiment. About 50% of that was spent with me mixing small concrete blocks with a semicircular hole in one end, out back behind the women's bathroom shed (even though there were no women in the building). Best ... Summer ... Research ... EVER (though living it switzerland was pretty cool).

Thoughts on the large hadron collider? If one were being sucked into a black hole, do you think one would realize it and, if so, for how long would you know (i.e. a microsecond)?

I'm a grad student in biochemistry (more interested in x-rays) and I found your poker story interesting and not at all too long. I started playing sit n goes a couple years ago when I had just started my Ph.D. program, fwiw.

LOL...just saw this. all the grad students playing around on 2p2. Also, Jinmoon, I feel your pain. I'm in the home stretch for my biochem. Ph.D. and similarly dragging my feet to the finish line. The whole Ph.D. process has sucked the life blood out of me.

Haha, I thought you were asking about me . It is very classy, though .

As excited as greying brunettes make me, my wife is a blond. I don't really have a "hair type" specific attraction to women. In fact, you can say that about a lot what attracts me to a person -- I don't get excited by (tall/short, blond/brunette, dark/pale, etc.) but more by the whole package, including looks, personality, sense of humor, intelligence ...

What´s your strategy to fight back against a competent button´s open steal raise that comes specificaly as a minraise?

So did you wind up marrying the TA?

Biggest strength in your game?



LOL, can't imagine where else on 2p2 I'll ever have the opportunity to post my fav poem so here it is:
http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html

It's my pleasure. Thanks for the kind words. And T.S. Eliot is seriously hawt.

In terms of BBs, I won a $1400 pot at $1/2 vs. a mega-fish, but it wasn't that interesting. I posted it in SSNL, let me see if i can find it ... here.

Biggest in terms of $won ... Well, I've won a few $3k pots at $5/10, but nothing to extraordinary (one of them was good -- I was 4-tabling and paying close attention to a fish. He had some serious bet-size tells -- I called his preflop raise and flopped a flush + gutshot. His flop bet was "I have an overpair" so I called. The turn was a jack and his underbet was "Holy **** I just turned top set!" so obviously I called. The river was the perfect card for me, completing my disguised gutshot, so I overbet jammed on his river bet. He obviously called and berated me before leaving the table. It felt pretty good and got me almost unstuck for the day.

As far as big losing pots, I've never really personally lost more than 170bb in a pot, and none of them are particularly interesting IMO.

I'll see if I can put that together, but it'll take me awhile.

Mmmmm, food. I'm a pretty big fan of most food to be honest. If you ever ask me about somewhere I've lived I'll probably say something like, "oh yeah, there's this great thai place on the corner, and you can get amazing sweet potato pancakes at the hamburg or ..." Recently I've been eating a lot of salmon burgers and Indian food. Mmmm, Indian food ...

That is simply an unanswerable question. I'll post a list of songs I've been listening to recently.

Also basically unanswerable, but:
For a long time Besieged was my favorite movie. Then it was Once Upon a Time in the West. For a brief period it was Blade Runner, then 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by Dr. Zhivago, When Harry Met Sally, the Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, and Annie Hall. I'm a huge fan of Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick, but really can't pick a favorite movie -- just a ton of movies I love and will watch over and over again.

I mentioned TV shows earlier, but if I had to pick a favorite I would say Arrested Development (sad it's no longer on).

Premium hands are all I ever play . Seriously, my favorite non-premium hand to play is any hand I'm dealt on the button.

I love this question. There have been a lot of hands I've played where I thought I made good calldowns with busted nut draws vs. busted non-nut draws (one of my favorite things to do), but my absolutely favorite hand is also one that I butchered and looks pretty bad. I'll post a link once I find it in the archives ...

Does chess count? If not, my favorite sport to watch has got to be college (american) football. I'm pretty terrible at all form of sports, and didn't really even start watching any until college.

I don't really want to get into a "best poster on 2p2" thing because there are tons of great posters here in all of the forums, and I've learned a lot from countless posters across a variety of forums. There are bound to be brilliant posts / posters who I leave out.

I will mention just a very brief few, though. In MTT forums I really like adanthar's and LearnedFromTV's posts. In the cash forums Jman has a tendency to post things that make my head explode with their awesomeness, and to do it in such a way where I feel like I should have seen it all along. fslexicduck also consistently posts really good and thorough hand analyses. I like soah's pithy posts in full ring because they usually in 1-2 sentences either say exactly what I would have said in a paragraph or destroy my whole faulty line of reasoning. Also, Buzz's posts in O/8 are top-notch.

Do I count? (j/k -- I don't think anybody would describe me as a tough player, more like an empty seat ).

Honestly, I'll say any good aggressive player who routinely plays pots in position vs. me can be a real headache. I've played with lots of aggressive players who can give me trouble, but I can't think of anybody who has routinely owned me over a large sample. There are definitely players who can be aggravating to play against, though, and several of the regular posters on these forums have made my full ring life uncomfortable with their near-constant preflop 3-bets and floats .

I played with a guy named Max in the LAPT who was pretty much always one step ahead of me, which was humbling. We only played together a few hours, but he was entirely in control of the table and squashed any moves I tried to make to keep myself from getting run over.

But in any experience like that there's something to be learned if you're willing to look for it. From that game and discussing some hands with him after the table broke it gave me a pretty new important perspective on dictating the pace of a game when the table conditions allow and how to sniff out spots where players are going to be looking to make stand.

Sure, but I'd advise you to find a better mentor. One who isn't jaded and who is still active in physics, for example . Seriously, having a good mentor to help direct you when you aren't sure what the next step is cannot be underestimated -- my graduate student advisor was not the most ideal for me, and I think that had a lot to do with the lack of progress I made in my research.

Again, it's my pleasure.

robert frost is a fish

do you have a yhoo chess account or chess.net account so we can play?

When I first got a cardrunners membership after some laughably bad tournament play and I watched the Jman and CTS videos ... it was the first time i'd really sweated a really strong player who was outlining their thought process.

Suddenly it all clicked there, I think. My default thinking level went from 1st to 2nd (more or as necessary depending on the opponent of course) -- I started thinking outloud about opponent's ranges and what their lines meant and how I could take advantage of it. I saw that I could open up my game a lot more in late position that I was, realized how position is a huge weapon as long as you aren't afraid to make some plays, realized how preflop action affects postflop play and the importance of having the initiative ...

basically it was a coalescing of all the pieces I'd been picking up through reading the forums, finally being put together into a working machine.

My advice to anybody reading this: Spend some time each week playing fewer tables than you normally do -- no more than four. While playing those tables, talk outloud about *VILLAIN'S* range as the hand is playing out -- what YOU think they're representing, and how they'll respond to each of your possible actions on a given board texture. Before you raise, ask yourself "what hands in his range do I expect to fold? Under what conditions am I firing another barrel? What do I hope to achieve by my action?" Before you call ask yourself what hands you're beating and what hands are beating you, and if the hands that are beating you will fold to a raise? Etc. etc.

Once you get in the habit of thinking / acting like this it will take your game to the next level (if you aren't already there).

favorite energy drink?

<shrug> working in physics kind of felt like my entire life was already spent being sucked into a black hole, so I guess just ask any of the jaded grad students working at CERN .

Poker can be a real drain on one's productivity in grad school. That being said, people like myself who get caught up in poker would likely have gotten caught up getting distracted by other things instead if not for poker.

I'm not sure if I'm better off playing poker than I would have been if I never learned the game. I have more money, that's for sure, but it's come at a cost -- there are a lot of things I used to be more interested in before like movies, music, books that I just don't think as much about any more -- it seems that will spending so much time worrying about EV, it's easy to lose sight of the less tangible value to be found outside of poker.

Would you rather have a rhino sized hamster or a hamster sized rhino?

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 meaning they play a perfect game, how would you rate the average regular at each of the different stakes from nl100 to nl1000?

It depends, but it's funny how things come full circle.

[Boring rant]NL games online used to have a 50BB max buy-in. The standard algorithm was to raise 4xBB+1/limper, which made pot-sizes basically perfect for playing TPTK / overpair pots, and hard to really effectively be setmined.

Then 100BB stacks started up, and people kept with the 4x+1 rule. It's not bad, but now it can be pretty tough for overpairs, so people had to adjust their postflop play.

Playing 6-max people start to realize that 3-betting wide instead of calling wide can be way more profitable because people fold too much / defend the wrong hands / play bad in 3-bet pot. People also start to learn that defending too wide OOP by calling can be pretty terrible since you'll be playing pots w/deep stacks OOP without the initiative. Regulars especially adjust and move mostly toward a 3-bet/fold game ...

Minraising, IMO, is just one way of adjusting to today's game conditions -- it has some benefits, like
(1) stacks are deeper if you get called, which can be good if you're IP and good at postflop play.

(2) 3-bets will be smaller, meaning deep enough stacks to maneuver postflop -- the 3-bettor will often find himself in an awkward spot if he does it with the wrong hands -- if the raise is too big it's easy for the minraiser to play against -- if it's typical (somewhere near pot-sized) the stacks are a little more awkward post, with 15BB in the pot and 92 left in the stack.

(3) If people call too much they'll find themselves OOP w/marginal hands in small/medium pots (which is good for the player w/initiative and position. If they fold too much they're giving up good pot odds and you're laying yourself a great price on your bet (2BB to win 1.5BB is great).

Minraising doesn't work all that well in very loose games where you won't thin the field at all, but it works great in games filled with TAGs and a few fish where the TAGs fold too much and the fish don't. Not to mention for some reason or another it seems like it can tilt the regulars something fierce ... Minraising, which used to be terrible in the loose passive fishy games from 3 years ago is now all the rage... (as is the related click-it-back)[/Boring rant]

How do I combat min-raises? I call a little more often than I otherwise would with hands that play well postflop because of the greater pot-odds/implied odds. I still try to avoid playing too many pots OOP, but am willing to mix up both calling wider and 3-betting wider in position, as well as playing in a few more pots from the blinds than I would to a 4BB+ raise.

The real weakness of the minraise is the pot/implied odds it offers you ... if you find away to exploit that dealing with the minraise shouldn't really be much trouble at all.

Do you ever feel nervous before you play or do you always have a very calm, confident mindset?

Steinberg?

I did indeed .

Speaking of which, if anybody is interested in reading about my non-poker life I have a blog that I've updated a half dozen times in the last two years at http://prufrockstar.org -- I was personally quite happy with the way the Orry Quest entries turned out. I should warn you though there hasn't been any new content posted since last summer. I should continue updating that some time ...


Table selection is pretty key. Playing fewer tables than a lot of regulars and paying more attention is also pretty key. I feel like I can mix it up pretty well (In a session I can run anywhere from 12/8 to 35/30) and adapt to table conditions as needed.

For the most part, though, I play a pretty safe, strategic game. I don't usually run huge bluffs with air, and those times I do I have a good reason for doing it. The psychology of the game isn't my strongest point, so I have to make up for that by playing a pretty logically sound game.

My hope is that people view me as an uncreative ABC TAG, and I'm happy to maintain that image.

I can tell you some of my weaknesses, though: I don't like to make big neutral EV gambles (which may hurt my ability to get into big +EV gambles in future situations). I talk myself into folding way more than I should, especially in spots where I induce bets that I don't want to call. Thankfully people don't seem to get out of line too much, even when I basically give them the green light too.

Another problem I have is that, at my deepest core I'm basically a nit, and I constantly have to struggle against that in order to remain capable of making some high variance +EV plays. This is one of the reasons I think it's going to be good for me to learn PLO.

I've never been a huge fan of Frost, but he's growing on me.

That'd be him. He totally owned me in what was a pretty minor pot in terms of the tournament but a relatively big pot in terms of my development as a player. I mentioned the hand in my LAPT Day 1 blog entry.