I do have a yhoo chess acount but i haven't played on it for a long time. el_sapito is the name (i think).

I also used to play on fics (http://www.freechess.org/). PM me and we can either set up a time to play or start a correspondence game via PM.

Coffee.

I've already placed my order for both -- there's enough love in this heart for both of these genetic monstrosities.

If I'm feeling nervous or tired or disinterested I usually just don't play.

I'm completely calm whenever I'm playing live, which I find a little surprising. Even at the three major tournaments I've played (2007 PCA, 2008 LAPT Costa Rica, and 2008 WSOP ME) I've felt perfectly comfortable.

It's important, IMO, to be aware of your mental state when you're playing a session. If I'm not feeling good about playing I take a break until I do feel calm, collected, awake and engaged. Tommy Angelo's book hits this point pretty hard with chapters on being a good quitter and using quitting/not playing as a means of lopping off your C-game. It's well worth reading if you haven't read it yet.

*** Do you think french players are :

A) Idiot calling station
B) Huge fish
C) Spewy ******s
D) A, B & C... so D.

*** Brune or blonde ? And why ?

Re: Music. My music interests are eclectic. In high school I worked in the music department of our local Barnes and Noble, which meant I got to listen to a wide variety of music while waiting on the one customer per hour who would come back into the section.

I generally listen to Bach, Metallica, or the Velvet Underground while I'm playing poker. I've also been known to listen to:

The Magnetic Fields (<3 69 Love Songs), Jurassic 5, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kenna, Hank Williams, the Buena Vista Social Club, Ani Difranco, Dar Williams, Megadeth, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Chris Smither, Blind Willie McTell, Miles Davis, Bartok, the Pipettes, the Postal Service, Franz Ferdinand, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Smashing Pumpkins, Dale Watson, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Susana Baca, the Cars, the Clash + others.

Lately I've been on a classic country and alt-country kick. I imagine country doesn't get a lot of love on this forum, but here are some songs that I think are well-worth listening to:

Whiskey or God - Dale Watson
Country Heroes - Hank Williams III
Stoned -- The Old 97s.


Crazed Country Rebel - Hank Williams III is also good for a listen every once in awhile.

<shrug> By the sounds of it I need to play with more french players.

Already answered somewhere.

I don't know if this kind of ranking is possible, but from what I can say is the biggest jump for me was between 200nl and 400nl. 400 and 600 play pretty close to each other, IMO. I only have about 15k hands lifetime at 1000nl so can't offer much of an opinion about how it plays, but it doesn't seem that wildly different than 600nl (though there are definitely some tougher regulars at 1000nl and game selection is key because there are fewer fish and they don't last long).

Proofrock - which Mario Kart character is your favorite?

Without a doubt it has to be Dry Bones driving that adorable little Bullet Bike.

Why did you move to Seattle? Where would you live if you could live anywhere?

Donkey Kong...he keeps it classy

what kart do u play

My wife is a medical student at UW, and I followed her.

If I could live anywhere I'd live anywhere but Vegas . Seattle seems like a really cool and laidback city which fits me well, so I'm looking forward to living here.

I only have the last 250k hold'em hands, and what you see will include all hold'em hands, including shorthanded and about 25k hands of limit.



Who wants to guess where everything finally clicked in the above graph?



Who wants to guess where I started experimenting with playing lots of tables of $1/2 after dropping around 18 buy-ins at $2/4?

Overall I've maintained a 4.5 ptbb/100 winrate over the 225k hands of nl/pl in the above graphs (about 5.4 PTBB/100 over the last 100k hands of $2/4).

pic of you, and your wife?

(i won't tell anyone about online poker being illegal in wash. state)

As you get older, do you find that you're starting to wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled?

Have you ever dared to eat a peach while walking on the beach?

Do you think you could name a locate 100+ countries outside of your own?

Do you believe that the American education syllabus go far enough when it comes to enlightening youngsters about the world around them?

What are the gambling laws like in Qatar?

What is the craziest thing you saw there?

Do you dig any other Eliot stuff? Or was it just that one poem

Best cappuccino in Seattle?

I once had one at a place called Zeitgeist, and it was awesome.

Two hands here, the 2nd is closer to my heart than the first, even though I ended up wimping out and folding king high to the river shove ...

Hand 1

This is from the WSOP main event. It may not be the best hand I've ever played, but I like it because

(1) it ends with me bluff-shoving the river in a multiway pot with my tournament life on the line zomg, and

(2) it's a pretty clearly +EV play that I would not have been capable of making a year ago, as if I had achieved a certain level of poker maturity (all I needed was somebody standing beside me to pat me on the back and say, "congratulations son, you've become a man.") I mean, it wasn't just "they checked so bluff because I can't win" it was "wow, that river card is perfect, I had planned to give up but now that they've both told me they don't have a straight AND I can credibly represent a straight I should shove."

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/87...-shove-248413/

---------------------

Hand 2

My favorite hand, though, is one I butchered horribly on every street. I'll walk through why I liked it, though.

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...ue#Post5766826

Let me say a little about my game at the point the above hand takes place, even though I didn't know it at the time.

(1) I was not as tight as I thought I was. In the above hand, I raised KJo UTG to 4xBB w/a 200BB stack, then CB near pot on a dry board into 3 players ...

(2) I regularly didn't know what my plan was for the next street.

(3) I did not think clearly about Villain's range on all streets, only when facing big decisions, and even then I mostly only thought "does he have me beat, or do I have him beat?"

(4) I was not capable of value-betting thin on the river. I was not capable of value-betting "medium" on the river either. In this hand, if I had AQ (for TPGK) I would have called a bet for sure but would never have value bet.

Villain in the hand was a better player than me. He was somewhat laggy and a good thinking player. We'd played together a fair bit and I'm pretty sure his read on me was that I was a thinking player, on the tight side, but one on whom he had an edge. He regularly played 1/2-2/4 online cash games and was capable of making moves and was a better hand-reader than I was. I believe he was aware that I would not bet the river with an ace in the above hand.


Without those vital pieces of information the hand looks really ridiculous when you post it in 2p2. It was in fact atrociously played by me, but it does have it's moment -- on the river I had a chance to redeem my poor play from the previous streets by making a crazy sick call (which I didn't make, even after tanking for about 5 minutes before folding KJo UI to a river c/shove).

This was also probably the first hand where I really seriously went through a "leveling" question. On the river my thought process went like this: "He checked so I'm pretty sure he's just giving up on his hand. I bet because I can't win the pot but I'm sure he doesn't have an ace. WTF, did he just c/shove? Man I suck, why did I bet so little with my obvious "value bet" on the river? Wait a minute ... he can't think I'd bet the river with an ace there because that's just not how I play. But I guess I can't really have many other hands either except monsters, and it's not like I ever have 76 or a set here. So if he thinks I don't have any hand better than 8x (because I would check all of those behind on the river), and he can't expect me to have a stronger hand I'll be enough to do this for value, the only reason for him to do this is if he has NO showdown value. KJo beats total air, unless he's doing this with 23 or 33 but I don't really think he'd bet those on the turn. I wish I didn't play this hand so bad up to this point so I wouldn't be faced with this tough decision."

In retrospect I should have called. I would have lost, but I should have called instead of second-guessing myself at the last minute and starting to worry about hands like 23 or 33 or 54 that might have been in his range, because honestly I didn't think they were there. Basically KJo seemed to weak to me to bluff-catch, even though it really wasn't.

The key to this hand is that he would not expect me to value bet the river with one pair but he would expect me to call with 1 pair, removing the value c/r hands from his range.

FWIW, he tabled KQhh so I guess in a FTOP sense I made a good river fold, even though in reality it was a bad river fold. How epic would it have been for me to call the river c/shove only to have to ship the 400bb pot to AKQ 98 high ... sick value bet dtbog.

Not really, although I have been measuring out my life with coffee spoons.

Single thing that helped you most to get your game to a different (aka better) level?

Did you ever have a coach? If yes would you recommend it?

100+ is a lot of countries. Would I have a blank map to work with? I think I'd do pretty well with this game, but 100+ may be pushing it ...

I'd like to see more, but I think it's sort of tough. For one thing, the US is geographically pretty isolated -- as in, it's pretty big and bounded by Canada (which culturally is pretty similar to a lot of the US as far as I can tell) and Mexico. I mean, I grew up in Iowa, pretty much the dead center of the country. If I travel a few hundred miles in any direction the most exotic place I'd get to was Nebraska. It would be quite a bit different if, say I grew up in Switzerland, where within a few hundred miles I would find myself in any number of different countries, each with a different language and culture. In that environment it's much easier for people to see the relevance of understanding the world around you.

I do think there's a great deal of value in traveling to places that are way outside your comfort zone and place you in entirely foreign surroundings, and would wish the experience on everybody, even if just for a brief while. It doesn't take too much insight to realize that despite our surface differences human beings are pretty much the same everywhere you go.

Strongly anti-gambling. However, what ex-pats do in the privacy of their own homes is generally not infringed upon by the government. I played in a home game once where the host even served pork!

There are so many definitions of crazy ...
Some things that were interesting / unexpected:

It was quite a visual shock at first to sit in starbucks and watch all the men in thobes and women in abayas enjoying cappuccinos while wandering around the mall with all of the usual US mall stores with names transliterated into Arabic. Eventually it became commonplace, but it was always fun to see knew people just amazed by the sea of thobes in the mall.

Watching censored movies was always a blast -- violence was no problem, but no kissing was shown on screen -- you'd see them moving in and then suddenly the ... I don't know what to call it, the dismount?

The driving was pretty insane - when's the last time you saw an SUV going through a roundabout on 2-wheels, or people taking a short-cut across the desert to avoid having to wait in line at an intersection?

My wife spooked a herd of camels while running in the desert and got chewed out in Arabic by the angry camel-herder.

A friend of mine was flirting with a Persian girl / making occasional physical contact with her at the coffee cottage when he was pulled aside by a man in plain clothes who was part of the "secret moral police" who warned him: "What you do at home is your business, but you can not do that here. I am being generous with you, but if the right Qatari sees you like this with one of our women, one call and you will be arrested and thrown out of the country."

The country has been built (as in, physically constructed) by a huge workforce of men shipped in from India and southeast Asia. Of all of the "craziest" things, that was the saddest IMO. Workers in matching blue suits working 12-16 hour days in the oppressively hot sun under dangerous conditions (it was not uncommon to hear stories like "a crane blew over in a strong gust of wind today killing 6 workers ...") being paid sickeningly little and treated poorly by nationals and ex-pats alike. I can be pretty cynical a lot of times about America the land of opportunity, but it's quite clear to me that if I was born into the position of any of those men my life would be hard and bitter with practically no possibility to rise out of it.

By contrast, my life in Qatar was one of luxury compared to my life in the States. As TAs we were given nice apartments to live in, cars to drive, a cleaning service to clean the apartment once a week, and better pay and benefits than any TA position I've had in the US, not to mention business class flights to and from Qatar as well as a travel allowance for our 6 week-long paid winter break. The food was amazing and inexpensive, the travel opportunities were abundant, I met lots of people with lots of interesting lives ... overall it was a great experience, and there's a good chance I'd still be there if I hadn't fallen for my wife.

I also like the Hollow Men, the Wasteland, and the cat poems. The Love Song is my favorite, though, partly because it took me so long to finally get and then I realized it described my indecisive tendencies perfectly.

It's wonderful to find a poem or song that makes you want to meet its "friends." I mean, Prufrock is responsible for me reading The Inferno and Hamlet, both of which add so much to the poem just by having been written and alluded to in the poem, and both of which have had a meaningful impact on me.

Another example I'd have is the Hank Williams III song "Country Heroes" -- I've never been a big country fan, but that song is responsible for me searching out Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Waylon Jennings, all of whom I think are great songwriters.

Still sampling, so I'll get back to you on that. I'm more of a latte / americano kind of guy, though. Zeitgeist is on my list of places to go, but as far as I can tell there's a coffee stand within 3-blocks of you no matter where you're standing in this city. It's great.