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Random Things

I've got my man Amir coming in for the upcoming weekend. This should be good as I see too little of my favorite big, hairy Pakistani friend. That's something to be excited about. Big, hairy, Paki men usually are. My apartment is even close to clean for this event. It's a beautiful thing.

Tomorrow is February 28th, which makes it the end of a short month. I was checking out my poker stats for the month just now, and my earn came in at about half of last month. Last month being my best month ever, this is still okay. I put in about 2/3 of the hours and got half way to my goal. This is less than ideal. I attribute this to a few things.

A) Variance coming back around to some extent.
B) I had an extended layoff mid-month.
C) After my layoff, I played like the world's biggest donkey for about four days.
D) I haven't done much to step up my game of late. I've been resting on my laurels as they say. What's a laurel? You've got me.

Anyway, March is my month. I can feel it. My dedication has returned.

It's time for a Molson. Cheers!

Trip to the Grocery

Here at chrismilone.org, we only bring you the most exciting topics. Thrills R' Us. So anyway, I thought I'd take a few moments to discuss the most exciting thing I did yesterday - going to my local Dominick's.

I don't get to the grocery store like I used to when I had a Dominick's at the end of my block. It was very convenient then, and it's less convenient now. After my Dominick's burned down, I don't exactly have a spot on my way home so I pretty much end up driving to one a few miles away about once every month or two. I eat out a lot. It's what I do. When I go shopping though, my inner vegetarian comes out. I don't ever buy meat at the grocery store and prepare it at home. Well, I shouldn't say never, but very rarely. However, when I eat out, I eat meat fairly often. Maybe I should eat out less? Maybe that would be more healthy? Probably.

Anyway, so yesterday I went to the store. I tend to buy too much when I go, but since I go so rarely, it's probably for the best. I got some good stuff. My favorite purchase was a 12 pack of Molson Canadian bottles. They had two 12 packs left, and Molson Canadian (definitely not Molson Golden) is fairly hard to get your hands on in Chicago. It also happens to be my favorite beer. I also picked up a couple of bottles of a cheaper wine that I like, a new sewing kit (can't find my old one), and a couple bottles of my favorite salad dressing on sale, among other things. See, this is exciting right?

A couple of thoughts came to me at the store. First, they had several types of fruit that were "10 lbs. for $10". I refuse to understand why they label things this way. How about 1 lb. for $1? What's wrong with that? Are there people who are fooled into buying 10 lbs. of navel oranges, thinking they need to do so to get the discount? If they are bamboozled by this, wouldn't they often skip the purchase altogether quite often? Who really needs 10 lbs. of any fruit or vegetable? Why not set this a little lower, like around 3lbs.? I just don't get it.

The second thing that arose happened at the check out line. I'm up there with an amiable enough check out lady in her 40s and a very nice utility clerk (a.k.a. bagger) who is probably around 17. I was a utility clerk once, so I'm sensitive to terminology. They were both very pleasant, which is fairly rare at pretty much any Dominick's in the city that I've visited. So my purchases start coming through. The utility clerk asks me about my wine and if it is good. I go into why I like it. She then tells me that she "doesn't think she'll ever smoke or drink" because "it just isn't worth it". First of all, I really doubt that. Secondly, is this really an appropriate comment to make to a customer that clearly drinks? I could smoke 4 packs/day also, she has no idea. Then, my sewing kit comes through. The lady checking me out asks me "is this for your wife?" For some reason, I explain to her that I live alone, I'm unmarried, and consequently, I sew my own buttons and whatever else needs sewing. She then tells me "you just need to find a good woman." Well, thanks for the tip lady. Clearly I don't need to "find a good woman" just to get my buttons sewn, I've got that down on my own.

So my question is, if you work in a grocery store does that give you the right to pass judgement on the purchases of your customer? I say sure, it's a natural part of the job. It's pretty much the same as a waiter passing judgement on the customers at his/her table or a cab driver doing the same thing about his fare. However, I don't think it's appropriate to verbalize it in any way or to offer them unsolicited advice on their life. I'm just there to buy food. I'm minding my own business. I wasn't upset by this, I just think it's inappropriate. Thank God I didn't buy condoms or something like that. Who knows where that could have gone?

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Poker - A typical night

I thought I'd do a sort of running diary on my online poker play tonight as many people are at least marginally interested in my poker exploits. Hopefully, I can type enough to make this interesting.

8:39pm - I sit down at Party Poker and get on the list for a $2/$4 table with an average pot size of $32. This is likely to be reasonably juicy. I tell my buddy Swartz where I am, as he's also interested in playing. We don't talk on IM during hands, but we do talk after. We don't cheat. Cheaters are the lowest of the low in poker. Plain and simple.

8:42pm - I get on my table.

8:45pm - I get on another table with a lowly $25 average pot. Not very juicy, but things have a way of improving as the night wears on. I'm now "multi-tabling". Two isn't very many, many players play between 6-8. That's too many for me, but at lower limits, I can see how it's possible.

8:50pm - I folded every hand for a couple of rounds. Net -$10.

8:55pm - I just won my first pot with AJ in late position in an unraised pot. The flop came JJ9. I smooth-called and check-raised the turn against an aggressive player to take it down.

9:03pm - The fish left and my first table broke up already. This is not uncommon. Net -$14. Misplayed one heads up hand with middle pair when I was out of position. I think I was ahead but folded the turn. I'll stick with one table for while. Swartz is on it also.

9:05pm - The not so juicy table has already turned into a donkey festival. This could be good.

9:07pm - My iTunes is on Party Shuffle, I just hit some sort of techno song. I don't even know what it is, and I can't see the playlist from my bed. I'll have to figure this out later.

9:09pm - Swartz is sitting on my left which he claims to love. He claims I can't beat on him from behind him. I guess we'll see how this works out. I'm probably not too bad to have acting right before you, as I'm generally a solid player. Operative word there being "generally".

9:12pm - Holding steady at the moment. +$23 at my table, so +$9 on the night.

9:16pm - I just 3-bet preflop with AKo. The flop came unders, check-check-I bet, 2 callers. The turn was a T. T was high card on the board. Check-check and I bet. Both players folded. Staying the aggressor is most of the time a good idea. Jennifer Harman wrote a reasonable chapter in Super/System 2. The major thing that I picked up from this is - when in doubt, the aggressive play is often the right one. Still, you can't get carried away with this. Incidentally, Swartz doesn't know I'm doing this post so I won't be talking about his monetary results or anything. I have appealed for no permission to do so, so I think that would be wrong.

9:25pm - I just hit Morrissey's Big Mouth Strikes Again on Live at Earl's Court. Sometimes the Party Shuffle can be good.

9:26pm - +$57 at my table - +$43 on the night.

9:32pm - I just semi-bluffed the flop with a gut shot straight draw. Got one call from a calling station. The turn gave me the nut straight. He called me all the way down. You have to love calling stations when things go right.

9:35pm - The aforementioned calling station is now on a run of luck. This is great, as the more money he amasses, the more should flow my way as the night goes along. Of course, it doesn't always go that way.

9:42pm - I just picked up AA in first position and lost a decent pot to trip queens. Thankfully, he reraised me preflop. I lost just about the minimum in that scenario. Still, only +$41 at the table now after just getting a little too aggressive heads up with middle pair from the BB with an A on board.

9:51pm - Not going so well. I'm up $18 at my table. That puts me at +$4 on the night. Up is up though, I guess.

9:58pm - Song 2 from Blur just came on. I had to get up and manually move on to the next song. I love Blur, but I hate that damn song.

10:02pm - Just pulled up another a table.

10:18pm - My new table is down to 6 players. Short-handed play isn't my specialty by any means. I should probably get up, but I haven't yet.

10:23pm - Holding my own short-handed. +$23 now on first table. No hands of note really.

10:30pm - I just lost a horrible pot to a straight after flopping trip kings. I misread the board on the turn. Moral of the story, don't blog, aim, and multi-table.

10:43pm - Nothing much happening. Even on the night at the moment.

10:57pm - I just picked up aces and got called down on a J9743 board with no flush possibility. Back to the plus side now. That, and The Postal Service is playing. It's looking up. The fish are still swimming.

11:07pm - Swartz just quit for the night after getting into it in the chat window with another player just for fun. This is far from atypical. Sometimes a good verbal sparring match can boost your concentration.

11:13pm - I just made a boat on the turn with 66, when a guy slowplayed trip 3's with A3 on the flop. He decided to cap with me on the turn and reraise my raise on the river, which was nice of him.

11:19pm - Swartz decided to just leave and get timed out of the table. He'll appreciate this in the chat window just now:

"pitpens: what the f donkey
pitpens: get out of here
CactusTerry: hell have more than you before you know it pigpen"

That's from his previous sparring partner and another guy that is semi-cracking me up right now.

11:24pm - Sure enough pitpens has less than Swartz.

11:31pm - Table 1 +$67.50 - Table 2 +$29.75

11:36pm - I just realized I'm not giving any good hand analysis at all. It's just too hard to type a bunch of analysis while playing. I'm sorry about that. There are probably only a couple of people that read this blog that would be interested anyway.

Here's a couple of things about me as a poker player and my poker views.

1) My bankroll is more than healthy enough to allow me to move up to $3/$6 and even $5/$10 if I was so inclined. I feel comfortable beating up on $2/$4 though. I can build my bankroll quick enough at $2/$4 that I might as well build myself a very solid cushion before I move up the ladder. Some people might say that's sort of chicken. I don't really think so. I just think it's prudent bankroll management.

2) I prefer online play to live play for limit hold 'em and the inverse for no limit, though I rarely play no limit in any venue. Limit hold 'em live is slow, and at the levels I play, physical tells aren't necessary to beat the game. They are nice, but definitely not necessary. It's certainly not worth the slow down. Still, I do like live limit hold 'em. In no limit, getting a read on your opponent is pretty much the key to the game. Being able to look at your opponent is a big part of this, so much so that I feel the game is quite a bit different online. All of that said, the purest poker is definitely live poker for any game. Online poker is great though, as you can play anywhere, there is always a game, and you can listen to Snoop Dogg in your boxer shorts while you are playing.

3) You can't learn how to play poker by watching it on tv. If you want to learn, follow this formula.

1. Read a book on the game.
2. Play - a lot.
3. After every time you play, go over the hands you played and how you played them. Look for ways to play them better. What did your opponents do? Was this good or bad.
4. Read more books and reread the original book if you thought it was good.
5. Find some fellow players that you trust to talk to about the game. If you can't find any, join a poker forum and discuss strategy there. I recommend fullcontactpoker.com or twoplustwo.com.
6. Play, play, play.

12:00am - The Smiths' Asleep just came on.

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up on my own anymore

That must be some kind of omen. As such, I'm shutting it down.

Final Tally - Table 1 +$81 - Table 2 +$4 - Early loss from table that broke up: -$14

Total on the Night - +$71. Not too bad for 3.5 hours or so.

Best of luck to you! If you enjoyed this post and/or you have other poker related topics that you would like to see addressed, let me know somehow. I'd be happy to come with that sort of thunder.

Sunday and Revelations

I cruised over to Barnes and Noble briefly today and picked up a couple of new books. I just wrapped up Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman. I realized a few things while at the book store. First, I've got a bunch of things on my shelf that I haven't read yet. This never stops me from buying new stuff though. At some point, I'm just going to have to stop myself until I read everything that's sitting around. Second, I think I'm actually reading about 5 books right now. Two of them are on body language and 3 of them are on the technical aspects of poker. I'm reading the body language stuff to help me with inspiration for tells. The problem with that being that I never really play live these days, so I have little opportunity to implement whatever I'm reading about. I'm also unable to just read about these topics. I pretty much need a steady run of something that I'm just reading for the sake of entertainment. I read these books much faster. This is usually some sort of fiction work, though it can occasionally be non-fiction. This sort of thing just takes my mind off of my regular job and poker. I think it helps me in both of those areas.

Additionally, I realized that I'm just not reading enough. I should be tearing through a book or two a week, and I seem to have slowed considerably. This makes sense for last week, but not necessarily for the time frame leading up to last week. I'm not entirely sure where my time is going these days. It clearly isn't going into reading, exercise, or even into poker. I'm probably far behind where I want to be in pretty much all of these areas. We all know that it isn't going into this blog either. Anyway, I pretty much need some sort of plan to focus on these things. Let's hope that I can come up with one.

One thing I noticed at B & N that was pretty crazy is that Poker books now have their own section. They used to be in the Puzzles and Games section, but they now are next to that under their own signage. This sort of makes sense as the volume of poker books coming out is really growing. There are even some good ones. I can't really say the same for poker DVDs, as I don't think that there has really been one that I would consider very good yet. Even my man Daniel Negreanu couldn't get there.

If you get President's Day off tomorrow, enjoy those mattress sales. I'll be in cubicle land.

Ahhh...Saturday

So, I'm relaxing today on a frigid Saturday. This past week of work left me totally exhausted. I was having Accenture flashbacks for a while. We were able to launch all of our websites in a redesigned format that is pretty solid. Check out one of the sites here, if you are interested. Feel free to apply for a new card while you are there. I'm relieved that this is over, though I still have much to do. I think my schedule should return to normal now. I apologize to anyone I've neglected lately, which is pretty much everyone.

Anyway, so what else is poppin'? Well, I had a little postal service incident this week. I'm not talking about the band either. Last Saturday, I didn't get any mail. This isn't totally odd, but it's rare that I don't have some kind of crap in my mailbox every day. Monday rolled around and again no mail. Tuesday was the same story. At this point, I'm thinking this is a little strange but I'm honestly too tired to care. Wednesday night, I get home about 11:15 from work. I pop open the mailbox and there's nothing again. At this point, I'm getting pretty peeved. Usually, I wouldn't care about the mail at all. However, this week I was waiting on my new Bishop Allen CD. I had just opened a new savings account, so I was waiting on those details (user ID, password, etc.). I was also waiting on the last of my tax information so that I might square things with Uncle Sammy.

In my unhappiness, I look up and see that our mail carrier has scrawled some sort of notice and posted it above our bank of mailboxes. Now I live in a building with about 40 units. We have the standard mailboxes that you open with the little mailbox key, and they all fold out at once for the postal employee to toss your mail in there. Apparently, all of a sudden, ours were deemed to be unacceptable, though I noticed no change at all. I guess that they snap back on the mail toter or something. As such, this person refused to deliver our mail as our mailboxes were "unsafe". This was a bunch of b.s., if I've ever heard it. Anyway, I'm sure my man Carlos was on the case the whole time. I didn't even need to complain. I got all of my mail this morning and it's all good.

I spent the morning playing around with my new account, squaring myself up with Uncle Sam (he owes me), listening to the Bishop Allen EP, and I caught up on One Tree Hill. All of this was fantastic. One Tree Hill is having a totally telegraphed school shooting episode this coming week. I could see this coming 20 minutes into this last episode. Still, it should be okay. The Bishop Allen record is a little disappointing.

I once had a brief pre, during, and post urinal usage chat with their singer Justin Rice about The Postal Service. He told me he didn't like all of that "beep, beep, crap" because it "doesn't rock". I disagreed, but I could see his point. Now, I get this CD in the mail, and suddenly Bishop Allen has a piano and their songs are much more melodic. I miss the jangly guitars and the much more "rock" sound that comes across in their live shows. One song in particular, Making Friends which I've heard some live versions of, was softened into an almost completely different song. Now if I'd never heard this song before, I might think it was great, but I'm left just missing the other version that I like much better. Now, I'm not saying I don't like January or that I'm not going to buy the new EP every month as they come out. Next time I see Justin though, I might have to ask him what happened to being a rocker.

I hope this finds you well.

Weekend

This past weekend was pretty crazy. I need a weekend to recover from the weekend. This isn't unusual, but it's especially true this weekend. On Friday night, I was at the crib of the Rocker's. They have this room with about a million CDs in it with a rock-themed bathroom nearby. It's like you died and woke up in an incredibly killer record store. On top of that, I finally met Ken for the first time. This was long overdue. It was a good time. We ended up playing some Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit. Ken carried my squad to victory, while the rest of the team mostly consumed Modelo Especial from cans to excess. I was able to chip in with my knowledge of Tori Spelling's role in Coed Callgirl. I'm guessing that I'm one of the few people in the world that have seen that movie multiple times. I have an odd fascination with Tori Spelling. Odd fascinations, while occasionally embarrassing, are things that come through for you in trivia games though. Anyway, thanks for the hospitality Rockers. It was off the meat rack.

Saturday, it was football in the morning. I'm considerably less sore than last time, thankfully. I then had to roll to Bourbonnais/Clifton, set my grandfather up with some paperwork and see my 'rents. That was a good time. Watching speed skating for over an hour might have been a bit much, but that's just how it goes with the Olympics.

Today finds me at the office. There's no real need to talk about that. I'm done now for the day though. I'm heading home.

Here's a question for you to ponder in your spare time. Do you like Kanye more or less because he always whines when it is Grammy season?

First CD for a Young Man

I was talking with my mom this week. She alerted me to the fact that my brother just bought his first CD. As many of you remember, my brother is 10. This seems like about the right age to me to start buying CDs. Anyway, the fact that he bought his first CD is sort of an event in itself. What does the young man pick up though? AC/DC's Back in Black. Apparently one of his other 10 year-old friends turned him on to this.

This is crazy on a couple of levels. First, how do 10 year-olds get into AC/DC in 2006? I was telling my mom that this is the first album you buy if you were born in 1968, not 1995. Second, I'm guessing my mom doesn't let this ride when I'm 10. My dad, he'd have been down. My mom, heck no.

Anyway, this just shows definitively something that I have known all along. My brother rocks.

Awesome

"What do you get when you mix a giant douchebag, a recording studio, and the worst single ever released by a human being? The funniest fucking thing you'll see today." Amen thesuperficial.com.

Check it.

Also, on the same site you can see the clip of James Lipton doing a "reading" of the single. Top notch.