Summer's Last Breath

I can tell summer is just about over. The Minnesota State Fair is underway and my oldest daughter is anxious to get back to school. This leaves precious little time to enjoy our short season...and thus, sacrifices are made.

I haven't been playing a lot of poker. A few sit-n-gos here and there and my favorite blogger tournament, The Friday Night Donkament and that's about it. We had a blast last week as usual. Bdidde and I chopped first and second place. Seems we both had a good return on that tournament. I bought in for ~$8. Just wish that once and a while, I'd make the cut for the side bets on the winner. I seem to always be..."The Field." Funny thing...Bdidde and I were the field when the betting started. We weren't even in the win/place/show phase. Suckas! Well played to all of the final table. Some tough competition and fantastic conversation!

If you aren't playing, you really need to consider it. Bam-bam's recent post does try to describe it, but I'll add what I like about it. It's just plain fun. The chat window is usually scrolling by faster then I can read and the one liners are zinging. This is a rebuy tournament. It's fairly cheap, so the rebuys are plenty and the suck outs historic. That's the therapy. You shove it in with monster like K7o and realize that you might be ahead...only to loose to the 3 deuce on the river. After the rebuy period, you are now sitting at a deep stack table with people that know how to play cards, but don't worry, the jokes just keep coming.

Tonight, I start a new 8 week poker league. We'll see how it goes. Seems this time we are fighting out for a poker cruise. Could be fun. Could be some of the sickest poker ever played. I hope to just keep learning from it and figure out how to keep myself focused. It gets hard to stay on track when it takes 8 weeks to get to the first step in getting the prize. But hey, it's live poker.

With one more week of summer to go, I'm not really sure I'll be on the virtual felt much, but you never know. I might be tuning in to a tournament you are playing and drop you a BOOM! You just never know.

9 years ago today...

Nine years ago today, a baby girl was born that changed the world for me. In that moment she was born I went from being just a guy to a father.

It was somewhere around the month of January, 1999, I was back in college working towards my BS degree and interning at a small start-up. OhCountess and I had been married for a little over 2 years.

My internship was in a city about an hour away from our home. The drive didn't bother me much, I enjoyed the quality radio time I was getting.

My life had worked itself into a nice routine. School and work kept me busy during the week and most of my weekends were free to be young. That is until I received a small box that changed it all.

On this winter day, I got home from my day like I usually did. My first order of business was to find my beautiful wife and give her a kiss. Today she wore a big smile and handed me a small box with a ribbon on it. This is weird. There is no scheduled reason for this present.

I could never let a box like this last too long with opening it. I pulled the tail on the ribbon and let if fall away. Lifting the cover off the box revealed something I never expected. Inside that box was a tiny baby bib that said 'I love my Daddy!'

Seven months later, my lovely bride was walking a tightrope. She has a preexisting condition that when mixed with a growing fetus was causing her to battle for her life while nurturing our unborn baby. We even had a talk that no young husband ever wants to hear.

The team of doctors looking out for my wife were fighting a battle. Everyone was playing this sick game of chicken. Keeping the pregnancy going long enough for our baby while watching my wife's health deteriorate. I like to gamble, but this was sick.

With 5 weeks to go in the pregnancy, the doctors looking out for my wife pulled the plug and said it was time, either we induce now, or we risk the mother. The baby doctors agreed that the baby should be big enough to be out of the woods. I chimed and said "Just get it done. I want the jackpot...I want both of them!"

9 years ago today, I became a father. I held her in my arms and for the first time in my life, I was filled with a love like I had never known.

I love you OhPrincess - Happy Birthday!!!

Enough already - two posts in one day

Remember, how I was impressed with Erick Lindrgren's bracelet victory, the class, the sportsmanship. Wow...Scotty Nugyen took a dump on the memory of Chip Reece. Yikes!

Apparently, there is no hope of ESPN making the Prince of Pukers look good...I saw this on Wicked Chops Poker and just had to share it.

Here are the High(low)lights of the final table of the $50k HORSE tournament...

Ha! Here's my TPS report sans-coversheet - bastages!

My poker blog has been so silent lately. That's funny, cause I haven't really been playing that much poker either. Well, that's not entirely true, but I haven't been playing that much notable poker lately. Even my poker blog reading has been slacking lately. Did anyone look at the calendar? For the love of Pete, where did the summer go?

As Drizz posted about just the other day, here in God's country, we are about to start up a tradition like no other: The Minnesota State Fair. For all you poor suckers that have never been to our little shindig, it's unlike any other state fair anywhere. You see, ours is HUGE. Not just big, no HUGE. To top off it's ginormous size, it's got everything you've ever eaten deep fried and on a stick. Where else can you get a BUCKET of chocolate chip cookies and then go find the all-you-can-drink milk stand.

Drizz...our plan is to be there Sunday (this coming weekend). I'll be the middle-aged guy with two kids, wife and eating something that will make my cardiologists eyes light up with anticipation for a huge payday. If are going to be there...let me know!

Bourbonators was this past Wednesday. I was super tired and played supre bad.

The bar I normally play poker league at has hosted the last two Fridays with a $50 payout for first the last two weeks. Decided to see what if felt like to play 85% of the hands. It felt like a rollercoaster. Going home early was nice.

My online bankroll is sitting at a level I've never been to before. Which will be great when I actually have time to play for more than an hour and a half in one day while not folding laundry, cleaning the kitchen AND tucking the kids into bed. I'd be looking for me to hit the bigger buy-in tournaments soon. I has tokens and I ain'ts afraid to use them.

I have been catching up on my poker TV divoing. I was really excited to see Erick Lindgren win his first bracelet. His play was fantastic and the table didn't seem to have too many soft spots. I was most impressed at his ability to stay focused and get maximum value for his hands every time. In the end when he won, his sincerity was apparent. That man really just wanted to win a bracelet. Congrats to him. He was about as gracias a winner as I've ever seen.



Hope to see you on the felt, or at the fair!

Poker Tracker 3 - Buyer beware

I'm a sucker. I'll admit it. I dished out real cheddar and bought Poker Tracker 3. If you are a predominately a SNG or tournament player, save your cash and wait for something much better to come along. This product is NOT ready for prime time.

The UI looks kind of cool and the reporting has great potential but it is lacking some very important features for tournament players.

It currently does not support importing of manually entered tournament results from Poker Tracker 2. That is correct, if you have spent the last few years grinding it out at Full Tilt Poker playing SNGs and making money, your results history is gone. Kaput. Fin. Without hope.

I tried the beta version out and noticed this right away. I even opened a ticket at their support site. At first, I was told that that feature would be in the paid version so to get it, all I'd need to do was buy Poker Track 3 - the full version (giggle) and my tournament summaries would be converted. Well, they didn't. Sure, they now support converting the Summary file created by the Full Tilt program, but anything prior to the start of that feature (April of 2008) in the FT software is still missing.

This whole process started for me on May 16th. As of today, here is the latest from their support:

Message left on Aug 12, 2008 09:28AM:

Hello,

Let me see, I just got brought in on this and am a little confused. That manually entered tournament results doesn't get converted in the PT2 -> PT3 conversion process is a known issue and it will be fixed in a future release. However, are you saying that your tournaments didn't get converted either?

If so, you could go to Utilities -> Export hand histories to file in PT2 and click the "Tourney hands / Summaries" tab and make sure to export these tournaments to a folder of your choice. Now you can manually import these into PT3, but unfortunately you will for now have to manually enter the results by going Tournaments -> Enter Results in PT3. Hope this helps.

Best Regards,
David Nilsson

by Peligroso [PokerTracker Support]

That didn't help. I'm a degenerate poker player. That's literally thousands of SNG tournaments. There is no way in hell I'm gonna find the time to hand enter in two years worth of SNG histories.

This current version of the Poker Tracker 3 software is really nothing more then beta code that you are paying for the privilege of testing and commenting on. I probably should have spoke up sooner then this, but I sincerely wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I really liked PT2. I could follow my results in different types of tournaments and spot trends in my game. All that information is gone.

There still may be hope for this product. They have made some significant strides in the UI over version 2. Another feature that is missing is that you can no longer delete a tournament from the history. I've noticed a few free roll or play money tournaments making it into the import. Once they are in...you are stuck with them forever. This gets to be really confusing when you play a HORSE tournament. It will import all the hands from the hold 'em rounds and then exclude everything else. I'd like to be able to delete these since they aren't reflective of a whole tournament.

The other thing I've noticed is that this program is really slow unless you filter your data. This could be the product of the DBMS (database management system) they are using, but it could also be from poorly written SQL or my guess is that they query each stat for each column separately from each other rather then building a cross column query that would find the results in a single query. I'm thinking like a programmer again...sorry.

If you have the cash and want to participate in this ground floor experiment, go ahead. I wish I could get my money back. I miss my money. I feel cheated and taken advantage of. Maybe this post and anyone that reads it, will make a difference to this company. My 3 months spent on this has been a waste of my time.

Thus concludes my rant for the day. Questions or comments?

UPDATE: I just got this from Poker Tracker Support - this is not encouraging...

Message left on Aug 12, 2008 3:44PM

Hello, Currently there is no ETA for this feature to be added. I can tell you that this is definitely something that will be added, hopefully sooner rather than later. Best regards, Derek

APerfect10 [PokerTracker Support]

From meh to meme

I've been memed. According to Zooks, I need to bend over and take it like a man. Yikes, that sounds like fun.

Da rules:

The Rules: Rules are posted at the beginning. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their names. Then the player goes to each of the “named” people’s blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. If you’ve been tagged, you do the same, letting the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer. They, in turn, answer the following questions.

Sounds like fun...umm...yeah. What are these questions?

1. What was I doing 10 years ago: Ten years ago, I was still childless, married and beginning a career in IT, aka - I still had hope in my eyes.
   
2. What are 5 things on my to-do list today:
   
   • Reply to this meme.
   • Eat gourmet marshmellows
   • watch 5 year-old play t-ball for the first time
   • enjoy ice cream after t-ball
   • work on software to scrape and store all of the internet's porn
     
3. Snacks I enjoy: dry roasted peanuts, fritos, prime rib
   
4. Places I've lived: Southeastern Minnesota, South Central Minnesota...I don't get out much.
   
5. Things I would do if I were a billionaire: (stolen shamelessly from zooks)Buy all my degenerate poker playing friends a trip to Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event (and all the lap dances they could stand); laptops and internet for everyone, well everyone I like; build a pool for my neighborhood; have Brad Pitt's baby; date and then dump Viggo Mortensen; grow an ass like Kim Kardashian & buy boobs to match. I'm such a philanthropist. Being a billionaire, I could also afford to by the best baseball team in the work, the Minnesota Twins...just in time to see them in the new stadium, thus given Drizz, Bodie25, PokerFool a pass to my luxury box. Numbbono would have to get on bended knee to enter the box. Of course, all of this would have to wait until after all the debt is gone, the college funds are secured and I've upgraded the camera equipment.
   

Soo....who gets tagged from here...I'm guessing I will pick 5 people that have no desire to play this game...not because I'm good at that kind of thing, but because hell, no one likes doing these thing...do they?

JamyHawk
Joanada
Poker Fool
NumbBono
Gentleman Jim

Now let's play along cause summer ain't quite fun enough :-D

How many of you have cashed in the LPR Tour?

Tonight was the inaugural Live Poker Radio Tour tournament on Full Tilt. 42 runners came out and your's truly joined the elite list of cashers in the event (there are 5 of us and I know who you are). Quite the star studded final table. I felt quite honored to be playing with them.


But in the end, the cardrack LJ was too much for me. My KJ ran into her AJ and she turns it into Broadway.

Congrats to Two Black Aces for taking it all down. Well done sir!

I'm tired, it's time for bed. Good night all.

My first pimp only post!

The fine folks at LivePokerRadio approached me with an offer I couldn't refuse. We only needed to negotiate the size of the truckload of money they would drive up to OhCaptain Poker (my daughter's Littlest Pet Shop oy fell on the truck and crushed it...damn it!). I've agreed to pimp the beginning of a new Monday tradition...the beginning of a legend. Without further adieu:

LivePokerRadio would like to invite you to join us on Monday's as we fill the void left by the departure of the MATH. We would like to thank Hoyazo for the two years he dedicated to Monday's At The Hoy.

The LivePokerRadio Tour will be offering many new opportunities for you to not only donk it up, but win. Come along for the ride. Everyone says they want to be there for the first.

You want the details? Let's get you all of them:

Date: Monday's starting August 4th
Time : 10 P.M. ET Full Tilt Poker
Buy In: $10 + $1 (May change due to special events)
Format : NLHE Single Stacks(May change due to special events)
Password : Boom