Run Forest, Run!

So Forest Whitaker won best actor for portraying Idi Amin. Personally, I don't think his performance was as good as his brilliant turn in Battlefield Earth. He'd taken a lot of flak recently for incoherent speeches at other awards shows (but at least he didn't thank Hitler). I thought he played it cool though.

It's funny that it would be Forest though, because on Friday night around midnight, I was half-drunk from Old Style Light and watching Bloodsport on the Spanish channel. It's the type of thing you do when you have a kid keeping you up and no cable. Actually, some movies are a lot more entertaining and easier to follow if you aren't distracted by the dialogue, such as Broken Arrow, Predator 2, or Commando.

Anyway, so as I say we're watching Jean-Claude steal lines and moves from Enter the Dragon while doing his best Johnny Cage when I suddenly realize the movie's black guy is...Forest Whitaker! Wow, how'd a legitimate actor end up in this schlock, especially after making Platoon, The Color of Money, and Good Morning Vietnam? Huh, movie coincidences.

Bloodsport is actually a true story based on the life of the film's action coordinator, Frank Dux. And by "true" they mean "colossal pack of lies". Dux once hilariously showed off the trophy he got from the fight portrayed in Bloodsport, and the LA Times proved that he'd bought it at a store hours earlier. Other amazing made up facts about Dux's life include his incredible turn as a paramilitary secret agent for the CIA.

Bloodsport also stars Ogre. That dude is cool. Cooler than John-Clod.

Bloodsport was Van Damnit's breakout movie. He stopped playing gay dudes and background dancers and launch a still-continuing career as a brainless guy who hits things until they're better. Admired by red-state maladjusted teen boys everywhere, he was too big for the 8 million Bloodsport sequels, but he did star in a long series of B-list "action" films with ironically homoerotic titles, such as Double Impact, Hard Target, Double Team, The Hard Corps, and the ironically titled Knock Off.

I wonder if Forest takes his calls.

Immortal question: who's a more embarassing artifact of the 90s, Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal?

Winning Poker Tournament #2 of 2

This is my Hand for Hand analysis.

As I said in the first half, I voluntarily played 109 hands. I'll be covering all the interesting hands from that set. I won't cover dull hands, or any hands where I just folded (even though there were a couple interesting ones). So here we go.

Format is #Hand, blinds, starting chips, hand, explanation.

#2 10/20 1500 6-6 from the BB. Flop is A-6-5. +500. A nice way to start!
#6 15/30 2550 AsJs from #2. Raise 4x with one late caller. 285 in the pot. Flop is 8h-3s-Qs. I bet 150 for continuation and get raised 450. Call with odds. Turn makes my flush and I clean him out. +1500
#8 15/30 4286 KsJs from #2. Gun calls, I call, BB calls, 105 pot. Flop is Kc-Qh-9S. I bet 90, gun calls. Turn is 9c, he raises my 150 to 300. I call (probably bad). River is 10c and saves me. +500
#10 25/50 4605 AcQc from SB. Middle position raises, I call, BB goes all in (1000). I fold. Middle had AJ, BB had KK. I congratulate myself. -150.
#12 25/50 4780 8-8 from #5. Open for 4x, SB calls, 450 pot. Flop Q-4-7 rainbow. He checks and calls my 250 continuation, 950 pot. Turn is 8 giving me trips on great board. He checks, I check (probably a little too clever here). River he bets 500, I raise, he goes all in and is cleaned out with K-Q. He could have won on the flop but instead...+2620
#13 25/50 7475 A-Q from SB. Call a raise. Nobody improves until the river A, when he decides to "bluff" with 1820 into a pot of 750. He had 6-6. +2220
#23 100/200 13551 Kc7c from SB. #3 raises 3x. I chose to call. I can't really explain this call; when I saw it in the DB I was pretty shocked. I'm sure I had a reason at the time, but it was probably a bad one. Anyway, I'm less than 1% to flop a flush, much less the nut flush, but that's exactly what happens...Ac-9c-Jc. He has AK, and I stack him. +7470.

At this point, I was in #1 for the entire tournament, probably about 1000 places left. That's never happened to me in a big tourney. Since I play conservative, I'm used to maniacs pushing chips all over the table while I try to slowly gain in front of the blinds. Here, my (well mostly) good play has put me up and up and up. Except for #23. That was just dumb.

#24 100/200/a25 20.5K A-10 BB. This was a supertight table, with tons of blind-stealing and only about 1/3 flops. On this hand the button and SB called, so I raised 4x (should have been more) properly expecting to win the hand. Button called, pot 2025. Flop 10h-5h-7d. Button calls my 1500, pot 5K. Turn Js. I check, he bets 2800, I call, pot ~10K. River 7s, I call his 1800, and lose to 10-Jo. -6925. Oops. His play on preflop and flop was terrible. My turn and river were bad. This hand really haunted me. I did kind of make friends with the winner, though. He eventually finished #40 and then railed and rooted for me the rest of the way.
#27 200/400/a25 13K JJ SB. #4 goes all in 2920, I call, lose to AA. Loose? -2945.
#36 300/600/a50 19K KK #2. I run into AK all-in with 8.5K. Board is 10-J-A-Q-4 and I am saved by a split. +625
#38 400/800/a50 17K KQ BB. Loose-aggressive SB open-raises, I call. I call (??) a flop of 7-9-J rainbow, but get out when he bets the 8 on the turn. -5K. Damn it.
#41 600/1200/a75 14.5K Ac7c #3. I open raise (??), SB goes all-in with 8k, I call at about 3.5-1. He turns over QQ. Board comes A-7-Q and I have a heart attack. Turn is A. If I were him, I'd be pissed. +10.5K.
#42 same 21K QQ BB. I lose to all-in K-10 when he gets a K on the flop. Kind of ironic. -7.5K.
#45 800/1600/a75 11.5K QQ button. My all-in gets called by AcKc; I hold up. +14.5K
#46-56 A long run of bad cards, where my only action was blind steals. At this point the blinds have climbed until I'm getting +7K on a win though. 54-56 I go from 21K to 50K.
#57 2K/4K/a200 52k J-4 BB. Big stack SB calls, I see free flop of Q-J-7 and he calls me down with bad odds to a straight draw. +17K and I'm in much better position now.
#58 2K/4K/a200 71K A-10 SB. Small early stack raises 4x, I call, pot 22K. Flop is 9-Q-K and I feel obligated to call his lst 9K. I wrongly figured A's were outs; he had AQ. -17.5K
After this, another long string where I'm being slowly blinded out.
#60 3K/6K/a300 45K AdKh SB. I reraise, he calls 70K in the pot for a flop of Q-5-6. With 18K left I feel committed anyway and semibluff the rest of my chips in. fortunately my AK nothing beats his AJ nothing, and I double. +56K This one hand gave me enough chips to maybe reach the final table if I could be steady.
#61-69 Are all blind steals that build me significantly.
#70 6K/12K/a600 112K QQ gun. I raise, #2 goes all in over my count, and I beat his 7's. How did this guy get this far in the tournament? His donation doubles me +133K.
This came just in time for two reasons. First, we were down to about 12 players, and things got really tight for a long time. Second, I saw no cards and floated in 9th for many rounds. Before I knew it, i was back down to ~100K just from getting blinded out on the short-handed table. We sat forever with 1 out to final table, when this happened:
#75 8K/16K/a800 141K As6s gun (5 handed). I raise 40 to steal, BB calls. Board 6d-4s-Ks gives me middle pair, top kicker, nut flush draw. He checks, I bet half, he goes all in well over my stack. Pot is 220 and I have 50K, so this is supereasy. He had 99; the turn gave me my Ace and high placement on the final table! +152K.

Beyond this the play actually kind of breaks down in being interesting. I obviously won a lot of hands, but they were all pretty much dull, just blind steals or folds on the flop. The blinds were big enough that they were all significant, though. I was chip leader almost the entire time. I did have them both short stacked and might have won uncontested were it not for this hand near the end:
#?? 20K/40K/a2K 1600K K-J SB (3 handed). I open raise 120, BB reraises 360, I call, pot 726. Flop is 7c-2c-7s. BB puts in his last 275K. I folded, but later realized that he would have bet with basically anything here, and I'm getting 4-1. On the one hand I'm probably beat, but on the other if I call and win it's over, and if I call and lose it's no big swing either way. Don't know. -362K.

But since I lost that hand we were basically even, and chopped after #3 was eliminated. It may very well have cost me $200. But who am I to complain. +$1200 tourney!

New House Photos

I promised pictures of the new house, so here they are. Share and enjoy.

Oh Make Me Over

I just found out Courtney Love is a Soka Gakkai member. Apparently she joined Nichiren Shoshou in the mid-90's. After quitting twice and nearly killing herself with drugs in 2005, she switched to us. Here's a video which includes her chanting and briefly explaining her faith.

Pretty neat.

Feb. 18 2007 Winning Poker Tournament Report #1 of 2

I'm going to split my tournament report into two parts. I'm going to use a lot of jargon, so if you're not a regular player, you might not get it. The second half will be posted Saturday. I am eager for skilled criticism of my play.

At noon on Sunday I entered an open tournament on PokerStars. It was a $5 tournament (plus $0.50 fee to the house) with 1638 players. I've entered a number of these low-stakes tournaments before and finished about even money, which is to say in the top 20%. It's not hard at all, given I play quite conservatively and many players are wild, because they are bad and/or aren't invested in the tournament. My goal this time, as always, was to learn and have fun.

6 1/4 hours later, I was dead-even heads up and agreed to split the top two places with my opponent. Top prizes were about $1400 and $900, so I got $1176. As a casual "student of the game" this was my biggest single-day payout ever. It also makes me a lifetime winner, which I'm happy about. I suppose for many players this is nothing, and the money isn't a big deal, but for me emotionally this was a big win.

On Saturday I'll post a (significant) hand-for-hand analysis, but today I wanted to talk about how the tournament went in general.

The Tournament in Essay Form
It started out immediately well, with me doubling up twice and winning a couple other key hands, to move me from $1500 to $10k. Then I got shifted to a very tough table--the tightest I have ever seen online. There were two players with a VP$IP around 22-25. Everyone else (including yours truly) was 16 or below. Only about 1/3 of hands were seeing flops. "Fold to the raiser" was the theme of the day.

Despite the field, I almost immediately doubled up to $20K when I flopped nut flush from the big blind against an aggressor. Then I lost about $7K in a difficult hand which I and some friends have been kicking around the Internet ever since (more on Saturday). At $14K and still near the top of the heap, I had even worse luck. I was shifted to a table with the #1 and #3 players. I couldn't find purchase and for a long time barely held on.

I grew slowly but steadily before being crippled down to about $50K, putting me near the bottom with about 100 players. Then suddenly I went all in and doubled up with AK vs AJ. Incredibly, I misread the board and thought I'd been eliminated. Good thing I didn't run too fast!

I floated for a long time after that until, just a couple seats short of final table, I quadrupled with two good hands (one suck out). That put me in first shortly after the table convened. There were big swings after that, but those big hands were really all she wrote.

Some Interesting Stats

I saw a total of 478 hands. At the end both my opponent and I sat out for about 20 hands waiting for the arbiter to come split the prize pool. Other than that, I actually played virtually every hand. I entered the pot 109 times, which sounds large, but was skewed up by the super-aggressive final 100 hands -- 38 of my hands were blind steals.

Thus my total VP$IP was a high 22.80%. My preflop raise was 15.06%. When I entered a pot, I eventually won 54% of the time. I won almost exactly 2/3 of my showdowns.

Ok, I ought to have seen each pair about twice. In fact I ran very rich this tournament, seeing AA twice, KK three times, JJ three times, and QQ six (!!) times. Other hands ran near average. I did get one hand nearly twice as much as any other: 14 times. That hand? 2-7 off!! To quote a friend, "That proves they're cheating."

The hands than won and lost for me paint an interesting picture. Among my top 15 winning (meaning BB/hand) hands were (most to not as much):
AJs, 88, AQo, KJs, AJo, AKs, KK, AA, QQ, AKo

Among my bottom 11 (worst to less worse):
ATo, JJ, KQs, 33, 76s, QTo, QJs, KJo

And remember, we're talking my biggest losers here. That's sure a big lesson to me about getting in with less than premium hands (except for the jacks).

Okay, that's it until my hand-for-hand on Saturday. I'd really love to hear what any skilled poker players have to say about my game.

Countdown to Baseball -- Larry Bowa

Just a few days until Cubs action. I said I'd be highlighting some youtube videos. This is the first. Larry Bowa was an all-star shortstop for the Phillies in the 70's, and is now an effective manager. He won manager of the year in 2001 on the Phillies and is currently 3rd base coach for the Yankees. MLB Wikipedia

He's also known as quite the hothead, which this video demonstrates. This is from his 4-year stint with the Cubs at the end of his career. Warning: This contains extremely adult language. Extremely.

Preview of Coming House Photos

Today I go to the official inspection of the new house. If everything goes well, we'll sell our current place and move in real soon. There will be lots more pictures to come on Friday. For now, there's a (badly taken) pic of one of the stained glass windows (original!) and a picture of the decorative front room fireplace. The dude in the second picture is the current owner.

Cool Tech: Pull My Finger

We all know from Monty Python that sheep's bladders can prevent earthquakes. But this just in: pig's bladders have a use other than for American football! They can also be used to regrow severed fingers. No, seriously. AOL CNN

Big Money Win

Well the big news of the day is my big poker win! Last Sunday I entered a $5 poker tournament with about 1600 people. I mostly was playing for fun and experience. 6 1/4 hours later, I came to an agreement with the one remaining player, and we split first and second place. I took home $1200.

This is huge. It represents my biggest single-day win and my biggest tournament win. Plus it was a ton of fun and I learned a lot. I have ton a lot of analysis already and might go over the tournament hand-by-hand later (I keep a live database, of course).

I first started playing poker about 8 years ago, long before TV made it hugely popular. Back then I learned a lot from the school of hard knocks and lost a little most times I went out. But this win makes me a lifetime winner again, so I'm very happy about that. Plus I have now "paid for" my laptop, which I bought in part to play online games, including poker.

Hiroko's getting pretty tired of me bringing up the win every time I make a small purchase. I'm going to the grocery...to spend some of my winnings! Sure we can stop at White Castle...I'll buy a shake with my winnings!

And so on.

Catching Up

It's obviously been a very long time since I blogged, and I apologize. I do plan on going back to an average-1-a-day schedule. Currently I have tons to post, so it should be easy. Also check out my blog for my daughter for pictures and stuff.

Let me try to catch up categorically with everything that's been going on.

Personal Life
We bought a house. For real and sure this time, I swear. Not like the last four times. I'll have pictures really soon; the inspection should be this week. All we have to do now (as before) is sell our place. But we've dropped price again and the market is looking up, so we're pretty confident.

There was a massive cascading hardware failure at work two weekends ago, that cost our tech department hundreds of hours of overtime. If the original failure hadn't been Friday night (giving us until Monday morning to get things back up) the AMA could have been in serious trouble. We're all working super hard to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Hiroko added to her endless medical travails by having another kidney infection, and she was feverish and in pain for a week. Also she got a huge blister that a dermatologist is just guessing is some kind of bite. Poor lady.

Sports
The Bears lost the Superbowl. It sucked a lot. We took Ren to a party, which was her first significant time outside the house.

It's 41 days until baseball, and just a few days until spring training games. I am very excited. I'll be posting more and more Cubs stuff over the next couple months. Maybe I should just make another blog...

Chess
I've been playing about an average of 1 game a day online, and playing my best chess ever.

Also Morelia, a major international tournament is going on right now. There's been one big upset. But probably if you care you already knew.

Poker
Last April, Jamie Gold won the 2006 World Series of Poker, which, if measured in participation and money involved, was the largest sporting event in history. He won $12 million. But it came out later that before the tournament, he'd verbally agreed to give half of any of his winnings to another guy. On February 7, he actually did it. That's some payout.

Also I have big news personally about poker, but I'll save that for a separate post.

Okay, that's all I can think of at the moment. Much more to follow in the coming days.

Griffey Wrist

Oh my god, Ken Griffey Jr. isn't even waiting for the season to start now! He's already injured himself. Maybe he should relax in Kerry Wood's hot tub.

Pictures of Japan (not mine)

My friend Paul in California went to Japan to visit his friend and sister. Here are pictures he took of his travels.