mahalo.

holy crap, i just won my second $10 buy-in tournament in a row. two for two so far. the hand history is here Hand History. I got really lucky this time though. I was forced all-in multiple times and happened to come out on top. If you want to watch dumb luck come into play, this is the game for you. Once I wasn’t short stacked anymore though, I started rolling pretty well.

I really thought coco was going to win it all. I made one stupid play where I chased the overcards and lost 250 in one hand. I’m still not sure if I should have bet on the flop and checked the turn, or vice versa. The first option might have showed weakness on the turn, causing some opponents to bet into me, making it more difficult for me to bluff them out on the river, but checking the flop and betting the turn might have been more effective, just in terms of chasing people out… and in this case, I was on the draw, so there isn’t any real reason to show too much strength… if i was afraid of people betting into me, I wasn’t getting a free card anyways, or I should have check raised on the flop - but just seems dumb with only overcards. I probably should have just bet overcards according to the pot odds. which is something like… 7 to 1, i think.

it was a nice weekend.

saturday, after running some errands, i went to a concert at the greek theatre - my first concert ever actually. the bands that were playing were: matt nathanson, howie day, guster, and O.A.R. i liked them all except for O.A.R… which had a few too many reggae songs for my taste. although they and matt nathanson did a cover of “sunday, bloody sunday” which got people pretty excited. howie day was really cool because he’s just a solo act, but he used, what i’m going to call “repeaters” really well. basically, he can play a riff, or record some series of sounds on his guitar on a machine and just have it play over and over again. he used multiple layers of this to create the background beats for his songs, and watching him do that was pretty cool. most of the people there seemed to be there for guster though… and they didn’t disappoint. they were definitely my favorite band of the evening, playing a lot of their old stuff and some of their new stuff. pictures of the concert are in the gallery.

sunday, i slept in and then drove back down to san jose in time to play some hold’em with jim, andrew, allen and calvin. jim is heading out to work in new york labor day weekend, so we thought this was basically the last time that we’d get to play together. we played with bigger blinds that we usually do, so people actually ended up losing all their money. i got pretty lucky and ended up up about $1.50.

anyhow, that’s the weekend recap. time for another night in the guest room.

an interesting blog on msdn on debuggin microsoft word.
article on MSDN blog

From CNN

I wonder if it’s necessary to grow the bone in the person’s body, or if that just speeds up the process somehow. If this were ever used to help regenerate limbs, I think it would be kind of weird to have someone walking around with a growing arm protruding out of his body somewhere.

despite the three weeks of pain, there’s always something to balance it out. with the strep throat and the virus, we went up to the lake, which was really nice as always. along with my migraine, i dipped my toes into a $10 buy-in Sit-N-Go tournament at Party Poker.

A “SnG” tournament is basically a simple tourney where 10 people sit down and play until there’s only one person left. Basically a single table tournament. The top three finishers get paid, $50, $30, and $20 for the finishes. I was lucky enough to finish first =) it was pretty awesome.

What I had learned from reading around and such, is that in the first couple of levels (the blinds increase every 10 hands) you play super tight, because there are a lot of newbies who will call you down on every hand, so you don’t want to go in without something pretty decent. Because of that raising isn’t necessarily helpful either, and you don’t want to lose bad hands because the blinds will start to hurt in a few levels. In my case, there was also a very aggressive player to my left, so I didn’t want to get stuck with his raises. I actually thought he was pretty good at first, but then watching the replay, I saw some of the stuff he went in on, and concluded that he was basically sort of lucky.

There was definitely one bad play I made when I was at level 3 or 4. I was the BB and the SB raised me. Now this guy had done this several times already, so I thought he was trying to steal the blind so I called him. When the flop came, I bet into him with nothing and he raised. I called the raise and folded when he bet on the turn. Lost me some money there. In the end play, with the blinds significant (300 in SB, 600 in BB), I started playing a lot more aggressive, because, as I had read and seen before (watched a number of tournaments before I actually decided to do it) stealing the blinds is really important. It helped that in the end, I also started picking up some pretty nice hands and they carried me through to the finish. It was nice when it came to the last two guys because I had such a large chip lead over #2 that I basically could lean on him and steal all the blinds I wanted until he was at the point where he was forced to go all in on every hand.

There’s actually a replayer online that let’s you watch the tournament play. You can see my hands and any hands that went to a showdown. The replayer is at:
Hand Replayer (You have to use IE). When it opens up, copy and paste the contents of this file: Hand History into the text box and start the replay.

Working with the eclipse stuff is going well too… finally at the point where I’m understanding some of the code I’m working with. Things are looking up =). Although it is going to be another night in the guest room since my bed is still wet from the stupid leaking hot water bottle that I used while my migraine was booming.

bacteria two weeks ago, some kind of virus last week, and now a migraine. i guess i should look forward to either food poisoning, or for someone to just beat the crap out of me next week.

i’m scrambling trying to pick up more guys for our hockey team. 3 guys are going back to school so they won’t be able to come back. might have got one, but still need two or three more.

okay, entries are now showing up per month now. haven’t got anything working in terms of being able to navigate between months, but oh well. it’ll come at some point. actually using eclipse to do my PHP dev now. it’s nice having syntax coloring and easy navigation.

played more hold’em tonight. ended up down $.91 from $4.00. you know something’s wrong when you’re losing to flushes made by T2s. i was so proud that i made the high straight on board that i called a $1.30 raise with a flush on the table. argh. this is why you bet out early. so you don’t end up in a showdown with a made hand that’s only second best.

ended up losing in the playoffs with both teams. lost in the finals of my tuesday division 3-0 although i thought it was a fairly close game. just lost tonight 3-2 in OT in the semi-finals.

what about them olympics? american swimmers are kickin butt. natalie coughlin is just awesome. taking that 4×200 relay team to the world record. beating the old record set by a team known to be using drugs. just awesome.

i was irritated thinking about this old, sappy email that used to go around. the one about the kid that went to the military and then came back missing a leg. and then he calls home telling his parents that he’s got a friend who’s missing a leg and asks if his parents will take him in. when his parents say that taking someone in like that would be too trouble, he goes and kills himself. but it’s written with a lot of dialogue to give the whole story a more “personal” tone.

i think about that and think if the conversation went differently. “hey, mom, dad. i have a friend who needs to stay for us for a while until he can find a job.” “oh, we’re not sure if we can tend to him, we’re of limited means you know.” so he thinks since his parents can’t take in another person that has the same flaw as himself (none, besides being out of work since he was just honorably discharged), he now proceeds to jump out a window as well. lame. what kind of reasoning is that. “since my parents find a stranger to be too much trouble to deal with, they obviously think that i’ll be just as much of a problem.” overly sentimental saps. i used to be one of them. now i think it’s a little too pathetic and self-loathing. i mean, he basically made that call to decide whether or not he was going to kill himself. way to make the best of the situation buddy.

at work i’m learning how to use eclipse. haven’t programmed in java since the IEOR robot class my last semester. but it’s pretty cool. finally starting to really get into it. will probably try some stuff tomorrow.