Steelers Win!

I don't think I mentioned here the biggest sports bet I have ever (and probably will ever) make. A sportsbook at a website called mansion.com launched a "little" promotion that allowed a limited number of signups a risk-free bet on the Pittsburgh Steelers' opening game of the NFL season. The bet was $1100. If you won the bet, you'd win $1000 on top of your bet. If you lost, they would refund your $1100. So here's the scenario. One of my friends and I had placed this large risk-free bet because our bankrolls could afford it and sat down last night to watch the most exciting NFL game I'll ever watch ... due to the money on the line! The game was intense ... we both placed our bets before we knew the main QB Ben was out of the lineup, so we needed Pittsburgh to win by 5 points or more. After the first half we were up by 4 points: so far so good!

In the 3rd quarter, Miami scored a touchdown which put them ahead by 3. Worse yet, Pittsburgh had a good march down the field stopped when they fumbled the ball on the one yard line!!! At that point, we figured our bet was lost ... but we were in for a real treat at the end of the game starting with a Pittsburgh interception which they would soon convert into a TD. Now we were up by 4 again with enough time on the clock that Pittsburgh couldn't just run the clock down.

Pittsburgh marched up field but got stopped at the 25 yard line or so and tried for a field goal - a $1000 field goal for each of us watching. To our dismay, he missed it. At this point, there wasn't that much time on the clock left, and we were worried that Pittsburgh wouldn't try to score anymore points on their next posession ... just try and burn the clock.

But then! Miami threw ANOTHER interception which the Steelers returned for another TD! Boy were we happy with that!

Pittsburgh held on to that score winning the game 28-17 and I'm now $1000 richer. w00t!

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Building Part 2

I left off my poker bankroll building at the end of January 2005. I had capped off a very successful initial 3 months at playing poker considering that most players who win don't start winning right away. Apart from a short spurt at Party when I had no clue what I was doing, I quickly learned the ropes to make myself at worst a break even player at the low limits. Part of learning the ropes, I forgot to mention that I took some of my intial PSO points to order an amazon gift card which I used to purchase 4 poker books to ramp up my learning of the game. These books, in particular "Small Stakes Hold'em" would be my biggest learning tools over the start of my poker career.

Early in February, my first PSO referral points came in worth $65 - apparently one can make a decent amount with some simple referrals!

At this point, PSO launched the PokerNow rake rebate plan. At the time, PokerNow was a skin of Party Poker (it has since been absorbed, and I'm not too sure if it even exists anymore). This was a great deal since I was now serious about online poker and could use a regular paying PSO points influx which were just about as good as cash. I deposited $100, worked through my deposit bonus and by the time the rake rebate plan collapsed due to Party Poker's insistence, I cashed out $273 and had earned another $60 in PSO points for rakeback.

I started my next promotion at Golden Palace poker on March 2, 2005 once again depositing $100 and getting started. I dabbled a little with no limit play, but for the most part, I stuck to my limit game and went through the raked hand requirements at golden palace. At the end, I cashed out $303 to my brand new neteller account which I had finally decided to start up since I didn't want to have to deposit anymore money through my credit card. Plus I received yet another $60 worth of PSO points for the promo!

From here, my poker exploits no longer simply followed the PSO promos around. There was some harder to complete promos to do, but I was also interested in building my bankroll, so I would jump around a little bit. Before I created my neteller account, I started a frequent flopper rakeback plan with Ultimate Bet through PSO. This would be a recurring site for me because when I didn't have a current bonus to work on, I would return to UB to do generic bonus and PSO points. From here on, I will probably need to go month by month ... so I'm going to wrap up my Feb-April months in a table here and be back with part three of this series in the next little while!

PokerNow rake rebate: +173 + $61 PSO points Golden Palace Poker: +$203, $60 PSO points Referral Points: $85 PSO points Absolute Poker (2 deposits): +$129 Ultimate Bet: +$80 + $22 PSO points (rake rebate) Total Winnings: $585 USD + $228 PSO Points

Sum of total winnings to this point: $1086 USD + $3490 CAD + $390.50 PSO points + 1000 chips

Stay tuned for the next three months or so!

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Building

Well it has been awhile since I last wrote about my poker experience. In this post I'm gonna start going through my history of my online poker transactions to build a picture of how profitable it has been in the past 2 years (well, its been since November of 2004). All of my poker experience has been through Poker Source Online which offers huge incentives to get started in online poker. In November of 2004 I started up with PSO and did their Party Poker promotion for a chipset. At the time, I only really wanted the chipset, which seemed like a fairly low risk venture. The promo at the time was to get a 500 chip set for playing 250 raked hands at Party Poker at .5/1 limits. I deposited $100 on my credit card and lost $30 there over the raked hand requirements (considering I knew nothing at the time this was not a big deal). I received my chips a few weeks later and I started thinking about learning how to play poker so I could take advantage of the rest of the PSO promotions.

In December 2004, I deposited $100 at The Gaming Club that at the time were offering an amazingly sweet promotion. $300 of bonus money was available for my deposit, I simply had to play enough raked hands to release it. As I recall it was something like 200 raked hands for $20 released at a time, but I'm not too sure if that is accurate and the promotion has long since gotten worse. I had aquired a copy of Lee Jone's low limit poker book and was using its starting hand requirements to my benefit and was almost immediately breaking even. Over the time at the gaming club (a little over a month), I played break even poker and cashed out a cheque in early January of 2005 worth $405. In addition, I received $70 worth of PSO points to spend at their store. My online poker life had begun.

Next on my list of places to be hit was Pacific Poker where I once again deposited $100. This site was full of fish-like players and I found it much easier to win there than at the gaming club. Between the experience of playing at the gaming club and party poker, and the weak players, I made a healthy profit for playing .5/1. Not long after, I had already completed the short PSO requirements and cashed out a cheque worth $184 plus my PSO prize of another 500 chipset.

A week later, I started the Absolute Poker promotion where I once again deposited $100 and worked through the PSO raked hand requirements while clearing the deposit bonus money. This promo was a little harder to complete at .5/1. In the end I made my first jump to playing 1/2 and hit a lucky streak of cards that ensured a profit when I cashed out. At the end of January 2005, I received my $60 PSO points prize with another cheque worth $189.

Sometime in January there, Party poker gave me some free money to play with which I turned into $53 more money. Hooray!

Another big event happened that January. On the PSO forums, the site organizers had arranged to come to Edmonton for one of the first Canadian Poker Tour events! With such short notice, they made a general post asking if people in Edmonton were able to make it to the $500 buyin poker tournament. I signed up almost immediately and got several others who had let me know about PSO sign up as well. We had a group of 5 people play, and it was me - the 2 month poker experience player who placed well into the money. In fact, I placed 6th for a prize of $3490!! Talk about a bonus for my bankroll! Alot of the reasons for my success was due to the tutelage of Darse Billings: currently a PHD student about to graduate after working on AI in poker for a number of years. He used to play professionally and made a pretty good living doing so, so his experience helped me out considerably. A great part of being a member of PSO is getting a chance to hit some free prizes just for being a member. Over these 3 months of being a member I received $32.50 of PSO points just for participating in the forums, and my great experience with the site would soon get me some referral points (in the next month). That gets me through my first couple months of bonuses. I'll update again in the next week or so with the next segment in my online poker experiences. Here's what I had received from November 2004 - January 2005:

Party Poker: -$30, 500 piece chipset Gaming Club: +$305, $70 PSO points Party Poker: +$53 from free money Pacific Poker: +$84, 500 piece chipset Absolute Poker: +$89, $60 PSO points $500+50 CPT Poker event: $+3490 (canadian dollars) PSO freebies: $62.50 PSO Points Total Winnings: $501 USD + $3490 CAD + $162.50 PSO Points + 1000 chips

Heraldk

Note: select segments were reworded and added to since the first posting to fill in some details I forgot in my rush to post. I've started work on the next few months of PSO experience and that will be up in the coming days!

Building Computers

Well apparently I've gotten in a habit of building computers for people. Odd. I built a computer a couple weeks ago for Diane, and yesterday I put together a new one for my Dad. It is amazing to me the amount that the cost of computers has dropped over the last few years. The fact that I can easily put a value system together for $500 impresses me to no end. Anyways, once again I need to make more of a push on my thesis. Lots of work to do, and I want to get it out of the way so I can do other stuff. I'm getting to the point where I need to start filling in details, and that is gonna be harder to do than the basic exposition that I've been doing for the most part so far.

Lots of bonuses in casino/poker land. I'm working on the new PSO promo room DreamPoker, plus one of boogster's promotions for play65 (backgammon). That and I did a couple of casinos last week but broke even on both of them. *sigh*.

Time for me to go in to school. Take care everyone!

Heraldk

Foxwoods Casino

Mike and I met in the lobby on Friday morning all set to take a bus to Foxwoods casino. This was to be my first live poker ring game experience, and I was pretty excited. The bus ride was about 2 hours long from Boston, and we arrived at Foxwoods sometime in the early afternoon. Foxwoods is an amazing sight - it is absolutely *huge*, with three buildings of hotel rooms, slot machines, poker tables, and other casino table games. Instead of heading to our hotel right away, Mike and I checked our bags and headed straight for the poker room. I sat down at a 2/4 limit table, and Mike joined a 1/2 no limit game. My first impression? These players were *terrible*. I got frustrated though because I couldn't get cards to take advantage of it! After about 4 hours of play, I was down about $60 or so.

Mike was really hungry, and I my stomach was fast to agree, so we left to get some food at the Hard Rock Cafe. We seriously had the best service at a restaurant so far this trip there, which was pretty cool so we left a pretty good tip. It helped that Mike was up almost $200 at that point!

Before returning to the poker room, we wandered around for a few minutes to take in some of the atmosphere. Really, it felt like any other casino I've ever been in ... just that it was ginormous. We stopped at a craps table and played a few rounds where I won about $25 ... not too shabby. Craps is one of the only casino games that I find fascinating because at a full table, there's so much going on. People placing bets like crazy, and yelling and cheering as the dice are rolled - there really isn't a game more fun that craps in a casino environment. Plus its a low house edge game if you know how to bet, so that's another advantage!

Anyways, after our brief break we returned to the poker room. This time, I got a rush of cards and pulled up about $50 at one point ... only to hit 3 bad hands for me in a row including twice running into pocket aces with a big pair of my own. I swung up and down quite a bit, but ended up only down $30 when Mike and I decided to head back around 3 in the morning.

We caught a cab back to our hotel which was just a few minutes away, and checked in. I got to sleep a little after 4:30 in the morning which is officially the latest I've been up all trip. I woke up around 10:20 to the alarm clock so we could catch the shuttle in after a bit of breakfast. The hotel had free breakfast before 11am, including these awesome belgian waffle makers that were all set up for the perfect one every time. So I rather enjoyed breakfast!

Mike and I caught the 11am shuttle back to the casino. We had about an hour and a half to kill before we caught the bus (so we thought) ... so we returned to the poker room for a little bit of play. I started up fast - with 3 hands in a row which I raised preflop (ATs, JJ and JJ again). I won the first two and lost the third, but was up for a decent amount of time. Not too much later though, I had a terrible beat. I had A6 of hearts and limped in. The guy in the blinds raised so 4 players and I all called. I flopped a flush draw with a Jh 4h 2s, so I check and called with lots of odds. The turn was a 2c, which looked a lot like a blank. Again I check and called with one lady also staying in. The river was the queen of hearts giving me the nut flush. Unfortunately, the preflop raiser had just made queens full. Ouch!

So I took another $25 hit, but all in all I don't think I played terribly. I should probably have laid down my Jacks to the Aces last night, but besides that, I felt really comfortable and the amount I lost was totally within reasonable statistical variance. Still, it would've been nice to come out of foxwoods ahead!

Mike is up about $100, which is nice for him. It pretty much pays for the sidetrip to foxwoods for him with a little on the side. Apparently I should've been playing no limit.

I typed up this post when I was waiting for the bus to show up at the bus terminal. Turns out that the bus was almost a full two hours late! So we waited for a long time for the bus to arrive and then were late arriving in new york to meet up with Mike and Nolan.

Up next? Adventures in New York! Our first visit is apparently the Museum of Natural History.

Heraldk

Poker Competition Results!

I'm up fairly early this morning and the first person to shower so now I can wait for everyone else to shower and spend some more time catching up on me blog!So last night four of us got back soaking wet from a night out at another bar. You know, I'm not a big drinker or anything but it seems I'm out a whole lot more often than I am in Edmonton. I guess its kind of fun to explore the city and hang out with newly met peers.Anyways, I got to bed around 1am last night and we got up around 8 in an attempt to get to the conference. After looking at the program we decided to skip the invited talk and get breakfast before the first paper talk. The set of games talks were on, which really was the stuff I was particularly interested in at this conference. I would attend several more talks than the previous day - one of the talks was the paper my name appears on. The official title of the paper was "Optimal Unbiased Estimators".

At 2:50pm, the announcement of who won the tournament occurred. The only people who knew who won were Marty and Christian with everyone else being kept in the dark until the announcement. Turns out, we won! We won by all metrics and it appears we got statistical significance in most areas which was pretty nice. I'm looking forward to getting the logs from the match so I can run the DIVAT analysis on them.

I attended another talk after the announcement and before Darse did his analysis of some hands in the match. Turns out one of the biggest things we took advantage of was CMU called down a lot on the river even if it had a bad hand due to some technical reasons. This is a terrible error, and I suspect this is a big reaosn we won.

A group of us headed out afterwards to go see Tomb which is an interactive puzzle sort of adventure. It was really pretty pricey ($16) but a pretty cool concept. Unfortunately, with our group being computer science people, the puzzles were a tad too simple to solve. I would really like to see them have multiple difficulty settings so that we would've had more of a challenge with it.

We had dinner at a steakhouse across from Tomb while we were waiting for our appointment. While being a steakhouse, everyone except Brad avoided the steak, which he said was a good decision. It's kinda funny how Albertans are so used to good beef which means we're pretty judgemental about other beef (particularly worse beef).

We decided to walk back through an area of town we hadn't been in before and passed Fenway park on the way to the Boston common. Fenway is where the Boston Red Sox play. We didn't get to see much besides the outside of the park but that was neat in itself. We walked back to the end of the Boston Common and got on the train back to the Hotel ... where we met up with Nolan, the girls from the previous night, and a couple of guys from Austin, Texas. After a quick shower, I joined them at a restaurant not far from our hotel called LTK (Legal Test Kitchen) which is a pretty neat restaraunt. They had super cheap guiness beer which was pretty awesome ($4.75!) ... though they didn't really know how to pour it properly.

Anyways, we stayed out until after midnight when the restaurant looked like they really wanted to kick us out so we vanished off to our hotel room where I stayed up for awhile catching up with yesterday's blog post.Any now I'm all caught up with my blog posts!

Heraldk

Poker Rush

Well I'm glad I decided to play some poker tonight. I got home a little late from school since it was raining really hard and I didn't really want to get poured on on the way home. When I finally got home, I threw some laundry in and decided to fire up full tilt and play a little 2/4. I ended up over $300 in the space of maybe an hour and a half! (two tables). This was a big relief - I have been having a pretty poor couple of weeks at the tables, so it was nice to hit some cards again. My profit in online gambling has been coming from online casino promos. I cashed out over $700 from casino-on-net on only a $200 deposit (yeah, that's $300 on top of the $200 bonus!), and got a nice win at Intercasino as well on a nice reload bonus. It is this money that will be funding me when I go to Foxwoods in a little over a week! Oh yes! I think I mentioned previously that I will be going to Boston and New York this month. I leave on Saturday morning (at 1:00 am so essentially Friday night). AAAI is being held in Boston and we have a paper there to present. Then a few of my friends and I are going to go to New York with two of us stopping at Foxwoods on the way there for a night. I'm looking forward to giving some live poker a try. I haven't played any real live ring game poker before this, though I do have my half a dozen or so live tournaments I've played in. It's pretty exciting! Then we'll spend a week in New York returning on the 27th.

In other news, my thesis is starting to take shape in my head if not on paper. I have an outline that I think will help organize my thesis a little better. In other research news, the paper Darse and I submitted to the ICGA special issue on poker has been accepted! The reviewer was pretty positive about the paper and his suggestions were all helpful in helping make the paper a little stronger. Yay! Soon DIVAT will take over the poker world! (We think its powerful enough to anyways).

Do pay attention to my photoblog. I plan on adding a flurry of photos in the next week to pre-emptively make up for missing a couple weeks of updates while I'm gone. Enjoy! I'm pretty happy with the set I'm going to upload ... soon!

Heraldk

Insane

I've been pretty busy since I got back from Italy, so I haven't had much chance to update here, and those times that I have had a little bit of time I ended up playing poker or doing chores around the house. So ... updates here have been pretty scarce. Anyways, what's happened? The Oilers! Man, they put in a good run didn't they? Just one game away from the stanley cup and they came SOOOO close. A couple bounces didn't go our way and we didn't capitalize on a 5 on 3 powerplay which really was what killed us. But the whole post-season was an enjoyable run, and I'm so very happy they managed to be able to make the run they did. Maybe they'll make it next year?

Poker. I tried playing some no limit, but I think I need to do some reading on it. I had a couple of fantastic days early on winning over $140. Now I've lost it all again. Hmm ... I need to learn some more about no limit I guess!

My research continues slowly. The team is ramping up for a poker competition happening at AAAI (which I am going to, as it happens). So there's some stuff I've got to do for that. Also, my thesis really needs writing so that's starting to get more of my attention. I leave for Boston to attend AAAI on the 15th of July and I get back on the 27th. A few of my friends are going to spend a week in New York while we're in the area, so that should be fun.

I do plan on finishing my Italy journal entries, but they take awhile to type and when I'm not home for long before I have to head for bed nightly I'm gonna need a little while to get myself back into the blogging routine.

Anyways, more updates to come. Oh, and new photo will be up on my photoblog soon.

Heraldk

PSO Poker Rewards Freeroll + Oilers Win!

Quite the day today! My family decided to postpone our Mother's day celebration ... partially at my request since for some reason PSO's poker rewards freeroll was scheduled for tonight. I really didn't want to miss this freeroll because there was a huge overlay on it. It was a $10K freeroll which I qualified for by playing 750 raked hands at poker rewards. Less than 150 people qualified and only 75 people showed up! I finished in something like 17th/18th place or so for a profit of $210 dollars! Not bad for a couple hours work eh? The Oiler game was pretty incredible tonight too. The Oilers are playing pretty awesome lately. Hopefully they can wrap up their series against San Jose at home on Wednesday! Shawn Horcoff and Ryan Smyth were crazy awesome for the Oil, with Horcoff in particular making some pretty amazing plays!

Anyways, I gotta get to bed. 7AM will come way too early tomorrow morning I fear!

Heraldk

Why so busy?

Why do I feel so busy? This weekend wasn't all that incredibly busy. I mean, I was at a couple of parties, and spent a day with my mom on her birthday on Sunday, but that's not all that busy. And even though I've got a lot on my plate for school, I still come home and don't do much on school. I'll keep working on the various poker and casino promos that have made me a tidy profit over the course of the last year and a bit. What inevitably happens though is I'll sit down and play poker for a bit and then I'll realize that its getting late, and I end up going to bed later than I really should have. I'm still getting between 6 and 7 hours of sleep a night usually, but I still feel like I really need to catch up on sleep. So what am I doing tonight? Blogging before bed. And I'm going to the gym tomorrow for 8am. Here we go again! Still, a number of exciting things are happening.

The Oilers took down game 6 last night and boy was I happy. So were many boisterous fans who took to Whyte ave last night. I'm told it was quite an experience to walk down Whyte ... crazy people everywhere! The Oilers played a so-so to downright terrible game right up to the third period. That was where they promptly woke up and slaughtered the redwings in dramatic fashion. Nope ... the Oilers don't do things the easy way.

I finished off another casino promo the other day. This one was at intercasino for a value of $150 profit. Hoorah! I am now up $340 in casino promos. I've also been playing 2/4 limit at full tilt clearing another deposit bonus. I'm over 2/3 of the way to getting a full tilt microsuede jacket with full tilt points! I like free stuff! Not only that, I made over $160 on one night of play last week. I had a couple of smaller losing sessions this week and then made another $60 tonight. There's a lot of variance, but I feel like I'm playing pretty well and I'm certainly profiting. I've cleared about $70 of my $300 deposit bonus there so far.

Heraldk

A relaxing, unproductive weekend

Well, I hope I can get myself going next week. Both this weekend and the week preceding it were wildly unproductive affairs which is really not what I'm aiming for at this point when there's plenty I *could* be doing. I wasn't even all that busy with other stuff ... I just kept getting distracted by silly little things like Sudoku. I'm aiming to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight and then get at the work I've got piling up tomorrow. On the other hand, I did get the chance to watch parts of all three hockey games CBC broadcasted today. The Oilers came out with an impressive effort in an exciting game that started at 11am our time *rolls eyes*. Ottawa's game was also quite exciting, even though they lost. I tuned into the calgary game 5 minutes into the third period ... but this one was not nearly as exciting. Anaheim looked in control of the game for most of the period especially with Calgary's Dion Phaneuf making a couple of terrible blunders that basically cost them the game.

In other news, I played some $2/$4 poker today at full tilt poker. I ended up down $2.50 for the afternoon, but I started playing again this evening and at the moment I'm up $38 which is kind of nice for half an hour of play tonight.

I also played in the PSO freeroll tonight, but wasn't all that successful. Its a shame because first place was a cool $2500 USD! I started out well by hitting some pretty good cards, but after that I just couldn't get a hand. I took a couple hits to my stack and then was forced to look for a hand. Finally, I picked up pocket kings and tried to get a double up off of a guy who used to be chip leader but had recently lost nearly all of his stack. He pushed me all in on the flop and I called. He had QT which had hit a ten on the flop ... and he turned the queen to win the pot. Ouch! So I was out in 133 place or so out of 281 people. Not terrible, but I think i could probably have done better.

Heraldk

Housekeeping

Not much of a post here tonight. I just wanted to mention a couple of bits of the current news. The Italy trip is looking like a go ahead for sure. Ryan was looking into plane tickets for us today. Hoorah! Its gonna be a good 16 hour flight to Turin at least. Gotta bring my laptop so I can get some stuff done :)

Next, one of the 2 papers I've been working on of late was officially accepted to AAAI - one of the top notch AI conferences around. So that's pretty exciting! I dunno if I'll be going to Boston for the conference, but it would be cool to do that too.

Next, I did another casino promo, this time at Starluck casino. This time, I was up money almost the whole way through and came out with a $100 profit. Hoorah! I'm gonna wait for my cashouts to clear before I do any other promos. My next plan of action is to do a Party Poker reload followed by a Full Tilt reload. Lots of poker to play in the next couple months!

I am quite enjoying the long weekend. Ryan took us out for lunch today after the hex meeting to the new asian village, which was really cool and nice. I then played a bunch of poker this afternoon and finished up about $60 or so on the day. All in all, the weekend is off to a good start. Sunday I have dinner at Diane's parent's place, and then Monday is dinner with my family. Yay Easter food!

Heraldk

+EV blackjack!

Well, this weekend was interesting on the gambling front. First of all, a guy on the PSO forums noticed that PokerNow has closed down permanently and offered players to transfer the remaining money that they had at PokerNow to an existing party poker account. The great part of this was that he and several people were transfering totals of less than a dollar to party poker and getting $25 and $50 bonuses! So I decided to try this to see if I had any money left in that account. I had $0.01, and transfered it. I got a $50 bonus! I've got to play 500 hands to clear it which shouldn't take long. I've already made $20 playing the super loose .5/1 games.

Second, I decided to try a second casino promotion. For those who don't know, these promotions can be positive EV if you get a large enough deposit bonus and the requirements don't require you to play too long. My first promotion didn't go so well ... I lost my $100 deposit ... and +EV or not, these promotions still have risk because the variance in a lot of these games are huge. I was still intrigued by the idea of +EV casino games, so this weekend I tried Golden Palace's 300% deposit bonus. This time, after a few hours of blackjack, my account reached $290 from my $100 deposit!

So I'm up $90 in casino promotions. It was pretty fun, and a nice break from poker. I really think I needed a break from poker since the past little while has been a tad frustrating.

Heraldk

Poker Room

Well I finally get to do the Poker Room PSO promotion. PokerRoom.com was my first ever poker room that I signed up for and I played a couple of their freerolls there. What I didn't realize was that that was going to interfere with my doing a PSO promotion there. Fortunately, I was allowed to wait 6 months after closing my previous poker room account and now I've reopened it and am ready for business! So I finally get to play at Pokerroom which is something I've wanted to do for awhile. I really like their software, and they have a lot of traffic which is kind of nice. So that's what I did last night. I also played in the 4th PSO league event. I played terribly - I didn't make a laydown that I should have and that cost me far more chis than it should have. After that, I was shortstacked and didn't get lucky. Oh wells.

Other than that, life has been going really well. The research front is trucking along ... even speeding up a little bit as I help get another paper ready for the end of the month. If this and the paper we submitted last month happen, I'll have 6 papers in my research career before I get to my thesis. Sweet deal!

Diane and I are doing awesome together. We spend a lot of time together and frankly, I couldn't be happier. We've been together for more than 2 years, and it still feels almost dream-like, though I think I'm finally convincing myself that it really isn't a dream. Yay!

This past weekend was a busy one. On Friday, I joined a group of friends for a night of beer tasting. It t'was quite enjoyable. I hadn't been at a drinking party in a long time, so it was kinda fun to do that ... not that I had a huge amount of alcohol. Just enough to feel a pleasant buzz. On Saturday, we went out for Dimsum, and then hung out for a bit before going to a games party that one of the profs in our department put on. It was fun, as usual. Sunday was pretty quiet and I was pretty glad for it. Diane and I joined my parents for dinner to celebrate my sister's birthday. We played some games and it was fun.

So that's my life update. I have no idea how I'm going to keep this pace going, but it's pretty fun at the same time!

Heraldk

PSO hits 25,000 members!

For those who read my blog regularly (which is almost nobody), they know I mention PSO pretty regularly. Well guess what? The best online affiliate hit 25,000 poker forum members recently. The sheer success of this site is an impressive feat. It takes a lot of patience and good customer support (read: more patience) to deal with the vast majority of people looking for a free lunch. To Mike and all the rest of the staff at PSO, I salute you.

For those who are too lazy to look back in my blog to see what I've said about them in the past, here's a quick synopsis of what they offer:

1. Instant Bankroll: This program gives players who want to play online poker, but don't want to risk their own money, a chance to play for real money. Players just have to meet some simple preconditions, and follow a set of easy to follow instructions, and they get $75 at Party poker (or $50 at Titan Poker) plus a $25 bonus if they play enough hands.
2. Promotions: These are the meat of the PSO site (for me anyways). They offer several promotions with different poker rooms where you can get free stuff for completing the requirements. I have literally got hundreds of dollars of free stuff from this.
3. Frequent Flopper Program: For players who play a lot of online poker, PSO offers rakeback at select sites. This gives you a percentage of your rake back in either cash or PSO points (which are as good as cash).

Add to this a very active poker forum, poker league, and the tendency to give away awesome free stuff all the time (sometimes almost randomly) ... PSO is essential for the online poker player.

Oh, did I mention that I got a $500 buyin to one of the CPT events last January? Yeah, that's right ... PSO just gave that to me. I won't claim everyone will get such great things, but ... you never know!

Heraldk

Poker League

Well yesterday was an interesting poker day. I played some 2/4 limit at Ultimate Bet for a very short time, losing far more than I really liked (some $150). I just couldn't have my good hands stand up or when I had a good hand someone had a better one. Bleh. So I quit and played xbox for awhile. I started playing Jade Empire this weekend, and I'm really enjoying it so far!

Then, at 7:00, PSO had their 2nd league event. Unfortunately, I had to miss the first one. Last night I got extremely lucky at some pretty key moments. Early in the tournament, I busted a guy when I flopped a set of Jacks to his pocket kings. I'm a little surprised he called my all-in bet on the flop, but I was happy! After that, I started to bleed chips for a long time. With about 70 people left out of the 130 that entered, I was in the bottom 20 people or so, and just trying to survive. Then I went on a tear - stealing the blinds with decent hands like AJ and KQ. These hands pushed me up to 3rd in chips at one point.

I collapsed later on - I can't quite remember what the hands were, but I lost a bunch of chips and then I mistakenly called a guy's bet when I meant to fold. Oops! That's a lot of chips to lose on a misclick. I was once again near the bottom of the totem pole, this time with 30 people or so left. I pushed with 53s in the BB (since I had no chips left), and hit two pair on the river. *whew*. Another double up and almost double up from there and I was golden to make the final table.

Once there, the table was real tight. Understandably since the top 3 get much larger prizes (since PSO was topping up the prizes of the top 3 finishers with PSO points). I stole some blinds to stick around my 6th largest stack (out of 9). Then, a guy raises in early position with KQ and I hold tens. I thought about it, and pushed. The guy calls (I think this is a terrible call), and hits a king on the river. :( I'm out in 8th for an $18.08 payout. Yippee.

Still, its not a bad spot to be in. The idea for the league is to count your best 6 finishes in up to 10 tournaments. Your average place then becomes your score and the person with the best overall score (lowest) wins a $1500 prize package to play an event at the WSOP. That would be sweet.

So ... 8th is a pretty good spot. If I can do similarly in 5 more league events, I'll be golden to finish in the top 3 for sure (if not first). Wish me luck!

Heraldk

Amazing night in poker

Goodness me. Last night was the best night for poker I've ever had. To set up the scenario, I had lost a lot of money on the weekend playing 2/4 limit. Apparently the cards just weren't with me and I played a little too aggressive in spots which cost me more than I probably should have lost. All told, I lost about $160 or so on Sunday which is the single worst day of poker I've ever had. Ewww. I quit, examined my game for awhile and thought about it a bit. I had some terrible luck, but I knew that I lost more than I should have. Monday night I played for an hour or two and won back $40 which was kind of nice.

Then last night happened. After I finally stopped playing around midnight, I was up $207 that night - my best night of poker yet. It pushed me solidly into the profit column again!

The hilight hand of the night was a $79 pot I won when a guy decided he wanted my big blind.

The table folds around to the button holding AJo who raises (as I would do). The small blind calls and I reraise with QQ. Button caps and both the small blind and I call. Flop comes QJ5, 2 diamonds. Small blind checks, I bet, button re-raises and small blind calls. I re-raise and everyone calls. Turn is an A (no diamond). Once again the pot is three-bet. River is a blank. Small blind gets out of the way at this point (probably had a flush draw), and I win the hand with trip queens. Sweet.

So with last night's winnings, I'm not up not only my $180 in bonus money I've cleared so far, but also up about another $100 on top of that. Yay!

Heraldk

Alberta Poker Championship Tournament

I mentioned a little while ago that I had won a satellite some friends and I put on to enter into one of the Alberta poker championship tournaments. It was a $200+20 affair, and it was last night. The summary is ... well, I did well, but didn't make the money. There was ~133 people in the tournament with the top 15 places paying out. It didn't take me too long to get comfortable. The play was not amazingly good, and I picked up a lot of pots with my tight aggressive play. People respected my raises, and I continued to pick up a decent hand once in a while. I doubled up about halfway through with pocket kings. First guy min-raises and I come over the top for all my chips. He calls (I think he thought I had a smaller pair and didn't want a call) and flips over pocket Jacks.

I took out a guy with 92o in the BB when I caught two pair and put the short stack all in. A few rounds later, I took another short stack out with 73o when he went all in and gave me 5:1 pot odds to take him out (I made a flush on the river with my 3 of spades).

Then I ran into a very dry run of cards. At that point in the tournament I had an above average stack, though not a huge amount above average. Probably around 24,000-25,000. Now I know that I played a little too tight, but its a little hard to make a big raise with Ace-rag from early position (I never got an ace in late position) ... and that was about as good as the hands were. I saw 75o several times, and worse hands than that ... and all the while the blinds and antes rose at a phenomenal rate. Over those rounds, my chip stack dropped to 16,500, and I just couldn't find a hand to play. Then comes the hand that I kinda wish I had played differently.

I have 16,500 in chips. Blinds are 700/1500, with 200 antes. UTG raises to 3000, and then UTG+1 re-raises to 8000. I'm in the big blind and look down at TT. What do I do? I'm scared of the raise-reraise thing. The player UTG could well have a monster with his minraise. A re-raiser has got to have something, and its likely AK or AQ at a minimum (if not JJ, QQ, KK or AA). Both players have similar chip stacks to me. I think one of them outchips me by a couple thousand and the other has a couple thousand less than me. If I call, I'm pot committing myself ... and the initial raiser still can act after me. I decided to fold, but I really wasn't too sure if I should have called or not.

Turns out I should have. UTG had AJo, and UTG+1 had AKs. Board doesn't pair anybody and my tens would've stood up and I would've almost tripled up. *sigh*.

Oh well, now I'm hoping that the cards turn out better for me. They don't. A couple rounds later, I pick up KTs (the best hand I'd seen with no action in front of me). Guy to my right folds but didn't seem happy to be folding, and I push. A guy on the other end of the table yells "NICE", and flips over AA. What can I do? No bad beat for him, and I'm knocked out in 26th-ish place. Top 15 get paid. *double sigh*.

It was fun though. Until I had that bad string of cards I really felt I had an edge on a lot of the players. I felt comfortable, and seemed to have this respect from a lot of players that I'm not certain is entirely deserved. But then again, I wasn't in a lot of pots. Just enough to pick up some blinds and antes and stay alive. I can't wait until the next chance I get in one of these big tournaments. I think I've got a good shot at the money on each try :)

Heraldk

A weekend of Poker

I didn't really plan it this way, but this weekend was more poker filled than it ever was. On Friday, I left work with a couple friends and went for dinner at the Druid. Then afterwards I was able to go to a poker night at Ryan's place. I bubbled out at that tournament unfortunately. The game was pretty wild - everyone who played was crazy loose, and I didn't really get cards to help me take advantage of the loose players. *shrug* - no worries.

Then Saturday was my own poker party. We had a surprising number of people turn out for it - so we had to have 2 tables of 6 people to start it off. My Dad, Diane, Curtis B and I made the money ... and Diane took 2nd place! :) I finished first, though my dad claims he forfeited his stack so he could return home for dinner (which is actually true, so I don't doubt him). It was a pretty fun day and there was some pretty incredible food people put together, crowned by Mike's pork roast.

Today I played poker in the afternoon after cleaning the house and won $69 on Full Tilt playing 2/4. Then my mom picked me up and we went to get a set of shinpads so I can play indoor soccer for the CS intramural team.

Then I played in a freeroll tournament through PSO and took 31st for $10. The tournament was kinda odd though because only 120 people showed up ... and they had 2000+ registered. So they had the top 200 make the money, and so everybody cashed a little.

So yeah ... a very poker-filled weekend. Now I gotta get some work done! :)

Heraldk

Poker Satellite!

Saturday night was crazy. I bought a deep freezer for my condo, as well as a couple of Christmas gifts - and then picked Diane up. From there we visited three parties, including Diane's work party, a fantastic dinner at Lingnan, and then a birthday party for one of our friends from Dance class way back when. Lingnan was awesome. Amy, the owner of the lunchtime establishment in Scotia place (by the name of Chicken for Lunch) is an awesome host - particularly when you are a loyal patron of her Chicken for Lunch restaurant. She took care of us and gave us gifts and we ate far more food than we should have. It was awesome!

I didn't get long to sleep in today - we had a satellite tournament to send one of us to an upcoming Canadian Poker Tour event in January. Amazingly enough, I managed to come out on top - which I was hoping for, but not too sure if I could manage. There's a lot of luck involved, and I picked up some key hands that got me through. By the time I was heads up with Curtis, I had a pretty sizable chip stack and was able to take him out in a couple of hands. Hooray!

So I'm going to be looking into details on securing my seat - but I'm not too worried about getting in. Should be fun ... wish me luck! I know a lot more about poker than I did last January - maybe that will be a good thing!

Heraldk