Monthly Archives: July 2004

Poker

Of all the bad beats…

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MultiPoker’s Sunday morning freeroll:

Party Poker No-Limit Hold’em Tourney, Big Blind is t30 (10 handed) converter

CO (t720)
Button (t510)
SB (t830)
BB (t890)
Hero (t765)
UTG+1 (t2110)
UTG+2 (t860)
MP1 (t2430)
MP2 (t880)
MP3 (t875)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with Qs, Qc.
Hero raises to t120, UTG+1 folds, UTG+2 folds, MP1 folds, MP2 folds, MP3 folds, CO calls t120, Button folds, SB folds, BB folds.

Flop: (t285) 7c, 7s, 7h (2 players)
Hero bets t645 (All-In), CO calls t600 (All-In).

Turn: (t1530) 4s (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: (t1530) 7d (2 players, 2 all-in)

Final Pot: t1530
Main Pot: t1485 (t1485), between CO and Hero. > CO (t1485)
Pot 2: t45 (t45), returned to Hero.

Hero shows Qs Qc (four of a kind, sevens).
CO shows Kh Qh (four of a kind, sevens, King kicker).
Outcome: Hero wins t45. CO wins t1485.

Suck.

I bounced out in 133rd (out of 189) within one or two orbits. Went all-in with KJs; ATo caught an ace on the flop and that was that. He also managed to take down someone with pocket jacks who didn’t improve.

Poker

CCWSOP IV

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We had our fourth no limit tournament last night. Eight players, $10 buy-in with $5 rebuys available in the first two rounds. No one rebought.

This was probably our best tournament yet, in terms of level of play and the action.

Some highlights:

One poor guy in UTG+1 played the hammer and flopped a boat. Unfortunately someone in SB made his boat with pocket queens when a third Hilton made an appearance on the turn. That was painful to see.

On another hand I raised with AQo and got re-raised over the top by someone who had pocket 7s. I called and caught my ace on the flop, and another on the turn, giving me a full boat to her two pair. That turned out really nicely since she had earlier sucked out a set on the river to my paired ace, ten kicker. In fact, I think she had pocket 7s then as well.

After that I had enough chips to push some blinds around and eventually got in the money.

With pocket 7s in the big blind I mistakenly raised $6 against two callers. Should have figured it was a bad idea after what happened to that girl, but…. The button re-raised $10 and I went all-in to find myself against cowboys. I bounced out in third with 20% of the prize money. Serves me right.

The heads-up play was intense. Lots of back and forth, lots of swapping of position. It lasted for at least two and a half rounds or so, and that meant that they were at it for about two hours (I think 45 minutes is way too long–but last time people complained 30 minutes was too short). There were some tough laydowns, and some crazy all-in action: 1) QJ beating AK when the board made a set on the flop and showed a queen on the river; 2) a postflop AXs flush draw beating top two pair on the river. Same guy held both losing hands. At some point pocket 7s lost again. Ugh.

Finally, with $24 in the pot and the buzzer signaling the end of the $3-$6 blinds, the shorter stack went all-in with AJo. Bigger stack called with K6o. K6 caught a 6 on the flop and won half the prize money. Unbelievable. But after the bad beats and suckouts that happened to K6 earlier, this was his due. The poker gods eventually restore balance and +EV.

Good times.

Fun Stuff

Jake and Adarsh in India

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Looks like they made it, and are up to no good:

Our first night there, we met Kerana, a half Afghani/half Persian girl who is living in Bombay. She’s quite a character. During our night with her, we snuck into a traditional Rajasthani wedding (where we were welcomed by a bunch of extremely extremely friendly kids, and stared at oddly by the older guests) and also attended what seemed to be a school/community dance competition–dances and costumes ranged from traditional Rajasthani to New Jersey 1983. Many of the kids were wearing Michael Jackson jackets. I had big plans to enter the competition (I could’ve taken those kids!) but Adarsh seemed to think that it would be somehow “inappropriate” for me to take the stage. So I had to settle for trying to teach Kerana how to dance.

Read the rest of this post and others at India 2004

General

Starship Troopers

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Watched Starship Troopers again tonight. Great movie.

Critics across the board have pretty much dismissed it as a pro-facist, Melrose Place in space summer blockbuster, but they’ve got it completely ass-backwards. This is satire, folks. The visual cues of Nazi Germany, from the eagle symbol of the Federation to the uniforms of military intelligence, should have made it obvious to any viewer that the film is trying to make a point. If the characters seem vacuous and bland, it’s because the society in which they live have stripped them of their humanity, filling them instead with nonsense about patriotism and the glory of violence. That these would-be “citizens” are devalued as human beings is underscored by the fact that about half of the characters that are introduced in the film are brutally maimed, impaled, or torn apart by the end.

This film is anti-fascist; more than that, it is oddly prescient of the terrorist attacks on the United States and the reaction of the country and our government to those attacks.

Thankfully, the good people at the Digital Bits seem to have their heads screwed on right:

…satire is incredibly hard to pull off because it has to function both as a satire and as the thing it’s satirizing. Dr. Strangelove is a prime example of this and so is Starship Troopers. On the one hand, if you go into this just wanting to see a bunch of monsters get blown up real good, you won’t be disappointed. The action and special effects in this movie are top-notch, holding their own against any blockbuster of the past decade. But you don’t have to look too far beneath the surface to see a far more interesting agenda at work. Verhoeven and Neumeier draw inspiration from the propaganda films of both sides of World War II, the American Why We Fight series and Leni Riefenstahl’s bone chilling Nazi classic Triumph of the Will. Sure, the enemy is literally dehumanized in Starship Troopers, but so are the humans. This is conveyed through the perfect casting of living Ken and Barbies like Van Dien and Richards. The Fednet News Feeds that pop up throughout the film are hilarious and serve to deepen our understanding of how this brutal utopia really works. And just in case you’ve somehow still managed to miss the point, Verhoeven has the audacity to dress Doogie Howser himself in full SS regalia for the movie’s third act.

This is worth watching. Go check it out.