Runner-Runner-Rebuy

I royally screwed up in the Big Game last night. With A-10 and a board of 10-under-under, I donked off 90% of my stack to Astin's set.

I planned on playing a solid game, and did just the opposite in a terrible and complete lapse of judgment.

1. I played A-10 from early position. STUPID.
2. I over valued TPTK. DONKEY.
3. I pushed all-in after a bet and a big raise on the flop by Astin. This alone, is not so bad, I figure Astin is stealing over 100% of the time, but I should know that he thinks the same about me, and that I was giving him about 4.5 to 1 to make the call. IDIOT (me, not Astin).

My head just wasn't in the game last night. Maybe it will be tonight in the MATH.

Yesterday morning, Gary Gygax died at the age of 69. For those of you who don't know, Mr. Gygax was the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, and he helped spawn a cultural phenomenon that touched books, television, movies, video games, and card games.

I had an awkward childhood, the son of a schizophrenic father who, in and out of mental institutions, was never really part of my life. From the age of four, I was raised with my sister, by a single mother who did her best to keep us fed and clothed. Finances were difficult. My mother worked multiple jobs, to save money and get us off of welfare. Time and money were never available until I was almost college aged, so things like Boy Scouts, Little League, and Soccer Teams were never part of my formative years.

In the summer of 1983, I had just turned 9 years old and was in a Toy's R Us with my grandparents shopping for a birthday present. They said I could choose any item I wanted. I felt like I had won the lottery, but I knew I had to be cautious. I couldn't just run and grab the first Stormtrooper off the shelf, I had a real opportunity here. Each row of toys had to be thoroughly inspected. Even the aisles with girl toys, because you never know what might have gotten placed there by accident.

After what was probably hours of deliberating, I had narrowed it down to The Millennium Falcon or Castle Greyskull. While I deliberated with myself, my grandfather was trying to push a baseball mitt on me. While he was expounding on the merits of America's pastime, I noticed a shelf of colored boxes and books.

I pulled a red box off the shelf and was floored with the picture of a huge dragon about to chomp some kind of barbarian with a sword in two. The blue box had a different dragon fighting the same barbarian, only this time, he was on a horse and looked better equipped to deal with his pending doom. I grabbed both of them, along with two adventures, Keep on the Borderlands, and Isle of Dread, and convinced my grandparents that all four were required to play the game.

The Falcon and the Castle went back, I we left the store with my first D&D purchase. Somehow, the baseball mitt made it home with us too. It would be years before I found someone to play D&D with, but I must have read those books and run myself through the adventures hundreds of times, eventually changing things here and there, or coming up with new ideas of my own.

D&D really sparked my imagination, and helped get me through some pretty lonely times as a kid, and later when playing with other nerds, it became part of a bond of lifelong friendships. I still play once a week with a group of friends of which whom some date back twenty years.

So on Wednesdays nights, if I have plans with you, don't expect me to show up until after 11PM, because I'm rollin' dice with my homies.

Thanks, Mr. Gygax, if there is an afterlife, they just got one hell of a DM. RIP.

I got a Mac over the weekend. And it has some nifty things about it. I'll be trying some new content delivery mechanisms over the next few days and see if I like any of them.

Here's my first try at a screencast, using iMovie and YouTube.

Obviously I need to figure out a few things to make this work the way I want to, but I'm hoping I can do something like this to replace/supplement poker hand analysis, instead of just cut and pasting hand histories.

Maybe it will be me, but I doubt it. My game is slipping. A few weeks of really bad variance (12 standard deviations out of the norm) in early February has definitely had an effect on my play.

At first I didn't think so, but looking back at my play over the past few weeks has made me now think otherwise. I've de-generated back into a tight/weak style. In an effort to avoid suckouts, I have tried to keep pots small and play only premium hands. This has resulted in way to many limps, and playing only my cards, not situations.

The end product of this has been getting halfway though tourneys, ending up short, and having to make many more decisions for all my chips than I would normally have to make. This puts me in bad situations where I need to call off my tournament life with less than stellar holdings, and push in spots I'd rather not.

Essentially, it has gotten me into exactly the types of things I hoped to avoid. When they say you have to play though variance, you have to play though with a good game, not a shitty one. It's a different kind of tilt that I guess I am experiencing, but now that I can see it, I will remove it.

GL to everyone tonight, and congrats to whoever the victor may be (as long as its me).

No time for serious hand analysis, so here's recap of another kind instead.

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I don't know who this altronIV is, but a google search came up with some anime thing, so I used that to represent the villian. Bust me next week at the math and you can be the feature villian.

Well....geez, thanks everyone for the great response to my foray into comic writing. At first I was thinking I'm definitely going to have to do more of these, but now I'm worried about living up to some expectations.

I already have tons of ideas where I can go with this if I decide to do some more, but we'll see how things go, I can't force it, and while it was really fun to do, I don't want it to get boring. I tentatively plan to do one for each MATH tourney, featuring whoever knocks me out as the villain. I'm sure some weeks will not make for much of a story, so I'll be playing it by ear.

It took me longer to create the comic than it did to play in the MATH, so I hope I get better at story boarding as time goes on. One difficult thing is coming up with photo's of other bloggers to use. I have spent some time scouring blogs and flickr for blogger photos but some villians will be hard to portray.

If Pauly or Al ever knock me out of a tourney, I'm all set, there are hundreds of photo's of them out there on the internets, but some people are hard to find. If anyone knows a good way to search blogspot for photos in archives, please let me know, google search isn't cutting it. If you want to be a feature villain, it would greatly help to drop me a link to flickr or something where I can grab some photos of you.

I missed the Riverchasers last night. I was at a friend's house and couldn't connect to his wireless with my Mac because his firmware is from 1953. His router was the size of a refrigerator and was made pre-transistor era.

Disclaimer - This post contains broad generalizations about professions. It is not meant to offend anyone, but probably will. Most likely, the broad generalizations do not apply to the intelligent, sophisticated people that read this blog.

Yes, it's true. Lawyers are greater than Doctors. But let's be clear here, I'm not talking about actual Doctors. An actual Doctor is someone who studies some very specific subject matter and is only granted the title "Dr." after adding something new to the field and defending it to a group of experts. You know, PhD's - real doctors. Doctor comes from the latin doctoris, meaning teacher.

What I'm talking about in this post is Physicians. Why they are granted the title Doctor is beyond me. For some reason, in the 19th century, they got jealous of real Doctors and started granting themselves the same title. And though they are MD's, and Lawyers are JD's, you don't see people going around calling Lawyers things like "Dr. Hoy" or "Dr. Ck." Not to diminish the accomplishments of Attorneys, I'm sure Law School is difficult and it takes a certain kind of mix of logical analysis and hard work to be a successful lawyer.

Physicians on the other hand (and PharmD's more so), just piss me off. They demand to be called "Dr." though they are not adding anything new to the field, MD/PhD's withstanding. To be a successful "medical practitioner" takes a certain kind of person. A hard working, memorizing person. This is not to say there are not highly intelligent Physicians out there, but just to say high intelligence does not seem to be a requirement to pursuing an MD degree.

I know many Physicians, and some are very intelligent, and some are complete idiots. Most lawyers I know are pretty smart people, and I can't think of one that I would consider an idiot. Plenty of them are assholes, but with the exception of Hoy's boss, I don't think you can get away with stupidity in the legal world. You just won't last very long.

The simple fact is, I guess I want any attorney I hire to be an asshole. Their job is to be the best, hard nosed, fuck you advocate they can for their clients. When I hire a lawyer, I don't want a nice guy to be representing me, I want to win the damn thing.

Physicians are more of a drain on society than people think. In particular, I speak of General Practitioners, or, Primary Care Physicians (PCP). I think this is where many of the dumb ones end up. In general, Physicians are not thinkers. They are memorizers. All medical school consists of is memorizing many, many, many texts. Residency might be where some thinking comes in. Watching, learning, and practicing with others in your selected specialty is what makes for a great surgeon, or psychiatrist. Though there is some of this in medical school during your two years of rotations, it seems to me that the residency is where real learning can happen. The rotations in years 3 and 4 of medical school just serve to weed out people from different specialties.

Are PCP's the weed outs? I don't know, maybe it's really competitive to get a General Practitioner residency, because everyone want the great hours. Maybe not, because the AMA seems to want to encourage people away from specialties. All I do know is that my experience* has shown me that PCP's are shitty, greater than thou, non-caring assholes.

When I hire a lawyer, that's what I want. It is not what I want when I hire a physician.

Example the First -

A year ago I had a very sore throat, fever, etc. I made an appointment with my PCP for 9:30am. I arrive on time. I wait an hour to be taken to the examination room. Once there, I read a magazine. I fall asleep in the chair and wake up at 1:00PM. No one has seen me yet. Furious, I storm out and demand my co-pay back. They assure me I was just about to be seen, as the "doctors" had just returned from lunch. This made me flip out on them. They gave my co-pay back and I left.

Example the Second -

My sister has two friends who have the same pediatrician for their children. One of them must go in to the doctors office with her child every time something is wrong. The other one only has to call the doctor and they will prescribe over the phone without making them come in for a visit. What the hell is going on here? Well, one of them has insurance that requires a co-pay, and one has insurance that does not require a co-pay. You figure out the rest.

Example the Last -

I have a rash of Excema on my lower leg. My insurance does not require me get referrals from my PCP, so generally, if I have an issue, I just go to a specialist in that area. It is difficult to make an appointment with a dermatologist, and my appointment was over a month away. I decided to call my PCP to see if it would be worthwhile to come in there in the meantime if there was something they could do for me. They first berated me on the phone for not coming in to them more often, and then told me yes, I should definitely come in if the excema was really bothering me and I couldn't wait until seeing the dermatologist.

I arrived, paid my $20 co-pay, and was seen relatively promptly. I showed then the problem and was then berated again for 5 minutes about how I should come in more often. I asked if they could just prescribe me a topical cream to alleviate the inflammation, letting them know I have used Betamethazone (a topical cortico-steriod) in the past with good results.

"No, you need to go to a dermatologist."

"I know, but I was told to come here in the meantime."

"Well, I can give you a list of Dermatologists to call."

"Then why the fuck did I come here? I don't need referrals, and I know how to use a phone book."

"Well, there is nothing we can do, I suggest you call a dermatologist."

"Thanks a bunch asshole. Next time, I'll stay at home and burn a $20 bill. It will save me 2 hours. Fuck you."

The PCP business is a god damn racket. There needs to be a class action law suit against the AMA. All that is cared about is the co-pay. They are in business to take $20 from you. I would gladly pay $100 for actual service. But we are forced to pay $20 for none. I'm lucky, in that I don't need referrals, but most medial insurance requires patients to first go to a PCP and waste time and money. The AMA and HMO's are in cahoots in what is probably the largest "legal" racketeering outfit in the history of the nation.

This is why lawyers > "doctors."

*I have worked at a law firm for 4 years, a large hospital system for 5 years, and an HMO for 1 year, so I do have a bit of experience in dealing with these groups of people. I won't even get started on the HMO's, I had to quit that job because of how evil they are.