Was doing decent, up 2 buyins playing aggressively raising over limpers etc preflop, could tell I was irritating a couple of players who just werent used to not being able to limp for $5 every single hand, when finally I 3bet AK to $60 and get snap called by one of the tilty players on my left. Flop comes down 649r and in about 5 seconds he suddenly says "265!" indicating an allin. Now we were heads up and I was leaned all the way back in my chair with my arms crossed, so there's no way he thought I checked. I immediately was like "huh?" and everyone at the table erupts to inform me that the action is still on me and his bet is binding if I check. I understand this but everyone including the dealer kept reinforcing this as if I was about to make some grave mistake "sir, sir, sir, the action is on you. His action is binding, just know that ok? He has to put in 265 if you check" blah fuckity blah to the point I was thinking "OK EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A SECOND!". I knew something was off. This out of turn bet just made no sense whatsoever because there is absolutely no way he thought I checked. I even apologized for a second and said "hey man I wasnt trying to make you think I checked to you somehow". And I'm looking at this board and I'm like why the fuck does someone 2x pot a rainbow dry as fuck board like this? Especially one that I was 100% going to cbet with AK.
The pressure got to me with the dealer still staring at me intensely trying to make sure I understood the rules so I folded. Obviously faggot on my left shows the bluff and taunts me with it. As the deep stack of the table I promptly racked up and left sort of as a statement that you just chased off $1500 with your $60 win dipshit, hope you're happy. I think leaving was the right move anyway because I was pretty damn tilted and knew if this guy is an angler he's probably just getting started and I dont have time to deal with cheaters.
I only travel to play in card rooms 2-3 times per year and yet I still recognize many faces and all of their playstyles. Who knows if they remember me, but they are clearly regs. They hug the cute dealers and bump fists with the floor manager. They possess all the cliche superstitions a poker player has. They make repeated requests for the deck to be washed and celebrate the arrival of a new dealer. What blows me away though is that they'll then make some tactical well-thought out decision to change tables because the current one is too nitty or something. They play like total fish and yet have been keeping proper notes and analyzed the current table to recognize it's just no good, meanwhile I'm just sitting there like "are you nuts!? This table is GREAT! What the hell are you judging your decision to move from?!"
I even got the chance to play with a famous reg who's supposedly loaded and good. He shoved his first hand in the dark and then lamented about waiting until the rebuy was over for the tourney he was sitting out in. He said he doesnt play until the rebuy is over because it's just a bunch of fish shoving on each other and he needs to wait until they tighten up and take the game seriously. He had plenty of bling and did seem wealthy, but this is a guy I'm supposed to fear because he's like a 5/10 pro or something.
I took the next week off from work to go grind it out in the live card rooms of Florida. With the weekend I'll have a total of 10 days of playtime which should be a good experiment. The goal is to experience the lifestyle of a professional poker player. It's easy to go on a holiday weekend and just have a good time, it's another to play every single day to the point that you wish you were doing something else instead. I need to know what that feels like and how I'll handle it in case after day 5 I'm like "holy fuck I hate this, I want my normal job back". So my days will generally consist of playing from around 7pm-2am, going to bed around 3am, and sleeping till 1pm. Eat breakfast, maybe early dinner, study a little, then go back to cardroom. I may try some daytime shifts since I've been told the card rooms are bumping almost all day long and a night life might not be necessary, even though I'm a night owl anyway which suits me best.
To help create this "normal every day life" during my time here I actually booked a room through AirBnB. I hate staying in hotels and figured maybe some schmuck's house would feel more like home. I snagged a room in a nice house in a country club. Indoor pool, lakeside, paddle boats, secured entry, full kitchen, the works. The guy himself is really chill, just some older businessman in his 50's with a family all grown up doing their own thing. I brought my computer and everything since he has a desk in my room so I'm pretty well set up here. This is SO much better than a hotel already. Even though it's not my home it still feels like my home. Plus the shit is way cheaper than a hotel. My fav hotel here would have cost me $1500 to stay. This guy's house is $500.
Beyond that, my life could get pretty boring. Eat/sleep/poker. But thats the point, because I already know I like doing two of those things. Last thing I want to do is quit my job, move to a foreign city, and just hope I like my new career path. I'll be playing 2/5 NLHE exclusively as that is the lowest limit one can make a living at and I dont know PLO.
This was my first night playing in about 3 months. My table was a little nitty but since I play full ring live like 6max online I can usually open it up a bit. The key element here was just the atmosphere. So many people say they hate live play mostly because they can play so many more hands online. From the moment I sat down until the 5 hour mark I loved every bit of it. Just the socializing, talking about Narcos, making racist jokes at each other, talking about poker and the 10/20 game going on above us, it all just felt right. Online players get bored from lack of hands. I get bored from lack of conversation. It's such a huge life commitment to dedicate yourself to the live format since it requires so many personal changes in your lifestyle. However I think those changes can actually keep you healthy. They create balance, something many live grinders are sorely missing. I actually enjoy waking up, taking a shower, eating breakfast, getting dressed, driving 10 minutes to card room, grinding, leaving for dinner, coming back, going home, settling in for the night and watching some TV. It's as close to a normal lifestyle as you can get coming from the American work force.
Trawling the internet and came across this rhythm game who's objective is to unlock more advanced melodies by executing streaks. I dunno why but this shit is just art, and I cant stop watching. There's just something beautiful about taking something ugly like a blocky ass pixelated game and painting it with rich music and a ridiculous challenge, especially in a sea of battlefield games and $1000 video cards.
There's like 5 sequels to this game and a ton of levels each with their own tunes.
And yes I dropped the automatic for a stick. I dont know what I was thinking the first time, but already am loving being able to put the car in the correct gear in anticipation of my next move, instead of having to predict how the auto will behave and creatively mash the gas pedal to get the desired outcome.
Am going to be buying one of the following - 2015 Mustang GT - DECIDE!!!
Red?
Oraaaaanngeee.....?
Poll: Orange vs. Red
(Vote): Orange
(Vote): Red
(Vote): Hope you die in a car wreck on the way home and during the autopsy they discover your lungs are fill
(Vote): ed with ash proving you were still alive and breathing while you burned to death fully aware of the
(Vote): pain and knowledge you were burning alive
I've actually had this installed for a few years but only just now bothered to make a video demonstrating it properly. Whaddya think? The future is nigh! Only recently have Google & Apple begun to compete in the carputer arena with very limited and restricted results. This thing is allin baby! With all the R&D and red tape involved making these commercially my guess is it will be another 10 years before this kind of connectivity is standard.
My last blog I talked about the ugly square brick I purchased which did its job in relieving my tech anxiety. So now it's round 2 with a more refined level of watches available, the Moto 360 vs the LG G watch R. Which would you buy?
The 1st up is the Moto 360. This watch's main feature is a very thin bezel and "elegant" design. Due to technical limitations they had to cut off a sliver at the bottom of the screen to house the display hardware, which drives some people nuts. I myself am undecided. It's one of those "cannot be unseen" details. So far reviews say you get used to it and the super thin sexy bezel overall makes up for it.
The other option is the LG G Watch R. Rather than going for an edge to edge screen they simply let the bezel remain fat, and camouflaged it with chrono markings to make it blend in. As a result the screen is slightly smaller than the Moto 360, however because it is smaller the pixel density is higher, thus making the images theoretically seem sharper. Some people feel the markings around the bezel are chintzy and remind them of a cheaper department store watch. Others like the sporty feel of it.
Awwwwwww yeeaaahhhhh... for any of you tech geeks out there the new toy this week are android smart watches. While the term "smart watch" has been out for a couple of years thanks to other vendors, none of them could do it right without a major player like Google/Apple obviously. So Google released a new fork in their OS called Android Wear meant for smartwatches or anything similar in this ultra portable category. I saw some vids and talked myself into believing these things could actually be useful, plus I have been without a watch for a year since my battery died so I just said fuck it.
I just bought this lil guy in black
My first fears were that it would be some gaudy brick like monstrosity on my wrist screaming "NEERRRRDDD!" while making women's vaginas dry up like a.... like something that makes women's vaginas dry up.
Anyway I swung by my local Verizon store who had one on display without all the cumbersome security crap so I could actually wear the damn thing and get a good feel for it (which by the way I have the most amazing Verizon store in my neighborhood. They have a fucking bellhop at the door who's sole job is to just open the door for you and greet you, then they take your name and enter it on a tablet that uploads it to a sales rep who comes and somehow knows exactly who you are you without ever meeting you. They arent pushy at all, actually answer legit questions, bring out demo units from stock of anything you want. The whole store is just bustling with activity, lots of neat toys like drones and remote control devices that interface with your cellphone all on display and fully interactive for the customer to mess with. Gotta give Verizon credit here for creating this little tech mecca in their stores lately).
Oh yeah, so I try on the demo unit and I'm instantly sold. It's perfect. It's comfortable, it's snazzy, the band feels great (the band looks like a cheap piece of shit at first but it's actually incredibly soft and comfortable. I still want to upgrade to a black stainless steel one though), it's light weight, the watch face isnt some huge unsightly eyesore gathering attention and the corners dont stab me in the wrist bone. It's just a really nice feeling watch. I buy it on the spot, get it all set up and so far I'm in love with it. It does exactly what I wanted it to, and that is remove the necessity to check your cellphone every time it beeps at you.
What you have to wrap your mind around is what the watch is really for; the purpose is to serve as a notification delivery system for your phone. Sure there are apps and stuff you can interact with on the watch by itself, but the big deal is that it ties in with your phone and just relays information between the two. The watch is not a standalone device, and the sooner you come to terms with this the sooner you can enjoy it. You arent supposed to be constantly fucking with it like you would a full featured phone. All it does is display whatever notifications are in your notification bar on your phone. While this doesnt sound like much it really bridges the gap between making your phone this total seamless experience with your life. One of my major 1st world problems is the struggle of having to whip out a 5" phone from my pocket hundreds of times per day. Or leaving it on my desk in a cradle so I can observe active notifications. The 2-3 seconds it takes to do this are converted into about a fucking nanosecond when you have it on your wrist. The phone wrist vibrates, you look down and boom, you instantly have your phil ivey twitter update. 5 minutes later you get an email confirming payment for something, BAM you see that shit and disregard it. Then your girl texts you whining about dinner and KABLAMO you swipe that shit into the trash, or maybe reply if you're a good boyfriend using voice-to-text.
You think it's silly right now, but once you acclimate yourself to it and get into the groove you instantly feel like you have saved 5-10 minutes of your life every day by not having to reach for your phone ever again. It's almost relaxing in a way, because you are satiating your phone addiction by having instant gratification at all times. Think of having unlimited crack if you were a crackwhore. The pipe is always lit with the effervescent tinge of smoke swirling from its tip at all times. You want a hit? By god have one my man, this one's on me. There are still dozens of other direct watch-to-phone interactions you can conjure such as changing profile status (silent/vibrate/etc), placing phone calls while driving using Google search (just say "ok google, call Sushi Taro" even though they arent in your phone book since it uses google search to identify the business name and lookup the number for you). The list goes on.
So to any of you tech guys who have been on the rail about one of these things, you'll love it. The market is very new so there's going to be tons of competition with lots of new devices coming up. Everyone said "wait for the moto 360, wait for the HTC" blah fucking blah. Yeah I'm sure my LG watch is going to get smoked by a competitor in no time flat, but right now it's amazing and I'll just sell them on ebay and upgrade my way through as I see fit. Losing $50 in depreciated smart watches every 3 months is an acceptable sacrifice to stay bleeding edge for a guy like me until the hardware/software fully matures and you can keep stick with a device. To be honest though I see no reason why this one wont receive plenty of love from LG and the community.
You are probably well aware of politicians to outright PR firms who specialize in "disinformation campaigns" to help push a certain agenda. But how often did you think regular Joe Nobody engages in this activity? Some people suspect a lot of "Joe Nobody's" are really plants by the aforementioned groups meant to blend in with the general public, but all too often such suspects have extensive online histories on a given forum that it's hard to imagine they suddenly converted to the dark side.
Today I was arguing with someone about the efficacy of EV cars and started to notice a trend in their posts. What I observed was a certain speech pattern, i.e. they went from speaking in a very casual forum sense to extremely well written grammatically punctuated responses. I got suspicious that someone else was doing the writing and did some string searches for their responses, and came up mostly empty handed. So then I decided to do a more broad keyword search and after clicking through a few links I hit jackpot. I positively identified the source of their statements coming from another author discussing the same topic. The disgusting part was that the user I was dealing with had made obvious efforts to manipulate the wording so his plagiarism would be obscured, but it was all there.
Besides manipulating the sentence structure ever so slightly to avoid detection, they also manipulated the context of everything by sourcing their information from sites that actually conflicted with their own point of view! For instance, this certain poser used an article that was actually supportive of EV's but cherry picked some of the short-comings they mentioned to paint an overall picture of why EV's are so bad. It would be like if I tried to convince you that sunlight is entirely bad for your health because it contains gamma rays. I'm failing to mention the benefits of sunlight and thus leaving you with the impression that it is all bad. I finally caught what was bugging me so much about this user; they were completely full of shit, and so heavily invested in such that they would do anything to misrepresent the facts to fulfill their agenda. They were on their own little personal disinformation campaign volunteering information nobody was even arguing about.
I'm still bugged by this because I cant imagine why someone would do it. It also bugs me because the efforts were so subtle that I'm sure this person poses for a normal every day walking guy in real life, which means he blends in with the public, which means his words can do damage because people will not have an immediate distrust for him. Why should they afterall? What does he have to gain? It's sick, when people volunteer themselves for evil for no purpose whatsoever. I guess he feels he has some kind of vested interest to "do his part" to sway history.
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