Random thoughts about my interests which include (in no particular order) poker, finance & investing, politics, football and whatever else I happen to see that piques my interest

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Pardon the Interruption

God, has it been well over a month since I last posted. Even though it took me about a week to finish my last post, that's still like April 9th and today is May 28. Sorry about that chief.

It has been a hectic time at work and home over the past month. At least work is now slowing down, tax time is over and the phones are not ringing off the hook. I have been working on one problem though for well over a week now and it's still not done. I have about 30 copies of handwritten pages from one of our clients with a bunch, but not all, of her stock purchases and sales since 1969 and I'm trying to get the cost for all these stocks. There is about 50 of them in her account now. The bad thing is, she bought AT&T before the break up in 1984 and held it all the way up to now. So there are numerous shares of AT&T along with all of the spin offs that have not merged back with AT&T (Lucent, Verizon, Idearc, Fairpoint, LSI, NCR, Teradata, and Vodaphone and I'm probably forgetting some too) not to mention having to figure out how many shares of Bell South became AT&T and SBC (Southwestern Bell) also. Some of the Baby Bells even merged with each other and then with AT&T. Needless to say it's quite a mess and since I am sure there are some purchases missing, not to mention all the splits, spin offs, reverse splits, and mergers, I cannot come up with a number for many of the stocks that agrees with the number of shares the lady transferred into us in 2006. I did manage to get a couple of them to come out right, but most of them are not right. But enough work talk

Outside of work, I have been spending a fair amount of time playing poker. I did manage to referee a spring football game last week and had a lot of fun, but most weekends I have been playing poker. My main game when I am not in a tournament is Omaha Hi/Lo. It is rare when I play that and don't make money, especially if I play at the Hard Rock in Tampa. That is one loose game. I refuse to play low limit hold em anymore except when I am waiting to play Omaha because I feel you just cannot consistently win at it. Due to the rules of the state of Fla, you generally cannot play in a limit game with a high enough betting structure to raise people with totally inferior hands out of the pot usually. Thats not an issue in Omaha because you know no matter what your hand is, you need help from the board to win anyway. But in Holdem, no matter how good your hand is, you can lose it to anyone if enough people stay in the pot. And most of these yahoos do it very often.

Anyway this past weekend was poker nirvana for me. Saturday afternoon I started playing at Derby Lane which is the closest place to my house to play. The spousal unit and I were gonna play in the 7pm tourney that night but I went to play some Omaha in the afternoon while waiting for the tourney. Before going to play ( the place doesn't open till 2 on Friday and Sat) the wife and I, along with the money pit, err teenaged daughter, went to see Indiana Jones. After the movie, which I will get into in more detail either later on or in another post, they wanted lunch but I wasn't hungry at all as I have had a cold since last Thursday and my appetite is way down. So they dropped me at the track to play poker while they went to eat and shop. I got there about 15 mins after they opened and the only Omaha table was full with 4 people waiting so I put myself on the list. While I was waiting I decided to play $2 limit holdem. I could have played 2-4 or even 1-2 no limit but I don't carry enough of a bankroll for the latter and I was just wanting to kill time till I played omaha so the 2-4 could have gotten expensive (though I usually do not lose much playing at that level either)

The poker room was running a couple of promotions, one if you got pocket 3s and played them to showdown and won, you got $100, and if you lost you got $50. You had to take them all the way to showdown though, you couldn't bet everyone out of the pot and then show them. I hit that twice in a row a couple of months ago and even though I lost both times, the extra hunny was nice. My buddy Dan hit them like 4 times in one sitting and won a couple of them so he got an extra 300 one day. Nice. So I'm playing for a while and I'm not playing too many hands because I don't want to just blow a chunk of change before I play the game I am best at. I win a hand after being down a bit to get myself close to even. Then I pull pocket Js. I was on the button and the pot wasn't raised when it got to me so I didn't raise it like I should have. Still it all worked out lol. Flop comes K J 8 with 2 diamonds. Lady in first seat bets, one other guy calls her, and I raise which they both call. Next card is a black 2. Lady bets again, guy calls, I raise again and they both call again. I'm wondering what they both are holding to bet into me and then call my raises. I am just hoping for one of the low cards to pair and make my boat when that beautiful final jack hits the river and I got quads. Again the lady bets, the guy calls her, I raise and they both call. I think the guy was just flabbergasted when I showed quad Jacks. He couldn't believe I had the goods. I said to him "Hey, I raised on every street, I had to have something"

That qualified me for the 2nd promotion, which is the high hand on all the holdem tables each hour gets a free entry into the WSOP tourney this coming weekend. It's a 200 dollar buy in tourney and the top 4 finishers win a seat in the WSOP main event plus a week of hotel, airline tickets, and 2 grand cash. NICE. Unfortunately my Jacks were beaten when someone made quad Aces but I didn't care. I won a nice pot and I already qualified for the tourney a few weeks ago. I HIT A ROYAL FLUSH for the top hand one hour. And you can only win once so I couldn't win again with the Jacks and sell the other seat anyway. The bad thing about the royal is they no longer give cash bonuses for royals. I missed it by about 10 days. Sucks to be me, prolly would have gotten 3 grand for the royal if I had done it earlier. The other bad thing is the guy who had the high hand before I got my royal, had a King high straight flush. How would you like to get a hand like that and NOT get the hourly high hand lol.

Not long after that I got called to play omaha so left the table with a profit of about 20 bucks which for low limit hold em is a huge amount for me. I played for a couple of hours and couldn't get it going. Not much in the way of hands and when I got a good hand, the flop never seemed to agree with me. So I was busy pissing all my holdem winnings right down the drain lol. But slowly as I folded a lot of hands. I started getting hungry right before 6 and since I was gonna play in the holdem tourney at 7 I decided to quit soon. Finally picked up a playable hand. Flopped the nut flush and it held up and even though it was a split pot, I still made a nice amount, enough to put me ahead for my time there too. Had a quick dinner, the wife met me while I ate, and we went to play the tourney. Think I'll pick up from here a little later.

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