Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.The Principal, "Billy Madison".
I'm an idiot. After battling for the past 12 months to get our credit card debt under control, we were at the final hurdle. With our tax filed, we were due to get enough back to pay what is left on both credit cards and be in the black again. But no...Poker got in the way.
I don't know how it happened or why. Well, I do really. It started about 12 months ago, I was tagging along to yet another shopping centre in Brisbane (does this sound familiar?) when we were in some crappy $2 shop and I saw some uber-cheap plastic poker chips for $1 per 100. Why the hell not says I? I grab three boxes and pay for it in change floating in my pocket. That's a bargain says I, and on we go. This would make playing our irregular poker games at home fun, and better than betting with 5c and 10c pieces or monopoly money. I knew the chips were shit, but for 3 bucks what can you expect?
The chips are shit. For some reason, you can't stack them more than 10 high because they are not flat. I mean, they do their job and it's not like we are playing for real money or anything, but it was just "ok".
Fast forward to Monday and I was searching around this world wide web looking for more poker related stuff, and I came across a few sites that sell felt for laying down on your dining room tables to play poker. We tried this at home with some felt that my girlfriend got for Christmas to do jigsaws on (I don't understand the logic of it, you shouldn't try either. Needless to say, she tried it once then relegated it to somewhere in the cupboard.). The felt was too small, so not only was it shit for it's intended purpose of jigsaws, it was also shit as a make-shift poker table. I liked the looks of these felts, and did a little bit of enquiry into costs. But then I saw table tops, and tables themselves - I became more interested. Tables cost way too much, but the table tops I liked. But you can't use poxy plastic chips on one of these tables can you? You need proper poker chips...The downward spiral had begun.
I started looking at chips. These ones are called "Suited", here are some called "Dice", and a myriad of others. You can buy these in rolls of 50? Not bad...Hang on, look at that case! How awesome is that?
Before I knew it, and lucky with the blessing (and egging on) of girlfriend, we had spent over $400 on the stuff. We are now waiting for our 52" reversible table top and 1000 "Royal Suited" chip set to come via UPS. I guess we will have to start having some home games soon then. Any Sydney-siders out there? Drop me a line, I have to make back that money some how.
I was finally able to get the home PC back up and running, and back into poker, all be it only one tournament. I was doing well, again sticking to my strategy that if I was going to raise, it wouldn't be for the minimum of $50 when that is less than 1% of the starting stack. So my raises of $300-$500 were getting far too much respect and I am winning blinds and limpers with relative ease. Good in one way, bad in another. I get a caller pre-raise with AJh and the flop comes (6, 5, 9) rainbow. He checks, and I'm thinking he might have AK or another combination of high cards or even a smaller pair. I raise $500, he calls. Turn is (A) and same again, check, raise $500, call. The river (J) helps, and he again checks. I raise $1K this time, and he re-raises me another $1K. Ha, not too worry, this is the weakest attempt to bluff me out of this pot I have ever seen. I call and he shows 78o for a flopped straight. I was way off, and I was really lucky it only cost me as much as it did. As my stack slowly dwindled, I was all in with AKs and get a caller with pocket T's. The felt helps nobody and it is good night from me in about, oh lets say 200ish. Just outside the top 10 money paying places. I am convinced I could not have played that hand any worse, and it really knocked the wind out of my sails in both stack size and confidence. That is probably not too bad of a thing really, because I was getting into the stage at that table where I thought every raise I made was going to be folded too. That crappy play put me off poker for the rest of the night.
Iggy over at Guinness and Poker has organized a blogger/reader tournament for August 22nd at 9pm EST, so some time Monday morning here. I won't be playing because of the time difference I will be either sleeping or at work, but if you have the chance you should go over to his site and join up, it sounds like it should be fun.
Another poker blog I had a look at recently was Uwannabet. I share many opinions with this blog (see post titled "Would you kill the golden goose?") and he also has a top ten list of gripes about online poker that would fit right in here. Another poker blog I am happy to recommend for it's good humor and relaxed nature.
That is all for now, and maybe by the time my next post comes around I could be playing live games at home with genuine 11.5 gram composite Royal Suited chips. Did I say genuine?
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