Scary Cards

Jonas: How do you know all this?
Amanda: Because I've played before.

”Saw 2”

Man, the tagline for this movie was right – “Oh yes, there will be blood!”. Not as good as the first, but still worth buying a ticket for I say.

I have finally made my way back to the tables, this time going for the deposit bonus at Pokerstars. So far all I have done is a few of their multi-table SNG’s, which are a really good format as we all know. I even managed to take a second place in a small Omaha hi/lo one. At one stage with about 6 players left, I was the only one that could cover the big blind. While that is good and means I have an obvious chip lead, it meant every other player was all-in on every hand and so a lot of coin flips result. But it was fun anyway.

Our big live tournament is on this Saturday night. We already have 20 confirmed, and we plan on capping the numbers at 30 – but even so, 20 is plenty to do what we want to do. I’m feeling more confident in my game, and I’m even starting to recognize a few hoels and how to plug them.

One fault in my game I think has always been that I was too scared. If I had a king high flush, I would fear the ace like the plague. If I’ve got tens over jacks, I’m worried about jacks over tens. It’s ok to be worried about those hands that beat you, when you’ve got the nuts-1 or nuts-2, but I was getting to the point where I wanted to fold unless I had the stone cold nuts. For example, if I had a straight and then the board showed 3 hearts, it was almost an automatic fold from me every time.

So I correct this, or should I say over-correct this. I started calling people down for information – not always a bad thing, but calling people down for information too often is just giving chips away. On more than one occasion I can remember calling down with terrible hands like King high to see a flopped two pair or better.

There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere, and I think I’ll find it sooner rather than later.

Over the weekend, I went to buy a PC game that I have been waiting for and excited about for months. I finally get it home and go through the extra-long installation period, before booting up the game and going through the extra-long intro graphics when…SNAP! I’m back looking at my desktop. Huh? Try again…same thing happens. I go through the whole troubleshooting thing and look for reasons on their website to see if this has happened to other people, but before long I just look on the box and see the system requirements. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m short on ram and I need a video card.

The system is about 3 years old, which I guess is ancient now days. 226mB of ram just doesn’t cut it anymore. At first I gave up very disappointed, and prepared to go back to the store and return the game, but I thought I would check out upgrade costs first just to see. I’m also looking at getting a new box, as the old one has a few problems – like the cd writer drive doesn’t work and neither do the USB ports. We’ve had some nasties on there from time to time, and I guess you are never really free of them once you get them, are you?

Perhaps the poker bankroll will take one for the team on this one.