Back in the Game

"You know what? I should start playing poker again."

That's a thought I had about a week or so ago when I realised that I needed something to do when I'm not working other than sleep, eat, kill time on Facebook, and not blog.

So I've started playing online again. And I've been amusing myself with the North American Poker League qualifying freerolls on Pokerstars. They're six-handed double shootouts - six players play until there's one left, then the survivors play for a ticket into the daily main tournament.

Something those unfamiliar with poker, especially poker that you don't actually have to pay money to play, is that players tend to do... strange things. In freerolls like this, along with bustos like myself, you have people who are just having fun and people who genuinely don't know what they're doing. So you get a lot of this:

Hand 1:

Poker Stars Freeroll No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 6 players

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BTN: t1500 75 BBs

Hero (SB): t1500 75 BBs

BB: t1500 75 BBs

UTG: t1500 75 BBs

MP: t1500 75 BBs

CO: t1500 75 BBs

Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is SB with Q K

1 fold, MP raises to t1500 all in, 4 folds

Final Pot: t50

MP wins t50

No one called in this spot, but you'd be amazed at the hands you see when people do call. So after the first hand, we're still six-handed, which is an upset in and of itself.

Two hands later I picked up Aces. (Don't worry, this doesn't end the way a poker story that starts with "...I picked up Aces" usually ends.) I raise and get three callers. The flop comes 10-8-3 with two hearts and the small blind bets. The guy next to him folds. I raise and immediately start talking to the computer screen. I'm saying out loud, "Fold. You need to fold. You really need to fold."

The next player goes all in. Now it's back to the bettor and I'm apoplectic. "You don't have anything. Trust me. Fold. Don't do this to yourself. FOLD!"

He doesn't fold either.

Poker Stars Freeroll No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 6 players

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

MP: t1500 75 BBs

Hero (CO): t1470 73.50 BBs

BTN: t1470 73.50 BBs

SB: t1550 77.50 BBs

BB: t1510 75.50 BBs

UTG: t1500 75 BBs

Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is CO with A A

2 folds, Hero raises to t60, BTN calls t60, SB calls t50, BB calls t40

Flop: (t240) T 8 3 (4 players)

SB bets t280, BB folds, Hero raises to t700, BTN raises to t1410 all in, SB raises to t1490 all in, Hero calls t710 all in

Turn: (t4470) 3 (3 players - 3 are all in)

River: (t4470) 2 (3 players - 3 are all in)

Final Pot: t4470

Hero shows A A (two pair, Aces and Threes)

BTN shows J 9 (a pair of Threes)

SB shows 8 4 (two pair, Eights and Threes)

Hero wins t4470

The real upset here is that my Aces held.

Now at this point, we're down to three players at my first-round table. This goes on for a while, and I soon realize that the guy on my right doesn't seem to know that he can move the bet slider to the right, or even that he can type a number in the box next to it, if he wants to bet more than the minimum on every street. I've abused this tendency of his several times to my benefit and have a decent chip lead when I get dealt two Kings on the button.

So I raise, the small blind calls and the big blind re-raises the same amount. I re-pop it (for more than the amount I raised to start with), the small blind calls and the big blind apparently figures out what that slider's for, as he moves all-in. OK, whatever. So since I have two Kings, I push all my chips in to get the third player out of the hand.

But he doesn't fold right away.

And here I go again. "Fold. Fold! You can't call this bet. You don't have me beat and you know you don't have me beat. I'm telling you this for your own good. FOLD."

I'm clearly too nice a person to play this game. I mean, I'm sitting here, yelling at the screen, knowing they can't hear me, and trying to get them to do something that I know is not in my best interest... for the second time in the match.

Poker Stars Freeroll No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t15/t30 Blinds - 3 players

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: t1100 36.67 BBs

Hero (BTN): t4955 165.17 BBs

SB: t2945 98.17 BBs

Pre Flop: (t45) Hero is BTN with K K

Hero raises to t100, SB calls t85, BB raises to t170, Hero raises to t390, SB calls t290, BB raises to t1100 all in, Hero raises to t4955 all in, SB calls t2555 all in

Flop: (t6990) K Q 2 (3 players - 3 are all in)

Turn: (t6990) J (3 players - 3 are all in)

River: (t6990) 3 (3 players - 3 are all in)

Final Pot: t6990

BB shows A 7 (high card Ace)

Hero shows K K (three of a kind, Kings)

SB shows Q 9 (a pair of Queens)

Hero wins t3690

Hero wins t3300

Final table, here I come.

The Summer of Electronic Armageddon

So I've been gone way too long. But I've got my reasons.

Let's go back to June 19th. I got home from work one night and I was watching TV when it shut off. On its own. I turned it back on and the volume started to max out. On its own. Then it started changing channels... you guessed it. ON ITS OWN. Efforts to exercise control with the remote were rebuffed with extreme prejudice. Finally I unplugged it and went to bed, baffled at what was going on.

The next day I plugged it back in. Same deal. So while it certainly wasn't in a vegetative state, it clearly wasn't capable of making rational decisions. I declare it dead and buy a new 26-inch flatscreen because it fits both my price range and my size range.

ONE WEEK LATER.

After getting a few too many blue screens of death over a period of three days, I started to panic and start my annual computer backup earlier than I normally would have. During the backup, I got another one.

And that one turned out to be the last one.

I don't remember how long I'd had that Dell desktop. Maybe since 2002? Did I move down here with it? Who knows. So I've just replaced my TV and now my computer's dead. (The wonderful irony here is that I had been considering for a while what kind of new computer I was going to get, maybe within the next year or so. We'll be coming back to this.)

So I went out the next day and bought a new laptop. Brought it home, went to work, came home and set it up. Couldn't connect to the Internet. Checked the cable, checked the modem, checked the connector cables. Nothing. After a combined hour or so on the phone with both the cable company and Dell support, it was decided that the laptop had a bad motherboard that wasn't recognizing anything that was trying to connect to the Internet.

Which meant that they'd have to replace it. And I'd have to stuff it in a box and ship it to Mississippi or Indonesia or wherever. (It might have been Arkansas, actually. Let me check. The label says Houston but I doubt it was the final destination.) I also have a metric assload of boxes piling up in my apartment because of all this, added by my purchase of a small bargain-basement laptop just so I could keep everyone updated on my progress quickly.

Got the Dell back a week from that Monday (we're in the middle of July now) and after fighting with it some more, I figured out the other aspect of what had happened: The cable modem the cable company game me was so old ("How old WAS it?") that they'd stopped updating USB drivers for it about two years ago. Thankfully, that problem was easily solved with the purchase of an Ethernet cable, which the comp happily recognized and chugged its way onto the Internet.

The speed of this thing is mind-blowing. Seriously. Why didn't I upgrade sooner? ("Because you're a broke idiot.") Easy there. I'm not broke.

ANYway, you'd think that'd be it. But last week - last Thursday, actually - my dad tried to call me with the news that my mom had been laid off from her nursing job that she'd had for about as long as we've lived in New Jersey. I say "tried" because my phone was busy. And my phone was busy because there was a problem with the line.

Of course, I didn't find out about any of this until Dad e-mailed me the next day. I figured - and hoped - that maybe it was just the phone that I've had for close to 20 years breathing its last breaths. So on my break from work that night, I went and bought a new phone, which, again, I'd been telling myself I was going to do for a year or so and never got around to it.

Turned out the phone wasn't the problem.

Two aborted attempts to contact the phone company later and I had an appointment because their remote test couldn't determine if the problem was inside or outside the apartment and somebody would have to come look. In the meantime, I actually had to turn my cell phone on for a week straight. I drained the battery on it. That's happened maybe one other time since I've had it.

This was finally resolved today. The guy showed up at about 8:30 this morning (!) and pokes around inside and outside for a while before finding the problem: a short in the wiring. It's possible that something related to last week's thunderstorms had caused the wiring to short out, but the outside connector box was pretty old anyway (Aside: The next building I move into will be much, much newer than this one. I've had a toilet and water heater go down on my watch and now this.) and probably just conked out on its own. It was a surprisingly easy fix - of course, they're trained professionals - and he was on his way before 10 and I set up my new phone, alerted everyone, and went back to bed.

(Though, to be honest, the telemarketers? The static? Didn't miss any of that.)

Anyway, I'm back, and it's almost football season to boot, so TJD business will definitely be picking up. (Among other things, the JackSux 6 draft is Saturday unless it isn't anymore.)

P.S. - This has been my ringtone for the last week.

Grand Theft Cable

Up until the end, this post was supposed to be titled "Unplugged" and it was supposed to be about how I spent at least 36 hours outside the Information Age. No TV, no cable, no Internet. It was supposed to be about how shockingly productive I was without being able to switch on and drop out. I might have even thrown in a life lesson or two, or said something pithy about how we need to disconnect every once in a while in order to reconnect with the world around us.

But that, as we say in my business, would be "burying the lede."

And the lede is this: I got my cable stolen.

Our story begins late Tuesday night, when I got home from work and turned the TV on, flipping channels while waiting for Poker After Dark to start. There's no picture. This, by itself, isn't particularly unusual - I just figured the cable had gone out for one reason or another, possibly weather-related. So I figured it wasn't anything more than that. But it went on (or didn't, as the case may be) for a little longer, and I just figured the cable was OUT out for whatever reason and went to bed.

I got up on Wednesday, still nothing. Or possibly nothing again; I'm not sure at the moment. My Internet wasn't working, either. And again, I didn't really think that much of it because I assumed it was being fixed. So I went out hunting for a new battery for my digital camera (which I'd found two days earlier after having it go missing for three months, but that story's not nearly as interesting) as well as my bi-weekly grocery shopping trip. No luck on the battery. There's a non-zero chance they don't make it any more.

I got home... still nothing. Now it's officially ridiculous. I called the cable company - it's about 8 by this point - and they told me they'd send somebody over the next day (today, now).

Now it's today. And we've all been there with the cable company. They tell you 10 to 12 and it's always closer to 12 than 10. In this case, it was after 12 when the guy finally called (I'd actually called them again just to make sure I didn't miss their call the first time) and he said he'd be over in 10 minutes or so.

When he showed up, he immediately told me to turn my TV on. I did. It came on.

What he said next was the last thing I expected I'd hear.

Apparently what happened was one of my neighbors had enterprisingly gotten into an outside cable connection and cut off a set of fittings, then illegally hooked up his own to that set. The set they cut off happened to be mine.

I was stunned. I actually said, "I didn't think this still happened in 2008."

By this point my modem had come back online too. I didn't think to ask how he knew what had happened, but he had obviously checked the box outside and cut off the illegal connection before he came in to see me. He did cut me some new connectors because my picture had gone fuzzy, so that was nice of him.

After he left, I plopped down in my chair and just started laughing. I got my cable stolen. In 2008. Think about that. It's absurd.

Semi-related tangent: The first story that came up on Yahoo after I started Firefox: the LifeLock guy getting nailed. Seriously, who didn't see that one coming.