C’mon Gary Cohen…what’s with that $20 electronic watch?

LOL…how does the Marlins starter walk Luis Castillo w/ 1st and 2nd 2 outs???

David Wright.

Johan looks pretty good at the plate.  He might turn out to be the Mets best hitting pitcher.

Gary Cohen just started talking about how they were discussing whether or not Reyes should steal less this yr and he just got CS w/ the Mets up 6-2.  Personally, I want Reyes attempting anywhere from 40-50 SB’s.  If you compare his and Wright’s SB numbers last year (BP guys, back me up please), I’m pretty sure Wright might actually have had more value as a basestealer.  On top of having a higher SB success rate if he attempts less steals, the fact that he wore down at the end of last year combined with it being the year where he attempted the most SB’s is probably not a coincidence.  Lastly, there has to be some injury risk associated with SB’s and our backup SS option is not exactly appealing.

Wright was safe on that SB attempt…

Johan is going to be awesome in the NL.

What if every human had 150 hours worth of time skippage that they could use during their lives? It wouldn’t be time travel because you can’t actually have events not occur.  For example, if you decide to skip your wisdom teeth getting pulled, you could skip ahead a few hours and they’d be pulled.  What would you use these hours for?  You’d obviously have to save some for some crazy events that might happen…

NL East - Mets

NL Central - Cubs

NL West - Dodgers

NL WC - Phillies

AL East - Yankees

AL Central - Tigers

AL West - Mariners

AL WC - Red Sox

Note that the AL West was close and I was going to take the Angels until Escobar got hurt.

NL MVP - Chase Utley

NL Cy Young - Johan Santana

AL MVP -  Alex Rodriguez

AL Cy Young - Erik Bedard

I haven’t gotten a chance to blog in a while but I’ve been grinding a good amount recently with really good results.  I’m also trying to learn PLO and so far that is going well also.  I’m eagerly awaiting the start of baseball season and I’m thinking of hosting some sort of contest where every week, I will send the winner some small amount of money.  If you have any ideas on how to structure the contest, please let me know.

Compared to other poker players who are as successful as I am, I think I’m one of the worst at dealing with having a losing session.  I’ve done some reckless and ridiculous things just to try and get “unstuck” from very minor losses.  It’s baffling why I haven’t been able to change this mentality in the ~4 years of so that I’ve played poker professionally.  My number one short term goal is to change this mentality.  I feel like I check my account balances every 2 minutes during a session to keep track of how much I’m up/down.  It’s absolutely ridiculous.  Starting today, I’m not going to allow myself to do that.  I’m going to try and keep a completely objective mindset towards poker.

I think this is an absolutely incredible deal for the Mets.  When preliminary discussions were first mentioned at the end of the baseball season and it looked like we would have to trade Jose Reyes for Johan Santana, I was still admittedly tempted to make the deal.  As is, it seems like the only player of any real value we traded is Carlos Gomez.  Philip Humber’s minor league stats are pretty pathetic and Kevin Mulvey and Deolis Guerra haven’t done anything to make anyone think they’ll turn out to be good MLB players.

 As for signing him, I know we’ll have to pay more per year if we give him a 4-5 year deal instead of a 7 year deal but I’m rather do it that way.  Pitchers tend to decline much faster than hitters as they age.  Santana’s best pitch is his change-up so you can make the argument that it’s not true for him, but he still throws his fastball in the low 90’s which is important.  Look at how Trevor Hoffman’s career declined as his fastball lost velocity (another pitcher whose best pitch is/was the change-up).  Injuries haven’t been an issue with Santana other than elbow chips (someone confirm this?).

 All in all, a fantastic day to be a New York Mets fan.

I think for the most part I’m indifferent to the Mets offseason.  I’m very glad they didn’t overpay for a pitcher like Livan Hernandez or in re-signing Tom Glavine.  I think re-signing Luis Castillo is probably pretty bad.  I would have liked to see Ruben Gotay as our starting 2b.  The Lastings Milledge for Schneider/Church trade seemed really questionable.  I would have liked to keep Milledge as trade bait (in a trade where we actually get someone worthwhile).  And if we can’t trade him, worst case he starts in RF.  I’m glad the Torrealba signing fell through.  This guy had some of the worst offensive numbers of any starting C, AND HE PLAYED IN COLORADO.  Look at his home/road splits.  Pretty gross stuff.  I’ll post some more thoughts later.

I was first introduced to poker for $ late my freshman year of college (2003). I was studying finance at NYU at the time. One of my friends asked me if I wanted to play a $10 game of poker.
 
Rewind about 3 years to high school. There was a big blackjack craze at our high school where during class when nothing was going on, we’d deal blackjack for $1/hand or whatever. Of course, as we lost we’d increase the stakes and end up playing for $10/hand which was a ton of money back then. I obviously had no idea blackjack was -EV and ended up losing around $100 which was a [censored] of money back then. Fast forward a couple years and I remember this one specific instance at a friend’s house where we degenerated to the point of playing high card for money. We spread shuffled the cards facedown on a table and just drew cards and then shuffled and repeated. It was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever had b/c it was non-stop gambling. We laugh about this to this day. I definitely liked gambling.
 
Anyway, back to the $10 poker game, being the gambler I was, I could not refuse. We played dealer’s choice with a 50 cent betting cap on any street. It wasn’t too serious. We’d usually drink a lot while playing. It was definitely good times though.
 
Next year (2004), I purchased a poker table and chipset off ebay. We had a good group of regulars to play a $10 buy-in game with. Now we were only playing NLHE. We had no idea what we were doing as we were using .25/.50 blinds so it was basically tourney style with only 20 bb’s. As before, it was more a social thing as there would be a lot of drinking and blunt rolling. Nevertheless, I think I ended up making $500-600 off this game overall. I was definitely one of the biggest winners in the game. I also met a lot of people through this game including J-Mac, Ezmogee, and P.Dirty who all post here.
 
Anyway, I wasn’t introduced to online poker until one of my friends from UNC started telling me how much money he was making playing 2/4NL and 3/6NL online. Back then, those were the biggest regularly spread games on the net. Apparently, one of his friends (Grandiose), was making like $450/hr. Intrigued by this, I figured out GoldenPalace had 10 cent giveaways and micro-stakes STT’s so I could build a bankroll without ever having to deposit. As crazy as it sounds, I grinded that up to $170.
 
I was told that games were softer on Prima, so I moved the money there. I had no idea what bankroll management was at the time. I grinded that up to around $6000 by the time the summer rolled around. Then I decided WTF, I never lose so let me rock this clown sitting at 25/50.
 
I suffered what was probably the worst relative beat of my career. I’ve been 1-outed for $30k pots before, but had never lost such a large % of my bankroll in 1 hand. I open JTs f/ the button. He reraises. I call. Flop is a beautiful Q98 rainbow. He open shoves for his whole stack. I insta-call. He turns over KK. Turn and river come running T, J and I lose.
 
I was so distraught over that hand I took about a 1 week break from poker which was a lot for me. I used to play every opportunity I got. I couldn’t stay away forever but it was probably the gambler in me that made me sit down again.
 
From there, I have never looked back. In the fall of my Junior year up to the winter, I made somewhere around $15k playing mostly 1/2NL. I had a few forays into high stakes again but my bankroll never dipped too low.
 
This is when I discovered 2+2 and shortly thereafter PokerTracker. For the next 3 months, I somehow convinced myself to learn/play LHE because the players seemed so bad. I was OK at it and won at around 1.2ptbb/100 over 35-40k hands of 5/10, 10/20, and 15/30. I had a couple of decent tourney scores around this time as well and my roll was up around $40k when PartyPoker introduced 400/600/1knl.
 
This is when I started to make serious money. For the next month or so, I crushed the 1knl on Party for around $35k. However, I went on my first prolonged downswing/breakeven stretch over the next few weeks. I probably lost $15k or so. Never having experienced such a large downswing before, I assumed the fish had all gone bust and decided to go back to LHE. Meanwhile, I won a WSOP satellite.
 
My time in vegas for the WSOP was the best vacation of my life. I met Grandiose and his friend Sharpie82 while down there and brought along 2 of my good friends from HS/College. None of us are really the clubbing type but we went to 6-7 crazy vegas nightclubs and had a great time.
 
Grandiose convinced me to go back to NLHE and try the 6-Max tables. I decided to give 600NL a try. In the few hands I played there it seemed really soft. I busted out in the main event late day 1 losing AQ vs QJ all-in preflop for a 50k pot. I was distraught but had a great time in vegas for the remaining week.
 
When I got back to NYC, I decided to forget about LHE and focus on NLHE. NLHE has been my main game ever since. For the first 20k hands of 600NL6M, I was running insanely hot winning at 14PTBB/100. It seemed completely impossible to ever have a losing session at 6-max NL. I decided to move up to 5/10 6-max and it wasn’t any tougher. Over my first 125k hands of 6-max 600/1knl, I was running at 9.5PTBB/100.
 
I felt extremely confident I could make significant $ playing poker for a living. I was registered for classes in the fall of my senior year but ended up withdrawing a couple days into the semester. I regret this decision slightly, although it might end up being the correct one if online poker suffers from US legislation.
 
In late September and October, I hit the worst downswing of my career. I lost probably $70-80k and around 30 buy-ins. Some of that was at high stakes (25/50+). I was running bad and playing much worse. I decided I needed to take a break. Like always, I couldn’t stay away from poker for too long and decided I’ll regain my confidence at 1/2NL. I screwed around with that for a few days and decided I was ready to go back to 5/10.
 
From November to March, I went on another ridiculously hot run winning at around 10PTBB/100 for about 110k hands. I played the PCA in bahamas which was a great time. They had beautiful weather compared to NYC and I also met some 2p2ers who I had chatted with a lot on AIM. In March, I decided I wanted to buy a car. Even though I would have absolutely no use for one and it would sit at my family’s home in NJ for the most part, I really wanted one.
 
I’ve always been into cars and after pricing/comparing, settled on an Audi S4. I paid for the car in total up front. This coupled with having to pay six-figures in taxes for 2005 winnings (I didn’t start filing quarterlies until April 2006) left me with only $30k or so online. The majority of my winnings was stashed away in an ETrade acct in some mutual funds.
 
In early April, I played in the LA Poker Classic WPT event. I ran really hot early day 2 and was chip leader for part of the tourney. However, on day 3 I lost a big pot on a coinflip and finished just out of the money. I met a lot of 2p2ers out there including Matt Matros, AZK, fsuplayer, flawless_victory.
 
Unfortunately, later in April, I ran/played bad again. I went on a 20-25 buy-in downswing and a long breakeven stretch that carried on through most of May/June. I also wasn’t playing anywhere near as much as I should have been. Probably a good thing considering how badly I was playing. The one silver lining during this stretch was that I won 3 out of the first 6 double shootouts I entered for WSOP seats.
 
Most of June/July I spent learning/playing golf and drinking with my friends who have all graduated but most of who have yet to find jobs. I figure this might be the only time I’ll be able to spend quality time with them.
 
In September I registered for classes and took a half-load for both the fall and spring semesters.  I played poker very sporadically.  This was about the time that the anti-gambling legislation was passed and soon enough PartyPoker stopped serving U.S. customers and it became increasingly difficult to get money on and off the other sites as Neteller stopped serving U.S. customers as well.
 
I didn’t play much poker with school going on but over the summer I had a great run at nosebleed stakes.   I was playing as high as $200/400 and $300/600 NL on Full Tilt.  I was probably playing the best poker of my life and living in a house in Vegas with FoxwoodsFiend, Krantz, and FlawlessVictory definitely helped my game.   The run continued for about two more weeks when Krantz and I went back to NYC but then we hit a sick downswing.  The downswing continued until the end of 2007 but luckily w/ my last semester of classes going, I wasn’t playing as much.  
 
Right now, I find online poker to be somewhat of a chore. I really find it boring and would much rather be doing other things. However, I really feel like I need to get in as many hours as possible while games are good and anti-gambling laws have not been passed. From April 2006 till today, I’ve probably only averaged 7-8 hours or so of poker a week. Pathetic.  Two years ago, I could play 12-14 hours in a day and have so much fun doing it. It was such a thrill to play a strategic game and make money doing it. These days I play for 2 hours, look at the clock and go “WTF!, how has it only been 2 hrs”.
 
I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with my life at this point.  I’ll probably still keep playing poker for a while but ultimately, I’d like to do something else.   I finally graduated in Dec. 2007 and it’s been fantastic having that weight off my shoulders.  Now I will have much more free time to get back in a poker groove and hopefully come up with some interesting business idea.

Hey guys,

I’m on a cruise right now for New Year’s with my family.  Disappointed I’m going to miss the DeucesCracked launch but I’ll be back and in the forums and updating my new blog here the first week of January.  Check out “Stuffing the Penguin,” my half of whitelime vs pr1nnyraid.  That series has been a ton of fun to make.

I’ll end this brief post with this statement: I would hands-down be the best GM in baseball.