I like my eggs scrambled and cooked well.  While I’m sure there are some of you who like them soft, is there anyone that likes them liquidy?  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been served eggs and there’s like a puddle of egg below the cooked portion.  I think that’s disgusting.

I am a huge fan of pizza and have tried pretty much all of the popular pizza places in NYC including Joe’s on 6th and Bleecker, Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn, Lombardi’s in Little Italy, Patsy’s (I’ve been to the one on university place and the one on the UES), Artichoke, and a bunch of others.  I think Grimaldi’s probably gets my vote as the best of the bunch although Joe’s is definitely the best pizza by the slice.

One thing I’ve been surprised by in my few trips to Europe has been the quality of the pizza.  I’m not talking Italy or a culinary giant like France either.  I had spectacular pizza in Germany and Copenhagen.  While the quality is probably half a notch below that of the places I mentioned, it’s significantly above average and better than most of the random places in NYC.  I also should mention that I didn’t go to any place known for their pizza.  I merely ate pizza at a bar while watching a “football” match in Germany and some random restaurants on the street in Copenhagen.

Dean sent me some deep dish pizzas in the mail from Giardano’s.  I am heating it up in the oven as I write this and will give feedback once it’s done.

In other news, I had a brutal leg workout at the gym today.  My trainer completely kicked my ass.  I was able to squat 195 lbs for 6 reps which is a PR.  I think I’m in excellent shape right now but I’d like to pack on maybe 10 lbs of muscle before our tv show starts filming in June.  I will have to scarf down as much food as humanly possible.  On Monday, I ordered 100 cupcakes from this incredible cupcake place in SoHo called Baked by Melissa.  I know 100 seems excessive but that was the minimum amount for delivery and the lines get pretty ridiculous so I didn’t want to wait.

I am pretty pumped for the elite 8 games tonight.  In one of my hsnl $1k brackets, if I get a Missouri/UNC final, I win the pool regardless of who wins.  A Missouri win is huge for me and to a lesser extend, Purdue over UConn would be nice too.

So I finally got in 20,000 hands at HU PLO with OK results.  I feel like I still make a lot of dumb mistakes and am winning mostly just because a lot of my opponents have been droolers.  I also feel like I have really good fundamentals and have a great understanding of poker theory and that has helped me hold my own against more experienced players.  After I win 50 buyins at 5/10 HU, I will move to 10/20.  I think segregating my PLO bankroll will help me get in more hands and also study the game academically rather than just trying to win lots of money everyday.

Result totals are 24,459 hands for +$ 22375 for a 4.57PTBB/100 winrate.

I’m installing a new version of iTunes right now and they have the dumb bar that goes back and forth and tells you the task it’s completing.  I don’t care what task it’s completing.  Please just tell me how long this will take so I can go do something and come back to my computer.

My iphone (POS) stopped working once I got back to the US.  It just did not give me any bars in the top left and said no service.  I took it to the at&t store so they could look at it and fix it and after a couple minutes of playing around with the phone, the guy says it needs a new SIM card.  He said that they had a bunch in the closet in the back but that he was unable to go get me one because it was too slippery back there.  I was redirected to a store 12 miles down the road, 3 towns over.

Took down some posts that needed taking down.  One of my readers makes a good point that it’s good for the public to think some live pro “characters” are good players because they will study their game.  Additionally, these guys probably make for more interesting tv than most high stakes online players.  Anything that boosts poker ratings is something that I am super cool with.  Just read about the Tom/BG/Eastgate hand in Jay’s blog and my initial thoughts are”wow, siiiiiiiiiiiiiick bluff by Tom”.  I’ll expand on my thoughts tomorrow.

Also, see Stinger’s last blog post about how tableratings results and hsdb results don’t really tell the true story because of the action sharing that often takes place.  Friends and family, if you see me -800k on hsdb, don’t worry.  I’ve only had a small piece of myself and have also had a piece of some others during winning sessions.  I’ve yet to have a losing year at poker since I started playing in 2004.  Also, 800k = 8 buyins at rail heaven so it is in no way indicative of how good I am at poker.  Railbirds are the ones that need some educating though unfortunately they probably don’t read my blog.

In other news, I will blog about eggs, pizza in europe, and food in general tomorrow.

I had my luggage lost on the way to Germany.  I knew this was a possibility as there were only 75 minutes between my connecting flight from Madrid to Palma Mallorca.  I specifically asked the lady who helped me check-in if I needed to pick up my luggage in Madrid and go through customs and re-check it.  She said she wasn’t sure but probably.  In the middle of her tagging my bags, a couple of her co-workers came by.  Apparently she hadn’t seen them in a while or something b/c she seemed really happy to see them and started chatting it up with them.  I let it slide and was fully expecting her to tell them she was working and couldn’t talk now but she continued the conversation for a good 3-4 minutes.  I had like 94 different thoughts fly through my mind.

1)  You are a goddamn airport employee.  You need to be extremely professional and security minded.  I don’t know anything about circumventing airport security, but her leaving my bag unattended on the scale could easily have resulted in disaster if that were my intention.

2)  Man, I need to take notes and outline this blog post b/c I am thinking of like 4 different things to write before getting done w/ each argment.  I will inevitably forget half the things I want to talk about.

3)  You are in the middle of helping a customer.  You aren’t in between customers.  Finish your job and at least socialize at a time where it won’t result in you screwing up because you lost focus.

4)  You are in the middle of helping a customer who is asking you concerned questions about his luggage.  This is usually the biggest concern for a lot of customers.  Even if your incompetence cannot possibly cause the airline to lose the customer’s luggage, reassure him by giving him your undivided attention and a nice smile on your face.  Research and answer his question about whether or not he needs to pick up his luggage in Madrid and re-check it after going through customs.

5)  #4 kind of reminds me of situations where I’m at a busy Starbucks or similar place that involves some customization of orders and the employees are socializing and not paying full attention when they take your order.  I am very wary of my order getting screwed up but feel bad treating them like idiots and asking them if they got it right before they fill it.  Sure enough, they screw it up somehow.  For the record, I actually do think these types of employees should be allowed to socialize so this is only a partial analogy which makes this airport situation even more extremely rude and unprofessional.

6)  One more gripe is that the question “where are you going?” should be asked more thoroughly and efficiently.  There have been times where the answer they are looking for is the final destination and other times where it’s the final destination THAT the airlines you are checking in with is taking you.  So if you’re connecting via a different airlines, they don’t want your real final destination.

Now, this lady absolutely had nothing to do with my luggage getting lost but the contrast between her attitude and that of the German lady behind the lost luggage counter was incredible.

This lady, despite speaking a little less English than the American check-in attendant, asked some very intelligent questions that made me feel better after my luggage was lost than before it was lost:

1)  Do you have a working phone in Germany? (Easily could’ve just taken having a phone for granted)

2)  What is the number for the hotel you are staying at?

3)  Did you have any connecting flights?

4) What were the time intervals between connections? (This helped pinpoint where the luggage was probably lost)

I also encountered a really friendly German driver who was in charge of driving a shuttle back and forth from our hotel to the casino.  After busting out, I saw a few drivers joking around with each other and asked when the next shuttle back to the casino was.  They asked if I was by myself and I said yes.  Rather than making me feel guilty or asking me to wait until there were a couple of more people, one of the drivers immediately volunteered to take me back.  Instead of being vengeful that I was making her take a 20 minute trip back and forth each way when she could have kept enjoying herself with her co-workers, she was very friendly and asked me about my stay and what I planned to do, etc.  It’s easy to say that my experience had a lot to do with individuals rather than differences between Americans and in this case Germans, but I’ve travelled to enough places to know that on average, Americans are not as friendly as locals of many other places I’ve been to.  They seem to make you feel guilty about making them do their jobs better.

I

1) A poker player’s word:  I think Doyle Brunson first wrote about this but it’s pretty remarkable how trusting and honest poker players are (I’m talking about hsnl types that know each other).  Whenever something really quick needs to be settled, a friend of mine will just think of a number in his head and settle the dispute based on what you guess.  I think this level of trust is really cool.  You know that really annoying kid who you bet Steelers -6 against and when they win by 7 claims that you bet Steelers -7.5?  The one who claims he paid you back the $100 he owed you a week ago when he clearly didn’t?  The poker world will chew him up and spit him out and I think that’s really cool too.

2)  Credit Card Roulette:  The basic idea behind this is to randomize who pays for a dinner tab, or round of drinks, or cab ride, or something similar.  Each person involved throws in their card and one gets picked to pay randomly.  This will just save you time and hassle in the long run.  How annoying is settling up a ten person dinner tab?  There is guaranteed to be a few people who can’t do math, or tip too little, or don’t account for tax, or don’t have the right denomination bills to pay the exact amount and the dinner tab ends up becoming a 20 minute ordeal.  Not only does credit card roulette increase utility by saving everyone time, but it also only requires one person to physically do anything.  I can understand that some dinner tabs might be too expensive for some people to handle the variance but CCR should be used as much as possible.  There should also be an understanding that you will just order what you normally would have were you to only pay for your own meal (see #1 on why there shouldn’t be trust issues).  If you habitually order less expensive meals, you need to just give up some EV for everyone else’s utility.  If you are going to be regretting paying an extra $3.45 ten years down the road, you have problems.

There are more things to add to this that I can’t think of right now so I’ll come back to this.