Poker culture pieces.
Very interesting post here from Doug Hull, almost out of the blue in a thread where the poster is really just looking for permission to move up a stake. Virtually every working pro I know is semi-retired, has a wife with significant income, has a side business that affords a lot of flexibility or is…
The controversial, noted, and Pulitzer-winning play Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar was addended by a “talk back.” I had the opportunity to see the performance, as well as attend the discussion, which is something I will generally skip. After all, you can expect a lot of very dull sentiments at these things, from the audience, the…
“Running GREAT!” Dan kept mouthing. “GREAT!” He wouldn’t stop complaining. He wanted attention, and it was grating. After limp calling from UTG and folding to a cbet, he flashed me 106o. “Can’t hit a hand!” He rebought again for yet another forty big blinds. “Can’t even make top pair.” He sought soothing through nagging. Embarrassing,…
In the beginning, I used a detailed database to chart my opposition’s tendencies. A spreadsheet, with a name, a quick summary, and then street by street tendencies. I remember reading that Phil Ivey once kept a notebook of all this thoughts on poker, which he later lost and never bothered to repeat. My database was not…
A moving afternoon at the Oregon Historical Society, where the cross pollination of a World War II exhibit and the history of the state itself produced a very convincing portrait of America and American life. Our history has given so many of us the opportunity for greatness, and the exhibits made it clear that making…
I finally lost my mind last night. It started (well, it started in June, but that’s another story) when another poor fool shipped his gutter over my flopped straight after I potted the turn leaving no room for me to fold. He binked the mysterious three outer, the one I blocked, to the nuts, announcing,…
There are formulas in art and poker that will get you good results. Brilliance, however, often goes its own way without all the variables accounted for and balanced, even if they can never truly disappear if the equation is to work. In Isolde, which I attended last night at the Theater for a New Audience in…
The pool of winners and losers overlap in many ways, but one of the many traits with which weaker players mark themselves is their instantaneous and natural use of the possessive adjective. It’s not universal by any means- not that readers of this obscure blog will tend to think in black and white- but the…
There is nothing like a difficult run to inspire new thoughts. The lesson of runbad is always to play better, even if it is immediately not evident. The other lesson is to focus on other projects, and this weekend, lonely labor days of writing and contemplation, has yielded incredible fruit. The screenplay, which I was…