Poker South Florida Style

The day after Christmas Bear Toe and I drove up to Dania from Miami to check out the Dania Jai Alai and Poker Palace (or whatever it is called). Our buddy BGE lives in Ft. Lauderdale, and he said this was the place to play. The poker room there is a decent size–probably 20 tables, but most of them weren’t used while we were there.

They run a tournament at 3:00 pm daily, and I signed up for that. It’s a $5 entry, winner take all. 2000 units, 50/100 blinds starting out, with increases every 15 minutes. While I was waiting for the tourney I sat down at a cash table–$1/$2 no limit hold ’em with $100 MAX buy-in . After about 10 minutes at that table, I wished I hadn’t bothered with the tournament.

It seems like there were two types of players there, pretty good and pretty bad, and the split was about half and half. I noticed when the tournament started that the pretty good guys at my table didn’t play in it, and the pretty bad guys did. I decided to just push all in every chance I got to possibly double up and get back to the cash table. There were 60 player in the tournament, and I wasn’t about to sit there for 3 hours for a chance at only $300, especially when there was easy money bleeding into the cash games from guys getting put out of the tourney. If I could pile up chips early, fine. If not, fine too. I think I was the 8th or 9th person put out. I think the wise locals show up just to pick off guys as they are put out of the tourney.

The rest of the day was pretty productive. My chip stack was swinging, but not too wildly and always trending up. As I built it, I’d open up a little and give guys action, hoping they’d stick around. By 10:30 I’d built it up to ~$700. Not bad for buying in at $100. My mistake was not leaving at that point. The poker room closed at 12:00, and people started getting really crazy as closing drew near. It worked out well for Bear Toe who won the final pot of the night (everyone involved pushed all-in) for about $500. I got caught with middle pair post flop countless times and was a little to liberal in giving other guys action.

I ended up leaving with $575 and a newly learned lesson courtesy of one of the pretty good players. It only cost me $65 for him to show me a big gaping hole in my game–pretty cheap!

Overall, a decent poker room. There wasn’t really any variety of games. A 7 card stud game was going on when we got there, but it ended and everything went to $1/$2 NL hold ’em. The dealers were fine on the whole. A couple were excellent, and one in particular was horrible. There were a couple of rules that some players had a problem with, but I didn’t think they were too out of line. For instance, if you show cards before the showdown your hand is automatically mucked. The service was not all that great, but I wasn’t there to drink and eat, so that wasn’t a big deal either.

I can’t wait to go back next year with a little knowledge going in!

No Place Like Home

We had a great time on our trip to Miami, but it is great to be home again and back into our regular schedule.  I couldn’t believe the story about the shooting at Hooter’s here in Knoxville–how tragic.  I actually found out about it while reading Total Diatribe…thanks Billy Mac!

With a week of almost nonstop non-posting, I have several things in the works.  I’ll be working the next few days to finish up my half written posts and complete my half thunk thoughts.  I’ll start by popping over to twitter and writing some notes.   All of this before I even get a chance to catch up on everything I haven’t read in the last few days.

It’s crazy how the world keeps turning, huh?

Headed for Fairer Weather

Round 1 of Christmas is over…at least the Knoxville portion.

Headed to Miami and 80 degree weather for the next week.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get some posts up between eating and…eating.  🙂

South Knoxville Water Tower — Some Real Solutions

Lots of people, at least 65 based on the comments on this article, are pretty upset about the huge new water tower being constructed in South Knoxville.  Apparently, many folks feel this new structure will ruin the Knoxville skyline.  No, I’m not kidding.  Their complaint is that it will ruin the Knoxville skyline.

“The bottom line is we have this horrendous, industrial-scale water tower, just blighting and defiling the view, not just from the South Waterfront, but from downtown also,” said Joe Hultquist, a Knoxville City Council member who represents South Knoxville.

As always, there are a couple of obvious solutions to this problem that will make everyone happy:

Either paint it orange with a big white “T”, or plate it with shiny gold panels.  Then it will fit right in with the rest of Knoxville’s “skyline”.

Global Warming–Don’t Just Suggest It…Prove It

I originally saw this article about the growing number of global warming skeptics in the scientific community.  It contains some pretty interesting stuff and is worth a full read…

The voices of many of these hundreds of scientists serve as a direct challenge to the often media-hyped “consensus” that the debate is “settled.”

While there I also found another great article

“The first Earth Day in America claimed the following, that because of global cooling, the population of America would have collapsed to 22 million by the year 2000. And of the average calorie intake of the average American would be wait for this, 2,400 calories, would good it were. [LAUGHTER] It’s nonsense and very dangerous. And what we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes.”

Is global warming a man-made problem?  Does it even exist?  I think it makes sense to read and listen to both sides before you decide, questioning possible personal motivations of everyone along the way.

Why I Don’t Delete Anything (Anymore)

I wrote something on Twitter last night after spending an hour or so reading old emails between the missus and me from our dating days.  At the time we were living 750 miles apart, so email was one of our major means of communication.  Seemingly unrelated, I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about some messages I was reviewing from an old Yahoo! group that was really active 6 or 7 years ago. 

I’ve never been one to knowingly keep a journal, especially one of those “deepest inner secrets” type things.  I know that for some people it’s a theraputic exercise, and I get that, but it’s not something I’ve ever really felt the need to do.  I’m reasonably good at sorting things out in my head, and honestly, there isn’t that much to sort out anyway.  I’m lucky enough to lead a very stress free, unscarred life.  It helps that I have a wide streak of apathy to boot.

However, I really like reviewing the back and forths I had with other people during different times of my life.  The major things in your life don’t need documenting because they are things you’ll always remember.  But it’s hard to think back and remember what happened during an unremarkable day or week.  Reading even the shortest little email from someone else makes it much easier to recall everything else that was going on in my life during that time.

I guess that could be the argument for personal journaling, but it is so much more natural for me to write dialogue instead of a monologue.  I need those other people to make it pop.

So I’m making a proposal to Mrs. Missus (hey, you finally get a real proposal).  How about if we make an effort to send each other an email every now and then, even though we now have the luxury of being able to talk to each other every day?  Maybe you have to communicate with me more than you’d like already, but let’s give it a shot just for a little while, say 5 or 6 years, and see how it goes.

Feel free to email your answer to me…I think you still have the address.

I’m Glad I Didn’t Win

In my most recent poll, I asked readers to choose the most annoying guy on the radio.  Fortunately for me, I have a face made for TV and am not on the radio, so I wasn’t eligible.

But I don’t think I could have competed with Sean Hannity.  He completely ran away with the poll, although I’m sure he’d say that was only because a handful of Ron Paul supporters found a way to hack my site and vote several times.

Hannity received a whopping 60% of the vote.  Maybe not all that impressive, but you have to consider than his buddy Rush was also one of the choices.  At least Rush is funny.

I even tried to make it a little more fair by including Jim Rome as a choice, but to no avail.  Sean Hannity is definitely the most annoying guy on the radio, and you heard ItFrom.Us!

Dream Connection Radiothon

If you are feeling more like Bob Cratchit and less like Ebenezer Scrooge Tuesday morning, I’ll be manning the phones with the Knoxville Rugby Club at Dream Connection’s annual Radiothon on WIVK–call in and make a pledge from 7am to 10 am!

If you aren’t familiar with Dream Connection, it is an East Tennessee charity that makes dreams come true for local kids with life threatening or chronically debilitating illnesses. Our club just started working with them last year when we did a golf tournament for their benefit, and they are a top notch organization. My favorite thing about this organization is that 100% of the funds they receive goes directly to making dreams come true for kids.

No overhead costs–printed materials and the like are donated. No paid positions–everyone involved works as a volunteer solely to help the kids.

Call in Tuesday morning and help this great cause!