Day: December 17, 2008

I never had my mojo tonight. My semi-bluffs got called, my bluffs got called, my one good hand did not. Blech.

Already whittled away, I have Ah-6h in the small blind. I call a min raise, the flop is 9-6-4. The raiser raises again. I looked him over and made a read that he was full of it. He often is. I called. The next card is 9h. He raises again putting me all in. I have the sixes and four cards to the flush and what the heck, I call. He did not have much. J-9, so the turn had given him trip 9s. I didn’t get my flush on the river. I rebought.

The next round treated me much better. I wasn’t playing any better, just the cards were falling clearly. I usually either had something or I didn’t, which is much better than marginal hands.

I call a raise with Ac-10c. The flop is Kc-xc-xc. I have the nut flush! It’s me and the same guy who knocked me out. He raises, I call. The turn is nothing. He raises, I call. I glance at my cards — uh oh! I misread my cards! My Ace is the Ace of spades, not clubs — I don’t have a flush at all! But now I have to call, the pot odds are with me. The river is the Qc. I have the flush (again!). It’s not the nut flush anymore, but only Ac and Jc beat me. He raises once more. I again figure, what the heck and call. My 10c beats his 9c. I get my revenge and double up.

I have about 4K, blinds are 3-6. I am having a conversation with another player whether short stack should be thought of as how much you have relative to other people (that’s the way I see it) or relative to the blind amounts. He thinks it’s blinds, and since he has only 10 blinds he is short-stacked. The next hand he goes all-in. Everyone folds to me, I have 6-6. Hm. This guy can play anything. And he thinks he’s short-stacked. I figure him for two high cards. But mainly it’s 10:45 and I have to get home and print and stuff and fold and organize our holiday cards. What the heck, I call. He has A-K. He gets his Ace and knocks me out.

Way too much “what the heck” playing from me tonight. I was definitely making some bad plays just to get some action.

Tonight: -$40
Running Total: $515

A few weeks ago my beloved TiVo broke. It did not break all the way but it was not recording all shows properly. I called their support line. The person diagnosed the problem quickly – it was a “known issue”. The fix was to reset my entire system, which would unfortunately delete all my season pass and preferences. They would all need to be redone. I was annoyed. I have 55 season passes. You heard right, 55 of them. Can’t I back this up somewhere? No. Can I export the list somehow? No. Can you save off my info at TiVo central and send it back to me in some format? No. I would just have to suck it up. Man, that’s annoying. I was angry.

Suck it up I did. I took a pad of paper and carefully wrote down all the season passes. I reset the system (this takes about three hours). I started entering all the season passes back. I hadn’t thought to record my thumbs up and thumbs down, so it has taken a few weeks more for TiVo to learn my likes and dislikes.

Thinking about it later I realized how the support person could have done a better job. At not point did she show any sympathy that this was a giant pain. If she had simply said, “I’m sorry but we don’t have any easy way to back up and re-enter your season pass information. You’re going to have to that manually yourself. I know it’s a lot of trouble for you.” I would have been much more calm about it. A simple admission that she was asking me to do labor to fix their problem in their product would have helped a lot.