Another Luckbox

I'm talking about Vanessa Rousso, who hosted this week's UPC Cash Poker.

I'm not talking about her being a luckbox on the tables. I'm talking about:

1) She's lucky she's in a field that's so small -- women professional poker players
2) She's lucky she's good looking and has softball bazoombas.

Before power-slamming me for yet another rant about a woman poker player, let me state my case.

During this week's show, the following hand occurred, with Vanessa announcing:
I'm not going to state the player types, stacks, etc. It's not really important (unlike Vanessa's appearance, obviously).

Blinds $100-$200 (I think)
Tony K (pretty rocky player) calls UTG with 66
Adam R raises to $800 with K7o
Phil G (Not Phil Gordon, some other G) calls with 44

Pot is now ~$2400
The Flop:
6 8 T, rainbow (I think) This gives Tony K a set, and Adam R. a gutshot straight.
Tony: Check
Adam: Bet $2500
Phil: Fold
Tony: Call

Pot now has ~$7400.
Turn: K
Board is now 6 8 T K
Tony (66): Check
Adam (K7): Bet $3,000 (He now has top pair + gutshot draw)
Tony: Call

Pot now has ~$13,000
River: 7
Board is now 6 8 T K 7
Tony (66) : Check
Adam (K7, two pair): Bet $8000

I almost threw my T.V. across the room when Vanessa says something to the effect of "If I were Tony, I'd have to consider a raise".

HUH?

Look, screw all the tricky stuff. The fact is, there's a gutshot straight on the board. The pot's got $20,000 in it. If Tony raises, he's only going to get called by a better hand. Period, end of story. The other announcer immediately disagreed, so that makes three people who thought her idea was el-nutzo. Just call, and hope he doesn't have a straight.

Vanessa should issue a public apology to all the fish who take her advice. Then again, people would probably call her with a worse hand just to see her lean over the table to rake the chips.

Yet another reason she does better than the average Joe with equal poker skills.

Web Apps SUCK

Tonight I'm again reminded of the "Fucking Stupid Fix", or "FSF", which is a methodology* I use to debug a Web Application. Forget any conventional (read: sane) methods of figuring out a problem. You know, such old school stuff like logging, setting breakpoints (a complete joke when debugging Web Apps), watches, etc. Forget about it. Journey with me down the road of fixing a Web App:

1. Clear your browser's cache. It's kinda like rebooting Windoze, except you can't go outside for a hit off the bottle because you have to clear the browsing history, cache, cookies, passwords, buttplugs and piss kittens from your browser's "cache". By the way, the word "cache" reminds me of something a tranny brags about having in his purse.
   
2. Restart WEBPrick (Rails) or Thomas Kitten (Tomcat for all you Tomcat users out there). Every time I see that fucking slit-eyed cat, I want to pry its eyes open with a red hot pair of tongs and defecate into its eye sockets. I think that James Gosling designed that logo as an "in" joke to stoners everywhere. Let's face it: James Gosling is Jerry Garcia's lost brother, and the Thomas Kitten logo is a Java programmer who's had a few too many puffs while coding useless interfaces and super-duper-super abstract interface classes. I hereby pledge $20 to the charity of choice for the best picture of the Tomcat logo getting its head split open with a bloody hatchet.
3. Use Eclipse to debug. HAHAHAHAHAHA -- Fooled You!!! Eclipse is the biggest turd of an IDE I've ever seen. If edlin was still available with Windows XPee, I'd use that. Let me think: My PC already takes 5 minutes to boot, with Norton Anti-Idiot and a host of other turd apps hogging my CPU, let's just throw Eclipse in the mix and watch the shit hit the fan. I love it when you have to develop a plug-in to allow your IDE to perform with the same blazing velocity as Microsoft Turd and Ecchsel. Eclipse is the new Emacs, make no excuse about it. I had to create a batch file to run eclipse, because there were too many zeroes in the VMARGS to fit in the "Run" window on my Eclipse shortcut. It was something like this:
   eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xms128000000000000000000M -Xmx512000000000000000M -XX:PermSize=6400000000000000000M -XX:MaxPermSize=1280000000000000000000M
   
4. Finally, the fix which always works with Rails, but I forget every fucking time: When all else fails, RENAME. David Hennemeier Manson decided not to follow in his father's footsteps and kill people. Instead, he made every word from the ENGLISH DICTIONARY into a Rails keyword. I blew 2 hours tonight trying to figure out why my :login_required method in my application.rb controller wasn't being called by the other shit-mitten controllers in my Rails app. After 8 beers and almost punching my monitor (which works, unlike Rails) I renamed the method to "FUCKING_BULLSHIT" and lo and behold, my app worked. Thanks, DHM!

That's enough for me. I'm drunk as a skunk and ready to start coding some more shitbox WEB APPS. EAT SHIT, YOU WEB APP DICK SLURPS

* If you hear somebody say the word "methodology" you should immediately insert the nearest MacBook Pro up the offender's ass.

Jennifer Titty

Er, I mean Jennifer Tilly was on "Poker After Dark" on NBC last week. After watching her play, I definitely have some advice for her.

1. Either knock it off with showing the knockers, or learn to control your breathing when you have a good hand. Every time you hit a big hand you breathe so heavily it looks like two milk monsters are preparing to invade the table, engulfing the pot and spilling into the dealer rack (no pun intended). When you didn't have a hand, the twin giants were sleeping peacefully. Every guy (and probably most women poker players*) are going to be staring down both barrels of your bazookas, so this tell will not go unnoticed, so you have to do something. You could try breathing heavy when you're bluffing, or better yet, how about wearing something normal and just trying to play poker better? See tip #2 below.
   
2. Don't check down a full house on the river when you're last to act. You flopped a set of Jacks vs. a player who I'm unfamiliar with. I can't quite remember the action, but the turn paired the King, so you had like the 5th best possible hand. On the turn, your opponent checked, and you also checked. This was a decent move. The river was a blank, and your opponent checked. You immediately checked and turned over the boat, making the comment "I thought you had quad kings". I almost fell off the couch laughing when the cameras showed the other players' faces when you showed your boat. I think somebody said "5th best hand, nothing wrong with checking", and I almost pissed my pants. The pot was fairly miniscule, and there was only a bet / call on the flop. So next time, try betting. If you get trapped by quad kings, it's probably because your opponent saw the jugs bouncing and knew you had a monster.
   

So Jennifer, in case you read this, please don't be pissed, but I don't see what the BFD is over you. You seem really cool, and you're definitely good looking. But I'm puzzled by the amount of attention you get in the pokersphere. Could it be that the poker-playing male demographic really overrates the looks of women who play poker? Stay tuned to find out.

* My editor is forcing me to have at least one chauvinistic and/or non-PC joke per blog. Hope you liked it.

Amateur Poker Pros

About 70% of people who play poker are pretty cool. I've coined the term "Smeagol" to represent the remaining 30% of poker players who both scare me and annoy me just like the Smeagol character. Overall, Smeagols act like they're playing in the World Series of Poker, even though they're playing low limit game where you couldn't lose more than $100 if you played with your fucking eyes closed.

You can find Smeagols in every cardroom in the country, and since the poker boom, they're bouncing off the damn walls. Here are some signs of a Smeagol:

Sunglasses
This is the most distinctive sign that you're playing against a wanna be pro who will take several hours to decide whether he's going to call a 10 chip bet when he has 100,000 chips in his STACK. I often wonder if they're really just staring at their own crotch the whole time and want to avoid being thrown out again for drooling on the table.

Headphones
Smeagols love to wear headphones. And they're never the regular headphones. They're either the crusty, wax laden "earbud" headphones that you push into your ears until they stick to your colon, or they're the firing range / Prince Charles headphones that you have to take off to walk through the damn door.

In a recent tournament, the dealer asked a Smeagol to remove his yellow stained earbud headhpones, and he replied "Nobody's said I can't wear them". The dealer replied "I'm saying you can't wear them". Kudos to that dealer. Too bad she didn't flip the table over and castrate the offender by wrapping the earphones around his balls.

Rulemongers
Any time there's some kind of an issue, you can bet there will be about 3-4 knowitall butt plugs who interrupt the dealer with their own stupid interpretations of the rules. Please, it's a $22 tournament or a $1/$2 game. These Smeagols should remember they'd have an extra few minutes to wack off to Card Player magazine at the break if they'd just shut the fuck up.

Thinkers
Poker pros give good advice, such as "watch the other players", and "don't look at your cards until it's your turn to act" so you don't give away any information about your hand. However, in low limit games, most players are too busy drooling over the waitress's bazoombas or figuring out what "K", "Q" and "A" means on their cards, much less give a shit about your lame ass expressions and "tells".

Whiners
Many times in poker, you will have the best hand, and your opponent will catch a few unlikely cards which beats your hand. Smeagols often stand up, and begin a whiny rant (much like Smeagol) about the odds and this & that. Many times, the Smeagol is very wrong in his/her assessment, and the opponent actually played correctly. Here's my suggestion: Work a few extra hours at your meaningless job this weekend, or blow somebody in the parking lot and voila--you're back to even.

That's all for now. Have fun playing poker. If you're not having fun, you're an idiot.

The Rating System

This blog is about whatever the hell I want it to be about. I'm going to bitch about stuff, and so I've devised a rating system to separate the minor rants from really important, life changing shit.

The rating system is as follows:
This is a minor annoyance, perhaps a quirk that someone has, such as being a douche.

The two finger rating warrants some kind of response from me. Perhaps a polite comment, such as "Bullshit", or "What the fuck are you talking about?".

Now we're getting somewhere. Three fingers is reserved for dickweeds who are too stupid for any vocal response to do any good and really just need a foot up their ass.

Four fingers is the maximum amount of fingers that I'm willing to cut & paste into this slurptacular blog. Four fingers is reserved for idiocy on a grand scale, such as political / religious / poker matters.

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