A Gentle Letdown.

In businesses that sell Western Canada Lottery Corp. tickets in Saskatchewan you'll find ticket checking machines.  If you check a ticket that isn't a winner, the message they display is "Sorry Appears To Be A Non-Winner."  I find the use of the term "non-winner" interesting.  I would imagine this was chosen after consulting an expert on such things.  Presumably there's good money to be made determining the most effective message for electronic displays.  "Non-winner" probably is less likely to offend or upset people than the term loser.

Lucky 13.

If this keeps up you're going to think this is becoming a poker only blog.  It's not, I promise.

Tournament 13 in the 100 Sit and Go Project turned out to be the best one yet.  I came in second and won $3.82.  I've played better than I did tonight, but sometimes all you need to do is play well enough.

I Played There.

I've been playing poker online since June of 2006.  During that time I've played on various sites.

The bulk of my playing has been on PokerStars.  It was the first place I played as a result of their World Blogger Championship of Online Poker.(Watching Spike's gambling competition show King of  Vegas was also an influenc in getting started.)  PokerStars has become the dominant online poker site, and unlike some of its rivals managed to survive the US crackdown on Americans playing online poker.  As noted in recent posts this is the only site I've ever played on using my own money.

I played on the ill fated Full Tilt Poker.  I played on it occasionally, and first had an inkling about the goings on in the US when I was unable to connect to the site.  However it's possible Full Tilt might have had trouble even without the crackdown.  It was already facing a number of lawsuits, including one from one time Team Full Tilt member Clonie Gowen.  PokerStars has picked up the assets of Full Tilt, and apparently will reopen it in November of this year.  I never managed to win any money off of them. 

Probably the most obscure poker site I played on was ScorePoker.  This was a site run in conjunction with Canadian sports channel The Score.  I did manage to win a golf shirt in one of their freerolls.  One feature that I liked about their software was that if you didn't play at all in the first levels of a poker tournament you would be booted out.  It eventually ceased to operate, presumably because the network didn't see any value in keeping it going.

For a while I played on the European based MansionPoker.  I signed up for their card room because of the TV series Poker Dome Challenge, which Mansion backed.  I did win some money at some point, but eventually decided to stop playing there.  I think I may have a software disc they sent me stuffed in a drawer someplace.

Then there was UltimateBet, the site that Phil Helmuth and Annie Duke were the spokespeople for.  As I remember it I stopped playing there after its software increasingly disagreed with the computer I was using at the time.  UB was another poker stite that was having trouble even before the US crackdown, having to reveal in 2008 that it had been heavily comprimised by cheaters able to see the hole cards of other players.

I briefly played on PartyPoker.  I didn't stay for very long, as for some reason I found the table software they were using at the time hard on the eyes.

Now I Have Two.

I've added another video onto YouTube, this one of a chatty magpie.  So click on it, and marvel at my cinematic genius. 

AK, Blech!

No, I'm not refering to Alaska here, but rather Ace King.  I think that pair of cards is the most overrated in poker.  I never have much luck with them.  Tonight was a good example.  In tournament 11 of my 100 Sit and Go Project I had a fairly good stack as we approached the bubble.  I picked up AK, and then one of the short stacks decided to go all in.  I called him, but it cost a lot of my stack to do so, on top of the chips that I'd already put in.  Another player called him as well.  The flop came, and it was a complete miss.  Into the muck goes AK, and I was way down, and starting to look like I might not make the bubble.  Meanwhile, all in player caught a hand and  won a lot of chips.  Ironically a few hands later he went all in again with his much larger stack, only to be called by a player who had him covered.  He lost, and only one more player had to go out to for the remainder to reach the money.   Fortunately I had more than the short stack, and made the money when he was all inned by the blinds.  I ended up going out in 12th place, winning 50 cents. 

Don'tcha Hate It...

...when you visit a blog you regularly visit, and there's no new material?  And when there is, it's meaningless filler, because the blogger is too lazy to write something interesting?

Conflict Of Interest?

I just saw an online ad for a company called Clearly Contacts.  But the ad was selling glasses. Should a potential customer be worried they'll give you crappy glasses to convince you to switch to contacts?  Nah, because a lot of customers probably want both.

If I Believed.

Today I found a dollar on the ground.  This happened just after I bought a one dollar scratch ticket that didn't win me anything.  When I got home I decided to play sit and go number six in my 100 Sit and Go Project.  I won $1.08.  If I believed in the idea of lucky things I might have given the coin the credit.

But I don't.

Goodbye, Joe.

I don't remember when I started reading comics.  But a good hunk of my early comic reading was war comics, a genre that's largely defunct.  Most of them were DC, and a lot of them were drawn by Joe Kubert.  Kubert died over the weekend at age 85.  Even at that advanced age he was still working, still doing what he'd first done in his early teens.  Besides his own work Kubert helped aspiring comic artists through his Kubert School, founded in 1976.  His sons Andy and Adam followed him into the business, and there were traces of their father's distinctive style in their work. 

Another important figure from my childhood gone.  Unfortunately I expect to see several others pass away in the near future.

When I Rule The World 14.

A system will be developed and installed on each roadway so you can't drive faster than the posted speed limit.  I might be magnanimous and give you a 5 or so kilometer overage.  Of course police and other emergency vehicles will be exempt.  Serious, a large percentage of you drive too fast.  Those speed limit signs in Canada?  Are in kilometers per hour, not miles per hour.

First Result.

How did I do in the first official tournament of the 100 Sit and Go Project?  I came in 15th, 3 places out of the money.  I did very well initially, including quad aces in my secon hand, but I didn't manage to capitalise on that.  Oh well.

On the other hand I just had a nice present.  I just picked up 2 bucks in a freeroll I stumbled across.  I came in 11263rd out of a field of 50,000.  I'm currently playing in the Weekly Round 2 freeroll, and I'll be playing in a couple of freerolls connected wtih making a deposit.  So maybe I'll get some more morey in those.

The Not So Big 100.

Prior to this week the only real money I've poker with online has been money I've won from the poker site.  But this week I changed that, although I've been thinking about it for a while.  I decided to make a one time deposit to PokerStars so I could launch what I'm calling the 100 Sit and Go Project.

A sit and go is a poker tournament is a tournament with no fixed starting time, but a fixed number of players.  Once that number of players has signed up for the tournament it begins.  It's a format used both live and online.  I intend to play 100 25 cent sit and goes.  Primarily I'll be playing the 90 player No Limit Hold 'Em version, although I'll probably play some of the 45 player version as well.

Why 25 cent tournamemts?  That should be pretty obvious.  You can play 100 of them for 25 bucks, versus a more expensive tournament.  PokerStars does have cheaper sit and goes, but they're turbo and hyper turbo tournaments, where the blinds rise a bit too quickly for my style of playing.  The cheapest is a 2 center, and as you can imagine a 2 cent tournament where the blinds go up every 2 minutes is pretty much a free for all where people play exceedingly loosely.   "Hey, it's only 2 cents!"  I want to mainly play the 90 player version because the payoff if you make the money is better, even if you have to get through twice as many players. 

As I said this is a one off deposit on my part.  So I paid with a prepaid credit card, a Vanilla brand Mastercard in this case, which is currently usable for deposits from Canada.  It cost me a bit in fees to buy it, but it meant not using my bank account.  I have no reason to suspect PokerStars of any wrongdoing, but the fewer people who have access to your bank account the better.  It also keeps me from being tempted to redeposit if I don't have much luck.

I'll only play one of these in a day, and chances are not every day.  I want this little experiment to last a good long time.  After all it would be pretty easy to burn off 25 bucks in no time, and what fun is that?

Gas Guzzlers.

As if the RCMP needed more bad publicity.  An officer from the Rosthern detachment, and his wife, have been charged  with theft for using an RCMP fuel card to fill their personal vehicles.  The charges include theft over five thousand dollars and fraud over five thousand dollars.  The amount makes me wonder how long this has been going on.  Or are they driving tanks, 18 wheelers, or some other vehicles that have really crappy gas mileage?

Weird Numbers.

"Roy Halladay, four and six" is not a statement you expect to hear.  Of course such an odd win-loss total for Halladay is presumably part of why the Phillies are tanking badly this year.

Gold Medal For Goofiness.

Conservapedia isn't a place I've spent much time looking at.  But someone posted a link to their 2012 Olympics page, and I just couldn't help myself.  As expected it's full of some rather weird ideas, such as the statement "... the pagan origins of the Olympics have been replaced by faith-based achievement by the participating athletes."  Really?  There's a difference between pagan running and faith based running?  And of course by "faith" they mean Christianity.  It's not like pagans had faith, right?  Then there's the weird question about athletes from public schools not winning gold medals.  Of course it's not so weird if you consider that the kind of folks who write stuff for Conservapedia don't like anything run by government that doesn't involve law enforcement or the military.  I also wonder how one defines an "increasingly atheistic nation," which seems to be an obsession of the page creator.  After all the number of atheists and others that the Conservapedia crowd would consider non-believers is growing in the US as well.

In any case if there's an Olympic competition for dumb Olympic themed web pages this one would certainly be in the running,  I suspect there are worse out there.

Addenda: The word faith being in purple is due to copy-pasting that line from Conservapedia.

But You Don't Have To Understand Math.

I know some of you have ad blockers running on your web btrowser, but you really shouldn't.  You're missing all the fun.  I just saw an ad for something that will help you avoid  "3 Awful Guitar Mistakes."  Apparently that something doesn't involve math, as the ad copy states "If you do either of these 3 things yo will NEVER play guitar well."  Of course maybe I was wrong in assuming that you can't use the term either when there are more than two choices.  Number things have never been my strong suit.

Need A Kitty Fix?

Go check out James Nicoll's new companion.  What a charming shade of orange he is.

I like cats, but I can't imagine owning one.  I'm too lazy to do the necessary cleaning up after them.

Exit Music.

Another familiar face from my '70s childhood has left.  Sherman Hemsley has died at 74.  He came to widespread fame as George Jefferson, the cantankerous neighbour, and African American reflection, of Archie Bunker on All in the Family.  The character proved sufficiently popular that a spinoff was created, the highly successful The Jeffersons, which ran for 10 seasons from 1975 to 1985.  Interestingly Isabel Sanford, who played George's wife Louise, was  20 some years older than Hemsley, although there was no acknowledgement of any  noticeable age difference between the characters they played onscreen.

If you've read  the obituaries today you've probably learned that Hemsley was a fan of British progressive rockers Yes.  He was also a fan of other bands in the genre, such as Gentle Giant and Gong.  He even did an album with Jon Anderson of Yes in 1999, which has not been released.  His favourite Yes song is said to have been "Roundabout."  Not a huge surprise, since it's lots of people's favourite Yes song.  So, here's some exit music for him.

They're Here.

A post I made back in April about the Hells Angels holding their convention in Saskatoon has generated a lot of hits.  It's being held this week, and here's the latest report from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.  The police expect some 400 Angels and associates to show up.  However Saskatoon police say they expect little if any trouble, as the Angels have better things to do than draw heat to themselves.  Not that they won't be watching, and they'll be joined by officers from other jurisdictions.  The Saskatoon chapter of the Angels apparently has 20 members, but police say they're looking to expand their numberrs.

You're Discriminating Against Me!

I can't believe how many of you out there are running contests and such forth that require going to some Facebook page to enter.  Some of us aren't on Facebook, you evil people.  So please stop your disriminatory ways!

Of course the reality is that if not being able to participate in something because you don't have a Facebook account is the worst problem in your life, you really don't have any problems. (And I'm not one to discuss my problems online.)  

It will be interesting to see if Facebook is still so prominent a few years ago.  After all a few years ago everyone and their brother seemed to have a Myspace page, and now it's pretty moribund.