Sgt Rock- Can You Hear Me Now? 1/3
Sgt Rock
Have you seen the TV commercial with the dude trying to use his notebook
in the WiFi cafe, but being annoyed by one guy looking over his
shoulder, then another waving butt-crack in his face? It's Verizon,
offering unlimited wireless internet access for $59.95 a month.
Intriguing, and down from $79.95, but still a lotto money, like $720 a year.
But then I remembered seeing Verizon on my company's "employee
discounts" webpage, with a special 800 number to call. So I did, and it
turns out they offer us a deep discount for this service too, plus they
waive the activation and shipping fees, and provide the $250 (list)
wireless card free. Damn, what a deal! My company employs a couple
hundred thousand people, and buys their wireless service from... guess
who. :-)
So I faxed them my driver's license, pay stub, and two pints of AB
negative, and 2 days later FedEx brought the package.
This isn't WiFi, and you don't need to find a "hotspot." It's
cellular. Anywhere you an access the Verizon network— Can you hear me
now?— you have internet, at dialup speed. In major cities, it's
broadband at higher speeds, comparable to low-end DSL. It ain't
lightning fast like our cable at home, but it works pretty much
EVERYWHERE, 'cept maybe out in the boonies. My laptop now has a phone
number, but it can't do voice or take incoming calls.
This was my second big tech-splurge this month. The first was when
Office Depot put HP zv6000 laptops on sale for $499 (base model, after
rebates) and with upgrades at 50% off. Sat with the salesman at his
screen and did a CTO— Computer-to-order— upgrading to XP Pro, Athlon64
3200+, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD, UltraBrite screen, Dual Layer DVD burner, 128MB
ATI Video, and extended battery, all for 8 bills. Ten days later FedEx
brought that package, direct from assembly in Kunshan, China.
The new notebook and new wireless card/service go together real nice.
After installing, configuring and getting online, the first thing I did
was play a couple Paradise 40/80 games for a couple hours, with nary a
connectivity hiccup of any kind. Yes!
So we're planning a Road Trip in a couple weeks, targeting San Fran,
Tahoe, Reno, Vegas, LA, San Diego, and other points of interest up and
down that corridor. Can you picture rolling down the interstate, one
driving, and the other with the laptop and wireless, playing high stakes
online poker?
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Been well over a year since we took any kind of trip or I posted
anything. Didn't make WSOP this year, either. Now that the world is
flat, everything is different.
We played in the local live games earlier this year, but lately are
playing mostly online, and doing pretty OK. Been putting this report
together a little bit at a time for about a year now. The following
focuses on limit Hold 'Em, live or online. I still don't know anything
about NL, PL, or tournament play.
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Played 30/60 one night early this year with the tallest man I ever saw
at a poker table. This guy— I'll just call him Mr. B, for basketball—
wears lucky #13 for my local NBA team, and sat right next to and chatted
some with me. Big? Yeah. Rich? Hell, yeah. But no clue about Hold
'Em, and couldn't care less about the money. Just partying with and
showing off for his mini-entourage of 3 hot (?) babes. It's fun playing
poker with millionaires.
Early on he was in seat 1 and I was in seat 8 when seat 7 came open and
B wanted to move to it, just as the big blind reached that seat. So the
dealer dealt his hand to seat 7, even though B is still stacking and
racking chips in Seat 1. He tosses $30 over to cover his blind.
I'm dealt AQ offsuit UTG, and open-raise. Everyone mucks around to the
BB. Mr. B, still in seat 1, hasn't seen his cards, but he "raises in
the dark." So I raise back, and he caps it.
Board comes A K 7, 4, 3
Of course I bet that flop, and AGAIN we cap it. He slowed down some and
just called my turn and river bets. He's STILL across the table from
his hand that he STILL hasn't seen, and at the showdown he has bupkis,
so my pair of Aces wins 24 small bets ($720.) To him this probably
means about as much as a dime does to me. Merry Xmas! I'll certainly
never forget that hand.
Later one guy offered to buy him another drink, but he said "No, we have
a game with Cleveland tomorrow." The offerer persisted, but then
another player told him to knock it off, as he had money on the game!
After losing a couple more hands B had that second drink anyway.
Next day I'm back in the cardroom, the game is on TV, and B isn't doing
so well, kinda dragging ass. Go figure. :-)
Faced Mr. B. again a couple weeks later. I had a Jack in my hand, and
by the river there were three more on the board. I bet it, and he
raised me! As I re-raised I told him that "Michael, Janet, LaToya AND
JERMAINE are ALL FOUR here with us tonight!" but he seemed to doubt my
veracity, and called anyway. Showed us 99.
=============
Is your game in need of an upgrade? Are you stagnating, or feeling like
you've hit some kind of a glass ceiling? Trying to figure out how to
"take your game to a new level," but don't know where to look, or even
what you're looking for? Well maybe, just maybe, you might be able to
find it at...
The Wall
Humankind has been looking for some kind of a "greater understanding"—
sometimes also called "enlightenment," or Nirvana, or "expanded
consciousness"— since, well, since forever. After those basic needs
like food, water, shelter, and safety are taken care of, people move up
Maslow's hierarchy and seek a greater understanding of what life is all
about, and where they fit in to the big picture. Or something.
Those quests for enlightenment et. al. have taken several forms over the
last couple millennia, and at various times people have tried to find it
through things like transcendental meditation, religious fervor, dousing
oneself with gasoline and igniting, chanting, kinky sex, yoga, monastic
lifestyle, drugs, chastity, and so on. Some of those practices may have
helped a little, but most did not.
Starting in the middle of the decade and peaking around 1969— the
Summer of Love— my generation tried to "expand consciousness" through
things like marijuana, LSD, peyote, mescaline, and an interesting
concept known as "Free Love." Those things didn't work either, but we
sure had a good time.
Of course it's hard to find something if you don't quite know what
you're looking for, and, hey, just exactly what is "Enlightenment,"
anyway? What's it like when you get there? What does Nirvana feel
like? Dictionary.com says:
nir·va·na (nîr-vän-ne) n.
1. often Nirvana
1. Buddhism. The ineffable ultimate in which one has attained
disinterested wisdom and compassion.
2. Hinduism. Emancipation from ignorance and the extinction of
all attachment.
2. An ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, or joy.
Imagine, if you will, A WALL, about as tall as you are, and as wide as
it needs to be to contain, in small writing and maybe pictures, like
thumbnails, representations of EVERYTHING that is inside your head. All
of your knowledge (including misconceptions, of course) memories,
images, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, fears, and so on, are recorded in
words and pictures on this vast wall.
Now imagine that you are standing very close to The Wall, with an empty
toilet paper tube in your hand, held up to one eye like a short
telescope. Your other eye is closed, and with your "tunnel vision" view
through the tube, you can see (are conscious of) only a small portion,
just a teeny-weenie bit, of what is there before you on The Wall.
Although you only see one small piece of The Wall at any given time, you
can quickly jump from one spot (thought, idea) to another. This might
be weakly analogous to the un-enlightened person's normal waking state
of consciousness.
If you can put down the tube, and open the other eye, you can see a
larger piece of The Wall, more words and pictures. Maybe you still can
focus only on one part of what's in front of you at a time, or maybe you
can "unfocus" a little and "see" a larger piece (raise your
consciousness) to be aware of more than just a single idea.
Then, if you can STEP BACK from The Wall, far enough to take a holistic
view and "see" ALL of it, so that you are at once conscious of
"everything"— which of course means being conscious of nothing in
particular— then you have attained the highest level of consciousness,
or Nirvana, or Enlightenment, or whatever you wish to call it.
I personally have never reached this level, but I did come close one
night in 1972, when we all took LSD and played Texas Hold 'Em Strip
Poker with a Pinochle deck. The term "Action Flop" was born that night,
and you shouldn't knock it 'til you've tried it. You can even skip the
acid, and with the right opponents it's still a pretty good time.
More recently, newbies in the live limit games I play have been
reminding me of this analogy of The Wall, with their tunnel-vision
approach, and narrow focus of attention on their own two hole cards. I
mean, these guys are oblivious to everything else around them. As soon
as their cards are dealt, they bring them in, hunker down, and take a
good look. Once they've peeked they may prepare to toss them, or they
may reach for chips. Then, finally, they look back up and try to see
where the action is, and if it's their turn yet, and, by the way, did
anyone call or raise the blinds yet?
Action before the flop seems to be the easiest time to find useful
tells. Tells on later rounds, like when cards hit the board, probably
have greater value, but they are also, at least in my experience, more
difficult to spot and interpret.
Anyway, I take my usual contrarian approach, and seek ways to do the
opposite of what my opponents do, In this case, that means minimizing
time spent looking at my cards, and looking instead at "everything"
else. I do grab and protect my hand right away as it's dealt, and get
it into "looking position," but that's all by touch. My eyes are on the
deal, and the other players, especially those behind me.
If you're trying to figure out how to "take your game to the next
level," then you might try this, even if just as an exercise: Don't
look at your hole cards, or at the board, until you really need to.
It's fairly easy to do this before the flop, but when cards hit the
board, it takes a lot of discipline to suppress the urge to look, and to
just watch your opponents. Try it.
Instead of being anxious to look at cards that aren't going anywhere,
mentally take a step back, and look instead at everything else. "Expand
your consciousness..." and try to look at, to serenely gaze upon, the
entire table, and to be aware of everything that is happening. With as
many as nine other players, there's quite a lot going on! If you can
get in touch with some of that, it just might open up a whole new world
for you to explore, and thus you arrive at the threshold of that "next
level."
One guy in my game pretty much never raises preflop with AA or KK. I
been watching him, and it's getting to where I can sense when he's
limping in with a big hand. Of course if I were busy looking at my
cards, then I'd never see the subtle things he does at these times.
Other, more frequent pre-flop tells include guys on your left telling
you that they're folding, or raising, and helping you decide, or maybe
even completely changing your mind about how or whether to play your
starting hand.
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Show Me The Money
Another place where you may spend too much time and effort looking at
the wrong thing is: While You're Betting. This was a real problem for
me, because I've never been any good at "moving chips," and had to
carefully watch to be sure I'm putting out the right amount. Once I got
it out there, often as not I would have to add or remove a chip or two
from the stacks to make them right. Spending all this time watching
what I was doing, I of course was NOT seeing what the other guy was
doing. Not good. And so, I decided that I had to learn how to bet and
raise strictly by touch, without having to watch myself.
It helped to keep my stacks sized according to the game. In a red chip
game, I used to keep my checks in $100 stacks no matter what. That was
dumb. Now, in $20/40 and $30/60 games I keep them respectively in $80
and $120 stacks, This makes it easy bring out a stack, maybe cut it in
half once or twice, as needed, and push out a bet or a raise, all the
while hardly taking my eyes off my opponents. Don't underestimate the
value of this.
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THE HAT
All this watching and studying of the opposition is something you don't
particularly want to advertise. No, you'd prefer that their oblivion
continue, and that they never notice your close attention to their every
move. When real pros wear shades in the game, it is of course more than
anything else intended to prevent others from seeing what they're
looking at.
I used to wear dark prescription sunglasses a lot, but the eyestrain,
along with the unwelcome "wiseguy" image they suggest, pretty much made
me give them up. Instead, I depend on the carefully positioned brim of
my hat to control who sees what. It works pretty good with just about
any hat. I usually wear a US Army camouflage "Utility" (baseball style)
uniform cap, with Sergeant First Class insignia, so if you see me at
Bellagio or anywhere else, please say hello, OK? If I got lucky and
have a big stack that day, I may even be wearing THE HAT.
Around the same time I started playing 20/40, '94-'95 or so, I decided
that I had to acquire and wear an ultimate poker hat. I think I read
somewhere that Doyle Brunson had said something about how, by tipping
the brim of his cowboy hat, he arranges that "Nobody can see mah eyes
unless ah want to them to." Well, I'm sure as hell not a cowboy, and
would look even more ridiculous than usual wearing a Stetson. Plus, I
thought, if we're going for ridiculous, might as well go all the way.
So I ordered a US Army Drill Instructor hat from Army clothing sales in
San Antonio. $54.00 plus shipping, but no tax. This is the same hat
worn by Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, Damon Wayon in Major Payne, Warren
Oates in Stripes, and Jack Webb in The DI. It also closely resembles
the hats worn by Smokey the Bear, Yogi Bear, and State Troopers just
about everywhere, and is sometimes also called a "Campaign Hat." This
hat has more brim than any other. I mean, it's just one big perfectly
flat and circular brim, with a crown in the middle. Perfect for hiding
behind. Not so good for being inconspicuous, or for looking cool (or
anything other than stupid) but you can't have everything.
Mrs. Rock claims embarrassment, and asks me to not wear THE HAT when
she's around, but sometimes I ignore her and put it on anyway. It does
tend to draw a lot of smart-ass remarks, so I usually keep it in the
trunk of the car, and, as I said, wait until I have a big stack before I
wear it; somehow I think that prevents me from looking like a complete
idiot. Yeah, like I really care. :-)
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Continued in Part II
Sgt Rock
http://sgt.rock.home.comcast.net
mail2:
sgt DOT rock AT
comcast DOT net
jpo...@gmail.com
because the floor was none too clean and I didn't want to take it off.
Also thought it would be good for table image -- i.e., other people
might think I was an ESPN newbie with the gimmicks at the LLHE tables.
Finally decided to ditch it -- why give other players one more mnemonic
to remember me by?