Monday Blues

One of my occasional catch-up posts...

Saturday sucked. Stuart Dougal's refereeing is about as consistent as Michael Jackson's skin tone, but, even so, Alan Thompson and Neil Lennon need to get a grip of themselves.

I've been meaning to put together some thoughts on Celtic's prospects for the season but events have rather overtaken me. I'll try to catch up soon.

More productively, I've now got a distributed client-server Poker Tracker setup running. PostgreSQL on a Linux server, a desktop PC doing the processing donkey work, and my laptop accessing the PostgreSQL database over a wireless network. More on that soon from geeky me!

Played some low buy-in Pot Limit Omaha on Poker Stars over the weekend.

Dear God! It was the poker equivalent of the intro to Saving Private Ryan - chip stacks exploding in all directions, bodies falling with every hand, whilst I belly wriggled and nut peddled my way through the maelstrom.

Quadrupled buy-ins abounded, but not for me. I escaped with my bankroll intact and a small profit. The Stars bonus points rack up pretty quickly at those tables!

Empire are now running a reload at 10 x bonus, so it's back to the low limit Hold Em tables to work that off this week.

How about a random baby pic?



She's doing great, putting on weight, getting more alert and active, and keeping us both busy. (Mrs Div much more so than I in all honesty) Time for her first inoculations this week, so time off work to support the family.

For a baby she has some interesting taste in music - recent tunes to have soothed her to sleep including some by Foo Fighters, White Stripes and Bob Dylan!

When the world of football and poker goes horribly wrong, it's much more productive to give the baby a cuddle, than kick the cat!

Time off work = late nights more acceptable, which hopefully = live poker. We shall see.

Speaking of music. Time for the next in my ever so intermittent series:

Music To Play Poker By - Part 3

The Stone Roses - Fools Gold

Another from the 'Madchester' era which defined my university years, and yes I am treating you to the full unadulterated ten minute version.

Actually I suspect a fair degree of 'adulteration' was applied while this track was being laid down.

Quite a few people seem to go for aggressive, high tempo music while they are playing poker. Presumably to keep them focused and their aggression levels high.

Personally, aggression has never been a problem for me. When I'm in 'the zone' it's controlled aggression all the way.

My biggest issue is keeping focus in the face of idiocy. I'm not great at handling a succession of bad beats.

By bad beats I don't mean the catching a flush/straight on the river when the odds were wrong to call type beat.

I'm thinking more the uber bad beats - cold call 3 bets with T3s, catch bottom pair on the flop and river two pair, WTF were you even doing in the hand, abominations.

The sort where the cards are so bad, the first inkling you get is when they raise you on the river.

In the privacy of my own home, Hellmuthian rants used to be the order of the day. A few soul cleansing moments of ranting and raving, then back to business.

With a baby in the home, those days are over. I hate myself when I resort to chat retribution - though every so often I can't resist the urge - so it's important to stay chilled by other means.

Thus, The Stone Roses make perfect sense. I can actually maintain my live game persona with this track on.

I'm not sure if it's purely the music, or perhaps long forgotten happy moments which were set to this soundtrack, but that T3s now elicits nothing more than a mournful shake of the head, a sigh, and onwards to the next hand.

Really just about any Roses song would have been acceptable here, but the title alone could swing it. Throw in a fantastic groove and the line:

'I know the truth and I know what you're thinking'

and it's the perfect poker song for me. Is there any sweeter moment in poker than when you hit that exact sensation, and know just what to do?

If only there were more of them for me! Sigh. Perhaps with practise...