Where things can get pretty igry ...Rick's Cafe Americain

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Poker Blog Stuff

CJ at Up For Poker has the first tourney report on the PJK.  And CJ is right. I should have played in one of these already. Good thing Rick is carrying the banner well.

One of the best movies of all time gets the Sports Guy treatment from hdouble over at Cards Speak.  Great post - check it out.

Pauly has been posting his Las Vegas trip reports over at the Tao of Poker and his Phish concert reports over at the Tao of Pauly. I’m into poker; not so much into Phish, so I know which ones I’m reading. But if “Meatstick” and “Fluffhead” mean something to you, check it out.  All I can think of when I read about Phish concerts now is this. Well, and this - even though he was cleared.

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My rooting interests have always been strange.  As I kid growing up in Queens I picked the teams that I would follow for the rest of my life for strange reasons.  I chose the New Orleans Saints and the Detroit Red Wings for their symbols (the fleur-de-lis and winged wheel, respectively). I chose the Lakers because of an airlines commercial starting Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that is lost to the ages.  And I chose the Pirates because a young benchwarming Ugarte was on a little league team called the Pirates that went undefeated in 1978.  The next year Willie Stargell and Sister Sledge took the Lumber Company to the World Series, cementing my devotion to the Pirates and weaning me from the Yankees.  (I confess to still bandwagonning the Yankees so that I can care about baseball in October.  And my first pro game actually included someone telling me “They aren’t booing, they are saying “Looooooou!,” so I have a deep affection for the Yanks.)

The Pirates used to play in the NL East along with the Mets, so I could always see them at least a few times a year.  I saw the 18-inning marathon that included an old Rusty Staub saving the game for the Mets despite being swapped between right and left field with Clint Hurdle on virtually every batter to keep him as far away from the action as possible.  I got on camera during the Banner Day festivities (yes, I taped it; no, I didn’t save the tape) between the games of a Mets-Pirates doubleheader in 1987 with my friend Chris (a Yankee fan wearing a Yankee hat) while holding a spray-painted cardboard box that said “Pirates Rule!” when the intricately illustrated bedsheet of a Mets flotilla sinking a pirate ship was caught in the wind just as the camera trained on it when WOR was going to commercial.  I saw the great Pirates teams of the early 90’s before the team ran out of money and dove into the cellar.

With realignment, the Pirates moved from the NL East to the NL Central.  Then MLB “unbalanced” the schedule so that teams play more games against their division rivals. Now the Pirates play at Shea for only one series a year.  That series is this weekend, so you will see me there rooting on a team of youngsters (Kip Wells, Josh Fogg, Oliver Perez, Bobby Hill, Craig Wilson) and overpaid mediocrity (Raul Mondesi, Randall Simon). With pride.

Tonight, the future of pitching (Kip Wells) faces its past (Tom Glavine).  Saturday afternoon, its more of the same as Oliver Perez meets Steve Trachsel.  The series wraps up with the unrealized potential of Kris Benson meeting the pitcher Art Howe tried to send to AAA, Jae Weong Seo.  Yes, that is exactly as well as I can sell the Sunday matchup.

Except maybe like this: Doesn’t it seem like perfect weather for an April game?

See you at the ballpark Saturday and Sunday.

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As it happens, I live around the corner from the Brooklyn Museum and will be there for some of the weekend’s scheduled activities and looking for Francis and Rose. (Beyond a simple hello, my mother has recently gotten into knitting, so I have some questions for Rose).

I have been watching the building in progress since I moved to the neighborhood last June, my view of the grand columns and classic design marred by construction fencing and cranes.  I never took the time to examine the
plan for the building, so when I saw the entrance addition in progress, it looked to me like a frame.  It turns out, though, that what I thought was a step along the way is the intended design - and now the finished product. I’m not impressed.

The new entrance doesn’t fit at all with the preexisting architecture of the building. It is like a tour of the architectural oddities of my education: from the fishbowl at Cornell’s Uris Library overlooking Libe Slope (which I like) to the Jerome Greene Hall extension at Columbia Law School (which nobody likes). 

Uris Library uses the slope of the hill to create a sunlit reading room with a great view of West Campus. It is also open to passers-by and was known for years as a prime spot for the see-and-be-seen set.  Now that “facetimer” is more a slur than compliment, it is a charming quirk to be visible to the people walking by on the hill.  In its place, the curved glass is integrated into the building and it just ... works.

Greene, on the other hand, with East Campus in the background, looks like a toaster dropped into an aquarium.  The green glass is jarring; the horizontal slats unappealing.  It wasn’t much to look at before, but is just sad now. You can see the evolution here.  ‘Bellerophon Taming Pegasus’ remains a cool statue, though.

The Brooklyn Museum entrance strips the Uris fishbowl out of context and slaps on the slats and green glass of Jerome Greene to bad effect.  It compounds the error by affixing it to the front of a building with a classic look.  I look forward to a view of the museum without construction equipment, but the entrance itself is going to take some getting used to.

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UPDATE A second Hammer makes the TV!  David Oppenheim reraised Carlos’ A3o only to lay down when Carlos reraised him back.  How many Hammers are we going to see?

UPDATE 2 Noli Francisco just killed the table to win this tournament.  He could read players amazingly well when he had the short stack and played extremely well with the big chip lead.  He was willing to endure coin flips because he knew he had the chips to take a loss.

Also interesting to watch was Randy Burger, an amateur player who, like WSOP champ Chris Moneymaker, won his seat in an online tournament.  I admire him for making it to the final table at a WPT event with only six months of poker under his belt.  His inexperience showed, though, as his tells were fantastically obvious. (He always checked his cards when he had a monster.) That said, he has a great bad beat story to tell.  Holding AJ against Mortensen’s AT with a board of A-x-x-x, Burger went all-in and got Mortensen to call - only to have a T hit on the river and knock him out of the tournament. If you are going to tell a bad beat story, you might as well tell one that starts with “So I was heads-up in a pot with the 2002 WSOP champion...” And his $12 online buy-in became $41,000 when he finished in 6th place.  Not bad at all.

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Pick up the nearest book.
Open it to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

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The rain outside made the air dank and humid.  Almost as though Ferrari was hot-boxing us.  The air was making people a little crazy, and the dual themes of the night were “anyone can have a flush at any time” and “beware of jacks.” I didn’t learn that these were the themes until well into the evening, though.

I don’t know if Pauly will blog it in light of his trip to Vegas (ed. - he did.), but there was plenty of action before I arrived.  At least two players left before I got to the game, but neither won more than $20.  On the other hand, not only was Ferrari’s stack small, he had rebought.  Pauly looked like he was doing all right, but I soon found out that he had rebought also.  Danny and Marie (Hee!) looked like they were treading water.  Coach and Joel were cleaning up.  Shuffle up and deal me in.

Like I said, I was playing tight.  Both Ferrari and Marie called rounds of Omaha/8, and in those 14 hands I played two.  I folded one after the flop and lost to Danny’s suck-out flush draw - that I managed not to notice - on the other. (Did he really play 8♣3♣? Yes he did. It would not be the last time that suited trash took a pot, even if it is the last time it appears in the Grovel.) Not too expensive, but not good. 

Coach likes to call wild card games, so I wasn’t surprised when he called Follow The Queen (Queens wild).  I was downright pleased when he dealt me AQ in the hole.  I bet on 3d street, 4th street and 5th street, with escalating bets each time.  My board was showing a straight draw, but since I had been betting it from the beginning, my hand really had limitless possibilities.  Only someone without much experience or a great hand would stay in against me ...

Unfortunately, my aces never improved.  Nothing paired up and I ended up with four to a straight and four to a flush.  Marie check-called all the way with a Q in the hole and bet out on the river.  When she bet on the river, I had to lay down becasue she had a pair of fours showing, and I knew that she must have had a Q in the hole to call the early bets.  In a 7stud wild card game, trip fours dragged the pot. I leave it to you to decide whether trip fours is a great hand. That hand really should have been a sign that I would keep finishing second best, but I played on.

Hold ‘em saw my only win of the night, as the tilt Ferrari was on when I arrived continued.  He called my preflop raise out of the big blind with suited trash, caught top pair on the flop (queens) and he bet it to the river.  My preflop raise was sincere, though, and my pocket kings took the pot.  This was the highlight of the evening.

And then came the thunderstorm.  The rain outside had gone from a light drizzle to a steady downpour, and it makes for a convenient, if cliché, metaphor.  My day, like the weather, was about to get much worse.

Another game of Q+FTQ, brought another wild card in the hole, and three to a straight off the bat.  4th Street was a Q. 5th Street was a 9, but a 9 that followed Marie’s Q. Out of 5 cards, three were wild. So far so good. 6th street was a 6h, which very nicely combined with my door card 2h, to give me a straight flush.  By the time the river came around, Marie had JJQ showing.  $5 max raise and a lot of action meant that the pot was probably ~$60 before the last round of betting.  Marie bet, I raised and Marie called.  I turned over my straight flush as Marie turned over her jack in the hole to make four jacks. She dispiritedly announced four jacks. And then Ferrari picked up her third hole card - revealing a 9 - and suddenly my straight flush might as well be a busted straight.

There are all sorts of reasons why I may have lost the hand anyway, since cards speak and eventually Marie may have flipped the 9 herself, but this is the second game in a row where Ferrari has reached into someone else’s cards. Last game, Ferrari plucked a card of mine out of the muck “to see what he would have had” if he stayed in.  Coach was appropriately outraged, but I just shrugged my shoulders. What do you do when the host is the person breaching the norms? You blog it, I guess.  Yes, I understand that everyone is supposed to turn up all of their cards - but if Marie had mucked after announcing four jacks, she would have lost despite the fifth jack. 

I also took a pounding in Anaconda when the first pass brought me the case 9 from Danny, but as Danny was giving me quads, Joel was sitting on his left passing him ... quad jacks.  The knaves killed me for good, as the round of betting after the declare put me all in.  Which brings up another question for the crowd:

The rules at Ferrari’s are thus: Table stakes do not apply - if a player is raised more than their stack, they can dip into their wallet to cover the bet.  If the player instead chooses to go all-in, the player can’t rebuy if they lose the hand and is done for the night.  The theory seems to be that there is an advantage in being able to selectively go all-in, but I can’t say I really understand where any advantage gained is unfair.  No matter, as I think the standard should always be table stakes.  My plea for table stakes:

The game is a $100 buy-in.  The buy-in is essentially a stop-loss provision.  It sets a maximum that I will lose before I make a decision about buying in again.  If I have to dip into my wallet during a hand in order to keep playing after the hand, I am effectively being forced to increase my buy-in.  Additionally, table stakes lets everyone know how much a player has to risk to call their opponents all the way to the river.  If you want to be in a position to cap every raise, you can buy in before the hand.  Table stakes is a simple, easily enforced rule. 

And even if Ferrari’s rule seems simple, is it really a “rule” if after the hand Ferrari tells me that I can rebuy?

Unwilling to just go home, I hung around and acted as the dealer for the rest of the night.  Ferrari and Pauly took some money back from Danny, but the hold ‘em was mostly uneventful.  $120 lighter, I borrowed cab fare from Ferrari and set off into the rain for a cab back to Brooklyn. 

In the cab ride on the way back, I ended up talking to my white (albino? maybe.) cabbie about my grind at the tables and his on the streets.  I like to talk to drivers about the vicissitudes of driving in a town like New York. Stories about medallion leasing or investing in medallion purchases are interesting, and like all cabbies he had his share of drunk passenger stories.  “I have limits in what I will put up with, you know?  I don’t come and vomit in your office,” noted my temporary chauffeur.

It was one of my better rides in a good while.  Then it took a strange turn as we rumbled down Flatbush Avenue. He said that it is an advantage to be a minority in the industry; he benefits from his whiteness because people get in and see he isn’t a “sand nigger” and it leads to bigger tips. Ugh. How ugly that looks on paper. But I couldn’t decide if he was a racist, or if he was projecting the racism onto his hypothetical passengers. It is a tough trick to pull off, but I ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt.  Why? Because that sort of casual racism is just too depressing to contemplate.

Especially on a night when I was already so far down.

Poker Blog Stuff

Ferrari often complains (both publicly and privately) when I write something about him that he disagrees with (check back for comments to today’s missive), but in his heart he knows that he gets off easy.  In Stephen Elliott’s April 8th poker report (soon to be posted, I’m sure), he gives a friend a severe beating.  This is the sort of thing that might even get me banned from Ferrari’s game:

The updates aren’t daily (and not even necessarily weekly), so to keep up with Elliott’s home games, you can subscribe to his yahoo group by sending an email to pokerreport-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Felicia keeps running the Poker Blogger tournaments at Planet Poker, but I still havent managed to get myself signed up.  Eventually I am going to have to get into that game. Paulsburbon won the Easter tournament, so huzzah for him.

Richard Brodie over at Lion Tales has a good tournament write-up that acts as a reminder that bad beats are just a part of the game.  He doesn’t apologize when he catches cards on the river and he doesn’t complain when his opponents do.  A good lesson for us all.

Iggy had a good run in a PokerStars WSOP qualifier that turned into a winner-take-all cash tournament when there weren’t enough players to cover the entry fee.  Iggy did well enough to chop the prize with the rest of the final four and earned more than $2,000.  Real dollars, not tourney dollars.  Big props to Iggy for the big win.  I’ve got to start playing in the WSOP qualifiers at Stars. It would be like buying a lottery ticket, but hey, I do that also.

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“After the Sept. 11 attacks, our nation faced hard choices.  We could fight a narrow war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush chose the bolder course.”

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First of all, I’m not sure that’s a valid distinction.  Does Rice really believe that al Qaeda is not a global menace?  Second, assuming there is a distinction there, Bush chose neither.  After demolishing what was left of Afghanistan (to what effect?), Bush has chosen to devote our country’s resources to creating a huge fucking mess in Iraq.  As I was saying to Ugarte just yesterday . . .

I continue to believe that American and global security have been ill-served by the invasion of Iraq, not only because of the incredibly poor planning and execution, but because fundamentally I think it has proved to be a very costly distraction from the greater threat of international terrorism (although I continue to believe that even that is hardly the greatest problem our nation faces).

By invading and destabilizing Iraq, we (a) placed a huge American military presence in Iraq and pissed of an extraordinary number of Arabs/muslims/etc. and (b) created an order vacuum which allowed and encouraged anti-American terrorists from outside (including the ones we dispersed from Afghanistan) to come in and attack us there.

If I were an al Qaeda “officer”, Iraq would be a wet dream for me.  On the one hand, it is a massive distraction and resource sink that forces the US to fight with one (or more) arms tied behind its back, and on the other hand it is a killing box ready-made for touching pastoral scenes like the charred corpses on the bridge.

If we can help Iraq to establish a stable, non-fundamentalist regime, I do think that will represent a step forward from the current situation vis-a-vis the threat/spread of Islamic fundamentalism.  However, it will also represent a return to the status quo ante.  Iraq under Saddam was essentially a stable, non-fundamentalist regime.  Since there is little indication that the establishment of a stable, non-fundamentalist, democratic regime in Iraq is even possible, I do not believe we have any real chance of “success” in Iraq.

This, I believe, is the fundamental folly of the Iraq campaign: Now, in addition to our own national security, the fate of Iraq (formerly a non-crazy-fundamentalist state) hangs in the balance.  All the invasion of Iraq did was commit resources and increase the pressure and the stakes.

I think it is a mistake to treat the threat posed by international terrorists and/or Islamic extremists as a national or geo-political entity.  Iraq is not the heart of “their” operations.  We are still not quite sure who or where “they” are—and THAT is what we should be focusing on.  How will we defend ourselves and our operations against international terrorists if the vast majority of our troops, hardware, etc. are fighting guerillas in Iraq?

I believe that what is needed is, to borrow a phrase from Ugarte, a “worldwide anti-terror force”.  Instead, we have unilateral and alienating action.  Our virtually unilateral involvement in a power struggle/reconstruction in Iraq was neither inevitable nor necessary, and I do not believe the “fight” in Iraq is more than distantly related to the “fight” brought to our shores by the WTC bombings, etc, nor that success in Iraq (which seems more and more like saying “success in Vietnam") will have any significant positive effect on the threat posed by international terrorists/fundamentalist extremists.  Nor have we, as some have argued, localized the fight. 

While, sadly, it seems that Al Qaeda and possibly others are taking advantage of our vulnerability in Iraq, I have no reason to believe that there are not as many or more al Qaeda and others all over the world planning attacks on us and our interests and our proxies anywhere and everywhere they can. 

The hullaballoo over Clarke vs. Rice is all a bit irrelevant to me, since in my view this administration has since 9/11 consistently shown that neither al Qaeda nor international terrorism are its top priorities.  Why in the world would it have been any different before 9/11?

*Note: Ms. Rice was cool and professional throughout her testimony.  I just couldn’t resist the headline.

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*I am unaware if it is possible to actually “run out” and buy a copy.  I don’t know where it is sold. So head over to subscription page and put yourself down for two years’ worth. I’ve been told it also makes an excellent gift. 

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Despite all of his winnings, there was one hand that got away from Ferrari.  One that he will have a lot of trouble living down.  Sitting two off of the button, Ferrari joined a hand with 68 (suited? he doesn’t remember - and by the time you finish reading this hand, you may not want to credit him).  Christian raised from the button and was called by three players including Ferrari.  The flop came 7-9-x and the action was checked to Ferrari. 

With a straight draw, a reputation for tight play and two preflop bets on his account, he bet his straight draw.  Christian raised behind him, and again four players saw the next card.  The turn was a blank. 

Check to the raiser, and Christian bet again.  Again, everyone called.  The river was also a blank; no flush draws, but Ferrari missed his straight .

Check to the raiser, fold, fold, and Ferrari is in agony.  Christian carries more shit to the river than the drainage system at a slaughterhouse, so the likelihood that he was bluffing was fairly high.  Still, Ferrari is essentially playing the board.  If Christian has anything better than 4 high, he has Ferrari beat.  So Ferrari mucks his cards face up and says* “If I had anything I’d have called you, but I missed my straight.” This is a questionable move, but Ferrari can build his table image however he likes.  More importantly, Pauly immmediately pointed out that Ferrari actually had a straight because the “blank” on the turn was, in fact, a 5.  Cards speak, but not if you don’t call the bet.  Scoop ‘em up, Christian.

Double kudos to Ferrari.  First, for willingly relaying the story.  Second, for not going on tilt for the rest of the night.

Now let us all join in a round of riotous laughter.

*Not a verbatim quote.

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