Thursday, February 21, 2008

Must Be the Full Moon...

The full moon was beautiful last night. I didn't watch the partial eclipse, but heard it was inspiring. But, dang, why is it every time there's a full moon, people and poker seem to get even whackier than usual???

The bad news is that the "spell" didn't end by awakening this morning; if anything, seems it's getting "weirder." I won't call it "worse", that's all relative; but it's definitely uncomfortable to an overly sensitive underly confident semi-human like the shamster.

Today there's an wave of ice and snow storms rolling through St. Louis. So decided against risking the weather and road quirks, and cancelled my modelling session at Principia University up in Illinois. The beautiful Principia campus, as I've stated before, is one of my favorite places to hang out, and they pay well, so nixing this gig hurts. On the bright side, it means I get to play poker all day (seems like it's been forever!).

On the dark side, my first (and so far only) foray onto the faux felt today was at PokerStars, a $5.50 rebuy/add-on turbo super satellite to EPT-4 Monte Carlo, the final stop in this year's European Poker Tour. I followed my strategy in the early goings: no rebuys, take the single add-on for $5 and play smart and patient amidst the five-minute levels. Worked like a charm, my hands held and I won two races at the river, and come first break I was 1st of 36 left. The event had started with 63, 12 would get paid off and top 6 would advance to the Thursday afternoon EPT-4 MC satellite.

And of course you can guess how it all ended. Shamster finished 13th, bubble boy once more. Went card dead, couldn't hit when made a couple feelers, won a couple pushes after I fell out of top 10. Decisive hand, with 3K left and blinds 800/1600 (150 ante), I called table's top aggressor on my right as he tried yet again to steal pot momentum from me. I had 33, he had KT suited, and everything went nice -- until a darn cowboy rivered. (Siiiigh!!!) What's a poor shamalamadingdongdorkdonk to do? Just move on to the next challenge, I guess.

There should be quite a few of those today, as I try to make up for lost time in online poker-land. I'm aiming for the Rounders Radio freeroll at Carbon in about an hour, then tonight will drop in on league games of Poker Analysis Freeroll League (Cake), Maximum Poker League (Cake), and maybe Shark Poker Tour (Absolute Poker) and/or The Bluffers (Reefer). That last site, Reefer Poker, is a new one that's a skin of poker.com, Carbon, Nordica, etc. More on Reefer at another time, though know that since I can't deposit there until probably next month I intend to freeroll a lot of Reefer to build my roll. (That sounds bad, and I love it!)

Got a poker scare earlier this week when a co-owner said he was going to have to close my home forum, Poker Analysis. The other co-owner, his estranged wife, said she wouldn't let that happen to PA, so things go on fairly normally as the soap opera plays out. I will still play for PA in the next Online Forum Challenge, set for mid-March at Reefer. A lot of good players are at and have come through PA, including Mike Sowers (SowersUNCC), a recent preliminary event winner live at Borgata on the WPT Tour (or was it WSOP? I'm always a confused shamster...).

Another poker "scare" earlier this came when the two February posts in Doyle Brunson's blog disappeared. Happily, they're back today, with new entries; seems he's changed the look/set-up of his blog. And now it allows comments. Doyle's Blog (link at right) is still one of my absolute must-reads on the web.

Modelling Tuesday at St. Louis Science Center with the "Body Worlds 3" exhibition was fun, though not as much as the first time. The initial newness and thrill were lessened, making it more just a job. And one of the other models got his picture in the paper today with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's article on the exhibition. Pooh. Oh well, SLSC curators promised they'd send us models a CD of pictures they took of us at work, so I'll get to share that with y'all eventually.

Yesterday night I lost my temper for a moment with an extremely talented artist, Metra Mitchell, who works as T.A. for the class I was doing at Fontbonne University. Long story short I can sometimes get paranoid when someone uses a laser pointer on me unexpectedly, especially on my face. We had a little cry and I think got over it. I figured later it must be partially the full moon's fault. That also explains Monday and Tuesday and today. Gotta hope the waves mellow soon ... and meanwhile try to flow with them and adapt.

OK, tables, I'm coming, moon or no moon. Brace yourselves...

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