submitted on Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 9:59:14 AM

Had my first fantasy football draft last night. I'm once again in a mind-boggling six leagues this year, which is a residual effect from last year when I overextended myself without realizing it. I ended up turning down a couple leagues this year, one that I did last year that's a money league, but ends up having like 14 teams, which dilutes the teams too much if you ask me. Plus, they had funky scoring where they included return yards, which really screws with who should be on your team. So I don't mind missing that league this year. I replaced it with a money league at work, which is what I had a draft for last night.

It was a live draft, which I've never actually done before. All my other leagues are online, given the varied location of its participants. It was pretty entertaining, although we were on a bit of a time crunch since our room was only reserved for two hours. We ended up taking a little bit longer than that, but it worked out fine. The annoying thing, though, is how long some people take. It just amazes me how long people sit there and contemplate who they're going to take in the 10th round. I mean, you don't need to spend all that time deciding whether or not Patrick Crayton is really worth it or not. As the draft progresses, it should be very clear to you what position needs you have, and should be ready to pick when it gets to you. It was the same few people every time, too. I mean, yeah, sometimes the guy right before you takes your pick and you have to re-evaluate, but other than that, just make your pick already.

Anyways, it was a fun time overall, and I'm mostly happy with my team. I think my steal of the draft was picking up Reggie Williams in the 10th round. I don't know why the guy was still around, he had over 600 yards and 10 scores last year, and I would expect more of the same with Garrard playing all season. Considering people like Jabar Gaffney and Vincent Jackson had already been picked, it seemed like a good find.

  submitted on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 8:52:40 PM

I hit my first ever royal flush today in a Pot Limit Omaha Hi tournament:

[quote]PokerStars Game #19690964826: Tournament #100869330, $10+$1 Omaha Pot Limit - Level VI (100/200) - 2008/08/17 - 16:05:30 (ET)
Table '100869330 31' 9-max Seat #6 is the button
Seat 1: Mike_Maloney (7645 in chips)
Seat 2: 2 callu (6005 in chips)
Seat 3: chechebobos (16775 in chips)
Seat 4: AAGAMBLER (3775 in chips)
Seat 5: Holtbrink (16310 in chips)
Seat 6: SubtleOne (3105 in chips)
Seat 7: thepokerchic (4725 in chips)
Seat 8: ferdglob (4810 in chips)
Seat 9: tomtom7 (5471 in chips)
thepokerchic: posts small blind 100
ferdglob: posts big blind 200
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Mike_Maloney [ ]
tomtom7: folds
Mike_Maloney: calls 200
2 callu: folds
chechebobos: calls 200
AAGAMBLER: folds
Holtbrink: folds
SubtleOne: folds
thepokerchic: calls 100
ferdglob: checks
*** FLOP *** [ ]
thepokerchic: checks
ferdglob: checks
Mike_Maloney: bets 800
chechebobos: folds
thepokerchic: calls 800
ferdglob: folds
*** TURN *** [ ] []
thepokerchic: checks
Mike_Maloney: checks
*** RIVER *** [ ] []
thepokerchic: checks
Mike_Maloney: bets 800
thepokerchic: calls 800
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Mike_Maloney: shows [ ] (a Royal Flush)
thepokerchic: mucks hand
Mike_Maloney collected 4000 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 4000 | Rake 0
Board [ ]
Seat 1: Mike_Maloney showed [ ] and won (4000) with a Royal Flush
Seat 2: allu folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: chechebobos folded on the Flop
Seat 4: AAGAMBLER folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 5: Holtbrink folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 6: SubtleOne (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 7: thepokerchic (small blind) mucked [ ]
Seat 8: ferdglob (big blind) folded on the Flop
Seat 9: tomtom7 folded before Flop (didn't bet)[/quote]
I runner runner'd that shit, too. Unfortunately I tilted my stack off a bit outside the money, but whatever.

  submitted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 8:00:52 PM

Went sailing on a tall ship out of Navy Pier on Thursday, got to take some good shots of the lake and the city. Here's a link to the album if you want to see:

  submitted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 3:33:57 PM

So Wednesday was Mookday, and that meant another chance to prevent this guy from taking the top spot on the overall money leaderboard and winning his bet. I will give Waffles credit, this bet has certainly made the Mookie quite entertaining as of late, and it also seems to have elevated his play as well.

I was fresh off an 8th place finish at the Mookie last week, where I flopped top pair with my AJ, decided to slow play against Waffles since he had position and a big stack, unfortunately for me he turned trips when a 4 hit, and we then got it all in with me drawing dead. Unfortunate, but I'm pretty happy with my play there. The big thing about that tourney, though, was that I decided to play very tight. I didn't try to see cheap flops early on, expand my range of starting hands in position too wide, just tried to stick to the strong hands and go from there. I find this tends to have success in blogger tournaments, because we have many fairly aggressive players to play against. Although LJ told me the other day that she thought bloggers were too tight, I feel like it's the other way around. But then again, we're on different ends of the playing spectrum, so it makes sense that we look at the blogger community differently.

Anyways, it worked pretty well for me, as I had a low seen flop percentage, but a good won at showdown percentage. I decided to try and employ that again this week, and it again worked well, although I will admit, for the first hour, I was getting a disgusting number of premium hands. AA twice in the first hour (And a third time when we were down to 2 tables) AK once, KK twice, and TT twice. In the first hour! Ridiculous. However, the unfortunate thing is that I couldn't get action on anything to save my life. I feel like normally in a blogger tournament I am constantly being 3-bet preflop, check-raised postflop, whatever. Always facing aggression. And for whatever reason this week, I didn't encounter any 3-bets, and my continuation bets after the flop encountered no resistance. Here's a brief sampling:













Good lord. The only hand I got anything resembling playback was my KK hand against Astin where I had to check the flop and the turn to even get him to bet out, and then he just folded to my raise anyways. All my raising, c-betting, general aggression, all without having to show down any of my hands, and no one even attempts to look me up the whole time? Argh. I don't even know how that happens. So an hour into the tourney, and I was fortunately up to 5700 chips thanks to all the cards I was getting, despite not showing down a single hand outside of the blinds.

However, early on in hour two I gave it all back on a hand I had a hard time with postflop.


So, if I can get results oriented for a second, I hate that play by my opponent. I am re-raising from the blinds for over a quarter of my stack, knowing I am out of position. I'm not 3-betting light here, although there is the possibility of a squeeze play, so I'm not necessarily uber strong. Still, it's safe to assume I have a strong hand. Second, my raise means my opponent has to call off literally half of his stack to see the flop. And he's going to do that with 66? I mean, aside from hoping to hit a set, I can't see what that accomplishes at all. I really hate that call.

But anyways, I really get into an awkward position here post flop. My opponent only has 1300 left, and there is already a pot of over 3000, and the flop was completely awful for me, two overs, three flush cards (of which I have none), and now I'm first to act. Ultimately I decided to use the ace as a scare card, and hope he didn't have JJ and would fold. I figured he had to have some kind of a had to flat call that kind of raise, but it also didn't seem like he would have A-x, because AK would likely re-raise, and I don't see how you can make a call there with AQ or lower. I guess I was putting him on something like KK-99, and was hoping the ace would get him to fold. I don't know if that's the right play there, but again, because he just flat called off half of his stack preflop, it really screwed with me postflop when he doesn't have much left in his stack, but the flop missed me pretty hard. Anyways, turned out he just got real lucky on the flop and I ended up losing half my chips.

Anyways, seems like some of my early aggression did pay some dividends later, as I was able to catch the big stack to my right trying to push back at an unfortunate time:


I couldn't hit the call button fast enough. I think I had pushed him around in the blinds once or twice before, so coupled with all my other preflop raises I had been making, I guess he felt like I was full of it. Good double up for me, and I was able to get back into things.

Not much action for me the rest of the second hour, although I had to fold a button re-raise with 88 to a push, and lost a race against Astin 77 < AK, and just like that I was down to 1900 chips. But fortunately I was able to get a big hand at the right time and pick up a nice pot:



Into the third hour, the blinds were up to 200/400/50, so with a stack of 5,000 I needed to make some moves and climb up the leaderboard, which I was able to do by winning three hands in a row, shoving in the big blind to a couple limpers, shoving into the big blind from the small blind, and taking the blinds with from the button. Just like that I was up to 8500 chips, and finally felt like I had some breathing room once again. We were then down to two tables, and I found my third AA hand of the night and jumped up to 10,000 chips, although I gave back a few thousand when my 98 sooted was no good against 66 in the blinds. But I hung in there, got back above the 10,000 chip mark, and was in 6th place or so going into the final table.

Here is my one big suckout hand that I had during the tournament, which propelled me into the chiplead:


Rambler had been aggressive in LP with his raises, which makes since considering he was in the chiplead. I hadn't been able to call his raises before, so I thought was okay to call, and I was okay with getting rid of it on a dangerous flop. I hit the flop pretty hard, with top pair and an open-ended straight draw, and I opted for the check-raise since Rambler was almost certainly going to bet out. Props to him for throwing out what looked to be a perfectly harmless c-bet, I didn't think for a second that he really had much of a hand. I figured even if he did have a hand I was probably drawing to 13 outs, but it turns out I only had 8. But I got lucky and hit one of them, and took over the chip lead.

I didn't get too many eliminations at the final table, although I did knock out AJ with AK when there were six left, to give myself about a 20,000 chip cushion over the second place person. Within about 10 hands 5th through 3rd was eliminated, and since I was not involved in those, I walked into heads up with NYRambler with a 100k to 60k chip deficit. HU didn't last too long, as Rambler was being pretty aggressive, so I decided to take a stand with another check-raise holding an open-ended straight draw, but karma's a bitch and I ran into KK this time, and couldn't find any outs:


I don't really have any problem with my play there. Again, nice job on his part disguising the strength of his hand with a good-sized c-bet, and with his previous aggression it was hard to tell when he actually had a hand. I think my push is successful there a lot, and I got a little unlucky by running into kings. What goes around comes around, I guess. Good game by NYRambler, I felt like he played pretty strong throughout.

Felt good getting second in the Mookie, although I'm sad that I didn't get to sit with Waffles once. I guess there's always next week.

  submitted on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 9:13:03 AM

I haven't talked about the Brett Favre drama too much, mostly because the media has been completely overhyping the story since before it even began, to the point that I tried to pay as little attention to it as possible. As is usually the case with overblown stories, the best approach is to remember that 99% of the media has nothing to back up any of their speculation, and just ignore what most people have to say until some actual facts come out. And that's what I did.

Obviously I did have my own thoughts on the matter (I felt like the only way Favre would ever play another down of football was for another team), but I certainly didn't subscribe to all this overreaction and hatred for either the Packers or Favre that many people have adopted. I can certainly understand Favre retiring and then changing his mind. I saw Michael Jordan do it twice. I also understand Green Bay wanting to move on once Favre retired and being put in a tight spot when he said he wanted back in. The Packers can't just release him, because it's a horrible business decision, which is easy to see. They didn't want him to play, because they wanted to go with Aaron Rodgers, so that meant his only two options were to stay retired or to be traded away. I don't put a lot of blame on anyone in this situation, it just evolved the way it did and the awkwardness was mostly inevitable. Favre probably hasn't made this as easy as he could have, but whatever.

So now I read that the Packers are going to have an open competition for the starting QB job, and Favre will be there in training camp trying to get his job back. That's certainly a surprising turn of events. To go from all these situations and circumstances to just having Favre come back to training camp like nothing happened and (most likely) take back his role as starting QB? I hope there aren't any long term team morale ramifications from a decision like this. Hopefully Aaron Rodgers is a professional about all of this (He has been so far, and being a first round career backup because the old guy ahead of you on the depth chart won't retire has to be very frustrating) and there isn't any real issue made about any of this. But I will admit I'm a little wary.

Either way, I always enjoy watching Favre play, so it appears that perhaps I can get another season of it...or five.