Where Have All the Good Titles Gone?

Crammed in a lot of play yesterday, mainly at 5/10 6 max, trying to get in hands towards the Hollywood Poker bonus I just signed up for, which is $1,000 and an iPod if you clear approximately 162,192,762 hands. It's actually going a bit faster than I thought it would, as I'm four tabling at 5/10 and racking up points pretty quickly.

Poker still surprises me, even when you think you've exhausted the ability to be surprised at the plays some people will make. It's not so much the chasing of gutshots or inability to release a low pocket pair on a board of overcards that's baffling, but things like donking the river with J high, after substantial raising on earlier streets, when there is not only a 100% chance that their opponent can beat J high, but also a 100% chance that they will call one more bet on the river.

And yeah, I understand the motivation, and it's not entirely misplaced, but it's odd behavior to see people engage in. Where exactly is that behavior learned, as it essentially has 0% chance of success, has been successful 0% of the time when employed in the past, yet it happens over and over and over? Sheer monkey greed overcoming all experience and rational thought, blocking out all the memories of all the times when that play didn't work?

Pauly has been knocking it out the park with his Born to Gamble series, which anyone not reading (all three of you) should check out, if you haven't. I always find the "How to be a Good Poker Blogger" posts that inevitably crop up amusing, as most mention the very obvious dictum of blogging about poker, not about your kids, your cats, or that funny thing that happened at work the other day.

And that's true, indeed, but the most interesting, well-written poker blogs are the ones that regularly stray from poker, pushing the envelope, including the reader in an ever-widening circle of the author's life, experiences, and everything else that they bring to the tables, instead of just how they feel you should play AJo from UTG+1 in the late stages of a MTT with a M of 4.

A simpler way of saying this is that lately I'm pretty jealous of the Pauly, Change100, Grubbys, and Speakers of the world. Far too often I take the easy approach when it comes to blogging, as far as taking the utilitarian road, compiling information and lists, cutting through the clutter to steer people in +EV directions, and similar stuff, with occasional nuggets from real, actual life thrown in, often in quasi-list format.

There's nothing wrong with that, and I don't really mind it, but I feel as if I'm painting myself into a corner, to some extent. The frustrating thing is that it's entirely of my own doing, is largely due to laziness, and can be solved very easily:

Be more interesting

Which is, cough, pretty damn ironic, given the uninteresting nature of this very post.

Ahh, what fresh hell is this...