Ramble Ramble

Had a nice, nice day at the NL tables yesterday, despite digging an early hole for myself by dropping three buy-ins in about 0.27 milliseconds. I think I may have a new poker girlfriend. Sorry, LHE, baby, but these things just happen sometimes. There's no accounting for fate. Or, you know, it's not about you, baby, it's about me.

I do think, though, that playing a ridiculous amount of LHE was definitely time well spent, as far as switching over to NL. Poker is still poker is still poker. All the strategry still applies. You just suddenly have the super human power to selectively manipulate the pot in the blink of an eye.

Even more so than at LHE, patience and position are your best NL friends. Far too many people get caught up in flashy NL play, floating with junk hands, making too many huge plays at too many pots with complete air, doing their best Sammy Farha imitation, ignoring the simple reality that a lot of successful NL play can be distilled down into:

Win more money when your opponent has TPTK than you lose when you have TPTK.

That’s pretty much it. If you can consistently do that, you’ll make many grandusands of genuine American dollars. It might not be flashy or exciting but it works.

Knock on wood, but all remaining hurdles appear to have been cleared on the house buying front, and we’re set to close on Friday. Thumbs up to that.

I’m thinking about biting the bullet and jumping through all of the hoops to get licensed to sell real estate. Definitely not something that I’d consider a dream job, but it’s something I’ve thought about doing at various points. Other than having to, you know, talk to people, it’d be a decent gig, and would definitely fit well schedule-wise with all my assorted freelance work, as I could do it part-time and in a more laid-back fashion.

The writing is becoming more and more apparent on the wall at the day job, and it’s likely only a matter of time before they start hacking away at positions here, as far as ensuring that quarterly operating income goals continue to be hit. Which is pretty funny and ironic, as that’s just about the last thing you’d want to do to ensure any sort of long-term growth, but it looks neat and shiny and fantabulous in the short term, as far as being able to continue to hit ridiculous quarterly targets.

The department I work in will likely be the first to go, as we’re just the lowly, non-revenue generating monkeys that create and maintain content, so I’d definitely like to have a firmer exit plan in place. I can likely bang out most of the classroom hours to get licensed to sell real estate in a month or so, so I’ll likely just grind my teeth and do it, even if I don’t immediately put the license to use.

The latest episode of High Stakes Poker was pretty priceless, as far as everyone paying Matusow to stay and play some more when he was ready to leave, and how excited and happy poor Mikey was to get $1,000 from each player to stay. Yeah, Mikey, they love you. They really, really love you…