Nothing to See Here

I gots nothing. Falling into the routine of work, work, and more work, getting up at the crack of dawn and getting home at 8 or 9 at night, eating dinner, passing out, rinse, lather, and repeat. It's actually sort of nice as far as a temporary, short-term way o' life, as it's easy to essentially zone out and keep my head down and not worry about much of anything.

Still digging High Stakes Poker on GSN, to the point that it's spoiling me a bit when watching the "normal" tournament coverage on ESPN/Travel Channel. It's probably a natural evolution of many factors, but I'm less and less interested these days in watching *insert random name* go on an extended heater over a weekend, catch many cards, and then run over the few remaining opponents by simply closing their eyes and swinging their big stack around. I mean, that's tournament poker, and I'm really not knocking it, it's just increasingly boring for me to watch.

High Stakes Poker, though, is a completely different beast, for all the obvious reasons. Aside from the instructional value of seeing how assorted pros play all sorts of hands, it's interesting just to watch the way they interact with the game and players, and how hyper-aware the best players are. You can slice and dice and analyze all you want, as far as what makes the winners in that game winners, but in the end I have to think the biggest factor is experience and simply paying very fucking close attention to everything that goes on.

The latest episode was a pretty nice example of that, especially how easily everyone was reading that jackass Zeidman, and how completely oblivous jackass was, at two different points, yammering on and on with yet another soliloquy. And, to a lesser extent, how assorted players have zeroed in on Amnon Filippi, especially Negreanu, who keeps playing nice cop to ensure that Filippi stays happily seated at the table.

'Twas funny, too, when someone called out Negreanu (I may be slightly misremembering, but I think it was the hand where Doyle strangely slowplayed KK versus Daniel) after he had verbally hemmed and hawed on the river, trying to put Doyle on a hand, and then quickly said "Or that", when Doyle showed his hand, when there was no way in hell that he'd been putting Doyle on that hand. I forget who called him out, but the point was made in about 0.2 seconds that Daniel was completely full of shit if he expected the table to believe that he'd considered the actual hand tabled as a possibility.

Edit: Err, strike the above. As pointed out in a comment, I was thinking of the hand where Eli hit his Broadway straight versus Daniel, not the hand where Doyle slowplayed KK against him. Der...

Pretty much have been poker-free for the last few days, so nothing to report on that front. I may try to sneak in a few of the big tournaments Full Tilt is running August 13-August 20, but it'll likely be a few weeks before I have any sort of time to get back into the regular poker grind.