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I realize it's perception more than anything, but it is odd how the beats and the junk-kicking seem to come in highly concentrated doses, in a coordinated, vicious flurry. Sat for two hours at a 10/20 shorthanded table in what should have been the best conditions imaginable, and all I had to show for it was a gaping hole in the bankroll and sore, sore junk. Played for a couple hours later that night, same result. Boo, poker.

Don't forget to hit up all those juicy Crypto monthly bonuses, if you're into that sort of thing. There's gold in them thar hills.

Is something happening in Vegas soon? I wouldn't know, as I'm simply sitting here, hands clapped over my ears, beating on a metal trash can with a ball peen hammer, screaming "Lalalalala I can't hear you lalalalalalalalalalalaala" at the top of my lungs.

(Someone actually showed up in my search stats a few days ago who came via Google, searching for "Lalalalalalala". Yes, indeed, search strings are always good for a chuckle, but you can usually tell what the general thrust of the search was, and what they were likely looking for. But what the hell could Mr/Ms. Lalalalalalala have been after? I mean, that's a lot of Las, more than just LaLa or something similar that could be a song, band, bar, etc. Seems like you're looking for something specific when you type in Lalalalalalala, yet also simultaneously doomed to get absolutely nothing useful back.)

Aside from the randomness of cards, I don't think my head is exactly in the best of places as far as poker goes. I'm having a hard time lately focusing and getting excited about the potential rewards for my poker labors, especially in the grander scheme of things.

It's been a bit exacerbated by recently paying myself the bulk of the profits from my business stuff on the side, as I'd just been keeping all the profits for the year in a money market account. But with the end of the year looming Mr. Accountant recommended we pay everything out, basically to zero out the books so that the corporation shows no excess income on the year and subsequently pays no corporate taxes on profits.

So, long story short, I just deposited the largest single check I've ever held in my grubby hands into our checking account. More than a year's salary at the day job. More than a couple of year's poker profits, assuming the rate I've been running recently would hold true for that time span, playing roughly the same hours.

All of which is very, very good, and I'm very, very happy and grateful for all of it. So don't get me wrong, I am in no way complaining or bemoaning my plight. It feels damn good to reap some of the rewards of my labors, as I've worked really damn hard over the last five years or so steadily building up stuff on the business side.

What's hard, though, and where I originally started with this, is that lately it makes me almost slightly resent the time at the poker tables. I feel like I need to put the time in, as extra income is always welcome, but poker can be a pretty hard way to make easy money (as other more famous poker pundits have pointed out.) I'm still not completely able to say, Oh, yeah, I dropped over $2,000 yesterday at the tables but hey, I'm a winner, baby, and I'll get it back. I mean, yeah, I can say it, and I've internalized it, but it still grinds at me, the paper loss, and affects my general mood and outlook to a degree that I don't like. And lately I seem to be questioning, more and more, if it's simply worth it, as far as the frustration and randomness, especially when I could be doing other things.

The real issue, I think, is the juggling of job/poker/business/life, and the relative weight of each of the balls. I can keep them all going, and am reasonably good at it, but they get harder to balance as the balls get heavier and/or lighter. Lately poker seems to be getting lighter, as I can't quite convince myself as successfully as I have in the past that the money I can likely make from playing 15-20 hours a week is worth it, especially when I could be doing other more stable/more profitable/more enjoyable things.

Which, in the end, is just a lot of babbling about nothing, really. I'm not really contemplating giving up on ol' poker, but I'm also not really happy with the current balance of things. Until I can heed the big flashing neon sign that says "Drop the Damn Day Job Ball Already You Idiot Monkey", I think I'm doomed to stay in the same holding pattern. Which, again, is a nice holding pattern to be in. Just a frustrating one at time.

Embrace Your Inner Donkey

Note to Bill Cowher: Sweet Jebus, that was one of the absolute worst displays of play calling I've ever seen. You're hanging in there, somehow, and you decide to go for an onside kick to start the second half? After you spot the Colts an easy TD for now reason with that gem, you decide to go for it on 4th and 4, and you go with the designed quarterback draw, with a gimpy Ben Rothlisberger (who isn't the most fleet of foot even when completely healthy)? That's the best you've got?

My junk is still sore this morning from all the kicking last night at the poker tables. I'd love to do the hip cool thing and say "I got stuck (insert a very large amount of money) but them got it all back, plus some, and then I took a dump and ruby-encrusted diamonds fell out of my ass", but sadly, that didn't happen. The horrible truth is everyone gets stuck at times, and there's not always a happy, silver-lined conclusion in the real world most of live in. Some nights you just turn off the computer and go to bed, junk aching, stuck. Such is life.

I did get accused twice of being a donkey, which is always fun. Once it was completely justified, as I was fairly pissed and called with next to nothing and no odds, and hit a runner runner flush. But the other time I was calling one more bet from the BB to close the action preflop with 59s, with six others in the hand. Flopped two pair and rivered a boat to take down an unimproved AA, who didn't think very highly of my pre-flop call, and spent the next fifteen minutes, umm, discussing it.

The interesting part isn't so much that hand, but the general idea that, assuming you're a smart monkey and playing well, you should likely be accused of being a donkey by average opponents on a fairly regular basis. It should likely happen most often regarding your play from the blinds, as that's probably the area where there's the most common opportunity to make the correct play, but one that looks donkeyish to the casual observer.

In the aforementioned hand (closing the action from the BB, calling just one more bet, with six others in the hand), I'd probably call there with literally any two cards. If you're disciplined enough to lay down the vast majority of hands after the flop (even when you flop top pair) and skilled enough to extract full value when the flop really hits you, you can and should call with some pretty junky hands from the BB, if you've got enough friends in the hand, and are closing the action.

You also should be regularly accused of donkey behavior on a fairly regular basis when you play overcards fast, get played back at by a bigger made hand, and decide to take one more card off, and get lucky and hit. Yeah, that's not optimal, as much of the value of playing overcards fast is in simply running over everyone and getting the field to fold, but what makes the play +EV in the long run is that you do, indeed, have overcards, and sometimes they hit and take out what was top pair.

Ditto for limping with small/mid pairs, when there's a raise from late position, with multiple callers, and it's one more bet to you, which you call, hoping to hit your set on the flop. Even if the flop misses you, you'll sometimes have odds to take one more card off, even if you're drawing to your two-outer, as long as it's just one more bet to call on the flop. Yes, it'll piss of Mr. AA to no end, especially if the flop is something like 8 10 Q, and you hang around for one more bet with 55, and hit a 5 on the turn. Yeah, it sucks, but if you're getting odds to call, you're getting odds to call. You may also pick up straight/flush outs after the turn, which in turn might justify a river call, giving you another shot at playing the "donkey".

Another good chance to play the donkey is in MTTS or SnGs, when you have a decent stack and are facing shoves by short stacks, whether pre-flop or during the hand. This especially happens late in MTTs, when antes and blinds are kicking in, as you'll often be faced with situations where calling with your mighty 73o is absolutely correct, as long as the pot is large enough and the amount to call is relatively small. Frustrating, especially if you're the short stack who finally gets a big hand, only to see it taken down by junk, but still the correct play.

So don't fear your inner donkey. Wear your occasional donkey accusations with pride. Remember, deep down inside, a donkey lurks within everyone. Pet him. Hug him. Feed him carrots and call him George.

And the Turkey and the Stuffing and the Football and the Poker

So yeah, good Thanksgiving vacation, all the way around. We were at the in-laws for most of it, which was pretty nice, as I was basically trapped with a laptop and nothing else to do but play poker and work on assorted projects, while watching much football.

Still running pretty well at the tables, but I've been playing with fire, playing 20/40 6 max. The swings are a little outside my comfort zone, plus I also, umm, sort of suck at short handed play, so I'm probably going to just cut and run while I'm ahead.

I have to admit that I was pretty surprised by the news than Nick Denton had decided to shut down Oddjack. I was obviously a fan (to the point of drawing heavy inspiration from the general thurst of it at oddsnark) so I'm not the most unbiased of observers, but it seems odd to just pull the plug like that.

I'm not even going to pretend to be anywhere near Denton's league, as either a blogger or businessman, but I think it's an interesting business example of attempting to monetize blogs.

People do indeed make money blogging. 'Tis a fact. But if you look at many of the profitable blogs and bloggers out there, the majority got there by doing something they enjoyed, first and foremeost, which resonated with other people, to the point that traffic grew large enough for the blogger to begin to profit via affiliate links and ad sales.

But the initial genesis of many successful (in a strictly financial sense) blogs is pretty simple: people blogging about something that interested them, which they could write about well, which they were willing to devote many hours to, for no reason other than they enjoyed it, with no eye whatsoever to ever profiting from it. Do that for a few years, do it well, and lo, you suddenly have lots of traffic, and behold, you find ways to monetize that traffic.

It's interesting, then, to see attempts to replicate that, as far as creating sites like Oddjack. I won't pretend to know the real motivation, but on the surface it seems pretty straight-forward: jump-start the profitable blog evolution process by hiring good writers in a hot niche, who will create loads of quality content that many people are interested in, that will profitably sell tons of advertising and/or sponsored links.

The only thing missing in the above recipe, that you see in other profitable blogs, is the time factor. Most successful blogs have been around for years and years. Or, according to Denton: "The moral of the story: it's easy to launch sites; much harder to make them popular."

Pardon my French, but, umm, no shit. Especially when you give them narrow, unrealistic windows of opportunity to be "made" popular. And when you define "popular" as "produces (insert very large number) of dollars of profit each month."

I guess I just find it a bit surprising that uber successful blog barons would operate in such short-sighted ways, especially after a lot of heavy lifting and foundation work has been poured. I'll be the first to admit that a difference of opinion there is likely the reason that I'm decades way from being financially independent and working a crappy day job I hate, but part of me can't help but think that's a jacked up way of approaching the Web, and content, and ways to profit from that content.

Just because something doesn't immediately make you $126,192,187 in profit doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, or invest time and money in it. That's ignoring part of the beauty of the business model of the Web in general. I still make money, each and every month, from sites I built back in 2000 and haven't updated in three years. Very tiny sums of money, true, but reasonably decent sums when you add them all up.

Aside from dollars and cents, it's just sort of generally disappointing that entertaining sites like Oddjack (which provided income for entertaining writers) can come and go so quickly in this day and age. On the one hand, it's cool that blogs have evolved to the point that sites like that could even be created in the first place, but on the other, it's sort of disappointing to see them created with such a narrow, pecuniary benchmark for success.

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for:

1) Awesome wives that put up with my degenerate activities.
2) Degenerate activities that allow me to click buttons and make money.
3) Poker blogs that instruct/entertain me at work/home.
4) Lemurs
5) More lemurs