Most of this week's been pretty uneventful, with the exception of me blowing lots of chips in the WCOOP 5cd event (not that anyone knows how to play 5cd, so it hardly counts) and losing a couple of really big 2:1's in the 6 max. Today was a weird day - I went 0 for 4 in the main tourneys with 4 early busts, didn't really feel like playing anything else, then entered FTP's 215 HORSE on a whim and wound up second for 4K. I even had a 3:1 CL HU in Stud 8 and went into the hold'em round with a 180/130 edge, but then went 0 for 13 hands in hold'em. Having said that, the structure late in that thing is terrible and it had been a crapshoot the whole way - as an example, I went from a CL with 11 left to 2 BB with 9 left - so I don't particularly mind the finish; when you're playing 8/16K with 130K effective stacks, there's no real skill involved, just flopping pairs.

More importantly, I'm unhappy about the fiasco on Absolute (check BBV if you're unsure of what I mean.) This will probably not affect the industry as a whole - it's not going to be mainstream news, poker's survived much worse, Annette (read: an 18 year old girl) winning a couple of mil will deflect attention anyway - but the fact is that the sites depend on a lot of implied goodwill to do business, and as of today, that's gone. As of right now, it's been almost a full two days and AP has done absolutely nothing about a business-threatening situation, while the affected parties are busy chip dumping in a mind-numbingly stupid attempt to take the heat off themselves. That's completely unacceptable to those of us who make a living trusting these places with five or even six figure bankrolls.

After this is over, and AP has taken whatever half-assed action they wind up taking (keep in mind that some people might be 50K in the hole here - that's worse than Pokerspot - and there's no way AP will pay them back, because they're Absolute [censored] Poker), I'm going to pull a few strings and ask for reassurances behind the scenes of the industry. This must not ever be allowed to happen again.

---

Woke up this morning - looks like JCarver's up another 200K from a nice FTP donkament. GG :)

Also got a bunch of videos out of it, but still trying to figure out how the software works. I might have something up later.

Anyway...77'th/3499 on FTP, ending with 44 < AcTc on a 9c5x4c board for a top 10 stack, and 59'th/1100-something in the Cake 100K when I lost a flip for 20BB to yellowsub. This later one wouldn't be a big deal if it didn't come within 30 seconds of the first one. Barf. It's probably a good thing that that particular segment of the video didn't record for some reason/I'm getting tired of super deep runs in big tournaments ending up with 5-15 buyins when I lose as a big favorite. Really.

On the bright side, while skipping tournaments for most of the rest of this week, I've discovered that I'm almost definitely a winner at FTP's higher stakes razz games after all. It's good to know that NL can end tomorrow and I'd still make marginal amounts of money off Internet video game equivalents.

BTW, to follow Bond's lead: who wants some non-poker content in this thing? I've been keeping it 100% poker so far and have no problem doing that, but either way, I'll leave it up to the comment section.

Mostly, I'm waiting on the Cardrunners microphone to get here so I can play around with making some videos. I tried to do some stuff with the regular mike I use for Skype, but the sound quality is bad enough that it's not worth posting. Tournament-wise, I haven't made a deep run in a week or so, so no really interesting hands there, either.

In order to make this entry not worthless, here's a hand Bond posted on 2+2:

Seat 2: ACFIORE (8,355)
Seat 7: muckthenuts (6,360)
muckthenuts posts the small blind of 25
snappingUoff posts the big blind of 50
The button is in seat #5
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to muckthenuts [Qs Td]
(2 folds)
ACFIORE calls 50
(2 folds)
ajgoal calls 50
muckthenuts calls 25
snappingUoff checks
*** FLOP *** [Js Qh Ts]
muckthenuts bets 150
snappingUoff folds
ACFIORE has 15 seconds left to act
ACFIORE raises to 650
ajgoal folds
muckthenuts

Before you say what we should do, let's figure out a)his range and b)what will happen if we call or 3 bet.

A)Villain open limped in EMP and then raised a very ugly flop. We can assume that he doesn't have AK here, and also discount AQ. AA-TT are all possibilities, though AA and JJ-TT are more likely. His overall range, then, is something like {AA, JJ-TT, Asxs, Ksxs, KQ, K9, QJ-QT, JT, 98}, but that does not count the raise size, which suggests a big made hand that wants to protect against draws and somewhat discounts combo draws. [Note that this isn't really a leak on villain's part on a flop like this even though he's giving away info; the flop is so bad and you'll have to slow down on so many turn cards that you may as well just try to win the pot here.]

B)1. If we call, the turn is a brick, and our 'big made hand' read is correct, the villain is probably betting all his hands again when checked to. We also clearly have to check/fold all non-bricks that don't boat us, even if we think villain might bluff a turn 9 (far too deep to bluff catch two streets) - and this probably includes spades, since the Qs just isn't that big of a deal and some of those outs are tainted.

2. If we 3 bet, villain might fold exactly aces. We'll wind up all in with everything else. If you Pokerstove his range and make the adjustments I mentioned, you'll find we're a little under 40/60 against it.

Therefore, what we have here is a pretty easy flop fold, and not folding here is a fairly decent leak (note that this doesn't apply in any buyin tournament where this can easily be Q7o.) Tournament players often don't get this because being this deep is rare and most of the time the action goes bet/shove/call, but with 115 BB, you have to think about what will happen on future streets, and on this board the answer is 'nothing good'.

BTW, (again, taking into account that the board is this bad), it is perfectly acceptable to check/call the flop and then bet a blank turn - a line that is pretty underused but ought to be considered here since we're pretty sure one of the limpers will bet. While it might not get the most chips in, it also greatly reduces the chances of us being semibluffed off the pot.