Poker Blog – icemonkey9 on PokerStars

I am notorious for never spending money on myself and buying family and friends things that they need that they can’t afford.  It’s not like I am doing really well right now, I’m definitely not.  It’s just my nature to be giving.  However, there is one thing I will splurge on for myself and thats my computer and its accessories.  It’s a nice thing because it does come with a heafty price tag but I only do it every 2-3 years at most.

The first big purchase was a new laptop.  I had my MacBook Pro for 3.5 years and although it is still running great, for what I do in my day-to-day activities I am just not a Mac guy.  Now, for general computing and all that, yes, Mac is awesome.  Video Editing? Mac all the way.  Gaming/Poker/Other stuff that I do, Windows is definitely the way to go.

So I found a site called Xoticpc.com which sells specialized high-end laptops and systems for a good price with excellent customer service.  I found the following laptop and was able to score it at a price I just couldn’t believe:

ASUS G73JH

The Specs on this thing are through the roof:

• 17.3″ monitor at 1920×1080 resolution
• i7 Intel Processor (goes up to 2.8GHz for single thread applications)
• 8GB of RAM
• Two 500GB 7200RPM hard drives
• ATI HD5870 Video Card (amazing!!!)
• Surround Sound
• BluRay Player + DVD/CD-RW Drive
• Windows 7

The price was $1,619 (I got a price match deal) which is just ridiculous because I priced out something similar at Alienware which came just under $3k for the same specs.  Asus is a good brand name and it comes with a 2 year warranty.  So, I bit the bullet, pulled out some poker money and had some saved and made the pre-order purchase.  It is expected to ship in mid to late February!!

Here’s the pic:

Asus G73JH

The other big purchase was some new headphones.  I’ve been putting these off for about a year.  For the last year or so I have had these SkullCandy Hesh headphones which aren’t bad.  They just aren’t great and the comfort is “meh” at best.  I’ve been meaning to buy some excellent headphones and with the help of “Infamous” (a guy I know via forums) he turned me on to the true leader in headphones – Sennheiser.  All the reviews I read basically say Bose is just an overpriced mid-range pair of headphones that has great marketing behind it.  Sennheisers are the true leaders of the industry.

After what was probably 4 months of shopping around and reading reviews, I finally settled on the Sennheiser HD555 headphones.  They are the middle of the line for them, but a huge upgrade in terms of quality for what I currently have.   They came down in price to a reasonable amount ($110 on eBay) so I made the purchase on these tonight.  Fortunately it’s shipping from Texas and should be here by Friday or Saturday at the latest.  Here’s the pic:

Sennheiser HD555 Headphones

Bye Shorty, It’s Not Your Birthday!

If you didn’t catch the news on the TwoPlusTwo forums, the official guy from Full Tilt Poker (FTPDoug) posted today that a major update didn’t get released.  Kinda sucks but we finally know what the major update will have in store for us rounders.  The good news was in this statement:

“To answer the most commonly asked question: we *are* going to raise the minimum buy-in on standard (no icon) tables. That’s not all we’re going to do, but that’s the biggest change. And that’s all I can say about that until the update.”

I couldn’t be happier.  Although the 6max games aren’t as bad off as the Full Ringers have it, this is great news for those of us that like to play regular stack poker.  My main problem with the shorties isn’t that they play push/shove using their mathematical edge (range + FE) at the table, it’s the ratholing.  What that means is that they win a pot (or a stack) and insta-leave and play at another table doing the same exact thing.  It’s absolutely excrutiating and it’s been getting worse and worse at Full Tilt in 2009.  This update will put an end to that, meaning the uber-fish will not be getting pinged off by these guys and good solid “real” poker can be played.  As you can tell, I’m rather excited about the news.

Overclocking My New PC Rig

An online friend of mine, known around forums as “Stu_Ungar” is a bigger computer geek than I am which is really kind of creepy and sad.  Moving on from that fact, he’s been bugging me to try my hand at overclocking my CPU since I have this sexy new motherboard.  I have an Intel Quad Core Q6600 chip, meaning it runs at 2.4GHz.  Well, after some serious issues/headaches/hassle and some help from Stu and the guys at Overclock.net, I actually was able to pull off the overclocking.  Since I have really good air flow, case fans and a solid CPU Heatsink + Fan, I actually pushed my 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz!!  Tremendous results as far as I am concerned and tonight I’ll be putting it through the stress test.  Others have reported results far better than mine but I’m really just not willing to “push it to the max” and am really happy about this whole experiment so far.

Pokering?

Poker is going well, thanks to a recent nice run the last few days that saw my -4 Buyin EV for the month even out almost exactly.  I not only recovered from the worst-day-ever but am in the green for the month.  I hope to keep that up certainly, it would feel great putting in one last super-solid month of poker skill/fundamentally for 2009 and if the results follow, then GREAT.

I’m a huge computer nerd that loves to have the latest and greatest when it comes to computers.  My main computer is actually a Windows PC which is where I do most of my work and play.  I do play PC video games, specifically excited for Command & Conquer 4, StarCraft II and Diablo III all of which are coming in 2010 (hopefully).

I never upgraded to Windows Vista because of a bad experience I had with it from Day 1 (like everyone else) and have been running XP which has served me well.  I have been closely following the development of Windows 7 and been asking friends how it’s been running that have been using the Release Candidate which is available for free from Microsoft.  All signs from my friends and industry reviews say Windows 7 is the real deal and is ready to rock n’ roll out of the box.  I pre-ordered my copy back in July when they were offering the 50% discount which I am happy about.  The only problem was the hardware!

I have a Intel Core 2 Quad processor that I wanted to keep as I read reports it is still one of the top processors around.  The problem is that my hard drive is nearly full (500GB) and my video card is old.  Originally I was just going to buy a new 1TB hard drive and that was going to be the extent of my hardware upgrade.  Then I learned that all the new video cards use a PCI Express 2.0 slot, which I didn’t have.  CRAP.  So if I wanted a new hard drive and a new video card, that meant I needed a new motherboard.  If I got a new motherboard, I might as well get the new memory (4GB) to go with it at the maximum speed.  Oh … if I wanted the new hard drive (on top of the two I already have) plus the new huge mega-powered video card it turns out my 500W power supply wasn’t going to cut it either.  Arg.

So this quickly turned into a “Cow jumped over the moon” story which boiled down to me weighing my options with the hardware upgrade.  I decided that if I really wanted to start fresh with Windows 7, I had to upgrade now to make the process as painless as possible.  So in the end I went with the:

- Hard Drive: 1TB 7200 RPM Hitachi SATA
- Motherboard: XFX nForce 750i
- Power Supply: 700W CoolerMaster
- Memory: Corsair 4GB Kit (2×2GB sticks)
- Video Card: XFX Radeon HD5870 (awesome card, but yes I am aware of the nForce/Radeon situation but I will not be using 2 video cards in tandem ever again)

So that set me back a pretty penny but everything is slated to ship right away and will be here with a few days to spare before the 22nd when Windows 7 arrives in the mail.  In terms what this means for poker, all of the software I use has stated (with more people chiming in on TwoPlusTwo who are using Windows 7 RC) that it’s 100% compatible.  It does mean the rebulding of my hand history database, but that seems like a minor nuisance compared to completely rebuilding my hardware system and installing a new OS.  Everything is already backed up data-wise, so I am not concerned there.

Anyways, that’s my big news – new computer here I come!

This weekend really represents the first time I’ve ever played 100nl 6max on both Saturday and Sunday for 4+ hours each day.  I got in a good amount of hands today, and the good positive news in all this is that I’m not discouraged or tilted.  I did make one tough call at the river that was in retrospect a bad call, but other than that it was just “one of those days” where the villain shot ahead at the river constantly.  This hand was the “worst beat of the day” which is just ugly:

Just gross, but I got my money in good.  Normally I would have just raised again preflop but against the squeezer I’m trying to get action and a raise here totally announces I have KK or AA in this spot against these players.  What I hoped for was someone with a lesser hand like TPTK while I had overpairs would stack (which happened) and take it down … but I lose the 88-22% situation which will happen.

The rest of the day saw some bad river situations where villains hit their gin card, or more tragically, I’d hit a big river only to find out I was way behind.

• I rivered a straight … whoops he flopped and slow played a boat.
• AK suited gets it in as nut flush draw + overs, hits A on river, he had flopped a set.
• AK hits TPTK on river (all rag board) he hit set on turn (which he flatted).
• AA < KT , kinda gross.
• AK loses coinflip AIPF vs QQ (fair enough).
• AKs < AJo AIPF vs loose mid-stacked fish.
• K3 in steal spot on BTN hits 2 pair, villain calls to river with top pair, river pairs board, his two pair wins.

So, those were situations where things just didn’t go my way, and most of the time I got out of the situation losing a $35-$50 pot which is better than losing $100 pots I suppose.  Looking back at the hands, AA just got no action today (nothing new there) except for the one bad beat, and I hit sets at 7% which usually doesn’t help (although they haven’t held all month!).

Anyways, probably calling it a day and hope to come back tomorrow ready to rock n roll at the tables and “get in on that Sunday juice” as someone put it.  Like I mentioned before, I feel fine, where before if I looked at the results say at the beginning of the month I’d be bitching/tilting/quitting big time.  I just had an unfortunate day, it’ll happen, and I’ll be ready to go tomorrow.  See you then.

Abbreviated post … I just want to see if this will work from weaktight.com :

$0.1/$0.25 Pot Limit Omaha Hi
6 players
Converted at weaktight.com

Stacks:

Pre-flop: ($0.35, 6 players) Hero is CO

trforgy1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.10, VietDo goes all-in $2.35, 1 fold, maloletkov calls $2.10, trforgy1 calls $2.10, Hero raises to $11.85, maloletkov goes all-in $25, trforgy1 folds, Hero goes all-in $13.15

Flop: ($54.80, 3 players)

Turn: ($54.80, 3 players)

River: ($54.80, 3 players)
maloletkov says “nh“

Final Pot: $54.80
maloletkov shows:
Hero shows:
VietDo shows:

Hero wins $52.10 ( won +$27.10 )
maloletkov lost -$25
trforgy1 lost -$2.35
VietDo lost -$2.35

I got so tired of dealing with the server issues I’ve been dealing with on my own server I just bought a cheap new webhost that supported WordPress. So far so good. The issue I was having problems with was that when someone would visit Gaming Illustrated Poker, for some reason the server would then serve the content from that site here at this blog. It makes no sense whatsoever, and I triple checked any and all database/IIS/etc issues to no avail. I tried getting a new IP and re-installing WordPress and that didn’t work either.

Finally I bit the bullet, found a webhost (JustHost.com) that offered me a sweet $2.95/mo hosting deal, and they’ve been great so far. Hopefully those technical issues are finally behind me.

Apparently it’s cool to show off on the internet. So here’s what I work on in my office, and there’s two pictures. The first is my main PC area, and the second is my iMac where I do the bulk of my video editing.

PICTURE 1: My Main PC Rig Area

What you are looking at here is where I spend about 80% of my day typically. You’ll notice on the left a big networked HP Color LaserJet 2605 printer. Moving to the right you see a wireless telephone on top of a filing cabinet (not really exciting). From there you see my PC computer, and mainly the dual monitors – the main one being a Samsung 24″ 1920×1200 and the secondary an Acer 22″ 1680×1050 monitor. My speakers are actually super baller even though they look weird, I got them while doing a review for Gaming Illustrated, and they are amongst Altec Lansing’s finest 2.1 speaker systems. The PC is an Ultra case with a Quad Core PC and 3GB of RAM, and yes I am running Windows XP because Vista sucks. You can make out my special Microsoft ergonomic softball-shaped mouse (I love it) and my Razer blue-glowy keyboard. Fun, fun stuff I know.

Desk Area Part 2 : Here’s my little beauty and long lost love.

On the other side of the room I have a built in desk where my wife will work when she is home, as well as my All In One fax/scanner thingie. But it’s the gorgeous 24″ iMax that is the prize possession here … and I sincerely think it’s the best computer I have ever owned. I think people are crazy if they do general computer (internet / write papers / make movies / picture stuff) and don’t get a Mac. Professionally I use this to edit sound and build video content for websites. I upgraded the RAM to 4GB and have behind it two external Western Digital 1TB hard drives.

So if you’re curious as to why NORAD sweeps the power consumption numbers in my room, you can now know why. MUUUuuaahahahaha!