Play for the set but call the all in. Genius!

So you're in the big blind with any two and it's limped 5 ways, you reraise all in (assume stack size/blinds proportionate) only to get called by a UTG Limper (who you have covered), his 44 holds up vs your JTs. We've all had this happen in low-mid limit, retard infested MTT's, just don't come crying to me about it.

Recently, someone who asked for some MTT help was annoyed about the above scenario. Or that I was advocating not open completing from the SB, or other standard stuff that even below average players would never do. In fact, it spawned an entire discussion.

Apparently, the aforementioned person had been having more success playing wild wacky, let's all take a flop and see who has the best hand poker. That's actually a good way to play if you're being hit in the face with the deck but for the 99.5% of the time when that won't happen, you're f c u k e d.

But daddy daddy, raising only puts me to tougher decisions. No, genius. Raising makes your decisions far more easier. It enables you to gain valuable information, nullifies difficult flops due to chip commitment, and applies pressure on the other guy.

But I saw Phil Ivey open limp/open complete/some other wacky scenario on TV. Yeah? Me too. Phil Ivey also puts the fourth raise in with Q high on flops that miss him by six miles...and it's good. When you can read players and play flops like Ivey, you can do whatever you'd like, but for now, it's probably a good idea to avoid tough decisions. If you can't play 8's on the flop heads up in a raised pot oop, how are you going to play them in a multiway pot where anyone can have any 2? Not to mention you're also defining the strength of your hand unless you're willing to (and I know you're not) limp aces and kings some of the time. Playing solely for the set is a losing move. Not only do you need to read boards to pick off hands worse than yours, you must also get better hands to laydown by repping the set when you miss it some of the time.

Doyle says: going broke in a limped pot is for retards. Threeup and I agree.

(An interesting sidenote: I had this discussion with Barry Greenstien once and he basically seemed to concur with what I've written above though appeared more lenient to the open limp but against weak opposition whereas I'd consider it more effective against stronger opponents where keeping them off balance is key. Nevertheless, rumor is that he's broke now, so going with Doyle's advice is probably the better option.)

But Jay, look at this person. He does this and that and keeps winning. Look, if you take a room full of retards, sit them all at a table, give them a deck of cards and force them to play an MTT, one of them is bound to win it, right? You put these people in front of me and I will bust them all, eventually. It's not because I am so good at poker, that's far from it, and if you've followed this blog you know I am not good at all. It's simply because they are so ridiculously bad, that Threeup can train a malnutritioned chimp to play at a far higher level than they could ever hope to achieve.

It's easily possible to make $200K/yr playing 200NL fulltime but some "winning" players only make a third of that. Why? Because they're awful.

You can suck and still be a winning player. Trust me, I know first hand.

Freerolls = Ipod. Ipod = winner. Holla.

So I recently recieved an Ipod for finishing in the top ten of last season's blogger poker tour on Poker.com.



I was originally planning to give it away to my cousin or someone but then I saw that it was the really tiny nano version.



So I decided to keep it.

Of course I had to test it out in a live game. So much for taking a break from poker?

Results below:



=)

Of course, Team FCUK was represented:

No Poker. Just movies.

Things haven't been going well in my personal life during the last week... and while I won't get into the exact details, it has been having a severe affect on my poker. My head is just not in it and once again I shot off because of a lack of concentration.

I've decided to take a break and thus had a chance to catch up on some movies:

Freddy got fingered - A must watch for Tom Green fans but far from excellent. I'm a fan of Tom Greens earlier work and not so much his latter stuff which unfortunately this movie happened to have a lot of. It definitely started off slow and I was almost forcing myself to keep watching for the first twenty minutes but it does pick up afterwards and has some genuinely funny lines/scenes. Rip Torn's character was without a doubt the funniest thing about the movie and Torn plays the character very well. Overall, it's in no way a comedic masterpiece but for fans of Tom Green or alternative comedy it's worth watching once. Everyone else feel free to skip it.

Fantastic 4 - What a piece of crap. This movie is not watchable, not even for fans of the comic/cartoon. No, make that especially for fans of the comic/cartoon. The acting is poor, only the dude who plays the human torch did a decent job. Everyone else involved in this movie should leave it off their acting resume. Mr Fantastic and The Thing are not likeable at all. The plot is stupid. Basically the only redeeming thing about this movie was that The Invisible girl was attractive. Watching paint dry would be more entertaining than this movie. Not even worth a rental.

Hard Candy - By far the most entertaining movie out of the three listed here and I'm not even sure if I liked it. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be a thriller or a drama or what but for a thriller it definitely had too many predictable parts. That's not to say that there weren't any surprising twists and turns at all, but they were fewer than I would have liked. The writing was far from perfect, with some scenes that were unrealistic and a disappointing ending. The acting, however, was relatively good for the most part and that alone makes it worth watching. If you plan to see this flick, be prepared for some uncomfortable scenes.

BOOM HEADSHOT

So after months of nagging from my good friend Uncle Jay and an unofficial blog banning I am finally here to introduce myself.

My name is Phreezenet and I have a gambling problem.

Yes, you read correctly. I sit at home exchanging insane amounts of $$$ with a slew of random degenerate gamblers in a game of skill(?) that is known as poker. Oh you've played that game before? I'm going to throw out a wild guess and just assume that you know as much about poker as I do about women. What? You think I have time to coattail the opposite sex when I can fire up the PokerStars.net software and shoot off to the latest Raven Riley romping while I play with world champions at the same time? NiceHand PHREEZENET. Well played.
Now back to what I was saying. You don't know poker unless you are a member of the elite few that sit at home mindlessly tilting away thousands of dollars playing online while simultaneously leveling your WoW character. LEEEEEEEEEEROYYYYYY JENKINS. If by chance you fall into any of the categories mentioned above please consider suicide for society's benefit. I know I have.

So why do I play poker? I play poker for money and I fcuking hate it, both the poker and the money. But mostly the money...and I love that! I lose and I break things and immediately feel great about myself. Or on the off chance that I do win I go to sleep that night and dream about waking up in the morning to immediately boot up and tilt away todays profit.

Hating money does have its advantages. I can now proudly walk up to a group of my college friends and boast "Hey I was up 30k this month and ended even, how are those 28k a yeak job offers coming along?"
Now please don't succumb to all of this banter and actually believe that I make $$$ donkeying around in online poker, it's all rigged and I'm just luckboxing it until Lee decides to throw the killswitch. But even with that, Poker has brought upon some positive experiences in the past 6 months - a 6 figure winner to date and a lucksack satelite into the WPT PCA in the Bahamas. But I'll have to get back to you with the month late PCA post at another time, I'm tired and Friday means a new bangbros video has been posted.

:RideTillyouDie

It just snowed in New York.

So I guess that means it's time for an update.

It's 5am, still dark, and as I'm looking through my window at the city covered in light snow two things come to mind: I love New York and I can't wait to go drifting tomorrow.

It's funny, I don't like the extremely humid New York summers or the really cold New York winters but I wouldn't want to live anywhere else in the world. I guess you can say I'm a New Yorker at my very core. With that said, I've been informed of an interesting business opportunity that would see me moving to Canada for a minimum period of six months so I'm sitting here and debating.

Will I be able to tolerate Canada for six months? What if it's longer? And more importantly, will Canada be able to tolerate me?

Meanwhile Threeup suggested that we throw down half a mill for a mansion in South Carolina. Live like kings and throw wild parties with topless coeds in pools of Crystal. Yeah, settle down there P Diddy.

But on to important things like...Valentines Day. To no one's surprise I don't have a valentine (See post below entitled "Why my girlfriend isn't very smart). I did however receive a congratulatory phone call. It came around 12:05am. My friend John decided it would be a good idea to call me up and wish me a "happy Valentine's" all while he was laying in bed with his Girlfriend.

I hate my friends, I really do, but I have to admit it was pretty funny (and disturbing at the same time).

But enough about all that, this is a poker blog right? Poker has been at a stand still. It was pretty much break even until I went on a mini rush for a few sessions and of course forced myself to play everyday. If you're thinking to yourself something along the lines of "well that can't be good" or "you're an f'in idiot" you'd be right. I played more tables than I could handle when not at peak and as a result played extremely poorly for the last couple of days. Add in that I wasn't running well and that's a recipe for disaster:

Yep, I broke even. Fantastic. I hate myself.

See, this is what happens when you have no real cashout method. Instead of forcing myself to donate all profit, I could have cashed out and bought a Rolex.

Speaking of Rolex, Threeup has been talking about buying a USED one for quite some time now. Who the hell buys used watches?! Okay, "pre-owned", whatever. But seriously, the idea grosses me out. If you've ever bought a used watch, please reply in the comment section.

Why I'm smarter than you

This is a post going out to all my friends, and some other random people I don't know, who currently have tens of thousands of dollars stuck in NETELLER and won't be seeing them for quite some time - if ever!

You guys are idiots.

This is exactly why I have never kept money in NETELLER for an extended period of time. Ever. No, I don't have psychic powers or a crystal ball next to my naked girly desk pen, I have common sense. There is no denying that NETELLER was the most preferred, convenient and safest money transferring option but to be totally oblivious to the fact that they can abruptly exit the US market or suffer a worse fate would be downright naive - especially after what happened with Firepay!

To the people who cashed out a few days before they went down and have accidentally had their money frozen, you have my sympathy. To those who kept their funds in NETELLER, you were almost asking for it. Something like this is exactly the reason why I choose to keep most of my money on reputable poker sites rather than sitting in some E-Wallet. The benefit to this far outweighs the inconvenience of having to spend a little more time transferring money from one place to another and then to another rather than just buying chips directly. For example, if need be, I can at anytime (and have before I even knew what NETELLER was) request a check or EFT to my local bank and expect it by weeks end at most.

Now some people may say, why don't you just keep the money in your bank account and then buy chips when you need to? Well, I have a simple rule for that: any money that gets taken off line, never gets put back up. It's something that has been working for me since 2003. If the money leaves my online bankroll, it never goes back in and is usually spent on things I don't remember buying or daily trips to the nudie bar.

So what does all this mean? Should you just keep a bunch of money in random poker sites? No! Quite the opposite! There are very few sites that I trust enough to keep more than 10 buyins for whatever limit I'm playing. In fact, there are only two. In actuality, I either distrust or dislike the majority of poker places and am forced to play/keep money on there only because their players are worse than VoxGibson.

The two sites I have 100% faith in are: Poker.com & PokerStars. To my experience over the years, these two sites have led the way in honesty, integrity and security in the poker world and I trust them enough to hold my money no matter the amount.

Poker.com is a newish but very solid poker room. The dedication management shows to their players is second to none.

PokerStars has flat out the best tournaments and customer support in the business. And it's not even close. They also offer the quickest and easiest player to player transfer option, making them that much better.

I strongly urge all Poker players, professional or not, to open and maintain accounts with both of these sites.







So what about E-wallets and how do we get our money offline? Well, it doesn't look good.

So far I've been dealing with ePassporte and am very unimpressed with them. Briefly, they suck. They lack many of the convenient options that made NETELLER so great. The same can be said for Ecocard. The reason why everyone loved NETELLER was A) because it was accepted by just about everyone and B) support was easily contacted through various methods. Both ePassporte and Ecocard have proven to lack in these areas.

I'll be looking into a few other online processors such as MyATM and eWalletXpress but don't expect them to be much better than ePassporte. Here's to hoping that YouTeller comes along and saves the day for online poker.

Also, we'll have complete reviews of ePassporte and Ecocard posted within a few days or as soon as Threeup finishes writing them. I know he was supposed to have them up earlier but he just won the big HORSE tournament (Nice going bro!) on FTP last Sunday so he gets a get out of jail free card.