THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 2010
Blog POKER
POKER POOCH
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I played in a game recently where dogs were permitted in the poker room. As a rule, dogs should not be permitted in a place where poker is being played, particularly when some people have an instinctive fear of dogs, or when the dogs can become needy or unruly.
Blog POKER
PLAYING THROUGH PAIN
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I spent the weekend watching NFL football on television and what struck me was the violence of the collisions. Players are bigger and faster than ever before and many of them have very refined hitting technique. It’s a tough game, not for the timid. And it’s clear to me that NFL players, for the most part, play in a constant state of injury.
Blog POKER
DIRTIED BY DEUCES
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As mentioned in previous columns, I experienced a scorching playing poker online and very much suspect that the entire enterprise is rigged. It would be ridiculous to think otherwise.
Blog POKER
BY THE BOOK
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After avoiding poker for several weeks, my friends Albert and Pino convinced me to play in a ring game in Etobicoke run by a “GQ,” a cocaine dealer we used to know back in the ´80s when we were all scrounging around Little Italy for nickels and dimes, who had spent some time in jail and had cleaned up his act.
Blog POKER
HIATUS
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I recently took a hiatus from all poker playing. And that’s not a bad thing at all now and then. I needed to clean out the bad feelings I’d been developing toward it, particularly after being demolished online. In retrospect I never had a chance and I don’t think most folks do when they play online. But my bad feelings about online poker spilled over to live poker and I played like a true donkey.
Blog POKER
GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE
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A friend of mine recently told me he’d been caught up in an email war with PokerStars over what he perceived to be some irregularities. Indeed, he had lost around $20,000 in a month and though I know he isn’t the best player around, he’s not much removed from a rock and plays as tight as you can play without being a rock.
Blog POKER
CHURRASCO POKER
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A few Fallsview regulars and I celebrated our birthdays a week ago. By some quirk all four of us were born in late August, and we share some traits, being late summer babies, I’m convinced of it. We’re all pretty decent poker players, and we all love NFL football, mixed martial arts, Dean Martin, voluptuous women and the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.
Blog POKER
649,740 TO 1
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A fellow I’ve run into a few times at Fallsview named Alessandro showed up the other night and I think he underwent some kind of transformation during one hand, which convinced me that poker has the power not only to humble people and reduce them to paranoiac babbling idiots, but it can sometimes reveal to its participants glimpses of the divine, of the paradisal, of the real and beautiful world t
Blog POKER
LENTILS AND POKER
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Table etiquette in poker isn’t a complicated thing, really. Too much demonstration, slow-rolling, talking when you’re not in the hand, smelling bad, looking bad, being a general asshole – it’s not rocket science my friends. Remember, when you’re going to a poker game that you’re not going to a bordello, a crack house, an abattoir, or a pig sty. Look at the fellows on television.
Blog POKER
VARIANCE?
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The other day at a home game in Toronto I was complaining to my friend Carmenooch that I hadn’t seen pocket aces in over a month. “It’s statistically improbable,” I said. “The odds suggest that you should get pocket aces every 221 hands, or something like that. Well, between computer action and live games I’ve played more than a thousand hands and I haven’t caught a whiff of pocket aces.
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