Egg and cheese bagel-check
Sugary foofoo coffee drink from Caribou large enough to put a man the size of a houseboat in a diabetic coma-check
Jack Johnson playing in the background-check.

Now where did I place that strap-on...

Oh! Hello. You guys are still here? I'm sorry, that could've been embarrassing.

I'm not gay, but I do play one on Tv. Either that or I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night, I never can remember. One thing I do know is that I have been playing a lot of poker the last week, though. And I am ready to write.

About a week ago, I remembered reading about someone in this cute, little community using Poker Source Online . Being that I'd decided a month ago to quit funding new accounts with money I shouldn't be losing, I thought, hey, what do I have to lose?

Why yes, English is my native language. Why do you ask?

Anyhow, I chose the $50 Instant Bankroll option at Titan because of the grand tales of super soft games, and loose women. Or was it the other way around? No matter. Let me say this, though; I've never been happier playing on a subpar site in all my life. Well, save for my stint at Doyle's last year.

The graphics don't suck that hard, and the players are just as bad as I'd been warned. Like, really fucking bad.

For example;

Imagine, if you will, that you're playing a .25c-.50c 6 max table directly across from me, and I've got a stack 3x the size of the max table buy-in. There's no way for you to know that I started off buying in short, though, with $35.

Sitting UTG with $50, you look down at your girly online hole card cam and see pocket 4's. Ah, the good, ol'...two fours. I don't know of another name for the hand, so I'll leave it as that; The Two Fours. Forgive me; I was up until 5:30am this morning chasing down a complete fish. I don't have the, how do you say, um, creativity to come up with something else. Yeah, run with that.

At any rate, you decided to limp with your Two Fours. Reasonable enough, wouldn't you say? Please do. Plink! Your 4 bits splashes into the pot unremarkably. Oh oh, the button--who just happens to be as handsome as he is an incredible .25c-.50c NL player--raises it to $2. Everybody else folds, and since you already have money in the pot, there's no way you can fold until you see the flop, you giany pussy, you.

Flop:6-5-2 rainbow

Not a bad flop for your pre-flop monster, so you decide to lead out for about 3/4 the size of the pot; $3. The button raises to $8. Shit, dude, he's bluffing you, though, so you call. Duh.

Turn: 6

That doesn't exactly help your hand, but you don't think it hurts you, either. But what do you know about thinking? Well, you don't know much and lead out for about 1/2 the pot this time; $10. The sexy man on the button doesn't put you on a 6, so he jams for the rest of your stack. Oh hell, you're probably ahead, and there's a 143% chance that the he's bluffing at you again, so you make the brilliant decision to call off your last $30.

So, let's get this straight; you've been raised pre-flop, on the flop, and significantly on the turn. At what point in early childhood development were you dropped on your head, repeatedly, to make you think you're ahead here? The only way you're ahead is if a rogue wave(sorry, been watching too much Deadliest Catch) comes through the internet and wipes your opponents cards off the virtual table, thus rendering his hand dead. That's the only way.

Of course you look like a genius when a 3 comes on the river to complete your straight to best your opponent's AA. Granted, it's the funny brand of genius requires you to drool on yourself and have an abject fear of anything resembling interpersonal communication, but it's genius nonetheless.

This is just one example of the special kind of stupid I've only seen at Titan. In the last week, I've seen more min-raises of min-raises than I care to count. I've seen people make a min-bet bluff into a $35 pot, and be mad that the got called by bottom pair. The Why Me? Syndrome runs rampant, that's for sure. When you're raising K3o UTG, and get beat by the BB's K2 that two pairs, there's no other explanation than utter retardation.

When I started out last with the initial $50, I--like I should've--started at the micro limit NL tables. .5c-10c, I think. After breaking even there for a few days, I got frustrated and moved up to the .25c-.50c tables. And maybe I've just been lucky to hit an incredible run of cards, but I'd like to believe that I play better when the money matters to me. A $10 buy-in means nothing to me, and that ends with subpar play. Lack of concentration and the Aw Fuck Its are certainly in attendance.

But when the money matters to me, I'm much more interested in what's going on. Granted, a $50 table buy in is not a large amount of money, comparatively, but it's enough that if I double up once, it'll pad my bankroll by a large amount. I don't scour the internet for random bits of nothing inbetween hands, I don't pay attention to the tv, and I most definitely don't get bored. Hell, I played 10 hours yesterday, and the only reason I stopped was because I could hear birds chirping outside my window, announcing that daybreak was not far off.

I have another 400/4500 Titan Points to work off until the bankroll is actually mine, and from there I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I've got a decent chunk to work with after a few great sessions last night where I doubled up on all three tables I was playing, and even was tripled up for a bit on two of 'em. I might make a deposit at Absolute and go after that set of Nevada Jacks that PSO is offerering. I am a chip nerd, and I've always wanted a good set of chips. Yeah, it's hard getting a consistant game together, but a boy can dream.

*****

Reason #365 that a popping poker bubble is a joke:

Easter is one of the few holidays where my family all gets together with the sole intention of not trying to stab eachother with an electric knife. It's a chore.

We're not fancy people, oh no. And because of that, I didn't wear what would be considered my 'tail chasing clothes'. It's just not appropriate. I wore a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt covered by my Party Poker hooded sweatshirt. The only thing I've ever recieved from that abomination of a site, besides the painful syphilis(don't ask), is a stupid hooded sweatshirt.

And I wear the fuck out of it. I wear it to the store; I wear it to the coffee shop; I wear it to the bar, all because it's so comfortable. It's hard to believe that anything pertaining to a site that has monetarily raped me in the past--like Party Poker has--sent me one of my favorite pieces of clothing, for free! The only thing in my wardrobe I like more is my neoprene codpiece.

The whole family is sitting at my aunt's house in S. Minneapolis, talking while the television hummed in the background. I'm not sure how I came away with so little real gamble in me, because both my mom and aunt love to gamble. Give it 15 years and they'll totally be the two old ladies sitting at a bank of video poker machines at 3am, with a Carlton cigarette in one hand and a slack oxygen hose in the other. No joke.

They were were asking me my opinion on the possible law changes against internet gambling, when a Party Poker commercial started.

Need somebody to play with? Ooooooooooooooo....get some real friends.

My cousin's 7 year old daughter immediately looked at me and said "Oooh, that's the same as on your shirt!"

That the product brand was immediately recognizable to a 7 year old is a good sign that the boom is nowhere near being over.

Thoughts on this?