August and everything after

Okay so maybe not that far back. Well I got a job last week. Pretty cool I guess. Im now the roaming manager for a pizza franchise here in Idaho. Actually as of last night, after being with the company a week, they asked me to take over their new store. That was the plan all along anyway but it wasn't suppose to happen until my probationary period was over in 30 days. Basically its the same and completely different from my experience with Papa Johns here. I think Im going to enjoy working here for the time being anyway. There is definitely a lot of potential with this company but I will just have to see where that takes me. Im really past the point in my life where I hope that anything more than what I have right now will come. I mean, I still have goals and stuff I guess, but.. Im just not going to worry about that stuff so much anymore. Maybe its contentment, or maybe I just don't care as much as I used to. I don't really know at this point. Im still going to work hard and try to improve myself and do the best I can for my employer. I just want to make sure this time I get credit for what Im bringing to the table.
The job has improved my perspective however. Just having somewhere to go and be accountable to is really important I think. As much as people want to dream about being lazy and doing squat all day its not all its cracked up to be. Well I actually enjoyed it but life called and said I had to get back to work.
Oh, what else. Well the poker game is still going pretty good. We didn't play for a couple weeks which really disappointed me but what can you do if nobody is around to play. This week I took first in both tournaments. We all got a little loose with the alcohol this week. Im not sure if it just made me relax enough to pound the crap out of them, or if they really just suck even worse with a few beers in them. I really think I overestimated their play originally. I mean a couple of them are still good players but they just aren't really hard to figure out. We played with a new guy this week and about half way through the tournament I read his hand blind. I like to do that once a week or so. Its fun to really put yourself on the line trying to guess someone's hand. Its really cool when you are right and you get to see the reactions of everyone at the table. I think so far the opinions of me doing that is.. Im either an extremely lucky guesser or Houdini. I get them right or very close about 85% of the time. One of the secrets in poker is to not so much put someone on one particular hand but a range of hands, and then let the action determine which of those hands is more likely. In this case I had seen the guy raise with the nuts.. AJ or higher.. LOL!! AJ really isn't the nuts, but these guys just think it is. So it folded to him in the small blind and I was in the big blind. He raised so I stopped to think about what I wanted to do. He definitely had an Ace hand because that is about the only hands he would raise with, even though I had an Ace in my hand to.. Which makes it a little less likely that he also has an ace but again these guys aren't hard to figure out.. So he definitely had an ace. Now the object is to find out what his kicker is. My kicker was a six so my hand was going to be a fold anyway since I knew he had an ace and pretty much any kicker he is raising with is beating me. You don't want to put yourself in a dominated position in Hold 'em, you just cant do that a lot and be profitable. Actually you want to avoid it at all costs, but lets face it sometimes we call with AQ vs AK and we suck out that Q to take the hand down. If you don't know what Im talking about, basically the guy with AK is playing every card in the deck against you and you are playing for the 3 queens left in the deck. Because if the ace comes the king is a bigger kicker so your ace is essentially a dead card. Not realizing this simple concept destroys a bunch of would-be good poker players. Anyway, I was able to narrow his hand to AT (ace/ten), and at this point I had told the whole table that I wanted to call his hand. I shot the guy a look while I was trying to determine what he had. Sometimes you can just look at a person and know they don't have much but this guy definitely wanted me in the hand, but I know from previous hands he seriously over values hands. Anyway, from his bet he clearly didn't have AK, or AQ, and it just wasn't an AJ bet from him either. Long story long I called it and his face just sank into the table and everyone was shocked again. A couple of them tried to play it off like it was nothing and I just got lucky. After I do something like this everyone wants me to start calling everyone's hand. I think its probably an effort from them to reassure themselves that they are still as good as they are if I cant call every hand from everybody. All in all, calling someone's hand isn't a big deal, but what makes it fun is when you have a guy like the one whose hand I called who just has NO idea how I did it. They start to fear you after that thinking that you always know what they have. I just think its fun. The really fun part is that I do it nearly every session once or twice and Im normally right but they just still assume its luck. That only helps improve my image as a luck bucket.
Hopefully I will feel like writing more this month since my everyday life isnt as boring as being a couch potato and playing video games...or is it.