“Pot.”

Current music: BT – Laptop Symphony from Two Tribes in Melbourne Park (07-Mar-2004)

Current poker: Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo ($.10 / $.25 blinds)

With assistance from Drizz and Ryan, I’ve been dabbling with baby stakes PLO8 this week ($25 max).

The one thing I’ve learned so far — people at this level are terrible. The juiciest play I’ve repeatedly seen involves calling pot-sized bets in a heads up pot, chasing the low half of the pot with absolutely no high draw. I love those people. Obviously, like in limit O8, two-way hands are the name of the game here (nothing like sitting on the nut-nut), but at worst chase the high half of the pot and hope the low doesn’t hit.

It’s an interesting game, as the pot-sized betting changes things quite drastically from the limit variant, but it plays. so. slooooooooooowly. Even with a mashup of “Godspeed” and “King of Pain” playing in the background, I find my attention wanders. The bright side is that the slow pace makes it near impossible to tilt (or at least, stay on tilt). Are you listening, Dawn Summers?

Mary, who seems to spend all day waiting for people to drop over dead, alerted me to the demise of Kitty Carlisle, age 96. That death vaults Team DuggleReaper into the 2007 RTFT Dead Pool lead, as the first team to ferry two team members to the hopeless gates of Hades.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with adoptees lately. Talking with a few of them has given me some new insight into one of my brothers, who is six months older than me and was adopted from Korea when I was 4. Might be a topic worth revisiting at some point soon (consider this post my mental placeholder).

Just yesterday I was thinking to myself “Man, we haven’t had a 2007 RTFT Dead Pool tally in a while.” Then today, I was rewarded with the news that Kurt Vonnegut died. Does the fact that I consider that a reward make me a bad person? Yes. Yes it does. But that shouldn’t stop me from congratulating Team Snailtrax for cracking the leader board. Updated standings via the link at right, as always.

Aural Crunchiness?

I’ve often said that gambling is the bacon of everyday life (it makes anything better). But really, my bacon worship is nothing next to that of Daddy or Al. It is especially for them that I am linking an article from today’s New York Times: The Perfect Bacon Sandwich Decoded: Crisp and Crunchy.

The research combined four types of cooking, using grills, pans and ovens, three kinds of oil and four types of bacon — smoked, unsmoked, streaky and thick cut — to establish the preferences of 50 tasters in such matters as the butty’s tactile and aural crunchiness.

I love that researchers spent 1,000 hours getting to the bottom of this.