Bloody Poker Weekend

Or, in "Friends" style, "The One Where When It Rains, It Pours."

Crummy weekend. I even had two stanzas of a poem written detailing the massacre, then thought better of it. The world does not need one more mediocre poet.

I decide to take a live shot again on Saturday, as much because I absolutely had to get out of the apartment as much as anything. I decided the 45-mile drive to Rockford and the games run by Rockford Charitable games was as good an excuse as any to get the new car out and up to freeway speeds for the first time, and it hums along okay, even at higher RPMs. It's never going to outrun a Ferrari, though, to be sure.

The Rockford experience was interesting. I played in a couple of small MTTs, $170 and $120, respectively, and cashed in neither. I didn't see much for cards throughout the day and despite making it halfway through the field or better in both, it was an uphill battle in each. In the first one I ended up short-stacked early, clawed back to above my starting stack, then exited after losing a race with fours against something like A-10. In the second one I also took an early hit after an all-in short stack connected with Q-10 against my waiting A-J, and then I clawed back again to get to the final table through frequent steals and one showdown where my A-K held against K-Q. Finally, though, I went out when I pushed with fives from EP with an M of about 3.5 and the SB called with pocket sevens. The funny part of this tale was the hilarious way the redraw was done for the final table. I recounted that in a post over at KickAssPoker for you all to enjoy.

The games were held in this old Italian-American community center on the east side of the Rock River, just north of downtown in an area I'd never been to before. It now also serves as a Rotary or Lions Club or somesuch, but I could look around the interior of the place with its high ceilings and inset stage on one wall and imagine an era when different types of political and social gatherings were held in its rooms.

Poker, though... blechhh. I returned home that night and went absolutely nowhere in a couple of late-night tourneys, and then Sunday, well, Sunday was worse. I didn't even get to play on Sunday thanks to one of my favorite sites screwing things up. Worse, when I contacted support for the site, I received a bullshit response, and I plan on going off on them in a day or two if they don't change their tune in a big hurry. (And, yoo-hoo, guys at as-yet-unnamed site, I know you read this.) To add insult to injury, the site in question locked down the complaint thread on their forum related to the problem.

So what that amounted to was waiting around for two hours for a site to fix a problem that they should have been able to fix, that they said they would fix... and that they didn't fix. Worse, the solution that was offered by support (in lieu of proper support) was and is unacceptable.

I expect to be going into excruciating detail about this matter in the near future. We'll see. And I'm going to make a few brief comments about a second newsworthy online site as well.