Your Weekly Dose of Crazy

This is actually approaching crawesome, but let's keep it here in Crazy, because of the enormous slabs of crazy.

"An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it."

Friday Is Kids In The Hall Day

Uberpost 002: Mini Uber is Still An Uber If I Say It Is

That's right, I'm going to keep up Iggy's shtick until he takes it back from me. The presumption is staggering. Like a twelve-year old trying to wear Michael Jordan's jersey. Julius_Goat: Shaming little people since 2009. Holla.

Trip reports from WPBT abound, so bound over to them if you ain't already:

Astin
Pauly
Derrick
Waffles
Gnome
Speaker
Jordan
jjok
Recess Rampage

Others, I have no doubt. Link 'em up in the comments.

This weekend I stayed up watching Mini FTOPS events for Poker at the Rail blog so that Al Can't Hang could go out and create a man-made SoCo shortage. See here and here for some of the hijinx I observed.

Al's favorite quote:

The Full tilt pros got mowed down in Event #7 like extras in Saving Private Ryan and thus there was nothing to report on their actions in that event.

My favorite quote:

BOM had top pair, top kicker and not much else, so after a couple of blanks, he was the bald-headed little girl with no lollypop.

Go, read, comment, and give me five stars, for crying out loud. Let's make me seem more valuable than I actually am, please.

Oh and hey! I even made a tidy score of my own while doing it. My first-ever MTT takedown. As the Buddah once said to the fish, "w00t." I'm even considering a post about some of the key hands, so you can see just how badly you have to play to win in poker.

Oh, and double hey! Speaking of Mini FTOPS and big MTT scores, go congratulate Hoyazo for pulling 27,000 out of the series. He needs your congratulations to stay awake, I promise. I heard that he's cutting his coffee with Red Bull, which is changing his chromosomes but not keeping those eyelids up. Luckily 27 large buys plenty of toothpicks.

Triple ripple hey! In case you didn't know, Astin's the WBPT winner. Which means that a small but growing percentage of bloggers thinks that I am the WPBT Golden Hammer winner. When you are only pixels and never show up IRL, it turns out that wacky theories accrue like wattles on Joe Lieberman's neck. In further Astin news, he took the sickest skyline photo ever from his room atop the Bellagio. Go, observe with wonderment.

It's nice to start up the blogging apparatus again. It was nice to just let this thing lie fallow for a month, but I have too much crazy and too much awesome to share, to say nothing of all those random silly poker thoughts. Time to get weird.

Here's a dose of crazy:



Here's a dose of awesome.



Here's some Kids In The Hall news that a few of you emailed me about. I have been watching for this to come around the corner for a year or so.



That's right, y'all. The Kids Are back. Can you wait? You'll have to. But not for much longer.

Oh yeah. Only 5 more weeks until LOST. Get ready for my ongoing nonsense as we follow the final legs of the greatest TV drama ever.

For those of you who are newbies and want to catch up, here's a little video that may help.



Time to go fire up Xtranormal and interview some famous poker hands. I'll see you around out there. Keep your powder dry.

Score!

I think it may be time for my impromptu and unofficial blogging hiatus to end.

Behold: I can no longer claim to have never won a large-field MTT. Respeck.

Exclusive Breaking News: Darvin Moon Reveals Hold Cards In Infamous "Worst Fold Ever" Hand

There are some disadvantages to knowing every member of the November Nine, and I've blogged about my travails extensively before. But, occasionally, there are benefits, too. My position give me access that few others can claim. And so, with the whole poker world buzzing about Darvin Moon's fold to Steven Beglieter's all-in shove while already thoroughly pot-committed.

Let's throw it to the always-stellar Dr. Pauly for the hand coverage:

Moon opened from UTG for 1.3M. Begleiter thee-bet to 3.9M. Moon smooth called. The flop was 4s-3s-2d. Moon checked. Begleiter bet 5.35M. Moon went for the double-fisted check-raise and pulled out 15M in chips. Begleiter tanked for a minute before he announced "All in" for 21M total or 6M more.

Moon mouthed, "Wow."

Then the worst fold in the history of tournament poker ensued. Moon folded.

In the 24 hours or so following that fateful fold, the buzz has reached fever pitch. What was Moon thinking? What could have kept him from calling with nearly 9:1 pot odds? And, most of all, what had he been holding?

Well, now I know. Darvin told me.

He was holding 5s6s for the nut straight and a shot at a flush or even a straight flush. But before you think that this laydown was some nefarious chip-dump or one of the worst cases of hand-misreading in history, be aware: The fold was a part of Moon's strategy. His strategy to win.

"I had to fold there, man," he told me in a hasty phone conversation this afternoon. "If I had called, I'd have been getting it in way, way, WAY ahead. And that just went against my general strategy."

Moon calls it his "Get it in behind" strategy, and he held to it religiously throughout the grueling seventeen-hour final table.

"I mean, look, man," Moon confided, "I've been playing a lot of online poker these days, and those dudes just seem to win a LOT getting it all in ahead of time, as long as they got the worst hand of the fellow calling him. It just seemed like a foolproof strategy. So I'm going to the deck mainly with Ace Queen, sometimes King Nine or something to mix it up, but I wanna be sure I'm always a substantial underdog, so that I am 90% sure to win the hand."

Moon denies misplaying the hand in question, or displaying a lack of understanding of pot odds. "Look, you have to understand, I had the nut straight," he said. "I mean, it was a lock hand with other cards still comin' that might put me in jeopardy of an even stronger hand. I just can't put any extra money in the pot under those circumstances, no matter how compelling the pot odds. I mean, I was trying to win the hand there by forcing a fold. I figured it was my only way to possibly win was by betting, because obviously holding the nuts I can't continue. It's just not good poker to give your opponent a chance to kick your junk when you can save your chips for a better spot, like when he's got Ace King and you've got Ace Six or something, and you can just wind up and junk-kick him without mercy. Just ask that Cada kid. He's figured out how to get his chips in even worse than I've been able to, and he's got even more chips than I do."

Joe Cada was unavailable for comment.



Image courtesy of Poker From The Rail.

Your Sporadic Dose Of Awesome

Let's be clear, here. The Beastie Boys' classic hit Sabotage makes everything better by a factor of 12.47.

Proof.

Friday Is Kids In The Hall Day

Give me a tea please, you bastard.