Late weekend update

The internet in my hotel has been out the last two days so I'm late with updates. I'm sure this has caused great concern in the poker world. Of even greater import is that I missed Miami Don's big tournament Sunday night and MATH last night.

This hotel living has started to really suck. The room upstairs has been host to some circus people who liked to train their dancing elephants at 1 AM, the Chinese national gymnastics team who were practicing their floor exercises, and now a large dog who seems to be left alone a lot and relieves the boredom by running around the room every hour or so. In the last week in the room next door have been two separate couples who've had late night fights. The most recent one got physical and I was half expecting bullets to come flying through the wall. I can deal with all that, but when you toss in the internet access being down for two days in a row, it's too much.

Now that that's out of my system, let's get back to the subject at hand. We played poker at work again on Friday so I got to give my new chips another workout. This time somebody else suggested a tournament, which I was quick to encourage, and I even convinced them to play with blinds rather than antes. I think everyone finally got the hang of the blinds, so there's hope that in the future we can do blinds even in the cash games.

The play wasn't much better than last time. Lots of big moves with total garbage. And even with 20-minute levels I don't think we got more than four or five hands in per level. I don't think this game will ever improve much because too many of the players are just there to have fun, and their idea of fun is to toss money in the pot and see what happens. If I hadn't been basically card dead both times we've played I'd probably be totally okay with that attitude. This time I only won a single decent pot, but still managed to take 3rd place.

After getting some dinner and taking a nap (I don't have nearly the tolerance for drinking all afternoon that I once did), I entered a 2-table $20+$2 SnG at Stars. I played a pretty decent game, only making a couple serious mistakes. The final five were all good players and it took a long time to finally get to heads-up.

My opponent was one of those players who like to push all-in whenever they think they have even a slight advantage. I think this style of play indicates a serious lack of confidence in one's ability to outplay an opponent. I suppose if I were up against a real pro it might not be a bad strategy even for me, but I still don't like it.

I tried to be patient and wait for opportunities to outplay my opponent, but the all-ins started coming more often and I eventually had to call with less than I'd prefer. My preference in this regard was well founded. I took 2nd for $105. Not a terrible result by any means.

Tonight is the WWdN at PokerStars, 20:30 EST, password monkey. I'm hoping the internet in the hotel will stay working long enough for me to play.