Not much new

After my fun time with Badugi, I've been trying to play some more but it's hard to find a game. Even play money games are few and far between.

So I'm back to playing a bit of holdem. I rejoined The Quest over the weekend, putting in maybe three hours at PokerStars. Last night I was at a table for quite a while with players who didn't suck and seemed to be taking the game seriously. That's pretty rare at the $0.01/$0.02 NL tables.

I was doing okay, up $1.25 or so. Then I seriously overplayed top pair three times. The third time I even said to myself, "Here I go, overplaying top pair again." But did I listen? Nope. Spent the next hour and a half trying to get back to even.

After quite a while of tortuously slow but otherwise reasonable play, Grandpa-somebody sat down and ruined the game. Okay, everyone is entitled to play their chips and cards any way they want. But this clown clearly sat down to play lotto, not poker. First three or four hands he pushes all-in on his first action. Congratulations, Grandpa, spend that $0.12 wisely. Somebody finally got tired of his antics and called him, had him big time before the flop, but, of course, Grandpa sucks out.

I decided it wasn't worth chancing it against this idiot so I accepted my $0.57 loss and called it quits for the night.

I've moved most of my poker stuff over to a new computer, but haven't installed the gizmos that let me create the nice graph of The Quest. As soon as I can figure out how to export a graph from OpenOffice Calc I'll update the graph with the new numbers. Despite the Sunday night loss I finished the weekend up a bit. Exact numbers are on the other computer. (Like anyone cares.)

On an almost completely unrelated note, I picked up a pretty cool new computer tool/toy last week. Back when I was four-tabling limit I found I was getting a bit of repetitive stress from reaching out to work the mouse in my far less than ergonomic computer setup. I reasoned I could improve the situation if I could just find something I could hold in my lap that would let me enter my action at the various tables. My search for solutions led me to the Wacom Graphire graphics tablet. It worked quite well. I could hold it in my lap and point at spots on the tablet with the stylus to enter my actions.

At work I've occasionally got sucked into doing some graphics layout stuff of one kind or another. I'm one of the least artistic people on the planet, but it started when I was the only one free to work on an ad layout. I found the software to do the job, brought together a bunch of images into an arrangement I really hated, but everyone else liked, and suddenly I'm "the graphics guy".

So I was doing some more work along these lines last week and was having a very tough time using the mouse to do what I needed. A quick trip to Best Buy and I had a new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. (My Graphire is among my many possessions still on the other side of the continent.) I'm not sure that the Bamboo is any better than the Graphire, but it does have the requisite glowing blue ring at the top, the ultimate sign of techie coolness. Anyway, the graphics tablet is great with the graphics program I'm using. Today I was experimenting with the calligraphy brush tool. I'm going to have to coolest signature for my email.

If you do any paint program stuff or work with Photoshop or anything similar, for $100 the Bamboo is a pretty nice tool that can make using these programs far more natural. And if you're four-tabling limit holdem, it might save you from a repetitive stress injury. (I don't recommend it for NL due to the horrible interface most sites have for entering bet amounts. The keyboard is the only way to go for NL.)