Tells. Attempted to watch/listen to the Zach Elwood poker tells webinar Thursday night. I say "attempted" because he used streaming videos to illustrate his demo material, and it was so incredibly jerky and jumpy that viewing it was essentially impossible. I'm pretty disappointed, too, as the audio was reasonable, and he was clearly saying all manner of really interesting things that I was very interested in. For instance, he takes strong exception to the standard Mike Caro advice of strong means weak, and weak means strong as it pertains to eye contact. He (evidently) showed a number of examples of this behavior via live poker videos, but I can't be certain, as it was essentially impossible to watch any of the demos. The webinar was a 3 hour affair, and because I bailed on it before the 1-hour mark, Elwood gave me a full refund the next day. He's a stand-up guy, and his material on tells is first rate, but he'll need to figure this aspect of the live webinar thing out before he does another one. (FWIW, it sounds as if about half of the attendees were in the same boat as me, while the other half had no difficulties at all watching. My internet connection speed was excellent, so I believe the problem was on his end...)
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ABC Training. Had another good app development session with Le Monsieur, but with all my recent work/travel commitments, I fear I'm becoming the weak link keeping this train moving forward on the tracks. Hopefully, I will have some time later today to push forward on generating the next lesson material.
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Losses. Made the mistake of trying to play this week while tired and jet-lagged. As a result, I'm down a couple hundred bucks, due primarily to bad/dumb/poor play. Looking in hindsight at some of the moves I attempted makes me cringe. Calling down with middle pair, chasing draws with terrible odds, yada yada. Online poker has gotten harder over the past few years, and you really have to be mentally sharp and alert if you want to beat the game. I was neither of those things this week when I sat down at the virtual tables. Dumb.
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Poker Book Redux. A few weeks ago, I wrote about two disappointing poker books I'd picked up at the local used bookstore (see here for that post).... Well, after some further reading, I'm starting to change my tune about one of them. Said simply, the book Killer Poker No Limit is actually much better than I implied last time. Yes, the style is still too "cute" for my tastes, but if you can get past his writing style, the substance is pretty solid. It's not a traditional poker how-to book, but it does have some interesting ways to evaluate hand and table dynamics. There's one passage a few chapters in that I have read literallly three separate times to get my brain around (it has to do with how you classify players at your table). I'm still only about halfway through the book as a whole, but based on what I've read thus far I can now recommend the book to intermediate and above players. Good, thought-provoking material. (Click on the book picture below to see more details...)
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WSOP Coverage. I believe coverage of the WSOP on ESPN begins tonight. Gotta go set the DVR to capture the action (woot!)-- and of course Norm (sigh).
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iPad. I mentioned last week that I've been given an iPad Mini to evaluate at work. So far, I'm really liking the device. Mr. Multi, however, made a comment in passing that he prefers the Android tablets, so I'm now wondering why he thinks that's preferable to the Apple tablets. I plan to ping him later this week to ask specifics, but if any of you have thoughts in the meantime, please drop me a line. Would be interested in hearing different opinions on the matter...
All in for now...
-Bug
