The happiest day of my life was yesterday. I was sitting on my Laz-Y-Boy when the Lions, who were a 9.5 point underdog, but down by 10, kicked a meaningless field goal at the last second to cover the spread.

Overall had a pretty good Sunday, the Lions and Titans covered and the Rams won outright and I had them at +300. I only had three losses the Saints moneyline, vs. Aejones in fantasy football who ran like god (He has Lendale White and Mewelde Moore and he just squeaks out a win). And eventhough I didn’t have any money on them the Vikings lost a game they could have won.
Brad Childress is a terrible coach. He shouldn’t be fired he should be euthanized. However yesterday wasn’t his fault he made some terrible decisions like squibbing the opening two kickoffs. Hester is a good returner, but not good enough to automatically concede midfield. He also should have gone for it on 4th and 3 from the 5 down 17, but instead he kicked a FG. The fallacy here is he figures if they kick a FG it is a two score game so they still have a non-zero chance of winning. If they miss while going for it on 4th the game is effectively over. However his goal should be to maximize the probability of winning a game not prolonging the time you have a 1% chance of winning.
However as I stated earlier the loss wasn’t Childress fault, the primary reason for the loss was bad luck. Chris Kluwe’s blocked punt and Charles Gordon’s muffed punt are both non predictive fluky plays. While Kluwe’s play was terrible it’s not as if Kluwe’s scouting report says “Can’t catch snaps. Loves kicking the ball into the opponents chests” it was a fluky play that could have just as easily happened to the Bears. Similarly Charles Gordon makes a smart play blocking the gunner so the ball goes into the endzone to get the Vikings a touchback, instead it takes a weird bounce into him his left arm; gifting the Bears a TD. At this point I think they should be starting Tarvaris Jackson over Gus Frerotte. Gus isn’t even an adequate bandaid and while the same is true of Tarvaris isn’t either he adds value running and is young enough that he could still improve. Ideally I would like to see Childress fired, Cowher hired and Tjax starting after the bye week, but realistically none of those will happen.

I only played one tournament the $650 PCA sat. I got short early won two flips before losing AQs > AQ and AK>AQ. I really want to qualify for the PCA, but I don’t feel like playing full schedules on Sundays when I can watch football all day instead. Right now there are no especially good tournaments, but once FTOPS X starts I will probably play full Sundays.

After missing all last week at school today for WPT Fallsview it was a bit of a challenge going back to class, but I ended up going to both of my classes and paying attention. Then I worked in the library for an hour afterwards after discovering I had an assignment due Thursday. In my finance 2 class my prof kept calling on me to answer questions because she thought I was screwing around on my CPU, when in actuality I was taking notes. I didn’t know a lot of the answers since I was gone for a week, eventhough I was paying attention. This tilted me because she concluded she was right that I wasn’t paying attention when in reality she might as well have been asking me what the GNP in Turkmenistan is. If I had been zoning out and not paying attention, which happens a lot, I would have been embarrassed, but her actions would have been reasonable ( or at least correct), but it tilted me because I was actually paying attention, maybe this is karma owning me for all the times when I don’t pay attention and get ignored.

The Patriots won today and I had them with the moneyline, which concludes a pretty good week of NFL betting for me. I am going to try and catch up to Mad Men and get psyched for school/ writing my fallsview trip report tomorrow.

As always reasonable, rational comments are welcome.

Well I am pretty sure before starting my blog I need to make some sort of generic introduction post, what I play, my poker history, my eye colour etc. So here goes. My name I Sam Greenwood I am primarily a cash player, but I play a lot of tourneys and have been running good in tourneys which causes me to play a lot less cash.

I mainly play 2/4-5/10 6max, I have toyed with HU, but I tilt a ton. Theoretically I am better than everyone I play HU so when I lose I feel it is unfair because I am better than them, this causes me to tilt. It is also a lot easier to justify all sorts of terrible plays HU based on game flow or a timing or w/e and while these terrible plays cross my mind in 6max, but they are a lot harder theoretically justify.

The good thing about having a bunch of big tourney scores, outside of making a lot of money is that it makes it easier to improve my game. I am not forced to grind at my B or C game as a way to make money, at least this is what I tell myself after playing 10k hands in a month. I am about to hit a slow stretch in school so in the next week or two I really want to start putting in a lot of 6max hands, but I have said that every week for the past couple months, maybe writing it in a blog will guilt me into doing it.

I want to start this blog as a way to get me to start writing again. I have always preferred writing non-fiction to fiction since I can do a better job of channeling my voice as a sarcastic ****.

I don't really feel like giving a long poker history because for most people they are pretty boring an uneventful.1

Edit: I wish I knew how to use footnotes, but since I don’t I will just add the comment in here.

1. Obviously I say that before rambling on for 1000 words about my poker history.


In high school I started playing freerolls where first place was like 25 cents. I can remember waiting at my computer for registration to open to make sure that I was in the freeroll. Retroactively I was probably terrible, but better than the average freeroll player and played/ran good enough to cash in one freeroll, which gave me a BR for 1c sngs.
After grinding penny stake SNGSs I satted into a a $1 mtt and came 2nd for like $50 or something and moved up to $2 sngs.
The next year or so was a bit of a blur. I remember having a big MTT cash for around 1k, after forgetting I signed up for the tourney and playing my first hand after blinding off half my stack. Since I was still in high school and didn’t have real expenses I didn’t need to cash out so I just kept climbing up the stakes and treated poker like a video game; wanting to get to the next level and to get a new high score. When I went on downswings I was upset that I needed to win money to get back to my high score, when a normal person would have been upset that they lost the value of their chequing account..
I kept playing sngs moving from the $24s on FTP to the Party $33s to $55s to $109s, until the UIGEA got passed. I made some big mistakes post-UIGEA, primarily not game selecting and playing in games that I was breakeven or –ev in and went on a huge downer. That I didn’t fully recover from until I had an awesome January once you ignore not cashing in the PCA where I had like 90% of my action after satting in.

I had just finished my first year at McGill and was planning on grinding all summer making a ton of money, instead I made like 50k in MTTs in May and than lost money for the rest of the summer, while barely playing, but watching a lot of TV. To be fair I probably played a lot more than I remember since I ended up getting supernova on stars and basically stopped playing regularly on stars in September.
Speaking of September (C+ segue) In September I started playing 2/4 6max with less than 1k lifetime hands of 6max cash. Honestly I was terrible, I could do some things right and was probably a marginal winner. I was the type of player that I would currently think is terrible a reg and I wouldn’t go out of my way to sit with them, but I would have no problem playing with them. While it was surprised me at at the time in retrospect it made a lot of sense that I broke even for the first 50k hands I played. My biggest leak was giving too much credit to my opponents, a problem I never had in tournaments. I thought cash games were the holy grail of poker and everyone was always trying to bluff me and had perfectly balanced bluff frequencies, turns out most people sucked in cash games as well. After a frustrating fall in both cash and tourneys I went to the PCA and sold most of my action. I played terribly in the ME, I was going to post a TR of it on 2p2, but was so embarrassed with how bad I played I didn't want to write it. Conservatively I would say I had two hands that were absolute abominations and two hands that range from mediocre to bad. It was as if I took everything I learned in poker and forgot about it because I could see people’s eyes. I should have been one of the chip leaders at the end of the day instead I was busto.
Luckily the rest of January was good for me and I made $1/hand over 25k hands at 2/4. However I lost money from February- April I basically only played Sundays and ran bad in tourneys. I was in a pretty ****ty apartment that didn't get that much natural light and Montreal was freezing cold, this made me pretty depressed and lazy. On weekdays whenever I was supposed to do school work I would keep procrastinating. If I grinded instead of school that would have been okay, but I didn't use that time to grind, to me starting a session signified that I wouldn’t study, however I could delude myself into thinking I would study after the next commercial.

My school year ended pretty uneventfully and I went back to Toronto for the summer, I was relatively busto at this point and was looking forward to grinding for the summer the goal I set for myself was to make 100k playing 200k hands. In May I played FTOPS VIII 2.5k and since I was pretty underrolled I sold about 65% of my action and ended up coming in third and cashing for 240k and personally winning like 85k or so. Two days later I came 2nd in the 109r for 20k. Once again my plan to grind all summer long was derailed by a huge tourney cash and my goal of 200k hands turned into 20k hands.

Outside of winning 100k in two weeks another reason I didn’t grind in the summer was that I lived with my parents. I was originally going to live at Max’s house, while he was in Vegas. However once his roommates decided they weren’t going to be living there I decided to stay at home where I could get free meals and some human contact. Living with my parents was fine … for two months. Then they started really annoying me, but Max was back from Vegas so I had no choice, but to live with them. I should have seen that coming because they annoyed me the summer before this one, but I guess I am retarded . When living with my parents grinding would become tough, they would often guilt trip me for playing poker. "Sam can you do xyz? You didn't do anything all day?" Which is bull**** grinding 5 hours isn't the hardest thing in the world, but it is work and it fairly stressful. My issue wasn’t that they were asking me to do chores, while living with them, that is reasonable. What bothered me is that they trivialized me working...