I've been playing a little heads-up lately on pokerstars. Nothing major, just a little $1/2 or $2/4 every once in a while. Here's a beauty that you might all enjoy. You can vew in on pokerhand.org. I also reproduced below. Of course I give this hand up if I don't have the nut flush draw to go along with my KK. This is one of those hands where you hit your draw, get pretty happy and then sit in disbelief as the chips don't come to your side of the table as you expect. Always lots of fun!

Pokerstars Game (?) Hold'em No Limit ($1/$2) - 2025/11/26 - 18:00:30 (ET)
Table 'Yunnan II' 2-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: Hero ($122 in chips)
Seat 2: djforever ($225.40 in chips)
djforever: posts small blind $1
Hero : posts big blind $2

Holecards:
Dealt to Hero KK
RAISE djforever, $4 to $6
RAISE Hero , $10 to $16
CALL djforever, $10

Flop: (Pot: $32)
3A6
BET Hero , $22
RAISE djforever, $28 to $50
RAISE Hero , $56 to $106 and is all-in
CALL djforever, $56

Turn: (Pot: $244)
3A6 7

River: (Pot: $244)
3A67 5
>>>djforever said, "gg"

Showdown:
Hero : shows KK (a flush Ace high)
djforever: shows 54 (a straight flush Three to Seven)
djforever collected $243 .50 from pot

SUMMARY:
Total pot $244 | Rake $0.50

We're happy to report that we changed ISP's this past weekend and are now on our own dedicated equipment. Up until now, we have been co-located on a server with other websites. The server was in Canada so we had two issues that were causing speed/response-time problems. First, when other websites experienced high volume our speed was affected. Second, because the server was located in another country, there were basic internet connection issues from time to time.

We believe that the new ISP and the new dedicated equipment should greatly help to solve these issues and result in a faster performing site. Please let us know if you are seeing our pages load quicker. If you are still experiencing any speed issues, do not hesitate to drop me an email or post a comment to this blog entry. I'm at scot@tworags.com.

On another topic, we're in the process of redesigning the site. This should take another month or so to be implemented. The new look will give us a friendlier/less corporate look. It will also better highlight our focus on blogging, trip reports and room listings/reviews. If any of you are interested in seeing some of the new layouts and designs, we would be happy to share them with you and hear your opinions. In the near future, I'll probably post some JPG's of the new interface and ask for comments.

- Scot

I had registered for the Pokerstars free-roll blog championship. The tournament started at 12pm CA time, but we had plans to at 12:15 and wouldn't be back for about 3 hours. That gave me 15 minutes to play like a complete maniac and see what I could do with my stack. I figured if I could double or triple my stack size, I might have something left when I returned.

We started with 10k in chips and just went at it from the first hand. For example, on the first hand a guy raises to 150 and there were 3 callers. I quickly made it 3k to go and took it down. This type of thing happened for the first orbit and I was sitting with 16k. So I had substantially increased my stack with no regard for what hand I had and without ever going past the flop. Of course someone could have woken up with a hand, but I tried to feel it out and determine to the best I could when people were hedging their bets.

I then called a raise with 66 and flopped trips. I made pot sized bets against one opponent, but the river brought both the flush and straight possibilities so when he checked to me on the river I checked too. Of course he got there so I was back down to 11k. No problem, within the next orbit I got back up to 19k. That's when my wife came in and told me we had to go. i didn't think a 19k stack was enough to last until I got back, so now I decided to push on every hand until I got called hoping to suck out.

I raised or re-raised all-in on 4 consecutive hands. On the 4th hand a guy called me with AT. I had only 97, but wasn't that far behind. He won the hand and I kept doing it again while my wife yelled from the car for me to join her! I got into two more 40/60 type all-ins and lost them both and I was put out of my misery for good!

Anyway, the moral of the story is that if I actually played like a maniac, BUT had a bit more control it would have really been interesting. I assume this is the way a lot of the better tournament players do it. They start off very, very aggressive to try and build a stack quickly. In this case if I didn't need to do the all-in trick and simply kept on pushing the edges when I knew that guys were not willing to take chances early on, I would have had no problem doubling or even tripling my stack fairly quickly.

I was just playing a 6-handed turbo on PS when this hand came up:

******************************************************************
Big Blind is t400 (3 handed)

Hero (t4855)
BB (t2220)
Button (t1925)

Preflop: Hero is SB with K, T.
1 fold, Hero completes, BB checks.

Flop: (t650) 9, 8, 7 (2 players)
Hero bets t800, BB raises to t1795, Hero calls t995.

Turn: (t4240) Q (2 players)

River: (t4240) J (2 players)

Final Pot: t4240

Hero has Ks Ts (straight, king high).
BB has 9s Qd (two pair, queens and nines).
Outcome: Hero wins t4240.

******************************************************************

Right after the hand the guy I beat starts saying things like 'what a joke', 'I can't believe you f*&&^^ called' and a bunch of things I'll leave to your imagination.

Let's look at the hand. PF I was a 65% favorite. The flop hit me very strong. I had two overs and an open-ended, so while I didn't know for sure, I likely had 14 outs when he pushed and I'm getting 3-1, so it was basically an autocall. As it turns out my outs were good so we were almost exactly 50/50.

My point is that he had no reason to go off... in fact, there's never a reason to go off. Usually the person who gets mad has no reason to be mad. This is poker. We all win when we're ahead, win when we're behind, lose when we're ahead and lose when we're behind. And you run the risk of looking stupid. Either because you're a bad sport, or in situations like this case, you are just plain wrong when you're complaining so you look really stupid.

So the next time you bust out, just shut the (*&%$% up and walk away.

I haven't played online in months since the old neteller days and wanted to try my hand at some of the wcoop events so Adam suggested I give ePassporte a try. Well I have and so far NO GOOD. I first tried using my Visa card and it was rejected. No biggie. I assumed it was one of those issues with the credit card company not wanting to fund a gambling site so I thought I would use the bank account option. I tried that but received a 'communication error.'

I next tried a second CC and it worked fine. Only funded $150 to start. I won my first $109 sng, but then bubbled a few times, and had a few interesting hands so I needed to reload. Today I tried to use the CC again and received a 'rejected by your bank' error. I called my bank and they told me that they not only didn't reject any transaction, but there wasn't any transaction. So I called epassporte and after waiting on hold for a while was told that they have been having a CC processing issue since Sunday. What? Is this a some type of Mickey Mouse operation? The guy told me to try a bank account. I mentioned that I did on Friday, but received an error. He knew about that but said it was a problem last week and they worked it out. This is not good!

Anyway, I decided to try the bank account option again and received the same error again. Oh, well. I guess I can ask some friends to transfer some money to my account, but maybe this is a sign. Who knows.