I usually don't mind shoving the first two flops

Will usually be chopping against one of these players, but the OOP flat of the CR is one of the strongest hands you'll ever see.



That was the first set I've folded on the flop in almost six months. One of the easiest spots possible especially with the EP and BTN players being so tight.


Not all that hard of a hand considering the villain was a Muppet.

I need to lose

As soon as I have my first losing session of the month, I'm moving up in stakes. Thats what I'm going to wait for.

The Human Brain: How We Decide.

Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of "How We Decide" and "Proust Was a Neuroscientist". Lehrer graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

He has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Lehrer is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab.

Hobby

Poker used to be my hobby. But now with poker as my actual profession, I need new hobbies. Basketball was great for most of my life, but I'm way too far away from being in the proper form to compete. The competition void has been filled by poker, but the athletic aspect hasn't been filled. I think I'm going to get back into bicycling (once Chicago thaws out). Biking was always great to clear my mind, it was a lot of fun, but its just not that good of a workout.

My friend Mary told me about how awesome hot yoga is. The problem is, I have one of the most inflexible bodies you've ever seen. Even when I played basketball for 5 days a week, I only touched my toes a handful of times in my life. While writing this, I tried the "Stand up straight and bend down to touch the ground" thing, and I'm half a foot away. I'd make a complete tool out of myself if I went to a yoga class. Poker noobs are tilting, and I think noobs in general are tilting for anyone that isn't noob. I don't want to be that guy that tilts people in yoga class.

Reg Wars

In a couple weeks, Newmamni is going to be creating a 2p2 Concept Of The Week Thread on Reg Wars.

Today, one of 2009's better regs (vizer#02) came back after a month long absence. His blog's title is "Bluffing My Way To The Top" and people are calling me lolbad for playing for stacks with an underpair against his obvious AK. Its not like I'm taking that line against every villain that takes the same line - but I'm definitely doing it with vizer a high percentage of the time. The last time I was involved in a regwar, was actually with vizer prior to his hiatus. Regwars are a form of tilt, and that kid is full of tilt.

Eating right

Psychological scientists X.T. Wang and Robert D. Dvorak from the University of South Dakota investigated how blood glucose levels impact the way we think about present and future rewards. Volunteers answered a series of questions asking if they would prefer to receive a certain amount of money tomorrow or a larger amount of money at a later date. They responded to seven of these questions before and after drinking either a regular soda (containing sugar) or a diet soda (containing the artificial sweetener aspartame). Blood glucose levels were measured at the start of the experiment and after the volunteers drank the soda.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that people's preferences for current versus later rewards may be influenced by blood glucose levels. The volunteers who drank the regular sodas (and therefore had higher blood glucose levels) were more likely to select receiving more money at a later date while the volunteers who drank the diet sodas (and who had lower blood glucose levels) were likelier to opt for receiving smaller sums of money immediately. These findings are suggestive of an adaptive mechanism linking decision making to metabolic cues, such as blood sugar levels.

The results indicate that when we have more energy available (that is, higher levels of blood glucose), we tend to be more future-oriented. The authors note that "the future is more abstract than the present and thus may require more energy to process. Blood glucose as brain fuel would strengthen effortful cognitive processing for future events." Conversely, having low energy (or low blood glucose levels) may make an individual focus more on the present. The finding that a diet soda drink increased the degree of future discounting suggests that artificial sweeteners may alarm the body of imminent caloric crisis, leading to increased impulsivity.

The authors conclude that if controlling blood glucose levels may affect our decisions for later versus current rewards, then "reducing the degree of fluctuation in blood glucose may offer a possible means for the treatment and intervention of some impulsive disorders, anorexia, drug addiction, and gambling addiction."

Download the article here: http://people.usd.edu/~xtwang/Papers/Wang_Dvorak%20%28psychological%20science%2009%29.pdf

Half TR

For the first time ever, this life nit flew in an upgraded airline seat, drove an upgraded rental car, and booked the largest room at two hotels this week.

Granted, the airline seat was on a discount airline, the rental car was purchased through priceline.com, and the hotels didn't have any real suites. However, it was still nice to not travel with the budget as the top priority.