Been a little while since my last update....partly because I've been lazy, and partly because not much of anything has been going on.

New years was a blast, I drove down to Minneapolis to party with my friends Dan and Adam. Other than getting obscenely drunk, Adam decided to go rockstar on his apartment and started destroying shit. None of us are really sure why he did that, including himself, haha.

Pokerwise, one of my resolutions was to become a Supernova this year, and well, I've been pretty lazy to start the year. Only played about 75 games or so, but i'm up so far on the year! LOL. It seems to me though the games have gotten infinitely softer since the year has changed. I just don't understand why i'm not putting in much volume anymore, maybe I'm just getting burnt out.

If you blog be sure to register for the Pokerstars Blogger Championship!

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: XXXXXX 248380

I'll have a more in detail blog soon

-Bakken

The Poker Blackout

While i've been really lazy the last five months and just playing video games and very little poker, the PPA has been very busy trying to legalize online poker in the U.S. and a bill has been submitted. Thats great right? WRONG! Attached to this bill will be a 15 month fucking blackout to US citizens, what does this mean? It means if you live at a US address you will literally not be able to play online poker for 15 months and it could go into effect as soon as January 1st. Most of the regs I used to play with seem to be making plans to move out of country if this happens. Obv, I won't be as i'm still rebuilding and just don't have that much of a drive to play anymore. Not sure why, just isn't the same as it was seven years ago, it feels more like work than a fun activity that makes me money.

My new years resolution was going to be "less video games, more poker" but now that may not work out because of this bill. Sigh.....well, I guess thats all I got, so get your poker in people, come January 1st, you may only be able to play at the brick and mortar casino's

-Bakken

A disgusting year for the Vikings, and it all boils down to Brad Childress. Its hard to tell if he's hamstringing his coordinators or not with his reputation, so i'm not sure if I would like Bevell fired as well. As for Frazier, i'm losing faith in his defensive scheme, but i'm willing to let him stay ( or even be head coach ) for at least two more years. I had my last straw with Chilly today when we were down by 21, at green bays 34 yard line, 4th and 11, with 3ish minutes left in 3rd quarter. Season is essentially over, you need to win out to have a chance at playoffs and somehow overcome this 21 point deficit. What does Chilly do? He kicks a FG!!!!! (which got nullified by another vikings hold ) What in gods green earth does a FG do for you there? I believe he cemented the termination of his position with that one play. He will go down as one of the worst coaches in the history of the Vikings and the NFL.

Now, onto the players....god where to even begin. Brett Favre has been absolutely awful, but you know, he's old, a future hall of famer, almost brought us the big one last year, and has really had no time whatsoever because of our atrocious line, add in the fact that he was being hamstrung by Chilly/Bevell's terrible offensive scheme and it makes you wonder how the hell he did so much last year?

The O-Line-----GOOD GOD.....#1-Loadholt and MCkinnie are worthless, they both don't pass the eye test ( as PA would say ).....I just look at them and see scared, confused, idiots to be honest. Loadholt averages 1 holding and 1 false start a game, McKinnie blows blocking assignments left and right ( as does Loadholt ) and its disgusting. McKinnie needs to be shipped somewhere, i'm willing to give Loadholt one more year as he is still young and looked pretty promising last year. The only solid O-line guy we have is our LG Hutchinson, everyone else needs to be scrapped. Which brings me to another point, Mckinnie and Hutch both do a pretty good job run blocking, but yet whenever we have a 4th and 1, or 4th and short, Chilly hands the ball off to AP ( totally agree ) but he ALWAYS runs the play to the RIGHT side. WHY THE FUCK would you run to the horrible right side of our line??? Oh, I know why, cuz Chilly thinks he's being sneaky...this is his thought process: "Well they know i'm gonna give it to Adrian, but they will expect me to run it left, so i'm gonna go behind my shit right side and catch them off guard." Well you forgot one thing Chilly you dumbfuck, Loadholt gets stood up every fucking play no matter who is coming through!!!

Wide Receivers-Berrian is a waste of money, other than him, i'm fine with our surrent setup.

Linebackers-I LOVE our linebacking core, it doesnt get much more solid than Leber, Greenway, and E.J.

Secondary-The injury to Griffin was a huge loss and I can only hope his injuries dont destroy his career and he is one of my favorite defensive players. A healthy griffin and your looking at Griffin and Windfield, with Cook and Allen doing some nickelback work and filling in some outside coverages...not too bad by me. Now we get to my favorite, the safeties....wtf, this is a cluster fuck here. Abdullah I have actually been pretty pleased with, not good, but not terrible like Tyrell was. But, Madieu Williams needs to be gone, he is one of the most trash players on this squad.

Now that im almost done venting, I have one more point to make....our Unrestricted Free Agents:

Sidney Rice
Ray Edwards
Chad Greenway
Ben Leber
Ryan Longwell

I only listed the notables....but why wouldn't you try to extend these guys contracts last year after the good season just in case we have a horrible season or the players lose respect for Childress? This is another front office mistake and surely won't be able to resign any of these guys if Chilly is still the HC....even if Chilly is gone, I dont see us signing any of these guys but Longwell....maybe Leber and Greenway because of Frazier, but Edwards and Rice are probably "See ya in the Spring".

I'll leave you with this little gem in parting, and I apologize for my poorly written blog, im not a good writer.

So i've decided to ease back into things....I'm currently only 4-tabling the $6.50 45 mans while im at work ( might have to leave the comp if a guest comes in, so don't want to have too many goin ) and its actually feeling ok to play, not the dread feeling i've been having the past few months.

I start my mini session today and see a player with a TLB avatar, and guess who it is, fucking MI_Turtle, or Nick Rainey....so I decide to go look and see what else he's playing, and go figure, he's registered in every one of the 45 mans's i'm in. Not sure why he's mixing in the $6.50's into his sets, but whatever, I have'nt gotten into any pots with him yet.

Nick is known as one of the best 45/180 man players on the internet and is known for the legendary amounts of volume he puts in. A lot of people think he's a douchebag, I am not one of those people. I actually knew Nick and golfed with him on occasion back when I worked at TPC. He's a good guy, and fun to play golf with, he hates to lose, even if its a small amount, the dude is just competitive. I actually had no idea Nick even played poker, let alone was very good at it back when he was Patrik's assistant. Anyway, i'm not very happy to see that he's mixing in the games I play, but meh, what you gonna do?

I think i've found a way to stay motivated to play now, i've been following a lot of online grinders blogs and have been reading that a lot of them face the same problems I have, but they always grind through it, I generally don't. I'm seriously contemplating buying some lessons for the 45/180 man turbos from either acbarone, bigbluffzinc, or Nick. While I am confident that my push/fold game is good, it can always be better, and learning from any one of those guys, along with a number of others certainly wouldn't hurt, and it might also push me further in studying my own game on a consistent basis. If you aren't constantly looking for ways to improve, you'll get passed by all the guys that are. I'm positive I have leaks and plugging them is always +EV haha.

i'd like to set some goals for myself for the rest of the year, but i'll just set one, play a consistent amount....somewhere around 1k games a month and i'd consider that an accomplishment.

My sleeping patterns have vastly improved, not sure why, but they are good now...I get 6-8 hours of sleep and have plenty of time to get shit done. Hope to buy a new car in the next month or two, and move down to the cities by Feb, than back to Vegas sometime 2011.

-Bakken out

I won two dinner tickets.....yup, thats the extent of my Fall Poker Classic Week. I ended up only playing two events, was going to play four or five, but just wasnt feeling it and decided to spend those days hanging out with friends and family.

Onto the events, Event #11 was the first one I played and I lasted a grand total of 35 minutes, it was a very weird hand, and part of me is upset at how I played it and the other part of me believes I played it right because of how my opponent had been playing. Villain had been playing 70ish % of hands since the beginning of the tourney and was even trying to trap people with hands like Top Pair and an eight kicker or something weak on very wet boards. In other words, this player was not good....at all. So Villain raises from middle position and I look down at AQ offsuit and decide to three bet him. Normally early in tournaments i'll try to take a more small ball approach, but I wanted to inflate this pot early to take the lead and make it that much bigger for when I take the pot with a C bet. He calls ( which I knew he would, he hadnt folded to a three bet yet ) and we saw a flop. Flop was Q63 with two spades. Well this changed things for me, now I want him to call my c bet. He checked and I bet around 3/4 of the pot, and he called. I took a look at him and he looked very weak, I didnt notice any specific tells as of yet, just a general "I'm not comfortable" look in his posture. This actually really confused me, at first when he called I assumed it was something like QJ, QT, KQ, or a flush draw....but villain had shown that he thinks top pair is a very strong hand, so he shouldnt be uncomfortable about having any of those hands. Turn was a 3. Meh, probably a good card, but he could have A3 or something retarded, regardless I moved along as if this was a good card for my hand. He checked again and I bet 1/2 pot, than he min raises me....grrrr, this surprised me, and so did the tell I now saw from him.....normally a tell of strength. I'm cursing myself for betting this turn now, what the hell did I get myself into a big pot for this early in a tournament? lol....so after some deliberation, I decided that he could think his Qx is a huge hand is trying to trap me with it. I dont want to scare him off so I just call with the intention of snap calling any bet on the river from him ( which should put me all in )...river is a 6, good card for me, that can't possibly improve his hand. He felts me, I snap call and he tables AA....sigh. AA didn't even come into the realm of possibilities in his hand range in my mind, and it cost me dearly. I see a lot of players playing AA and KK like this and its very odd to play it as such. I worked perfectly for him here, but I think in the long term for him to play AA or KK like this is a very bad play. Trapping out of position is a very difficult thing to do and it generally costs you more equity than just barreling away with the hand. Seeing as now I had a lot of time to kill, I went and got drunk with my old man, haha.

Event #12....this event was, well rather droll. I didn't get anything going, I'd win some small pots, than lose a big one...rinse, repeat. I had 8500 at first break because I misplayed a hand against a good player. Went on a little mini heater and had it up to 20k which was somewhere around top 25 at the time, and than lost two races to shortstack all-ins and was back down to 9k. As per usual when I need the table to remain tight or need to pickup a hand, the table loosens up and i go completely card dead. I didnt play a hand for 1.5 hours and was down 6500 with blinds at 400/800 when it finally folded around to my button and I blind shoved. The small blind called with KJ and I tabled 84....damn, lol. Hit an 8 on the flop, but he went runner runner for a flush and that was that.

So I won two dinner tickets for my two events as I didnt make dinner break in either haha. Oh well, it was fun to play some live poker again and Canterbury's renovated room is very very nice. I'd rate it as one of the top five rooms in the country now....not even kidding, its gorgeous, spacious, comfortable, and the dealers/floorpersons are competent.

Later that night I went to dinner with Brook and Kat, two girls I hadnt seen in probably sixish months, maybe longer. It was good to see them, just sat around and bullshitted until like 1:30 am. I can bs with the guys for hours upon hours, but most girls I get bored talking to after 15 minutes and have to get drunk or something, but these girls keep me entertained and I can easily talk to them for hours and have fun doing it, so that was fun.

I still havent started grinding online again, really just having a hard time getting motivated to....I think I'm going to force myself to start up the 45 mans again this week. Try to set a schedule for it and stick to it, gonna have to cut back on the video games and porn heh.

Anyway, thats all I guess, pretty boring entry if you dont know anything about poker so I apologize for that.

-Bakken

Problems, problems, and more problems.....lol. I don't think I played a single session of poker the entire month of September, if I did play a session, it was probably too small to remember. I just have had no motivation to play, which probably has to something to do with these reasons:

1) Playing very low limits- I'm playing the $6 45 mans, and its just hard for me to enjoy playing and putting in a good amount of volume when at best i'll make like maybe $2500 in a month.....boring as fuck in other words.

2) I'm not sure if I can even beat the 45 mans.....these things are fucking reg infested....which normally i'm completely fine playing against regs, as i'm certain I have at least a small edge on most and at very worst give up a small edge to the very good players. The problem I find with these games now is that there are a good number of regs who play the $6's for a living, they just mass multi-table (30+ Tabling).....and these particular regs, even tho they are probably on auto-pilot playing so many tables may have better push/fold games than me.

3) My results have been super devastating.....regular speed 9 mans, and 200 nl cash are games I know I can beat....I have a large enough sample in both to know that I can beat those games and downswings don't hurt my confidence in those. But I cannot handle play 9 man regulars anymore as they take for fucking ever to play, and 200 nl cash I don't have the bankroll to play anymore since my going broke in style fiasco in vegas. So that left me trying new games, specifically the super turbo 9 mans on ftp and the 45 man turbos on stars. I have 900 games logged of super turbos and am -1%, now that could easily be just variance....but the fact that I don;t really KNOW if its me playing bad or running bad makes it seem like it could be a massive waste of my time. The 45 mans I love because I can 12 table them easily ( which is a ton for me lol ) but once again, im not sure if I am playing them correctly....I only have 450 games of these logged and am -3%....could be just a run bad streak again, but at the same time, it seems when I sharkscope the players in these fields a lot of them are regs, and a lot of them have good ROI's at the limits i'm playing....am I good enough to beat them? I don't know....the unknown is something I've always hated, I don't like investing my time into something if I don't know with absolute certainty that its going to show me a good profit. I review my hands on twoplustwo and sngWiz and everything seems like im playing pretty well, minus some spots im still learning about, but I can't help but thinking what if these posters are wrong? or what if SNGWiz is flawed? My brain is literally too negative and overactive all the damn time.

4) I've been super stressed and can't shut my brain off to sleep....so i've been sleeping like crap, my sleeping pills aren't working....so I generally wake up super late, groggy, with no motivation to do anything. I never expected to be back in MN this long, I thought I' be back in Vegas already and its really getting to my mental psyche. If you've ever read the book "The Secret" and believe it, like I do, you'll realize like I do a lot of the bad things that happen to me I bring on myself by thinking negatively about everything....and I try to change my negative attitude but I just can't seem to change that mindset....maybe I should get hypnotized or something haha.

I'll start trying to play some more again on Tuesday I think....I havent decided if I want to grind the 135 man rush tournies on tilt ( I've had a lot of good results in those ) or continue to bang away at the 45 mans and see if after 3k games if I can beat them.

I'm gonna play in 3 events at the Fall Poker Classic, so maybe i'll bink something huge there....worst case scenario, i'll break even from the whole fiasco playing the suer soft live games....I love live poker, not so much online, haha.

Anyway, just figured I'd update this beotch since its been over a month since my last post.

-Bakken out

First off, Grandma, if you read my blog, skip this one...its vulgar haha.

This blog will have nothing to do with poker, and all to do with how I hate the clientele at my place of employment. If you have worked in some sort of customer service field in the past decade, you have probably noticed how people have become more needy and really a pain in the ass to deal with. Well, I think I have found the job with the neediest clients in Minnesota.

Let's begin with my bashing of these pathetic people....

1. Last weekend I had a woman come up and tell me the soda machine ate her $2, I apologized and told her there was nothing I could do as we dont deal with the machines, we just let the company put them in here for the convenience of our guests. She gets pissed and demands a refund or a comp to the restaurant for a fucking orange juice. Ok, now I am able to do this, but she has just pushed me over the edge by being a raging cuntasaurus rex over fucking $2! So I proceed to tell her politely that it isnt within my worldly powers to refund her or comp her and if she wants her money back she's better off calling the soda company...Heh, take that bitch....NNNOOOOOO!!!! she isnt done, now she wants me to find the number for her to call the vending company, HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE NUMBER IS? So I walk over to the machine and start looking for a number ( as if this dumb bitch couldnt look for herself ) and just on a whim, decide to press the orange juice button....well what do ya know? its fucking sold out. I tell her this and she continues to have a conniption because she doesnt want water and the machine wont give her her money back. I proceed to tell her that i have to get back to the front desk to do my job....in other words, I was politely telling her to fuck off.

2. At 5:30 am yesterday morning I get a call asking when the pool opens, I tell her 8 am, she gets a little huffy and than hangs up on me. Two seconds later calls back and says well can you open the door to the pool so I can sit in the hot tub? What part of "the pool is open at 8 am" did this cunt muscle not understand? I say no, I cannot, pool is open at 8 ma'am....She flips out on me: " Why do you wait until 8 am to open the pool when there isnt even a lifeguard on duty?? I just want to sit in the hottub? I want to speak to a manager, we better get some sort of compensation for this inconvenience, let me speak to your manager now!" BITCH! ITS FUCKING 5:30 AM, THERE ISNT A FUCKING MANAGER HERE, AND FURTHERMORE, WHO THE FUCK IN THEIR SOBER MIND WANTS TO GO SIT IN THE COCKSUCKING HOTTUB AT 5:30 AM, THIS ISNT A FUCKING CLUBMED, ITS A FUCKING HOTEL!!!

3. Now I'm dealing with this Qigong Group shit....they're like a spiritual healing, all natural type of batshit crazy people. So far they havent been too bad, just super needy, super needy equals me getting bitter. Than the shove that puts me over the edge. Woman walks down at 11:30 pm and asks for a blanket ( They have a blanket in their closet, but she refuses to believe me ) so I walk back to laundry to grab her a blanket and go figure, we dont have any. I can feel my blood starting to boil now, so I grab a duvet (sp?) and ask her if thats ok, im out of blankets....This succubus proceeds to lay into me for not having a blanket. I go about my business and tell her i'll ask maintainence to look for one at Burlington. She storms off.
Wouldnt you just take the duvet or 3 so at least you have something? Well this is no ordinary freak, i'll get to that in a bit. Maintainence finds a blanket and I go to bring it to their room....chair outside of the room? Thats odd. Knock on the door, three times...finally a woman answers and she's fucking crying, I look in the room and its dark with four ugly trollops sitting in a circle with candles lit, all fucking crying. WTF????!!!!! These fucking whack jobs are probably putting a hex or curse on me as I type.

I have so many more of these irritating stories, and as most of you probably know, it doesnt take much to irritate me, and it isnt just these guests I hate, when it comes down to it I hate people in general, all fucking people. If I dont know you, or you arent a friend of a friend and I meet you...I hate you. if you are a hot chick trying to get me to buy you a drink...I hate you, I hate you so much that i'll try to sleep with you so I can "accidentally" stick my dick in your ass as payback, take that bitch. If you are a guy who cuts in front of me to order a drink...I hate you most of all, and I will spend the rest of the night cockblocking you. I just really hate people, people suck, its no wonder the terrorists hate us, cuz as a whole, we are one needy, self righteous, spoiled country. I've come to the realization that there is no inbetween love/hate for me.....Friends/Family, love you....anybody else...probably hate you. If you are my friend, than you probably hate people as well, and that is probably why we are friends, because we can sit around and make fun of how pathetic people are to make ourselves feel better, which in turn that means i hate me, and i suck....so I guess that really does mean all people suck.

Rant over

-Bakken