smallchou.com/blog

one thing that i’ve learned in the first few days of work is that i’ll be needing to make copious use of the gym facilities here. remember when you got to school freshman year and suddenly all of the food was prepaid and all-you-can-eat? and you summarily packed on 10 pounds chewing on rubbery chicken tenders and sucking down beer by the gallon? well, my new job is like that, but there are no nightly keggers and the food is really good. in other words: food budget down, new balance running shoe budget up.so i haven’t discussed it on here yet, but in a few weeks i’ll be trekking to australia to visit for the first time. it should be a really great experience and i’m excited about it. the itinerary for me? sydney (described by my new cubemate as a cleaner version of san francisco, fused with socal beach culture) and then cairns (only as a pitstop to the whitsunday islands and port douglas). my fourth continent and my first real travels since europe (no, walking from the venetian to paris on the strip doesn’t count). time to get my camera ready…not much to report on the poker front. i’ve been playing low-limit omaha-8 and stud-8 online. i’ll also be instituting a new evening for garden city trips (wednesdays are now shot), which should be easier now that i’m closer. this sunday i’ll probably make a run to the good old gc, or maybe a jaunt up for the 6pm no limit hold’em tournament at artichoke joe’s. i haven’t played in that tourney in a while. in any case, time to get back at it this weekend. as with all returns to the felt, i’ll be instituting my “play four orbits, take a one orbit break” rule to keep focused. eventually, i think i want to get up to that 20-40 game at gc. first stop back: the 8-16 w/ half kill…

more writing to come this weekend… maybe.

if you think about it, there are only a handful of times in your life that you sit down and sign a document called “At-Will Employment Agreement.” this is one of those nights.a few months ago, i came to the realization that i needed a change. more precisely, i needed to affect change, which is something that is related but different. one of the frustrations that i always felt at oracle was an inability to truly influence things. working at an organization like oracle always feels like you’re riding in a tour bus. it’s going somewhere and it’s going to get there, whether you contribute or not. it’s not going to get there any faster if you bust your ass and, even worse, it’s not going to arrive any slower if you scrape by every day. accurate or not, that’s how i felt.don’t get me wrong, i’ll be eternally grateful to oracle and my two years there. i met and worked with some tremendous people. i learned lessons small and large. i grew more comfortable in my own skin. and, most of all, i got my feet soaking wet in the working world. in reality, it was a helluva better choice than many other jobs i almost chose. but i think, all along, i sort of knew that it wasn’t really the place for me.

tomorrow i’m going to start finding out if google is the kind of place that i’m looking for. i want to learn and i want to enjoy myself. but most of all, i want to feel that i’m affecting change that is proportional to my effort. that sounds very boring, but it’s simple: i want to make a difference. i don’t think it’s too much to ask.

i realized just now that i’m still young enough to care too much.this whole week, i’ve been hammering away at a mountain of work that i NEED to finish. my (soon to be ex-) coworkers are all amazed that i’m working so hard in my last few days. when i told one dev manager yesterday that i was working on a piece of documentation and asked him a few questions, he looked at me like i was crazy. with a bewildered expression on his face, he said:

“when’s your last day? friday? this friday? and you’re working on this? i wouldn’t.”

i took it as a good sign that i was still willing to pour in so much effort three days from departure, but just now i realized it might be depressing to care so much sometimes.

i was downstairs on a conference call with someone who’ll be starting here and moving to the bay area soon. considering that we weren’t going to have any time overlap, i thought it’d be great for the company and my team if i spent a few hours in a web conference with him, getting him prepared and excited. i spent a solid hour beforehand digging up old slide decks and outlining all of the various ongoings. after briefing him on the current projects, giving him tidbits on the new exciting features in the pipeline, and advising him to stay out of the tenderloin when looking for housing, i was rewarded with a heartfelt ‘thank you’ and many kind words. awesome! i came upstairs, practically bouncing from the good deed and genuine appreciation. sound great, right?

with just an hour or so left before 5, i was ready to plug away at some work and call it a day (i mean, it IS wednesday on my last week of work). i was greeted with sobering news: due to circumstances completely out of my control, a project that i had been working on for many moons had been shelved. organizationally, the move makes complete sense and i support it wholeheartedly. but like so many things in the big corporate world, the news on the ground looks a lot worse than it does in the air.

and now i just feel disappointed. i’ve got two more days left at work here. i’ll probably never work at this company again. i’ll probably never work in this industry again. and yet i’m crushed that this piece of code isn’t going out the door. is this strange? i’m thinking i just care too much…

the wsop main event final table is today and jamie gold, the chipleader, is apparently quite the winning personality. every time i’ve read a cardplayer hand history, it’s been some ridiculous hand like ‘jamie gold calls off a bunch of chips with 78 and flops a straight.’ that’s the thing about poker though: sometimes you just out-flop people… for eight days straight…i think anyone who follows poker is probably rooting for allen cunningham. espn did a nice feature story on cunningham a few days ago, but people who follow poker already knew him to be one of the best players in the world, adept at every game and experienced in every situation. it’d also be great to see such a seemingly nice guy and quiet personality win the main event, after seeing how many asshole poker players are out there these days (check out shane schleger’s post for an example). it’d be nice to see a good guy like cunningham win.

Blogged with Flock

so if you’re a little confused about how i went from the statement that ‘my whole trip was this amazing experience that i haven’t digested yet’ to ‘the two lessons i learned from my trip are that poker is tiring and you need to not care about money,’ then this post is for you.between my week spent in chicago catching up with the stoopsons (stoops, will, pseudostoops, and baby stoops) and my week spent in las vegas, i had a host of small experiences that made me realize one thing: i’m way too young to be doing things that i don’t want to do. i think this was really driven home when stoops told me about a man we’ll call ‘father of pseudostoops’. most notably i was startled to find out that, before becoming a very successful business man, ‘father of pseudostoops’ played several years of beach volleyball for a living. i’m not quite sure why i was so stunned by that fact, though i have a theory. somewhere in my life i became convinced that if i wanted a ‘successful career,’ i had better get my ass out there right out of the gate. i never really argued this fact in my head; i just took it as fact. considering that being a professional beach volleyball player is probably not ‘career-advancing’ for anyone besides beach volleyball players, i suddenly found myself thinking about things differently. i mean, if pseudostoops’ dad could play beach volleyball for several years before launching into a wildly successful professional career, what exactly did that say about the necessity of getting on the corporate ladder as soon as possible?

what does that have to do with a week of poker? a few months ago, i had a conversation with a few friends where i noted that i hadn’t done very many ‘notable things’ (actual words) since i left school. i felt like i could count the number of such events on one hand. as you can imagine, that was in fact the conversation that sparked my plan to live in las vegas for a week, and it worked. twenty years from now, i’ll look back on the week that i spent living out of a suitcase in harrah’s as a great experience. i’ll fondly recount the time that i got all my chips into a huge pot as a 9:1 favorite and subsequently got crushed. well, maybe not fondly, but you know what i mean. i’m glad i spent that week because i was doing something notable (in my own mind) that i loved. sure i was in a rush to win chips, but it’s more that i was in a rush to do something that i wanted to do. i’m pretty sure ‘father of pseudostoops’ didn’t think he’d be playing beach volleyball for his whole life, but it was something he wanted to do.

now all of that is great, but what’s the actual implication for me? well, i used to at least believe in the idea of a Deferred Life plan. ‘save now so you can enjoy it later.’ ‘put in time at work now while you’re young.’ ‘get started on your career early.’ ‘work here for a few years until you’re ready to go to business school. THEN you can do whatever it is you want.’ actually pretty much anything that starts with ‘do this for a few _______ until you ______.’ all of these ideas are some variant of a Deferred Life plan. and i now think they are all bullshit. working in a job that you don’t like for some kind of other benefit (money, ladder-climbing, early retirement, etc.)? that’s bullshit. when i’m 60 years old, i’m not really interested in sitting around sunning myself in my huge mansion, happy that i saved so much money in my 20′s. i’m not into Deferred Life plans anymore. money is far less important than not wasting time. the tagline i like the most? Tell Better Stories.

so what am i planning in the next couple of months to not let that time slip away?

• taking a new job (more on that later)
• visiting a new continent
• playing more poker

there’ll be a time in my life when i’ll have to do lots of things that i don’t want to do. there’ll be time for compromises and sacrifices. i’m 24, that time’s not now. i’m way too young to be doing things that i don’t want to do.
Blogged with Flock

oh! i almost forgot about the best hand of the week last week, when my own girlfriend busted me in a big $3-$6 pot. i thought i should write about this since you would all find it so amusing.ivy wanted to get started in poker, so she sat down in the 1 seat of a $3-$6 game and i sat in seat 2, giving her advice on hands to play. i told her i wasn’t going to soft-play her in hands, since she needed to learn, so when i picked up AhQh on the button, i raised her limp. the two blinds called and she called. $24 in the pot.

the flop came 8-8-3, with one heart. everyone checked to me and i made a standard bet with position. all the players called. $36 in the pot.

the turn came with the A of spades. gin! i thought i probably had the best hand even on the flop, but i’d find out now for sure. the blinds checked and ivy checked. i, of course, bet and got one caller from the blinds and ivy sneakily flat-called me. $54 in the pot.

on the river came a 9. clearly i was going to bet here for value when it inevitably checked around to me… until ivy bet INTO me. what the hell? i looked at her trying to see if she had slowplayed an 8. i thought i told her not to play most hands with an 8 or lower in it. could she have 99 and hit a boat? maybe a worse A? she bum-rushed me into calling by laughing at me (clearly a sophisticated reverse tell) and dragged the $66 pot when she showed me the stone-cold cooler of A8.

kids these days, they learn so fast…

Blogged with Flock

phil ivey said on the circuit yesterday that, “if you’re not willing to take a thousand dollars out of your wallet right now and set it on fire, then you shouldn’t even consider playing poker.” while this is being said by a guy that plays $4000-$8000 every day, meaning that the exact sum is probably not applicable to players at lower limits, the point is valid: you need a disregard for the amount of money you’re playing for to be successful.it’s actually rather ironic when you think about it: poker players spend all day pursuing large amounts of money, it would seem that the money is important to them. in fact, at the table, the opposite is true. to play effectively and play un-scared, a poker player needs to have a disregard for the amount of money he has on the table. it’s meaningful only in terms of acquiring more chips. now this is something i read about in numerous books, but i didn’t really understand it until last week.

i sat down at a $5-$10 NL cash game last tuesday at the wynn, and immediately the difference from 2-5 was evident. guys were sitting at the table with mounds of chips, and 3-inch thick wads of 100′s behind them. i asked one player how much he had back there, and he absentmindedly replied, “about 25.” that’s not 25 hundred (incidentally, i realized quickly that my ‘short-stack’ thoughts on cash games is slightly incorrect. i’d write on this, but you’d be bored).

in the first hand i watched, i got some insight into what ivey meant. two players raised and re-raised each other before the flop and saw an AKQ flop. the first player, clearly a high-action asian guy of about 21, pushed in for about $900 into a $600 pot and the other player (an older tight guy) called instantly. i was positive that they would be flipping over set vs. set, or at the very least AK, which is in fact what the tight player showed. i jumped out of my chair when the asian guy flipped over 9T and rivered a J. he justified the play by saying, “i thought he had jacks or tens,” while he nonchalantly stacked about $2000 in chips.

now i’m not saying that 9T guy made a good play that will be profitable in the long run. he made a play at a pot with four outs. it was reckless and he got lucky. but he made a play at a pot without fear, based purely on a (very incorrect) read. is it a much more reasonable play with a flop like 673? probably. but his disregard for $1200 of his own money was telling.

after a few hours, i was finally comfortable at the stakes. but in retrospect, comfortable isn’t the right word. it’s just that i had “forgotten” the stakes that were in play. i know it sounds weird, but once you’ve been in the game for a few hours, you no longer worry about how much you bought in for. you just play poker. i’m not sure if that’s the disregard for money that phil ivey was talking about, but i think it might be.

Blogged with Flock

for all you poker players, next time you take a bad beat and you’re feeling bad? go watch this video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yg551su1KnM)… should make you feel better

the first thing i learned from last week is that being a full-time poker player is tiring. really tiring. sure, it’s not in a physical sense (because, after all, i sat around a table all day), but it is in a type of mental exhaustion that i’ve never felt before. i can remember spending hours studying for a class while in school and never feeling NEARLY as zombie-like as i felt every day last week after playing 10+ hours of poker. you can ask skratch, but when i got up from the table each night i could barely focus on talking about anything. part of that may have been the taxing emotional bad beats that i took (for personally disturbing amounts of money), but i think most of that was all of the time spent THINKING. why did he bet that much? what kind of hand would play that way? how should i play this hand? how much is in the pot? how little should i bet? who’s this new guy? how does that person play? when you sit at a table for ten hours a day thinking through all of these decisions in your head non-stop, you start getting tired, even when you don’t know it.on wednesday i played at caesar’s. i spent about three hours trying to set up this over-aggressive player who would overcall lots of hand. this guy was so hellbent on getting broke with one pair that i just needed to find the right spot. i eventually got a sizeable stack (about $450) into the pot very good against him and he sucked out on me HARD. so hard that even the dealer said, “wow, that’s pretty rough.” it’s fine. it happens. but in thinking back on the day, i was sick about what happened AFTER the hand.

about twenty minutes later, with another reasonable stack, i re-raised the hyper-aggressive norwegian guy on my right (Norway, for short) to $65 with KK, after he had raised to $20 with (probably) a shit hand. i knew Norway was an idiot and was glad to play my whole stack against him when (i imagined) he would inevitably push me in for $200. but things changed when the solid player in the SB (Solid, for short) re-raised to $250 even in the easiest motion i had ever seen. as Norway decided whether or not to call with KcTc (by the way kids, KT is a crap hand), i studied Solid, trying to figure out if he was strong or just trying to re-steal (since i very well could have been stealing from the donkey). he looked very strong.

because this is a story about how being tired can affect your play, you obviously know what happened. Norway laid down his monster two-card royal flush draw and i stuck my chips in the pot senselessly as a heavy dog. if there was ever a time to lay down kings before the flop, this was it. given a fresh brain with my read on the situation, KK is a tough but sensible fold. given a tired brain twenty minutes after a sick beat, KK is unfortunately an instant call. and subsequently an instant loss. i actually knew even before my chips got into the pot: poker is tiring and i can never get kings to catch up on aces.

Blogged with Flock