The other night a player sat down and immediately started to play a lot of hands. Let’s call him VPIP79. This is one of several hands I played against him:

Call me a lemur, but it’s hard to fold an overpair while heads up against a loose player, especially when the pot’s that big. Of course, when the top card paired on the river, I figured I was dead, but I’d see what he had. It never even occurred to me that he had bottom two pair on the flop. I mean, who the hell plays seven-deuce offsuit?!

Then again, maybe he was bored.

When I’m bored, I prefer raising, and I prefer connectors:

The flop raise was definitely an attempt to see the turn and river for the price of 1SB. But all the pieces fell into place and I got my straight. The SB remarked that he didn’t put me on that hand at all.

I guess that hand made an impression, since someone cold-called a later raise with A2o. The SB from the hand above saved me some money by 3-betting with his flopped boat (he had T7s in EP) after A2o raised. I mucked and the two players went to war. A2o busted and left the table.

Phil Gordon went to a charity event for the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation and did a little gambling:

They had a raffle for some brilliant prizes, and being the sorta guy I am, I decided to take a shot. Raffle tickets were selling for $25 a piece until you go to the $500 donation level when they went for $20 a piece. At a $1000 level, you get 100 tickets ($10 a ticket). Everyone seemed to be buying $25 tickets, so I thought what the hell, lets make a nice sizable donation…. I bought $2000 worth and got 200 tickets in exchange. Then, I found out that I bought them from the “wrong girl” and that there was a contest going on whereby the girl with the most tickets sold got a prize. So, I ended up buying another $2000 in tickets. $4000 in tickets purchased in all. By my calculations, I had about 1/3 of the tickets in play.

To make a long story short, I won the top two prizes:

Two round trip tickets to Sydney on Qantas in the “sleeper” seats plus 6 nights at the Sydney Harbor Marriott. $25k value.

and…

Two round trip business class tickets to anywhere in Europe courtesy of American Airlines. $18k value.

$43,000 for $4000. Not bad. My girlfriend was extremely happy as well, as you might imagine.

So if he had 1/3 of the tickets in play, and we assume the other 2/3 were purchased at $25 per ticket, he contributed 20% of the donation pool for a 33% chance of winning at least one prize and ended up with an ROI of 1075%. Not bad.

Read more at his MySpace blog.

In case you are wondering, I raised to steal the blinds, flopped a boat, bet the flop, called the check-raise, raised the turn, and bet the river. He had 55.

Sometimes I read a poker blog and I feel myself going on tilt. I won’t name names, but I encourage you to let loose and blog about the poker blogger who most puts you on tilt. Because I need something to chuckle about.

Okay, fine, I’ll name names. The blogger who most puts me on tilt is SirFWALGMan! Deep down inside I think his online mania isn’t a wholly accurate reflection of the man, but damn, sometimes I feel like pissing away half my bankroll just for having read one of his posts. Don’t worry, man, we still love you.

From his MySpace blog:

This sounds like something that BG, JoeSpeaker, or many others could knock out of the park.