1. Water droplet dispersing water

2. Colored pencils in a circle

3. Wedding ring heart shadow

4. Child saluting a parade

5. Dad and son walking

6. Newborn sleeping in odd place

7. Bride in cowboy boots

8. Fisheye blurry rock concert

9. Bokeh Lights

10. Cat in box

I used NextWorth to sell my “old” iPhone (EPHT3GCK7PYK) before and got a good deal. I sold both a 3G and a 2G phone at the time. It’s a great service and easy to use. You simply enter the phone you want to sell, it’s condition, and they give you a quote. Once you accept the quote (and enter all your info) you have 21 days to send in your phone. You print the shipping labels right at home. It’s so easy. Within a week of receiving your phone they send you the money (I choose the PayPal option). With my iPhone 4 now ordered, I went ahead and set up for both my 3Gs and my wife’s 3G to be sold. It couldn’t be much easier, and the prices are fair. Sell your iPhone.

I’ve been chosen to be a Webby Awards judge this year. The Webby’s are the Oscars of the Internet. In 2007 Fido Finder was nominated for an award in the Best Web Services category of the Webby Awards, and because of this selection I was chosen to participate in this year’s voting. It was an honor to be nominated in 2007 and it’s an honor to be a judge and help to award top websites with a Webby. I won’t reveal what categories I will be judging but I will be participating in judging in 9 categories. Good luck to all those competing this year for a Webby Award.

I have a Mac Mini that I purchased to code my iPhone app. I only used it for the iPhone development, so I currently have it hooked up to my living room LCD TV so that we can watch internet TV (if we miss an episode due to the DirecTV DVR’s being all booked up on Thursday nights) and to watch Netflix instant downloads, etc. I had been using a wireless mouse and keyboard until I searched the iPhone App Store and found an app called Wifi Touchpad by MB PowerTools. Edit: See update below, found a better app, Air Mouse! This app works amazingly! You can replace both mouse and keyboard functionality via wifi. For a mouse, your iPhone screen becomes a touchpad. You drag your finger around to move the mouse instantly, no delay. Tap the screen or tap the simulated mouse buttons to click on items. Tap an arrow to bring up the keyboard. There are a few other features that I haven’t used yet, but the mouse and keyboard worked perfectly. You do have to download and install a free “service” application to run on your Mac to talk to the iPhone app. Just set the app to run when your user account loads and you’ll be good to go anytime you want to control your Mac from the couch.

Update: Air Mouse is an even better app! I recommend watching the video, this app is incredible.

I played a cash game at a friend’s house on Halloween night. It was a blast, even though I lost money. It was a group of friends that I don’t get together with very often. I have a few different groups of poker players that I play with and these were one of the first groups I played poker with. During the game the hand below came up. I was on the long end of luck, and maximized it.

Poker, specifically No-Limit Texas Hold’Em (NLHE), is such a intricate game that you can easily find yourself in a predicament and have no idea how you got there. You can be in the Big Blind (BB) and feel “forced” to call a min-raise with Ace-Four, telling yourself that you’re only going to continue with two pair of better, and suddenly you find yourself at the river, all-in, because each step of the way you convinced yourself to take one more step. Flop – “Well I have top pair…” Turn – “Well now I have a flush draw, too…” River – “Well sure I’d be all-in if I called, but it’s only 1/2 the size of the pot…” And as you get knocked out of the tournament with A4 you sit back and think, “How did I get here? Didn’t I warn myself not to play a big pot with Ace-Four?”

I recently had a hand that really brought the point of sticking to the plan to the front of my mind. In this hand I did not stick to my plan. I made a plan, tried to enact it, and when the other player disagreed with my plan…I went along with his plan. His plan seemed OK. In NLHE this can get you into lots of trouble.

If you want, you can view the hand at – http://www.holdemhandhistory.com/play/5126/

In the BB I had 78s. Blinds were 300/600. A player raised to 2,200. This same player had just taken down the blinds with a raise of 2,400 (4x the BB). I wasn’t sure what the change in betting size meant, but I felt that even if he had a huge hand I could do some damage with my suited connectors. I wasn’t happy that I’d have to play the hand out of position (OOP) but I figured I had to gamble a bit if I was going to do anything in this tournament. I had been playing for an hour and a half and still had about a starting stack. So I make the call and we go to the flop heads-up. The flop comes K 8 4, rainbow. I make second pair. The King obviously scares me. I check with the expectation to call a reasonably bet, and fold to anything outrageous. I’m checking here for pot control. We don’t want to play a big pot with second pair, but we can’t just give up second pair every time. The preflop raiser checks too. The turn is another 4, completing the full rainbow. No real straight draws, no flush draws on the board. I check, again expecting to call a reasonable bet. Nope, he checks. When the river is a 3 I’m pretty sure that I have the best hand. Checking both the flop and the river, when in position, heads up, puts my opponent’s hole card range in either something ridiculously good like KK, for a full house, or a complete miss like AQ or AJ (or worse). I’d say that 50-70% of the time second pair is the best hand here. I cannot rule out the player making a bet large enough that I have to fold the best hand, so my plan was to make a blocking bet so that we can go to showdown for an amount I decide. I bet 2,000 into a pot of 4,700 – I’m trying to set the showdown price of 2K because I don’t want to call a pot-sized bet, for example. Without much hesitation my opponent raises to 5K. This is where my plan goes out the window. I specifically bet 2K so that I would not have to call a 5K bet after checking. But here I am, calculating my pot odds, looking at calling 3K to win 11,700. I end up convincing myself that I have to call, and the guy flips over KQs for a flopped top pair (we both had two pair by the turn when the board paired). WHAT?!

Now, I’m not even going to get into how poorly he played the hand, because I’m trying to improve my play, not his. But this is exactly how in NLHE you can get to the river and wonder, “How did I get here?” Preflop you could have told me, “You’re going to get to the river with second pair, and it’s going to cost you 7,200 total in chips to see if your second pair is the best hand…do you want to do that or fold now?” I’d fold 100% of the time. But when you allow yourself to inch further and further without remembering what your own game strategy was, you end up sticking 1/3 of your chips into a hand that you knew you should be playing differently. I knew that putting in a blocking bet of 2K was the correct play, but I allowed myself to negate that play by calling a sizable raise. Folding preflop is not necessarily the correct play for 78s, you should fold it many times and call a few times, but in this hand, folding the river when the opponent finally makes his move is definitely the correct play. That is, against most players that I face at the levels I play. For the record this was a $60 buy-in 3 table tournament, most of these guys aren’t thinking past level one.

I was reminded today an event that happened to us few years ago and thought it was worth posting. One night (2 AM), as me and my wife slept, our 2 dogs (at the time, now 3) bolted to the front door in a fit of barking. For most people this is your biggest fear coming true. You assume that this is exactly how a home invasion would start. As we jumped out of bed and went to investigate we noticed that there was also barking coming from the other side of our front door. Strange, to say the least. My first thought was the worst – and oddest, that something had happened to one of our neighbors and their dogs had come over to tell us of the horrible tragedy (they would do that, right, right?). We peeked out the front window and saw 2 large dogs barking and going crazy on our porch. Then we realized, we also heard a hissing cat! What in the world is going on here?! We quickly realized that we were not in danger of an intruder and decided on a plan. We got our dogs into a room and closed the door. We open the door to investigate and the dogs immediately changed demeanor. They were happy to see us. We saw that there was a cat in the corner of our porch, apparently defending himself from the dogs. We were checking for tags on the dogs when all of the sudden a car drove by, and then stopped, and backed up. This is either really good or really bad. The car stops in front of our house. A lady gets out of the car and the dogs take of running to her. She’s ecstatic and in tears at the same time. The dogs jump in the back seat of her car and she explains that she’s been driving around for 3 hours looking for her dogs. We’re just stunned, in shock, and just not understanding what just happened. We ask the lady if she also lost a cat, and she had not. The lady thanks us and drives her dogs off. What just happened?? She lost her dogs, spent 3 hours looking for them, and just happened to drive right by our house just as the dogs are harassing a cat, which had woken us up?? What?? So we try to turn our attention to the cat, but he’s not having any of it. He seems like he could be hurt and he wants to bite and scratch. We end up getting him partially in a kennel, for protection and shelter, and leaving it on the porch for us to deal with in the morning. When morning comes, the cat is nowhere to be found. I guess he wasn’t hurt and took off after things calmed down. But seriously, how did this all happen? I was there and I’m still confused.

I released my first iPhone app last week, Hold’Em Hand History. With lots of help from my brother and his company, HHH was developed because it is a product that I myself wanted for my own poker development; and assumed others would like it as well. I’m competitive, so I take most things seriously, even games. For many many years I played basketball at least once a week. In recent years nagging injuries have kept me from playing basketball, and after being introduced to poker it became the perfect fit for my competitive nature. So naturally (for me), I take poker seriously, even if it’s just a hobby.

To become a better poker play you have to be active. There are many concepts that you just won’t learn without reading books, reading magazines, watching poker on TV, or talking to people who have done all of those. Discussing hands you’ve played with peers is one of the best ways to develop your game. Hold’Em Hand History is a tool that allows you to record the details of live poker hands in order to discuss and share the hand with friends. You can record every detail of the hand, and then send an animated replay to friends of yours.

If you’re not discussing hands with friends, you’re not getting better at poker.