Last night I was playing in another poker tournament. I played pretty conservative for quite some time. I finally started to get some playable hands.

Before I knew it, I was heads-up with one other player. We played several hands back and forth, and then the dealer announced, "this is the last hand". The tournaments are timed, and when there's no last man standing a chip count is taken to determine the winner.

I checked out his chip count, he had me covered by about 7k or so. I was under the gun, and looked down to find , a MONSTER hand, heads-up. I decided to act weak, if I could get just 5-6k more of his chips I'd win for the night. And since I don't play as much as some of the others in the league, a win is huge.

I made a really weak raise of 2K from the small blind. The current blind stuctures were 500 and 1000. It was a no brainer for my opponent, he had to call. He did, and the flop came down . Wow, I flopped a set, and along with my set I had the stone cold nuts. There were NO 2 cards my opponent could have that would beat me. I checked to my opponent, and he checked as well. The turn produced the . I bet out 3k, my opponent just called. I still was confident. The river exposed the . Now I had a full house. I checked, hoping my opponent would take a stab at it. He bet out 6K, I said, "I'm all in", and he called! He turned over King high, I turned over my full house for the win. Twas' a good night.

First off, if you're reading this, and you don't know who Comcast is, or you have dish, let me tell you how lucky you are.

I awoke this AM to find that Comcast had totally revamped the menu systems on my set top box. I didn't like them  before, but got used to how they worked, and while not stellar, they weren't really that bad.

We like to have Good Morning America on in the AM when we're getting ready, eating breakfast, and rushing out the door. I turned on the TV and clicked MENU, instantly I was confused. The menu is all pixely, and terrible looking, when in HD mode, it used to be crisp and clear, but I can get past that.

Ummmmmm where the Hell is my HDTV option? It's like GONE. What the hell, hmmmmmm, click menu again, and this 'quick menu' thing comes up that allows you to choose an option quickly, instead of choosing it from the menu.... I don't really see how it saves time but I digress. So I notice a new icon, way off to the right, HDTV, ah, there it is!

I click left, expecting the menu to wrap, and to go from the first item to the LAST item. It doesn't. Now instead of 'menu, menu, navigate down twice' (four clicks) I'm forced to click 'menu, and six clicks of navigation to the right' (and then enter).

Ohhhhh man that's dumb. Ok, so I don't really have an option. I go to TV Listing for HD by time. Ummmm there's two channels listed. WTF? Where did all my HD Channels go? I notice that there are little < and > carats at the top of the page, no no no... you're kidding me.

They've apparently grouped the channels by some sort of category. So now instead of paging down the available channels by time, I have to right click, right click, through all of their predefined categories.

The other option is to choose search from the main menu, some more clicks through their ridiculous interface, and choose HD. Resulting in the same view described above.

Tell me who their usability expert is, I'd like to punch him in the face.

Every aspiring poker player attempts to try and not give off 'tells' while they play. If you don't know what a tell is, it's best described as "giving away the strength of your hand, inadvertently". Tells can be anything, the way the chips are thrown into the pot, the way someone replies to a question, or even how they are postured at the table. A tell is not a sure fire way of knowing that someone is strong, or weak. Often times, players send out 'fake tells' to confuse you.

At the level I'm playing at now, I don't think the majority of people I play cards with are well educated on these things. I've recently started on trying to get a better read on players.  I've been reading books, watching professional player videos, and just trying to improve my game. I recently watched a video by Annie Duke (she used to live right here in Portland, but moved to Las Vegas recently).

The video mentioned something interesting that I had never considered. Annie Duke encouraged poker players to read FBI journals available at most public libraries. Well, I don't have the time to go find, and read these journals, so the information I was able to glean from her video seemed good.

Tonight, I was focused on trying to read players in pots against me. I did not expect to be put to the test on the very first hand of the night.

The blinds were $100 / $ 200 (tournament chips, not a cash game). I was dealt 'under the gun' (the first position after the big blind). I raised the pot to $800. I had one caller, and both blinds folded.

The flop came down, . I had totally missed the flop. I was first to act, and I had a feeling that this flop had completely missed my opponent. So I made a continuation bet of $600.

He instantly called, this worried me. The turn produced the . I had put almost 1/2 of my chips into the pot. I decided to check, I knew he'd probably move his remaining chips in, and I knew I'd have to fold, or risk the rest of my chips to see the last card. Like I expected, he moved all his chips in, and for a second, I considered folding. I decided to wait, draw it out and see if I picked up something.

My opponent was starring me directly in the eye, generally appearing to be strong, means you're weak. From his behavior, I was pretty sure that my ace high was the best hand. I watched him a bit more. I said call, and turned up my cards.

He turned up his, and with a disgusted face, he asked me, "how could you call?" I said, you did something that made me call. The river was a blank, and I doubled up.

Annie Duke's video mentioned that people that are uncomfortable about their situation (i.e. lying or bluffing in this case) tend to unconsciously blink more often than people that are telling the truth. When my opponent moved his chips in, he must have blinked about 20 times in thirty seconds or so.

Everyone at the table gasped, they all wanted to know how I could make the call. I replied I picked up a huge tell on him, they all bugged me to tell what it was... I didn't. :)

I'm working on a .NET project w/ a friend, and I intitially thought FolderShare was the for sure way to go. So after setting up a new foldershare instance with my friend, I realized, (duh) that there are files we don't want to just blindly copy back and forth. There is no way in foldershare to exclude a file from a share. My friend Scott said "Dude, it's FOLDERSHARE, not FILESHARE" thanks Scott. But he suggested using Subversion. We use it at work, and I'm not opposed to using it, but I did not want to pay for hosting and did not really have a server (publically accessible) to set it up on.

Scott said there were some places that would host subversion repositories for free. So we found https://OpenSVN.csie.org/ It looks like a site I would probably design (read bad). So it must be good? :) We created our project, set it up to use only HTTPS and even created two user accounts that can access it.

Installed Tortoise SVN 1.4 and bam! Connected! So we now have version control, as well as a place we can work out of. Too freakin' cool.