Insane Live 1/3 Game

Katie and I played in a beyond-wild $1/$3 game at Hard Rock on Saturday. The guy to my left didn't understand it was table stakes. He had a stack of $19, dealer told him it was $25 to call, and he said "Aww for real?", reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Dealer told him it was just what he had on the table and he seemed to consider folding at that point.

Table Stakes (who was actually a very nice guy) and I tangled in a few hands, including my last hand at the table. I limp KK UTG as probably 95% of pots were raised by one of two players, but alas, not this time: The entire 8-handed table called behind.

Flop: Ah Kh 8c (Pot: $24)

Blinds check, I toss out two red chips, table stakes raises to $20, player to his left flats, everyone folds back to me, I raise to $40 (wouldn't normally size this small but they were both really short), they both call.

Turn: Td (Pot: $144)

I gangsta-toss a benji into the middle, table stakes calls all-in for about $20, player to his left calls all-in for about $60.

River blanks, table stakes flashes a queen with a knowing look, and I win the pot. Ship it!

Meanwhile Katie immediately shot up about $800 when she limped/shoved JJ $300 deep and got called by A5, then called a 150bb overbet shove with 44 on a flop of Q54. When the guy got called he sighed and was like, "I probably got kicker trouble here." She actually put up a Cardplayer blog on the game from her perspective, check it out here.

Superuser

A couple years ago, Katie and I took on the long project of writing a full-length thriller called The Superuser. Reviews were good but sales were slow, in large part because we were getting very little exposure as a self-published Kindle book. I read another low-priced indy thriller on Kindle called Thread of Hope, where the author blogged about being in a similar situation, then making the book free for a couple of days, getting a ton of downloads, and then doing very well in paid sales once the book had a price tag again.

So it was experiment time for us. Between last Friday and Sunday it was free, and its free sales ranking improved until it was #60 or so in Kindle Free, and we got over 6000 downloads.

Not everyone can manage to make 6000 x $0 for three day's work baby!

It was cool though that people were reading it, and our hope was that sales would be decent when it returned to the paid category.

Well on Monday it became paid again and sales were very slow again, but yesterday and today it looks like they've picked up some as we're currently about 6,000 in Kindle Paid which is better than it's been at any point previously. It's also doing a lot better in searches. So the experiment continues, but even if we never get a huge number of sales, it was still a very fun project where I got to collaborate with an amazing writer. So no regrets no matter what happens at this point!

Buying FTP $$

Another tough spot with a horse recently. Very talented MTT/MTTSNG player and friend/nice guy, always behind on rent/expenses and needed a loan. Like I've blogged about before, I used to be pretty quick to loan money in these situations particularly to friends and players I trusted. Since then I've had a lot of bad experiences unfortunately, including super-long repayment times, outright defaults, and hard feelings from players I had thought of as good friends.

In this case though, we were able to reach a diffferent arrangement. While I'm not actively looking to buy FTP $$, he had money caught on there so I bought a chunk. The EV of this purchase is tough to assess. On the one hand, I paid a significant discount compared to par value. On the other hand, a lot has to go right for me to collect:

And even if all four of those happen, the timeframe is very unknown. But at least this way he gets to pay his rent and I've got the potential to make a bit more if FTP money does get repaid.

www.TeamMoshman.com