Exciting finishes in baseball

In the movie The Perfect Storm, a confluence of weather events combine to create a killer storm. It took just the right conditions.

Baseball was like that this year. On Sept. 6, the Atlanta Braves held an 8 1/2-game lead over the St. Louis Cardinals for the Wild Card playoff spot. The Cardinals had to get hot, but also the Braves had to collapse.

Even in the last game of the season, the Braves had a 3-2 lead in the ninth inning. Their ace relief pitcher gave up the tying run and they lost in extra innings.

(Other teams had problems, too, see here.)

St. Louis will now play the best team in baseball: the Philadelphis Phillies. The first two games are in Philly, but game three will be next Tuesday in St. Louis. I've got a ticket and there will be photos.

All along the watchtower

Fort Matanzas was built by the Spanish in 1740 to control the Matanzas inlet, the so-called back door to St. Augustine FL. The word fort is a misnomer. It's too small to be classified as a fort and is more properly called a watchtower. Seven men at a time were posted here. If an unknown ship was spotted, big cannons fired warning shots.

Fort Matanzas is located about 14 miles south of St. Augustine. It's on an island and visitors have to take a U.S. National Parks ferry to tour it.

You can read more about it if you click here.


Above: A U.S. Park Ranger stands next to one of five cannons.


Above: I wasn't the only tourist with a camera.


Above: Fort Matanzas offers a unique glimpse of a vanished style of military architecture and engineering.

Photos by MOJO and taken with my Canon. Click on images to enlarge.

Elevate your game

Accurate hand evaluation is the key to good bridge bidding. Milton Work developed the high-card point count which Charles Goren simplified then gave to the masses. For many years after that, methods of hand evaluation didn't change much.

Now top players are incorporating losing-trick count into their repertoire. LTC doesn't replace point count, but is an additional tool. Jennifer Jones, in her 28-page booklet titled Losing Trick Count, explains what this is and how to use it.

Jones gives examples from actual play. I love this. Many authors make up deals to illustrate whatever point they are making. I prefer real-life deals.

There have been other books on losing-trick count, but Jones takes it a step farther. She explains how to incorporate LTC with Bergen and constructive raises. Because many tournament players use Bergen raises, this is important.

Here's a hand from Jones' booklet that is instructive. You hold:
♠A 10 8 4 3 ♥10 9 6 2 ♦5 ♣K 9 7.

Your partner opens 1♥ and right-hand opponent overcalls 2♦. What would you bid?

Many players would see and ace and a king for 7 HCP and add 2 for the singleton and raise to 2♥.

As Jones' excellent booklet explains, this is an eight-loser hand, so you must invite such as by bidding 3♦. If you don't know how to calculate losers or what all this means, grab a copy -- you can thank me later.

You can order the book for only $10 (includes handling and shipping) in North America if you go here.

You can find out more about Jones' book if you click here.

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Jennifer Jones is a retired attorney and an ACBL Diamond Life Master. She lives in Santa Rosa CA.

Jones regularly attends North American Bridge Championships and has many high finishes. Several of the example deals in the book are from world championship play (World Bridge Series) held in Philadelphia last year.

Read her blog JennBridge here.

Our Spanish heritage in St. Augustine FL

Above: Castillo de San Marcos as seen from Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine FL.

There's lots to see and do in St. Augustine FL, but the old fort, Castillo de San Marcos, is a must. Construction began in 1672 by the Spanish, about 100 years after St. Augustine was founded. Previously, a series of wooden forts didn't get the job done, so this masonry fort was built. It was used to help guard the city and the treasure ships that traveled up the Florida coast taking gold, silver and trade goods back to Spain.

Did you know? Castillo de San Marcos was built out of coquina, a Spanish word meaning small sea shells. The shells would bond together making a stone similar to limestone.

You can read what Wikipedia says about this historic place if you click here.







Photos by MOJO and taken with my Canon 40D.

Poker pearl #64

Above: The book Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta and Matt Flynn is a terrific read. They had a special sale two weeks ago offering it for $10 (Plus shipping) and I snapped it up.

In the book shown above, the authors describe a situation in which you have ♥
K ♠K and raise to $7 preflop in an online $1/2 NL hold'em game -- both blinds call.

The flop is ♠8 ♣8 ♥3. The small blind bets $12 and the big blind folds and you call.

The turn is the ♥8 and the small blind bets $20 and you call again. The river is the ♥Q and the small blind checks. What should you do?

The authors suggest betting the pot -- $85. In their scenario, the small blind calls and shows ♦6 ♠6. Pocket kings are good.

"When you have an overpair on a paired dry flop with no straight or flush draws, you are in a classic way ahead or way behind situation. Either your opponent has trips or a full house . . . or you have him crushed.

"In way ahead or way behind situations, you should often dial your aggression way down and make small bets or allow your opponent to control the betting. If you are way behind, then you'll be happy you didn't put in extra action. And if you are way ahead, then you don't want to give your opponent an easy fold."

Miller's web site is here.

Above: The Charleston SC harbor.

My niece was married last weekend in Florida, so I decided to drive and make a vacation out of the trip. I lived in Raleigh NC for 21 years, so visited there first, then drove to Charleston SC.

There, I took a GrayLine bus tour and it was okay, but what I really wanted to see was Fort Sumter. Even if you hated history in school, you probably know that when Confederate artillery opened fire on this installation in 1861, the American Civil War had begun.

Fort Sumter's located in the Charleston harbor on a man-made island. (Seventy thousand tons of granite were shipped from New England to build it.) It was originally constructed to help guard the Atlantic coast after the War of 1812 with Great Britain. The structure is five-sided and made of brick.

I traveled from Charleston to Saint Augustine FL, founded by the Spanish in 1565. There are forts there, too, and I'll blog about that later this week.


Above: Fort Sumter seen from the ferry.


Above: The place is a fort and forts have cannons.


Above: This shot shows the left-half (looking towards Charleston) part of the fort. The bricks you see on the left are what's left of where the enlisted men were quartered.


Above: I hear they give discounts to seniors such as the old guy in this shot.

Images by MOJO and taken with my Canon.

Short attention span? No problem, play a speedball mini

I like playing the speedball mini-tournaments on BBO. They go quick (12 boards, a good number) and you don't have to worry about getting opponents. Yes, the players are mostly terrible, but isn't that true in most fields? Part of the skill is how much you can beat them up.

I enjoyed the scorecard shown above (from tonight's 9 p.m. ACBL speedball tournament). I was wired and played with Kateb135. We had all plus scores except one board the last round. That works.

Poker pearl #63

Above: Andy Frankenberger is shown on the cover of the Sept. 7 issue of Card Player magazine.

Andy Frankenberger, former Wall Street trader, decided to take off a year and see if he could make it playing poker. The results have been terrific: a WSOP bracelet and a World Poker Tour win. Here's what he says:

"Some people will refer to me in casual conversations as a gambler, and I stop them and say, 'I am not a gambler. I am a poker player.' Anyone who thinks poker is happenstance probably doesn't have a good frasp for the game. Luck can win you a hand -- or even, if you are extremely fortunate, a tournament -- but another tournament? No way. Evaluating the chance in any given hand is a skill, and it is a skill I learned well as a (equity derivatives) trader."

Odds and ends:
I love the Card Player magazine -- it's the best of many. Having said that, I've noticed that it's getting thinner and thinner. I'm guessing it has fewer ads, fallout from Black Friday. Fewer ads means cost cutting, so fewer articles as well.

My check from frigging Cake Poker bounced. That was bad enough, but my bank charged me a $17.50 fee for this. They really suck. I mean really, really suck.

My check from Bodog didn't bounce, so it looks like that site is a place to play. I play mostly $4 sit and goes when I'm killing time.

Crash and bastin like Poker Academy. Poker Grrl got her start there, too. I tried it, but find playing for something, even small stakes, to be more interesting. Part of the fun at PA would be if I knew the players -- there's a social part to poker. I go there and feel lost, so I'm thinking I'll stick to Bodog.

Take me out to the ballgame

Above: Autozone Park is the home of the Memphis Redbirds.

It's not summer without baseball, right? Thursday night I visited Autozone Park in downtown Memphis to see the Redbirds play the Albuquerque Isotopes, Los Angeles Dodgers' AAA farm club.

Yes, there were fast balls and stolen bases. Yes, there were hot dogs and tons of other good food. Hot dogs always taste better at a ball game.


Above: A young fan follows Rockey, the mascot, around the basepaths.


Above: A Redbird slugger takes a whack at a fastball.


Above: In the middle of the seventh inning, fans stood and sang "Take Me Out To the Ball Game."