Well, I decided to get stupid and start my own blog. I haven't figured out what I am going to talk about though. I figure I will start with a little poker, some politics and throw in some other tidbits.

I now firmly believe you have to be an idiot to be elected to Congress, or at least wanting to get elected. You get to say stupid things and have a big following. Now that I think about it, that does seem to have a good side to it. I am probably being a little cynical here--many probably start with good intentions by then get corrupted on the way by their newfound power. Somewhere along the line, they figure out that the game in Washington to try to get elected so they can get reelected a few years ago. I was never in favor of term limits, but sometimes you have to take drastic actions to solve a problem......

I am just amazed at the way our Congress behaves. They have decided in their infinite wisdom that internet gambling is a bigger bane on our society than their internal lobbying reforms where hopefully all hell breaks loose from the Abramoff scandal. I guess many need something to deflect the attention from their expected problems and need something to woo the religious right. Check out these comments by Representative Goodlatte in this article:

"Gambling on the Internet has become an extremely lucrative business. These offshore, fly-by-night Internet gambling operators are unlicensed, untaxed and unregulated and are sucking billions of dollars out of the United States"

So instead of taking prudent steps to regulate and legalize gambling in this country, his solution is to ban them all and call them all fly by night unregulated operations. What he fails to tell everyone else is that several of the big poker site such as Party Poker, Pacific Poker, and Paradise Poker are listed on the LSE and are regulated by local authorities. Also, he fails to mention is that this legislation doesn't actually criminalize gambling over the internet--it just makes it illegal to transfer and accept funds from these sites and also puts the impetus on banks and legislation to enforce it. It also doesn't make it illegal for ISP's to block gaming sites (the double negative is intentional)--talk about hypocrisy, criticize China for censorship and then allow censorship in this country. Basically if your ISP determines that a site is "inappropriate", they can block it and you have no recourse. Bastages.

As for my poker, I have been playing mainly sng's these days and taking a couple of months off from my favorite game of limit. Limit holdem is a grind; and while I enjoy it, it does take its toll after a while. Many of the limit players of the plusone have been taking similar breaks by playing different games also, so I am not alone in this. I haven't been doing bad, but the suckouts really leave a bad taste in your mouth after a while and I sort of have to quit for the day or at least a few hours to get the taste out of my mouth. Take yesterday in a HU match, blinds are at 50/100, my opponent has a slight chip lead~200 chips. I get AA on the button, raise it up to 150, my opponent reraises to 300, I pop it up to 500 and he goes all in and I call. He flips over KQ of clubs and I show my aces. Of course, a JT fell on the flop and you know that queezy feeling that something is going wrong, turn is a blank and the river of course is an ace and bye bye tournament. It happens--I put my money in when I had the best hand and got outdrawn. I still didn't like it, and I took it easy for the rest of the night.

All right, I am done for now--this seems to be a pretty long post for the first one. I am still figuring this blogging thing out.