mistakes in poker and politics

since i play at the 1-2 tables, i am playing with players who are not real good on the whole and i see them make many mistakes, the biggest two are not raising big enough with big pairs and then after the flop not betting enough to run people off hands. yesterday, i was in the big blind and 5 people call and then the button raises to 7$. i look down and i have the 4s-7s, obviously not a very good hand but i know that everyone else is going to call so i put in the extra 5 dollars. sure enough, the other 5 call so now 7x7 or 49 in the pot. flop comes Jc, 5s, 6s. i bet ten dollars into the pot to represent the jack and everyone folds except the button who raises me to 20 dollars; i call. the turn is the 3h. i check and now he wants to bet big and bets 30 dollars. i raise to 60 dollars and he then compounds his mistake (s) by going all in and i am now 200 dollars richer. he had kings. had he raise to 15-20$ preflop as he should with that many people in before him i would, of course, mucked that piece of cheese and he would have won the pot. plus, if he had bet huge on the flop i would have had to drop my cards but he priced me in and it cost him his stack. you gotta remember what grandma said....always raise big with big pairs....grandma didn't fuck around and neither should you.

today, i played for a little over 4 hours and won 152 dollars and was in maybe ten hands not counting blinds all day. i just refused to get involved with less than premium cards and just waited those people out and paid off on the few hands i won.

i will go back to the case of the dueces tomorrow and maybe another shoot-em up story.

sure hope that stimulus money gets into the economy quickly before everybody is unemployed. i agree with paul krugman that the only problem with what obama has done is that it is not big enough. we gotta fix things (bridges, roads, levies,) and build things, (schools, high speed rail, desalination plants) because just giving the money to banks to loan isn't going to work. we've tried that and all they did was go buy other banks and still refuse to loan our money back to us. (it is a good thing for the bankers and stockbrokers and politicians who got us into this mess that we don't live in france of the 17 hundreds because we would have those motherfuckers up against the wall or on the chopping block....not that i would do that but, truth be known, i probably wouldn't stop others from doing it) jobs is what we need. manufacturing is what we need. not only do we have to fix the immediate problem we have to face the fact that we don't make enough here anymore. true wealth of a nation is in WHAT THEY MAKE, tangible goods not intangible services.

oh well, our greed and stupidity got us into this and hopefully the nation as a whole will learn some very vaulable lessons from this disaster. number one of which is never elect another republican to the presidencey. check out when unemployment was the highest over the last 50 years, see how it was ALWAYS the republicans who got us into these messes. nixon, reagan, bush and bush all brought us recessions. we are slow learners.