Random Thoughts to Bring in the New Year

As 2009 comes to a close we at CPL Poker Blog and Podcast want to wish you a very happy and prosperous 2010.  Happy New Year!!

We also thought it would be a great time for some random thoughts and reflections on 2009.

The Good - This has to be the blog and podcast.  Readership and listenership is up - a trend, we hope, that continues into 2010 and beyond.  Thank you all for stopping by and listening to the show(s). With that increase came our first unsolicited advertiser (777.com)  - check them out.  It's a nice aggregate site of various poker rooms and casinos with reviews, bonuses, etc.

The Bad - In order of how much they irk me (least to most).  What's with the Bellagio's Five-Star World Poker Classic schedule??  Okay, the tourney takes place in 2010, but they released the schedule today.  ALL of the tournaments are rebuys!!  Seventeen prelim events leading up to the main event and all of them are rebuy events??  Huh? 

"FAIL" - apparently the trend for the kid's these days on the interweb seems to be the use of the word "FAIL" to mean some variation of "didn't go well".  As in, "tried to get in to the midnight showing of Avatar - long lines - FAIL".   If things go really bad you can call it "epic fail" - as in, "I flopped a four flush on an A high board, played it like I had the A. Moved all-in on the river with a massive Q-high only bluff.  Epic Fail - guy snapped called me with his pair of 3s".  Hey, here's some advice - using any variation of the term FAIL in 2010?  Epic Fail.

Pronouncing Tolkien - A Swedish online poker phenom by the name of Isildur1 stormed onto the scene in October.  This has led to innumerable mispronunciations of his name by such folks as Ante Up Podcast, Raw Vegas TV/Wicked Chops, and Mike Matusow (BTW- clean up that foul mouth, Mike, damn).  Each tending to butcher the name by pronouncing it along the lines of:  IZ-ill-der.  My God - do you even watch movies?  Over three years (2001 to 2003) the Lord of the Rings Trilogy racked up 17 Academy Awards and each film ranks between 2nd to 15th in All-Time Worldwide Gross Receipts.  Okay, I can live with some regional dialectic variations in the pronunciation - give me ih-SEAL-door or ee-SILL-dur, or some mash of the two, but NOT -  IZ-ill-der, that's just....Epic Fail.  Now go read Silmarillion as punishment.

The Ugly - Only one thing can go here (and I won't go into too much detail).  At the end of 2008, I set a couple of simple poker goals for 2009 - results-type stuff.  I didn't hit a single one - not one.  Let's hope 2010 is much better - for us all.