Small joys

I took the day off today to get my license renewed. Fearing the worst, I budgeted several hours at the Jersey City DMV. I brought two(!) books along and prepared myself for a long haul.

You know that great feeling you have when you make a crying call at the river with bottom two when some psycho bets half the pot and proceeds to showdown top pair no kicker? That's how I felt when I strolled out of the DMV just 25 minutes after walking in with a brand new license--they even gave me 6 years rather than 4 since I have a spotless record (helps that we only drive the car as a weekend shopping cart--12,000 miles in nearly 3 years--mostly long road trips). I don't normally associate the DMV and joy, but we have to wring every little bit out of this life don't we?

Other happy notes--PokerStars 120 max reload bonus, no expiration--20% of deposit, offer good till the 19th. That is like being given free money since you absolutely know you'll clear it sometime.

Further joy, PokerRoom stud tables. Juicy juicy. They like to raise on 4th and fold on 6th. Fun combination. PokerRoom tourneys seem weak as hell too, but for some reason PT doesn't work on them, which means you kind of have to pay attention the whole time, which is not my style for online holdem MTT's--maybe I should play them more often to get back to the basics.

Finally, shout out to PokerDominator. I don't know if I mentioned it before in detail, but this is a great free poker database. It does what I used to do myself in a homemade db, but better. Furthermore, the creator, a guy named JD, is extremely responsive to questions and suggestions. If you have never checked it out, you should. I use it to track all my online play as well as my live play, effectively keep track of my complete bankroll in one spot. It is superflexible, allowing you to create your own locations, games, whatever, and then saving what you've done so you can reuse it.

And a nice but vital feature is that you can re-export all your data back to yourself as a csv file, which lets you play with it further if you like but more importantly allows you to back it up in the odd even the site goes down. I am so appreciative of JD's work and his continuous responsiveness that I created a banner for him and linked up, sans advertising fee. The banner is pretty much worth what he paid for it, so perhaps he'll send me a better one.