Jeffrey Romano Blog

For a reason unknown, a random string of coincidences happens. For example, maybe you will see the same number a lot in a week…on lotto tickets, sports scores, phone numbers, menu prices, and anything else you can think of.

It just so happened that today was a string of coincidences that was a mix of anger and comedy. Recently I’ve been watching a bunch of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episodes. In every episode, the plot develops in small steps and you can almost predict the ending until Larry David throws in a hilarious twist. I’ve watched at least 5 episodes in the past couple of weeks.

When I woke up this morning I was excited to make a great breakfast with all the the food I had bought last night at the grocery store. Usually the night I go I end up eating half the food I bought, but this time I had the self-discipline to hold back. However, all the dishes in the house were dirty. Upset that I had no ability to make breakfast, I made a cup of Kona coffee and watched sportscenter. Because I couldn’t make breakfast, I didn’t have enough energy to make it to the gym. The one day of the year that someone calls and asks me to go to the gym with them, I can’t go. At this point I’m pretty upset so I go to turn on some music and play poker.

My phone is ringing and I get to my desk just in time to miss a call from my Dad. Like all people over the age of 50, he leaves me a voice mail. He says he is at the dentist by my apartment, and that he wants to meet up after his appointment. He then also told me not to call him back because he was going to be in the dentist’s chair. I oblige, passing up playing poker because I’m under the impression I’ll be seeing him in an hour. Back to sportscenter, I’m getting frustrated with spending the day so far in my house. 2:30pm rolls around and he calls me back. He tells me he doesn’t want to really want to meet up anywhere but he wants to stop by just to say hello. However, my house is currently a mess and given the short amount of time I would have had to clean, I just couldn’t invite him over.

Embarrassed I said, “You can’t come over here right now, my place is in no shape for you to see it.”

We talk for a few minutes longer, prolonging the unfortunate realization that we just won’t see each other. My frustration grows.

As soon as I find out he is not coming over I hop right onto online poker. First hand I get dealt AA get it all in vs KK and lose. I wasn’t too mad because it was only a $20 buy in, but I decided it wasn’t my day for poker. I was in about 3 others and was making calls to massage places near me. I unregistered for all my other tournaments while I was booking an appointment. The first place I call is a place I have never been before, but is close.

I make an appointment for 5:30pm and at the end of the call the receptionist says, “Ok so I have you for 5:30pm with Orien, is that ok?”.

While mindlessly multitasking I reply, “yes”.

About 3 minutes into the next 5 minutes, I start doing some research. I look up all the stats about Orien and find out he is just some random dude at a massage parlor. I begin thinking to myself about the situation. Am I going to drop $100 for some random dude with no accolades to give me a massage? If I’m paying $100 I want a hot red head or a little Asian girl that can do handstands on my back.

I panic.

I quickly think of the most common excuse I can, and call them back. I tell them that I have just gotten called into work and I have to cancel. She responds optimistically almost assuming I was going to cancel. It makes me wonder if she won a bet or something.

Situation under control, back to playing 3 tables. I bust on all 3 in the next 2 minutes. However, the doorbell rings and its Fedex, giving me a check. I feel a bit of relief and decide that I am going to get a massage, at the place I have been going for the last several months. On the way I can deposit my check. I call up the other massage parlor, “Fu Shen”.

The lady who picks up seems to have spent all of 2 weeks in this country, and less time learning English. She knows almost nothing, understanding every 8th word I say. Let me just put it this way, It took 7 minutes to book the appointment. Finally after battling the language barrier, we come to an understanding that I have an appointment for 4pm, under the name Jeff.

I excitedly hop in the shower hoping for my day to turn around. On the way in to the bathroom I drop my towel on the dirty hallway floor.

I make it to the bank which is literally next to Fu Shen. There is only one ATM in kiosk, that accepts check deposits. I wait patiently while a girl exhausts every single option at the ATM before she withdraws her 20 bucks. Finally I deposit, snatch my ATM card, and I head into Fu Shen 5 minutes late.

As soon as I enter the hallway there is an awful smell. It smelled like some gross chemicals but not like bleach. Not even really sure how to describe it better as it was a first for me. There is a tanning salon across the hall and I just assume its that place. I walk into Fu Shen, and I greet the little Asian Lady at the desk.

I said hello to her optimistically, excited for my massage. She follows with, “hello?”. I pause for a second wondering why the hell she is saying hello as a question. I just continue the conversation and explain to her that my name is Jeff and I have an appointment at 4pm. The whole time she is just smiling at me and then just replies, “hello?”.

I don’t know what to say at this point. She stands up and walks over to the doors where I usually get my massage. I follow her by the door and she opens it up and there is a person getting a massage in the room. At this point I’m totally confused, I’m trying to get a level on this receptionist. Is she just messing with me? There’s just no possible way the person getting a massage could feel comfortable with me looking into the room. She then closes the door and just starts laughing.

I say, “what the hell”.

She walks me back to the front of the store where there is a clock. She says, “come back” in very broken English. I realize this is a strugglefest in the making, so I just say, “I have massage at 4, I am Jeff”, while holding 4 fingers up. She looks at me and starts laughing again. This was a weird and creepy laugh. She then ushers me over to the clock and points at it. She points at the little hand of the clock then points to 5 o’clock notch.

While pointing at the 5 o’clock she says, “You come back at 4″. I look at her and burst out laughing hysterically and saying yes,yes, yes, over and over again. “I’ll be back at 4 you crazy woman”. About 2 seconds into me laughing she just starts laughing again and nodding her head really fast. For about 5 seconds we were just standing next to each other laughing at each other. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life with an Asian lady.

After the 5 seconds is over we just pause. She doesn’t say a word and neither do I. She isn’t even smiling anymore. I look at her once more and leave without saying anything. I don’t think I’ll ever be going back.

The day is only half over.

1 Comment

Usually for me Wednesdays aren’t so solid. Tuesday night I drink a lot of wine, and Wednesday morning I drink a lot of coffee, you get the picture. However yesterday I marked one of my best days ever ROI wise. I played 4 MTTs, mostly 2-4 tabling the whole time. I final table bubbled a $100 buy in on Full tilt, and bricked a $24 on tilt as well. On Lockpoker I played the $30 rebuy and won it. I cruised through that whole tourney without needing to run good, even though I got lucky in a couple spots, but that’s how you win tourneys. My 2nd MTT on the site was the $55 rebuy which I also won as well. It is amazing how easy the tournaments are on this site. I have absolutely no problem getting all my chips in early with any type of draw. I don’t care at all if I’m behind, because ALL THE EQUITY in these tournaments comes from bubble play. When I have a stack going into the bubble, I’m finishing top 3 in the tourney almost every time. The stack sizes polarize so fast, after a few hands you already know who is folding 90% of the time and who is not, easy game. I believe its more profitable to gamble early on, and if you lose, onto the next one.

I still don’t think I can win the bluff challenge unless I ship the major at the end of the month. But it doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is showing you are capable, which I am.

I owe a lot of this run good/play good to taking Tuesday off. Instead of grinding for 8 hours I got a massage and a burrito, in that order. It is amazing what just 1 day off can do for you mentally and physically. After all, don’t you work as hard as you can during the week just so you can live for those days off?

Hopefully you are running as good as I am at the moment

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Wow what a surprise, Charlie Sheen gets heckled off of stage on his dumb tour. Who would have thought? Answer, I would have thought, and I did think. For those of you who thought Charlie Sheen had any talent outside of movies and television, you suck. Comedians and actors rarely mix well, and this is a perfect example. When actors think they can be awesome without someone writing their script they are almost always dead wrong. The same goes for the opposite, when comedians think they can be actors, most of the time they fail. Dane Cook falls into this category of no talent acting. Of course like every other rule, there are exceptions. Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, and a few others all had great stand up performances and transitioned well into acting…they are next level.

Speaking of next level, I won the $50 rebuy last night on Lock for about $4,600. I went into the final table with more than half the chips in play, I believe my stack was around 200,000 and 2nd in chips had somewhere around 35,000. The key for me in that tournament was my bubble play. I got really lucky in that my whole table just wanted to cash. There was one point where I raised 10 out of 12 hands and took them all down preflop. So just about all of my equity in the tournament came from a 25 minutes span of relentless aggression…easy game.

The bluff challenge is underway on lock poker and it is awesome. This is one of the best promotions I’ve ever seen as people are playing either way above their limits, or 10x as much as they would usually play. Since everyone is going for so much volume, I’m going to let everyone burn themselves out this month and ship the rake race next month…good plan I think. I don’t think I have any chance of winning this competition, but I’d like to come top 10. Considering they don’t factor in rake back, sit n go grinders have a much smaller chance of winning than a heads up cash game player does. You can follow the challenge here….

http://www.lockpoker.com/challenge/

2 Comments

What you talk about, and how you say it determine your social encounters. Dentists say the first thing someone looks at is your smile, well that’s great. When you start talking to a girl about World of Warcraft at a bar, she probably is willing to pass up your great smile.

With that being said, what you talk about is going to carry the most weight in a conversation. When I’m meeting new people at a party I try to bring up a positive topic. A topic that will draw in everyone’s discussion, about a positive issue. I think when you engage a lot of people together, they will use you as a buffer. That means they will try to maintain a good relationship with you. When I don’t have a good issue to talk about, I’ll usually open with a joke so that people won’t feel awkward around me.

When talking, I want to hold the attention of as many people as I can. Talking to slow will bore my audience, and talking too fast will convince them I’ve had way too much Redbull. If I raise my voice too high I’ll be obnoxious and if I speak softly I’ll look like a bitch. The crowd and makeup of the crowd is the controlling factor.

I walk into a room, there are 4 girls including my girlfriend. I say, “Hey I must be Charlie, because you’re all my angels”. Instant hit.

I walk into a room 5 girls 5 guys, and use my friend Jesse’s joke. “Why does the chicken coop have 2 doors?…Because if it had 4 doors it would be a chicken sedan”. If someone says that it was a good joke, I then say, “it’s for the kids”. A great way to cap off a joke that is funny in every possible mix of people I can think of.

If there are more guys than girls in the room I’ll just talk about sports, you can’t go wrong there.

I’m not saying this is what you should do by any means. I wrote this blog trying to analyze my social situations. Sometimes its fun to look at the way you socially progress throughout a party. Some times, you meet everyone at the party or you’re that guy alone in the corner with a bottle of jaeger.

The next time you have a bad social interaction, think about the reasons why it happened. It might help you avoid another one.

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The typical online grinder has a gigantic monitor packed with overlapping tournaments every Sunday, and for a while that was me. Sunday variance sucks if it goes the wrong way, and most times that’s how it goes. To counter that, I decided to only play on Lock, and only play a few tourneys. The results were 2 final tables and a money bubble which could have gone either way. I came 5th in the $30 rebuys, 2nd in the $50 rebuys, and unfortunately bricked the $100 rebuys. Overall it was very easy to dominate when only playing on 3 tables, and I ended up with a $3,500 profit.

What a tournament….the NCAA has to be the best I’ve ever seen it. Everyone has a losing bracket because every team is getting upset. I really want VCU or Butler to ship, I think Butler shipping would be one of the coolest stories of college basketball. Even though I had Kansas winning it all, I’m not mad they lost because they didn’t lose to a high ranked seed. Is there any format better than the NCAA tournament? Absolutely not, imagine if football did the same thing. The brackets would be outrageously fun for college football, and it would draw in so much more attention. The bowl games generate a ton of money via sponsorship, but way more people would watch if it was the tournament format.

Spring training for baseball is happening and I couldn’t care less.

Is anyone else getting completely dominated by allergies? They have to be the worst part about spring.

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Cake is a dead network. It has been dead for a while, the minute it started lowering its daily guarantees. Ever since Lockpoker has moved to the Merge network it has been thriving. Every single month it has been growing and some months it has grown almost 100% which is astronomical considering the market. Pokerstars and Fulltilt dominate everything so getting anyone to join a site takes strategic tactics.

Aside from the very saucy rakeback deal I have with Lock, it is also offering very cool promotions. Every Monday night, the Lock pro “Jason Young” hosts a $20 super turbo tournament. It isn’t there for the super grinders, its just a fun tourney to talk trash in and make a few hundred bucks if you run good. Also, if you knock out Jason, which I did the first tourney, you get a $100 bounty. As the site gets bigger and bigger, more of the Lock pros will get to host a tournament. Which eventually means, I will get to host one…FUN!!! Although it would never be the caliber of the FTOPS, or the SCOOP, it would probably much more care free and enjoyable. Given that I would be the host I get to think up any format I want, and submit it to Lockpoker. I was thinking of a $30-$50 buy in 6 max shootout. Considering I play more 6 max tournaments than 99.99999% of all poker players, it would be suitable.

So, when/if the time comes to host. I’ll put up some links on here to sign up under my affiliate. I’ll probably even offer some sort of incentive like free coaching for an MTT, rake back, deposit bonus, or even an online stake…I don’t know just thinking on paper.

For those of you who read this blog that play poker, what would it take to make you sign up on lock? This is open ended for all sorts of suggestions, including hate from “the constipation”.

Happy friday!!!

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My oldest brother who works for an insurance company, sent me a link that estimated the total cost of the natural disasters in Japan are going to amount to $200-$300 billion. That has to be the biggest downswing financially I’ve seen a country have.

International issues are so confusing. Are we at war with Libya right now? We drop missiles on them and issue a no fly zone, what does that mean? If we have jets flying over a country when they aren’t allowed to fire unless fired upon, what good does that do? I guess I’ll just leave these issues up to the politicians.

I’ve been looking into acupuncture for my growing carpal tunnel syndrome. All these places are charging $100 for just 40 minutes. What the hell is that? Maybe I’ll just google acupuncture and stick some needles in my forearm and see what happens. It can’t be that hard right? When that doesn’t work I’ll be forced to seek treatment, you really can’t mess around with this stuff. That’s just the side effects of a rake race though, what can you do?

I’m almost hoping that the next season of the NFL is canceled. These guys are arguing over making a few million and several million. I just don’t care anymore. It would probably good for the country to get off the sofa on Sundays and do something real. Also we wouldn’t have to listen to these smug ESPN sportscenter anchors talk about slavery in the NFL….GET over yourself ESPN.

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Over the past few months I’ve been antagonized for supporting Nick Cage. I’m not sure how the argument came up, but somehow we ended up comparing him to George Clooney. I still maintain that Cage is a better actor than Clooney even though his recent movies have been of poor taste. Cage has better range, and a best actor award to boot.

For some reason when people bring up Cage, they mostly bring up his newest garbage. “Season of the Witch”, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, and “Bangkok Dangerous” are just a few of the titles where he is clearly just trying to get paid.

The real Cage brought us truly great movies. Just to name a few, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”, “Rumble Fish”, “Raising Arizona”, “Leaving Las Vegas”, “Con Air”, “The Rock”, “Face Off”, “Gone in 60 Seconds”, and “National Treasure”. Clooney has great movies too, but for some reason he just doesn’t have the lead talent that Cage has.

As far as best actors ever go, I’m not ranking Cage in my top 5 but I give him a big pat on the back. Best actor of all time has to go to Danielle Day Lewis….thoughts?

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Recently I’ve been fortunate enough to leave my home and stay a couple weekends away from Boston. I was in Chicago for the “Chicago Poker Classic”, and I was in Connecticut for relaxation. Soon enough I’ll be in Baltimore visiting some friends.

Wherever you live its easy to get bored and you start to take for granted your every day comforts. For me, traveling has always been the best refresher. I like to meet new people, eat new food, and experience new cities. Even though Chicago and Fairfield weren’t as exciting as Paris or Rome, they both were a change from the cold snow swept streets of Boston.

Also, a great way to impress a girl is to take her some where. Even if its a day trip, being adventurous has its rewards.

Right now I’m looking to take a trip to the place with the best food. So far the best single meal I have had was in Paris. The restaurant was set at the top of a hill by the Sacré-Cœur overlooking the whole city. The best food overall was in Rome, which was all next level. I’ll never eat anything in America as good as the street food in Rome, just how it is. Got any suggestions for countries or states with good food?

top of paris…

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Somehow once again nature is dominating Boston. Just 2 days ago it was 70 degrees now its snowing outside. I’m starting to wonder if the conditions are better in Siberia. At least the snow was delayed until the day after St. Patty’s parade. Yesterday marked the 1st time I have ever been to the Southie parade, and it was great. Literally every single house in Southie has a party with unlimited booze. Pretty much anything goes as long as you aren’t reckless on the streets.

So far this NCAA tournament the big east has been a real disappointment. They still have a couple of teams left but overall they haven’t been as strong as everyone said they were going to be. I never understood why people put so much weight on a team’s conference. Last year the ACC and whatever donk region Butler was from, both were in the finals. Both conferences were weak. I’ve had many debates with roommates and friends about the legitimacy of BYU and San Diego. They all say that BYU and SD are bold predictions because they played crap teams all year, even though they were two of the best teams in the country before the tournament started. The whole tournament is based on the idea that any team can win, that’s why its format is so damn good.

Even though I have both those teams going far, I still think the Jay Hawks are going to scoop this year.

ROCK CHALK!!!!!

5 Comments