The Slinky Is Back!

The midnight blue Shelby Matchbox car with pimped rims and Steve McQueen coolness, the plush red football with Oklahoma across its puffy skin, and faux Fisher-Price blackberry with stylus pen that counts 0-10 and sings along to your ABCs. These items sit at the bottom of the toy chest placed strategically in the corner of the family porch if there’s such a time that the kids deem these toys to be the most important thing to play with again.

There was a fit thrown at Target a year ago when we walked past the Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars without allowing our son to pluck one off the shelve. At the time we relented for sanity sakes at the time due to several late nights with a little girl that had Pavarotti’s lungs implanted.

While eating at Perkins one evening with the parents and enjoyed the chicken fried steak with skin on whipped potatoes and gravy, my son spotted the skill crane in the front lobby. Two tries for a dollar would have to wait until my wife finished her taco salad bread bowl. Sure enough, right when the last black olive was downed, my son made a beeline for the skill crane to await his father’s deft touch in obtaining badly sown stuffed animals. Since the Mickey Mouse doll was buried, I saw my only chance to score was the Oklahoma football sitting on Mickey’s right ear.

The ABCs would be repeated infinitely after my son’s second birthday party since the Fisher-Price toy did not have an off button and would only cease the mind numbing warbling after several minutes of inactivity. Of course if thrown in a toy chest, something is bound to start it up again while retrieving the new toy of choice.

This weekend, I reached into the toy chest of old, discarded playthings, and found the cash games at PokerStars to be much better then squawked about on several websites. The interface was still appealing, and the players were lined up to push all-in with less then suited aces at the NLO8 and PLO8 tables, which made my balance there gain a few ticks. Its true that the games are not a merely bet the nuts and win as they were one/two years ago, but rather a softer crowd of nut-peddlers that can be pushed off pots with ease and those players you can value bet until that $50 you spent at Pebble Creek Golf Course over the weekend, along with the box of Titleist which found a new home among the trees and ponds, are all paid for thanks to the anime avatar in the second seat that just couldn’t let go of that third nut low draw.

Over this summer there hasn’t been the opportunities to sit down with a cold beverage and grind away at these games versus my 10pm please-don’t-fall-asleep-watching-Sportcenter-and-blogging-while-playing “sessions”. To call that poker would be like Barry Bonds calling himself humble. Which is why I’ve been forced to play with new toys like turbo SnGs and even gambOOOling it up in the $1/$2 and $2/$4 games versus slightly tougher competition.

Smart? Maybe not, but no one has ever accused me of being intelligent before.

Thanks for dropping by, now that Scotty is gone, will Lee be able to take it home for the Pros and stop short stacking at the $.50/$1 Omaha games at Full Tilt?