text: Recently the Bat was playing in a online poker tournament. The Bat had increased his starting stack by half and was looking to snap off the fishies surrounding him on his starting table.
  Immediately, the Bat looks down at two red ladies. Queen of hearts, Queen of diamonds, winking at the Bat suggestively. Queens are the embodiment of poker’s temptation, especially under the gun, and they looked oh so suggestively as the Bat pondered. The Bat got that queezy feeling in his stomach he gets anytime he looks at queens.
  A raise is clicked out, fairly standard 3x bet for online poker tournaments, and it’s folded to the small blind who puts 3x bet of Bat’s 3x bet. Does that make it 9x? Think so. The Bat’s probably shipping it right here.
  That makes the Bat a little happy. Maybe they both have AK. Far more likely than AA and KK. Even better maybe one has JJ or lower and the other AK. The Bat reckons to himself, he says “Bat… the Bat reckons that the second guy is probably on a hand like AK because he flat called. It’s a good situation for AA or KK to shove. Since the BB has AK it’s likely the SB doesn’t have AA or KK. So maybe he has JJ.” See when the Bat wants to play poker tournament online he’s got his thinking cap screwed on tightly. Does that make the Bat a screwhead? Maybe.
  The Bat looks at the chip stacks. He’s got both covered but he’s fairly certain one or both players will call a shove at this point preflop. The Bat determines his best course of action for this poker tournament is to flat call. If an A or K doesn’t hit the Bat can bet it, and if one of the Blinddonks has AA, KK so be it. If an A or K does hit, the Bat gets out and still has plenty of chips.
  Flop is 9 high. The SB insta shoves, the big blind folds (bye-bye AK). The Bat knows the hand is between KK and JJ for the small blind. The AK fold makes it more likely it’s JJ. Bat calls and it is JJ. Jack hits the river and all the Bat’s careful thought goes out the window. Argh! Sometimes the Bat hates to play poker tournaments!
  The BB in chatbox says the Bat should have shoved preflop, likely JJ folds and AK calls. Then the Bat wins the hand. However, that’s a tad results oriented isn’t it. The guy advocates the Bat isolating the hand the Bat is in a coin flip with and taking away the Bat’s ability to fold for less than the Big Blind’s full stack if an A or K hits.
  Actually, the Bat got exactly what he wanted. He set up an escape route and isolated against a hand he had dominated that was drawing to two outs. True it didn’t work out in this poker tournament but poker tournaments strategy is to survive and advance. Bat almost survived and almost advanced.
  The Bat enjoyed the circuit event in New Orleans, which just won the rights to the Superbowl in 2013. Still didn’t get a hoodie but the Bat is working on it. The Bat played some cash games and the Bat was aggravated by the donknuts that sat at the table with him.
  Example Uno: Donknutjob A in a 1-2 No Limit Hold ‘Em cash game decides from early postion to call a $15 raise with 107 off suit. Later in the evening he told his neighbor “I always plays those sooted connectors.” Neither sooted nor a connector. However, if Donknuts were able to read their cards they wouldn’t be able to win any money.
  So, donknuts calls my $15 raise, and three other players do also. Doesn’t matter what the Bat was holding but know it was a big pocket pair. Flop smacks donknuts in the face… 689 two spades.
  The Bat’s holding it down on the button and biding his time to drop a big bet and thin this field. EP caller, aka Donknuts aka guy who still plays with matchbox cars and makes the vroom vroom noises when he’s by himself in his seedy apartment watching the cartoon network aka bad pokah player decides to throw a stack of reds into the pot.
  The other limpers fold, the Bat mulls it over. Why bet so much? Never underestimated the depths of somebody’s stupidity or cowardice. The Bat did. Yes, the Bat played this hand bad. Nobody would play their flopped straight for so little value. So what if there is a flush draw.
  PokerBat decides to shove his stack right to the center. The old matchbox vroom vroomer insta-calls. Ouch. Yes, he flopped a straight and the Bat is drawing very thin. Bat misses and pays off bad player. Bat might be the bad player.
  So, tail between legs the Bat returns to the hotel to play a little online. Sho nuff, once agin I got another big pocket pair–lead out with a big preflop bet, get called by j8 o/s and repeat the exact same scenario. Bat loves unsuited nonconnectors aka any two cards aka dumb man’s hand.
  That didn’t work out so well. Pokerbat decided to play online roulette. Swing and a miss. Spin and miss. Bat’s on a bit of tilt. Ain’t going to let the online roulette wheel beat me down.
  “Vroom, Vroom” says the Bat and sure enough one spin later the Bat’s number hits. Unsooted connectors are gone from the Bat’s mind. The bat likes to play roulette online. Couple more roulette spins and then one more number hits and the Bat calls it a night. Who needs poker!
  The Bat thinks there are some good tips for poker players probing a guy the Bat suspects is on a bluff:
  Liars don’t gesticulate as much. Got a verbose, New Yawker type at your table who won’t shut up and his arms flail with every story. He puts a big bet into you. Then when on a bluff you ask him a question and he’s less animated. Beware he might be on the bluff.
  If the answers are short and curt he may be on a bluff. This is a toughie to implement because it’s not like you are going to ask the guy to tell you his life story while you are deciding whether to call or raise.
  Liars use phrases like “To be honest with you” or “To tell you the truth” more often than truth tellers. Funny, because both statements imply that they don’t always tell the truth if you really break them down. They also give indirect answers to questions, and repeat and or ask you to repeat the question (perhaps a stall tactic to compose their lie) with far more frequency then truth tellers (though the poor guy could be hard of hearing too).
  Liars are also less cooperative and guarded. You feel like somebody is on the defensive he might have something to hide. They might be fidgety or uncomfortable, wayward eyes, deeper breathing, or a higher vocal pitch. They don’t feel as comfortable meeting your gaze.
  The Bat recommends you ask questions and probe for reactions. If the bettor looks cool as a cucumber and can carry on a conversation, he probably has the hand. As Caro has said, a guy with the nuts can answer any question you direct at him, a guy on a bluff can’t tell you what he did five minutes ago.
  Seems everybody else that blogs for GCP (www.gulfcoastpoker.net) has one or is getting one why none for the Bat?
  The Bat thinks it’s odd that Annie Duke crushed Joan Rivers in every way possible, short of grinding Rivers plastic skin and brittle bones into a powder and sprinkling it in her coffee she consumed her in the contest. And she lost. Strange.
  Ilari Sahamies crushes Tom Dwan over a two day span. He won almost 2 million, winning big pot after big pot. Dwan was reeling. The PokerKing, had the deets.
  The WSOP is projecting 7,323 entrants into the World Series of Poker Main Event. How do they know this? Seems these guys always figure out exactly what guarantees to make and they always hit them. The Bat will go with the over. Expects plenty of my Euro friends to be there.
  The PokerBat wants a hoodie. Not a hat but a hoodie. The Bat wants one of those Gulf Coast Poker hoodies, and the Bat wants it now.
  The Bat walks into a bar room poker game. Sees an old man and a young kid. They have fish plastered across their head like they were drenched in seawater. Bat sits down and plays. Five buy-ins later the Fish are walking out with all the money, the shark is chum.
  That was a long time ago. The Bat hasn’t had a losing session in weeks… okay… maybe days… okay… maybe the Bat just had to buy a new laptop because the Bat punted the last one into my pool. The Bat has a collection of them in there.
  Online poker tournaments can tilt the Bat. When the Bat wants to play in an online poker tournament he should put the laptop behind unbreakable glass. That way the Bat beats up the unbreakable glass, which is unbreakable, and the laptop survives. The Bat likes to play poker tournaments but the Bat’s laptop does not like it when the Bat signs on to play poker tournament, it usually means a wet future!
  Wonder if Chad Brown has seen his Poker’s Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. For those not in the know, that poker face, is when in an intimate moment with a man, a woman fantasizes about another woman. Singer Lady Gaga coined the phrase, and stipulates you need a poker face to not tip off your partner your mind is contemplating Ellen Degeneres’s. On a sidenote to this sidenote, the Bat wonders if any dude really cares what the woman is thinking about. The Bat kids, the Bat kids.
  Ruosso wasn’t the only one from the area doing well over there. She chopped at three ways with the winner having a shot for a bigger piece. They each got 450k (Euros I guess which is probably 450 million U.S.–that’s a joke) and played for the extra 150k.
  Ruosso got heads up with a Fort Lauderdale man who in this article complained about his lack of press. The Bat sympathizes. He should get more press. People should write blog posts about him, and name him and not refer to him as a Fort Lauderdale man. Anyway, the local man, who is not getting named enough in the coverage of Ruosso, came into heads up with an incredible lead and couldn’t close the deal.
  Ruosso, who surprised the Florida man twice, once by coming back to win and then when she pealed off her shades, became his new favorite player. The Bat believes he was serious when he said, “She’s the greatest thing to ever happen to poker.”
  However, The Bat wants to introduce the man to Chris Moneymaker, the hole card camera, and Phil Hellmuth. The Bat also wants to introduce the unnamed man to himself. It’d be nice to put a name to a face you know.
  Bad players can be the toughest to read. Yes, they are easy to pick up tells but sometimes that does you little to no good. I was taking a break from online poker and playing in Lake Charles, having returned to Louisiana for May Day, the other week and saw this scrawny kid from Houston go into a glare and bet mode. Problem was he was doing it to the second best player at the table? First best (is that redundant or is that repetitive?)? The Pokerbat of course.
  Anyway, second best player at the table would study the kid, who was making a move on the second chipleader at the table, that being the same person as the second best player at the table. First chipleader… yeah, I did it again… was the Pokerbat of course. So, second best player at the table would nonchalantly toss in some black (hundered dollar chips) and the kid would grimace like a bully getting hit in the face for the first time.
  When I play online poker, the differences between two types of school yard bullies is harder to see but still can be seen. They play poker online like they approach life. Some big kids never have to fight, so although they bully they are fight adverse. Once their victims pop them in the nose, they move on to less agressive victims. Other bullies have been roughed up every day in a hardscrabble life whether at the hands of their brothers, an abusive father, or mother or sister. The second lot, you don’t want to stand up to, those bullies know what pain is and know how to inflict it. They are happy to exhange blows. No, when you are making a stand the first lot are a better choice as they don’t fight back–much.
  The same is true in poker. This scrawny kid was a wannabe bully and he broadcast it with his glares that he didn’t want to be trifled with (strong means weak). The second best player keyed into that and hit back. Because the wannabe was the first kind of bully, he put his tail between his legs and folded. A real bully, made rugged by the harshness of poker would have fired back. As it was, the second best players overbet (“NO, YOU GO AWAY”), would have been a great place to steal if the Pokerbat were in the hand. But alas, the ‘bat wasn’t.
  Some people seem to think police officers should not have a break. Those people are wrong, officers should be able to have breaks in the full view of the public without fear.
  The Sun shared a picture of Police Officers having cups on tea in the sun and mocked the #ThinBlueLine at the same time.
  The distasteful article was published at a time when the policing community has pulled together and need the support of each other following the tragic death of Police Constable Keith Palmer.
  Police Officers like anyone else are entitled to breaks, and they are entitled to have them at anytime they wish.
  We should be supporting these officers having a break in the public eye because if they are already out in the community the instant a 999 blue light run happens they can delpoy much quicker.
  Police Officers and high ranking officers have now shared their support for the police team that was snapped.
  Simon Cole Chief Constable of Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland said that he fully understood that some days police officers do not even get the chance to take a break.
  And Dee Collins Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police supported her officers and other cops across the land.
  I want our Officers & Staff 2 be able 2 take their breaks in full view of the public, a great opportunity 2 engage, chat & listen #wellbeing https://t.co/TbA62oWPRf
  If you see a police officer out in the community then why not buy them a brew and say thanks for all they do.