The Super Bowl is coming to the New york and New Jersey area?

Please tell me that I am not accurate!!!! Why the heck would the NFL allow the Super Bowl to go to a stadium that will be affected by the weather is beyond my comprehension. My wife like to tease me and criticize the American Football players for wearing pads instead basically playing rugby. She has commented on why the game has to be played in a climate control setting for the Super Bowl. Now that the game is going to be played in the coldest month of the year in a outdoor stadium I feel that next stop is Europe and we will have football teams over there soon. Why can't we leave things alone in sports. Do you have any idea how much tickets are going to cost much less scalped tickets are going to be? Can you imagine if the Giants or the Jets make it to the game what the price for a ticket will be? I know that Dallas is hosting the super bowl this year and the Cowboys have a chance to be in the game too, but at least their stadium has a retractable roof. This makes about as much since as the Minnesota Twins opening an outdoor stadium for baseball. I cannot wait to see what happens when the Twins are playing the Rays or Yankees in the playoffs and the game is called due to snow flurries. Or at game time the temperature is -10. "Hello sports fans, we are live at Giant Stadium with the temperature is -12 and with the wind chill it is -34 on a blustery and frigid day for football. It is so cold in the booth that I am wearing four shirts, three thermal underwear bottoms and I cannot feel my let leg. Lets go down to the field and get a report from Michele Tafoya. OOps she is frozen solid and her microphone is stuck to her chin. we will hear from her later after she thaws out..." The Halftime show has been canceled because the strings in Bruce Springsteen's guitar break each time he plucks them. Bon Jovi can not comb his hair because the hair product has also frozen so they refuse to go on. But wait, wait, I believe that Amy WineHouse who has nothing to do with New York or New Jersey is going to perform. Once again a British import will be performing at our big game and she is so high that she cannot feel the cold. They should play the game in Buffalo. That would be cool. In fact the Super features the Arizona Cardinals and the San Diego Chargers. Two teams that have no cold weather games all season and meet today in the Super Bowl.
If you are a New Yorker or a Tri-Stater this is good news to you why? This may create more jobs in the area. It may create and rejuvenate the economy in the N.Y.and N.J. area but if you don't have a job in sports or are not rich, this does nothing for you except raise the terrorist warning flag level to off the charts. I hope by 2014 to be living in New York. I can't wait to see this debacle unfold...
That logo is not the actual logo for Super Bowl 48 or whatever the number will be in 2014...

online poker.. good or bad

I like to play poker when I am at work and I am bored. Texas Hold 'em is my game and I think that I am pretty good at playing. I was playing the other day and I never realized how mentally disturbed people are around the world. The arguments had on Poker Stars.com are absolutely priceless. People get upset if you take to long to play or if you don't speak English or the language that the table predominantly speaks. When I say upset, I mean upset. People literally will curse you out over any type of comment or if your computer freezes or if you beat them consistently. I have to admit, it is pretty frustrating and you want to play a hand and person is debating whether or not to fold or bet. Some people do take forever. My only problem with that is you are playing for free. I currently have 180,00 plus in my account and as much as i want this money to be real, it is not. I know that there are speed games and those games are even wilder with the commentary. The funny thing is that there is supposed to be a person who monitors all of the conversations and they admonish people for speaking in another language and those who curse. People are smarter than they think. Currently there is an argument going right now as i blog to you. A player named Twinkle eyes is upset because she or he was cursed at in Spanish for winning on the river. So now every one is writing all of their messages in Spanish and she or he is responding in English with profanity. To write the word shit for example, she has typed it as s.h.i.t. The computer allows that.
Yesterday there was a debate whether playing online poker can make you a better player. I said it does because it helps you get familiar with so many types of hands and maybe it helps you develop your own style. Yes there are people who play every hand and go all in on every hand and you just want to slap them. Yes there are people out there who think that they know everything and you just want to strangle them. But there is no better feeling of satisfaction when you beat them. I love it when a person goes in on every hand annoys everyone at the table and then I get a hand and go all in with them and they have nothing. My only weakness is betting. I never know how to bet. Most times i under bet and instead of burying my opponents out of hands I give them the opportunity to stay in them. Sometimes it works because I have a great hand but sometimes it backfires. By the way a table moderator just stopped the game because the table is speaking too much in Spanish. That happens from time to time. I just had a hand that I am sure I was winning and since I did not blow up the pot, someone just hit a club flush. I am quitting now because the moderator has done it again because these idiots starting cursing again in Spanish.
Poker is a cruel game. I have had so many bad beats and tilt moments that I wonder why I still play the game. Online poker is a drug because there are no consequences for your actions. If you lose all of you money, the give you a thousand dollars three times an hour. I prefer to play in the 5 to 10 dollar game. The money tends to last a bit longer and the cards seem to be more friendly. I play the 100 to 200 game when I have had a good few days of winning. I do pretty well on those tables and the dialogue is pretty wacky. Plus once in a while a real pro will play and he or she will spend the entire time guessing your hands and they are usually right. I played with Daniel Negraneau once and after beating him twice in a row on river beats he began telling me every card that i was getting. It was weird that he guessing my hands correctly. Everyone is a genius. I think that the only difference between online and real poker is money pressure. The skill of body reading is over rated. Yes everyone has some kind of tell but you really have to know what you are looking for. I admit I get nervous when I play for real money and you can tell it in my conversation. The very first hand I ever played at a real table I hit three jacks and won a good pot. For the rest of the night I was real quiet. I was so scared that in the next hand when i got a king ten I mucked it and the table flopped a king and a ten. I would have won because the next card was another 10. A full house and because i was scared I let it go. I was out within five hands after because i started chasing bad hands. I have grown into being a better player but I will never forget that night.
Anyways, if you do play online poker, play each hand like you would if you were playing for real stakes. Who knows maybe it will make you a better player. Don't get mad at your opponents if they criticize your ability. Then again you will never see them so talk as much s.h.i.t. as you can.

Just a few observations worth mentioning..

I really have become less of a fan of inter league baseball than I used to be. I know some will say it is because the Mets can't beat the Yankees(which is a lie), but I really think that it has lost something for me. Plus the match ups really are unbalanced. The Royals play St. Louis six times which helps St. Louis. Washington and Baltimore should be the game of the week. Detroit and Los Angeles is a real rivalry that I cannot wait to watch. The Colorado and Kansas City game should be ESPN sunday night baseball. Why do the Boston Red Sox one year play the Braves and then the next year play the Phillies? Did you know that the Florida Marlins for years had the most wins in Inter league play. Who cares right!!!! I think that when the same teams play each other year in and out, if they met in the World Series, the surprise element is gone!!! Plus these days so many players have changed teams that everyone has faced everyone somewhere down the line. With the All star game possibly expanding to get more pitchers in the game and both leagues trying to make sure that the starting nine players play longer the speculation or wonder of how Roy Oswalt would do against Derek Jeter in a real game goes away. I almost said Halliday but i remembered that he is a Philly and he has faced Jeter hundreds of times. The only games worth watching was Phillies and the Blue Jays but the games have been moved out of Toronto because of a G-8 Summit. In short I will still watch them all if I can but I really think that I prefer watching teams play each other for a purpose.
Why is it so difficult to play on clay in Tennis? Every year some unknown male or female makes a name for themselves based on how well they do on the dirt. The French Open is upon us and i wonder how many top players will not make it beyond the first week. Is it conditioning? The rallies are longer, the ball is easier to get to, slicing and side spins tend to win while playing on this surface. Pete Sampras and Andy Roddick never won on this surface because they can not over power an opponent. Serve and volley style tennis works but only in right situation. Serena and Venus use the tactic when they are in trouble and when they are serving well. Rafa uses his spins to move his opponent on and off the baseline and when he is serving well, he is impossible to beat. Federer just makes you hit one more shot and if you miss it he usually makes you pay. We shall see what happens.
A quick observation about Lebron James. He is going to get paid no matter where he goes. He should stay in Cleveland and become a hometown legend bigger than anyone since ..... no one. The city of Cleveland has had some of the worst luck in sports. Micheal Jordan, Edgar Renteria, John Elway are people who have killed the city's hope of winning a title. Think about it,what superstar has been a superstar in his hometown. Joe Mauer is the only one I can think of. He has not won a title there yet and probably will never. Lebron needs to stay home. He can be a Yankee fan anywhere. Cleveland needs you!!!!

Athletes really need to give us a break..

I am not one of these sports junkies that believe in conspiracy theories or one of those guys who point the finger at anyone who can do something better than I can. I believe firmly that just because someone has done P.E.D.'s, it doesn't make them super man or woman just because they took the drugs. They still have perform and sometimes the drugs don't make that much of a difference. My question and my blog today is why do these guys lie after they have been caught or why do athletes go through this period of denial. Are they trying to sample public opinion and see who has their back or who is against them? Are they hoping to stay on the front and back page of the newspaper so society does not forget them? Is what they are involved in so laden with trouble that it keeps them from telling as to protect themselves and their families from violence? Pete Rose lied for twenty years before admitting he bet on baseball. He went to jail and maintained while he was in jail that he was innocent of betting on baseball. Marion Jones denied ever meeting Victor Conte and then Conte supplies ESPN with a photo of him and Jones that he has in his office. She also denied using drugs. Mark McGwire lied for years about steroid use. Now we have Floyd Landis who went to arbitration, went to court, went to all media outlets and proclaimed his innocence. Yesterday he all of sudden is a singing like a canary. Do they all miss the attention? Winning the Tour de France is a huge deal. Pete Rose is one the 15 greatest players ever to play the game of baseball and he did not want to get banned from the game so he lied. Mark McGwire has hit 583 home runs which is in the top 10 in that category and that would have put him in the Hall of Fame. Marion Jones won Olympic Medals and was clearly one of the greatest 10 women sprinters in Track and Field History. It is easy to say you got caught, now come clean. We know that there has to be more to the entire saga than people are letting on. Plus nowadays people are keeping DNA samples around just in case they have to testify and save their own ass. Monica Lewinsky kept President Clinton's sperm on a dress. Roger Clemens is up a creek because his trainer has kept his DNA to cover his ass in Clemens HGH case. What is going to happen next. O.J. is going to admit to killing Nicole and Ron on his deathbed. Robert Blake is too. Still waiting for someone to admit that they killed Kennedy...

hello my friends...

It has been two weeks since I last blogged and a ton of things have happened good and bad in my life and in the sports world. The NHL playoffs have gone mad with a team losing the first three games of a series and comes back to win four straight. They were even down 3-0 in the first period of game seven. OUCH!!! Sorry Bruins fans!!!! I actually like the Bruins and lost a bet that they would still win the series. No Sid the Kid or Alex the great trying to win the Stanley cup. Lebron is "gone fishing" as the Celtics took him over their knees and spanked him and the Cavaliers. Tiger did not make a cut and withdrew from a tournament. Lawrence Taylor is being accused of rape of a 16 year old girl. The Mets went from first to worst in that time period. My baseball team finished its season unceremoniously and we will not have a triple crown winner in horse racing this year. I may touch on those topics later this week but today I am sounding off about this Arizona law.
It is sad that we have as a premise in this country that tells the world to bring us your tired, weary, and poor. No one is from this country. We all came from somewhere and it is disturbing how racist and short sided we are all becoming. Racial profiling is everywhere. I have tanned white friends who tell me that they get pulled over because they are thought to be Latino. I have been lucky that I have not had it happen to me and I think that being 280 pounds and and well spoken may have something to do with it. Arizonans are nice people. Every person that I have met from Arizona has been the nicest person that i have ever been around. This state just has a lot of backwards thinking. They did not have a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and I wonder if they still don't. I cannot understand why a state on the border of foreign country want to anger so many from that foreign country. I live in Los Angeles and we too live on the Mexican border. We took this land just like the land in Arizona was taken and set aside for people to live in. People often wonder why the Mexican Federali's rob almost every American they can. It is due to the stupid laws that discriminate against their people. The funny thing is that right now, the Phoenix Suns are led by a foreigner named Steve Nash. The Arizona Diamondback have a few players from outside the U.S., the Arizona Cardinals do as well, and the Phoenix Coyotes do as well. Many baseball teams have spring training in Arizona and all of these teams have players from all over the world. The money generated from spring training is in the millions and for the legislature to ignore that fact is crazy. Yes the point is that if these athletes are legal to be here then there is no problem, but we all know that they are not. For Phil Jackson to say something supportive of this law shows his ignorance of his own team. There are a few Lakers who are foreign and I wonder if they have their papers in order. The immigration argument in this country is a foolish one because this country was built on the backs of people who were not citizens or natives to this land. I say we tax them all and make some money off of them because that is why most immigrants are here. They are here to get a better life. Do you know how much it costs to go through immigration in this country? The hurdles that my wife and I are going through because I don't make a ton of money is ridiculous. We actually have to find a second sponsor and the second sponsor would be responsible to take care of my family until she became legal if something happened to me. The process takes from 3 months to 10 years!!!! So until you are involved in the situation, I think people should just shut up on the topic. Yes I don't want to live in a world where every criminal around the world comes here and gets asylum or can hide here because we did not protect our border, but how we say to the world to bring us your tired, weary and poor, and expect to tell who is really tired, weary and poor. This country is supposed to be a land of opportunity, and instead it is becoming a land of jealousy and bitterness. I run a youth Hostel and the guests often ask can they leave their passports with us in the office because they don't want to lose them. Can you imagine traveling around world with that fear of losing your identification knowing that at any moment if you lose it in Arizona, you are going to be detained in a prison cell until they can figure out who you are? I tell all of my guest to take their passports everywhere they go in this country... You never know...

this past weekend in sports

This past weekend in sports remind me why I love watching every sporting event there is to see. I wish that I did not pay the 64.99 to watch that fight but both fighters are two of my favorite people to watch. I just wish that Moseley had developed a jab over the years because if he had that fight could have been interesting. Plus over his career, he would have never lost. He is a great two handed fighter but he has never had a jab and that is why some of his losses have been surprises and some of his wins have been as well. He should now retire and become a promoter and develop a young champion because now more than ever boxing needs a new face.
I blogged a while ago that I preferred boxing over the mixed martial arts and I still do. However, boxing needs to get some more prize fighters and say goodbye to some of the veteran fighters. Bernard Hopkins, Shane Moseley, Roy Jones Jr., all served admirably as ambassadors for this sport. Oscar De La Hoya has become a great promoter and should stay retired and help the sport find a new star. The Russian brothers need to fight and give us a universal heavyweight champion. Why participate in a sport if you don't want to be the true champion. Brother or not, they owe the people who spend hundreds of dollars to watch them fight a night to remember.
Now we wait to see if Manny and Floyd can get it on in the fall or by Christmas. I think that they will. I just hope that I have a job and can afford to watch it!!!
I finally get to see the Mets play and both games they lit up like a Christmas tree. Santana is not the pitcher I thought he was. He is so inconsistent with his location. He had a curve ball and a change-up. Now he has confidence in neither. David Wright is hitting for power but he is not hitting for average. Neither is Reyes. The Mets will go as far as those two guys will take them. I like the starting pitching and the bullpen so far, but when Beltran returns can we contend? I think so, but Santana needs to become the horse I know he can be. Bay is finally starting to wake up and the rookie is impressive. The Phillies are really good!!!If they stay healthy, they can score a million runs. They have only one starter though and that might be their undoing.
Golf this weekend had three amazing feats. Rory Mcilroy shot a course record 62 to win a tournament yesterday, Ryijo Ishikawa shot a 58 to win a tournament in Japan and Tiger Woods shot a 79 and did not make the cut for the 6th time in his career. Lorena Ochoa retired after her event this weekend and Justine Henin won her first tournament since she retired to become a mom and a wife. I did not watch the derby. I thought that it was canceled due to the weather. The NBA playoffs are here and I am off to a bad start. Denver and Dallas are gone. I miss the days when the Knicks were in the show.. I will write about that tomorrow. Pray for my team..