Pocket Tens

Good morning everyone.  It seems like I just posted...  :)  Before I get to today's topic, let me throw out some miscellaneous tidbits that I wouldn't have been able to hit you with yesterday.  I forgot my weekly Monday fantasy baseball update, which has the Bikini Hill Giants sitting in 9th place in a 10-team league.  What I wouldn't have been able to tell you yesterday morning is that last night, my team (boasting a "stellar" .233 batting average for the month of April), hit .415, scored 8 runs, and had 4 stolen bases...  Hitting their stride in May?  Hopefully...  There is also some buzz now that my alma mater will be joining the Sun Belt Conference after they compete in the WAC for only one year (which begins this fall).

The subject of today's poker post is my least favorite hand to play, pocket tens.  Since I wrote about the 'evil hand' recently, I thought that I might as well address this particular hand now.  I promise that in the near future I will write about a poker outing where I actually won some money...  If you believe Phil Hellmuth's list of 'Top 10 Hands', you pretty much have to play pocket tens, as they are his 6th-ranked hand (AA, KK, AK, QQ, JJ, 10 10)...  I no longer have the particular poker book that I read this in, so I don't remember if Phil created this list or if he just passed along the findings of a group of anonymous poker scientists somewhere...  Anyway, the first thing that I don't like about 10's is that there is a group of 4 overcards that can appear on the board (A, K, Q, J - okay, hopefully you knew the 4 overcards).  If you are facing multiple opponents and one of those cards show up, pfffttt...

The second thing that I don't like about the tens is the potential straight disaster that you can face if you hit your set.  I did not consciously recognize this next fact until I read it in a poker book.  If someone would have quizzed me on it, I am sure that I would have been able to figure it out, and it's like a little lightbulb came on when I read it.  To make a straight, it is NECESSARY to have either one of these two cards?  Think about it for a second - avoid the temptation the scan down in the text - in Texas Hold 'Em, either in your hand or on the board, you HAVE TO HAVE 1 of these 2 cards to make a straight.  It's impossible to do so without having either a ___ or a ___ in your hand or on the board...  (that is 'Jeopardy' music that you hear in the background...).  Okay, you have to have either a 5 or a 10 in your hand or on the board to make a straight in Texas Hold 'Em.  (If you didn't know that already, try to make a straight in your head without those cards - c'mon, I know you want to...).  So your ten hits the board, giving you a set - yippee...  If your hand doesn't fill up, the board doesn't pair giving you a full house, there are going to be all kinds of straight possibilities out there.  The one time that sticks out in my mind occurred during a 1/2 NL session at the Red Rock Casino (Red Rock was my favorite Station's Casino for accumulating freeroll hours in the desert).  We had a donk at the table.  Let me tell you right now that if there is a donk at the table, he will eventually hit a hand against me (it's about the same odds as having an ace show up on the flop if you hold pocket kings).  Anyway, I'm up for the session after grinding for multiple hours, and I still ended up winning for the session, but I flop a set of 10's.  There might be three of us after the flop, and the turn card makes a possible GUTSHOT straight...  I bet, he raises all-in.  He was short-stacked, and I had the odds (or really close) to call even if he did make the miracle straight, because I still have ten outs to make my full house in the worst-case scenario.  I called, hoping my read was wrong, but OF COURSE he hit his four-outer and I didn't catch on the river...  GRRRRRR...

The third thing that I don't like about pocket tens is that they will hurt me if somebody else is holding them.  This is the most memorable hand that I've lost playing at the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma.  For you Vegas junkies, this place has a 46-table poker room.  It's not Foxwoods, but it's still pretty impressive, and if Oklahoma had sports betting, I might be moving closer to the Oklahoma border (Winstar is LITERALLY located off of Exit 1 when you cross the Red River from Texas - YES, EXIT ONE).  Anyway, in a 1/2 NL game, I have A Q, and the flop come K J 10 (not bad)...  I'm in with two other opponents.  My opponents go nuts (well, for having about 100 each in chips), and the only reason that they both don't get all-in is that one makes a mistake in poker protocol (he tries to raise all-in, but makes a string bet).  I know his intentions, and am mentally BEGGING the board not to pair.  Turn card, another 10.  This second opponent gets his chips all-in and I proceed to fold my nut straight, face up...  My opponents flip over J J and 10 10...  PFFFTTT...  The table is AMAZED that I could fold my straight there - I told them that based on the action, someone SURELY had AT LEAST J 10, let alone...  Yeah...

In summary, pocket tens are worse than the evil hand...  :)  I hope that you have a great day and I will see you again on Friday.

                

Take It Back

Good morning everyone.  It looks like I'll be posting two days in a row this week...  Sorry that I didn't make it yesterday.  I was really sick this weekend, going to work on Saturday when most people probably would have called in feeling as badly as I did, and then I finished off my sixth straight day of work on Sunday.  Yesterday was one of those days that I went back to bed ANYTIME that I felt tired.  So here you go, your Tuesday ramble, my 100th post at 'Bikini Hill'...  I would start this ramble off with a joke about pizza, but thinking about it, it's kind of cheesy, so...  (think about it..., think about it..., AH... there you go).  ;)  Stole that from one of the bands who played at our venue on Saturday night.  For all of the Boise State 'bashing' that I do because of my strong belief that they NEVER PLAY ANYBODY, it seems that 32 NFL teams agreed with me during the NFL draft, as everyone passed on quarterback Kellen Moore, who led the Broncos to a 50-2 record as a starter.  Moore has been signed as an undrafted free agent by the Detroit Lions.  The band Jars of Clay played at our venue on Sunday night.  They are a Christian rock band from Nashville, Tennessee, and are best known for their song 'Flood', which was the lead track from the 1998 movie 'Hard Rain' starring Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater.  Freeman and Slater are part of a group of armored car drivers who take part in a heist in this movie.  It did not occur to me until I prepared to do this ramble that Slater (who actually tries to do the right thing - I was bluffing a minute ago...) hides out in a church that ends up being torched in an effort to get him to vacate it - a church is burned in the movie whose lead track is performed by a Christian rock band...  Go figure...  I actually liked the song 'Flood' so much at the time the movie was released that I bought the Jars of Clay CD it was recorded on.  I enjoyed seeing the band perform it, and I do have one funny moment to pass along from the show.  At one point during the evening I looked up into our VIP section and saw a guy performing on his own set of 'air drums', having a great time...  I don't know if I've developed a 'sixth sense' working this job for 9 months now, but something prompted me to look to the stage, where of the 5 musicians performing at the time, none of them was currently playing the drums...  :)  It's good to see that the folks in Oklahoma City have figured things out now.  Last year I was crying on my facebook because the home fans in the Thunder/Mavericks series kept wearing blue t-shirts, which was the color of the OPPOSING TEAM'S uniform.  It did my heart good to see the Thunder fans all sporting their white t-shirts last night.  And I'm sure that some people thought that I was crazy predicting that this series would go seven games.  We've had a one-point buzzer-beating game and a three-point game.  ;)  So, I've mentioned here before that the Texas State Bobcats will be joining the Western Athletic Conference this fall.  The university has a sign with the letters WAC capitalized, headlining the words 'We Are Coming'.  It's unfortunate for my alma mater that the rest of the conference appears to be leaving...  UTSA has announced that they will be leaving the WAC after this season to join Conference USA, and it's rumored that Louisiana Tech will be following them.  Two of the current WAC members have announced that they will be bolting to join the Mountain West Conference.  It will be very interesting to see where the Bobcats end up...  For all of the commercials that I bash here on Mondays, I have found another one that I like.  Have you seen the ESPN commercial where the balding white guy keeps showing up to places where he has made reservations, is getting picked up at the airport, etc..., and keeps getting responses of disappointment?  His name - Michael Jordan...  :)  At work early last week I heard the most unusual response to a statement that I've ever heard, and it keeps making me smile thinking about it...  After my shift I was involved in some banter with my friend Megan (this is the same Megan who completed her first half-marathon a few posts back).  I do have a tendency to pick on people that I like in case I have never stated that here before...  ;)  Anyway, I'm walking away from Megan toward the end of this banter when I turn and express, "I'm an ANGEL..." (letting the word 'angel' just ROLL off my lips...).  I'm out of sight now walking up the stairs when I hear the shouted response, "TAKE IT BACK!!"...  :)  Really, I am one of the good guys, just ask me...  ;)  I wonder why something as fragile as the toe is located on the end of your foot...  Yeah, I JUST got up to get something to drink and JAMMED my toe into a bookshelf...  GRRRRRRRR...  On that note, since it IS Tuesday, I will be back with a poker story for ya tomorrow.  Have a great day!
          

NHL Rd. 2/NBA Rd. 1 Predictions (Wow, Wow, WOW!!!)

Good morning everyone.  What a Friday morning this is.  The first round of the 2012 NFL Draft was held last night and there's so much going on in the sports world that I'm not even going to address football.  I will address my past predictions - wow, wow, WOW...  If you have a minute, go back and check out my predictions for the 2012 NBA regular season, and compare them to the final regular season standings.  If you don't have a minute, I correctly predicted ALL 16 playoffs teams, and I NAILED the 66-game regular season records of several teams (mainly in the Eastern Conference).  In the first round of this year's NHL playoffs I called the winners in 5 of the 8 series.  I called 4 of those 8 winners (New Jersey, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Phoenix) in the exact number of games the series would go, and I called the Capitals in 6 (they won in 7).  I also called 8th-seeded Ottawa, who forced a seventh game with the top-seeded Rangers.  We aren't going to discuss how badly I whiffed on the Canucks and the Red Wings because we don't have that kind of time...  ;)  Below are my predictions for the second round of the NHL playoffs (which begin tonight) and the first round of the NBA playoffs (which begin tomorrow).


Second-Round NHL Playoff Predictions:


#7  Washington Capitals vs. #1  New York Rangers   -----   Capitals in 6 games
#6  New Jersey Devils vs. #5  Philadelphia Flyers       -----   Flyers in 6 games

#8  Los Angeles Kings vs. #2  St. Louis Blues            -----   Kings in 6 games
#4  Nashville Predators vs. #3  Phoenix Coyotes        -----   Coyotes in 7 games



First-Round NBA Playoff Predictions:


#8  Philadelphia 76ers vs.  #1  Chicago Bulls                -----   Bulls in 5 games
#7  New York Knicks vs. #2  Miami Heat                   -----   Heat in 5 games
#6  Orlando Magic vs. #3  Indiana Pacers                    -----   Pacers in 6 games
#5  Atlanta Hawks vs. #4  Boston Celtics                     -----   Hawks in 6 games

#8  Utah Jazz vs. #1  San Antonio Spurs                       -----   Spurs in 6 games
#7  Dallas Mavericks vs. #2  Oklahoma City Thunder   -----   Thunder in 7 games
#6  Denver Nuggets vs. #3  Los Angeles Lakers           -----   Lakers in 7 games
#5  Los Angeles Clippers vs. #4  Memphis Grizzlies      -----   Clippers in 6 games


And there you go...  With all of today's predictions this almost seemed like a homework assignment, but you have to love this time of the year in sports (and it deflects attention from my fantasy baseball team)...  ;)  Have a great sports weekend and I'll see you again on Monday!
    







    

Living In Las Vegas

Good morning everyone.  I'll get right down to business since this post is going to have some length to it.  I'm now 14 weeks away from being able to move back to the desert, and I decided that today's entry would summarize the things that I did and did not like about living in Las Vegas.  I will start with the negatives first so that I can end up with the good stuff.  I previously lived in Vegas for 2 years (when the economy was good), from May 05 to April 07.  The positives and negatives below are listed in no particular order...


THE BAD


1)  The Weather - IT... ALMOST... NEVER... RAINS...  Go figure, since the city of Las Vegas is in the state of Nevada, in the middle of the DESERT...  I grew up in the Northeast throughout most of my youth, and with the exception of the two years listed above, I have lived in the state of Texas since I moved south to attend college.  The thing that I discovered from my previous stint in Vegas was that I have personally become acclimated to humidity.  It is pretty much too hot to do anything outside during the summer in Las Vegas, but "it's a dry heat..."

2)  There Is No Water - This is a little different from the reason listed above and is a bit of an exaggeration, but let me explain...  San Marcos, America has a river running right through the middle of campus at my alma mater (there is a stretch of grass overlooking the river that is nicknamed 'Bikini Hill' - you may have heard of it...).  During the hot Texas summer you can jump INTO this river, float the river, etc, etc...  I cannot vouch for this with 100% certainty, but when I lived out in Vegas before, I was told that the city would not allow any new homes to have swimming pools and that no new golf courses could be built due to the lack of water.  I SWEAR that on my visit to Atlantic City three summers ago I was ready to move up there after walking out of the poker room and staring THE ATLANTIC OCEAN eye-to-eye...  AWESOME!

3)  The Feeling Of Isolation - There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million residents in Clark County (depending on which source you trust), so let me explain...  San Marcos, America is 30 minutes south of Austin and 30 minutes north of San Antonio.  If you drive much farther than 30 minutes in any direction from Vegas, you will run into MOUNTAINS.  Yes, Las Vegas is nicknamed 'the valley' (although I prefer 'the desert') on the local Vegas news, etc...  The way that I have driven into Vegas many times, from the south (out of California), it's VERY OBVIOUS that you are driving UP a mountain, and then DOWN a mountain.  I grant you, it is a VERY BIG BOWL, but for some reason I let that bother me...  Let me add that I did not have a Myspace account, facebook did not exist yet, and I felt more than a little separated from my family and friends.

4)  The Feeling Of Having To "Watch Your Back" - I guess it's due to the gambling, partying lifestyle out in the desert (what's that you say?), but I always felt like I had to watch my back to avoid being scammed by somebody.

5)  The Lost Souls - I really wasn't sure how to title this reason, but it is very depressing to see the poverty level in Las Vegas.  This is in a way a reflection of the reason listed above.  There are a number of people living in the desert who have gambled above their means or for some other reason have fallen on hard times, and it is very sad to see the poor neighborhoods and the homeless who you do not see in the television or print ads for the city.


THE GOOD

1)  The Weather - HUH?!  Wasn't that number one on the bad list?  Forget the fact that Vegas doesn't have much rain and is dry, and the seasonal temperatures are VERY SIMILAR to those in central Texas.  It gets a little warmer in the summer and a little cooler in the winter.  BUT Vegas does not have a lot of (if any) tornado or hurricane watches and warnings...  ;)

2)  Poker And Sports Betting - What do I do since there is no river?...  In Las Vegas I can make a sports bet/parlay on practically anything, and a casino has NEVER failed to pay me on a winning bet.  If you have read this blog at all, I LOVE making predictions, especially when it comes to sports, and especially when it comes to football.  In Las Vegas I can play poker RIGHT NOW (whenever right now happens to be).  I can ALWAYS find a game.  This could be a reason all its own, but since I'm relating it to poker, Las Vegas is 24/7 - Las Vegas is ALWAYS OPEN.  You might have to search your Poker Live App. to see where the game is at 4:00 in the morning, but you will be able to find one.

3)  You Meet People From Everywhere - I am a people person, and I LOVED the fact that I got to meet people from all over the United States and all over the world.  The three rowdy guys from (insert the name of a country here) can really liven up the poker table.  I didn't know that there were so many beautiful women from (insert the name of a country here).

4)  Your Friends Will Come To Las Vegas -  Even without the advent of facebook, I can easily recall meeting up with friends from San Marcos, America and family AT LEAST a half dozen times in the two years that I lived in Las Vegas.  We dined together, we gambled together, we had milk and cookies together...  ;)  DON'T GET ME STARTED on how many of my friends have gone out to Las Vegas in the past year (which I have been made well aware of through my facebook account)...  I am sure that having facebook will make the desert feel a little less isolated also...

There you go.  I hope that clears things up for you a little.  Some things for you to ponder if you have never visited the desert or have thought about moving there yourself.  Something that I was evidently too stupid to do was to make the short 5-hourish drive from Vegas to the west coast to see the Pacific Ocean (and yes, I have never been to L.A., or San Diego, or San Francisco, etc, etc...).  I hope that you have a great day and I will see you again on Friday with my first-round NBA playoff predictions.

        





            

100 Days

Good morning everyone...  My dry erase board on the wall, and my Las Vegas calendar on the opposite wall are both telling me that I have 100 days until my current lease is up and I can move back to the desert.  At this point everything is still a go...  I think that on Wednesday I may dedicate my post to what I did and did not like about living in Vegas previously.  As the sports scene is about to turn into a big whirlwind later in the week, with baseball clicking off at a regular pace, and the NHL and NBA both churning out playoff games (as of this Saturday), I am about to be very busy at work this week, working six days in a row (with many of those shifts starting earlier than normal).  This is just a notation in my ramble and not a complaint, because I'm still scrounging for and squeezing every nickel for my venture back to the desert.  What that means hockey-wise is that I am going to miss seeing a lot of second-round games.  My basic cable package (included with my rent) does not carry a lot of the stations that have been showing the games so far, so I haven't seen as much action as I've wanted to.  There have still been plenty of overtime games so far, which I love about this time of year.  I'd like to send out my condolences to my blogging friend grrouchie, whose Penguins were on the wrong end of a six-game series against the Flyers - sometimes there are victims when I get a prediction right my friend...  Grrouchie and some of my other new readers deserve some grief of some kind, because there is a group of newfound (to me) poker bloggers who will be venturing out to Vegas in the next few months, before I have made my move westward...  Josie, another one of my new readers, encouraged me to get out to the desert earlier, while imploring me to bring a lot of money, which reminded me of my favorite quote about myself:  'People have underestimated me my whole life'...  ;)  Like she thinks taking my money would be as easy as making the trip to Vegas - PFFTTT...  :)  I am going to miss meeting this group...  If you look at my profile under the 'blogs that I follow' section, you can visit some of these blogs if you have a few moments to spare.  Josie is a Red Sox fan and Grrouchie is a Steelers fan, and both of these fine bloggers play poker, so these people do have some redeeming qualities...  ;)  This Monday blog is once again coming to you on my Saturday, the 'weekend' preceeding my six straight days of work, so there will once again be many chores awaiting me after I hit the 'publish' button.  It seems very strange that I will be moving once again as much as I dislike the actual act of moving...  On t.v. this week (I think it was on the show 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader? - this was a rerun on a very slow t.v. night), I learned that Emily Dickinson evidently lived in the same house her WHOLE LIFE, and I just responded by rolling my eyes at the t.v.  I couldn't even imagine what that would be like, having moved as many times as I have...  Oh yeah, my 'fantasy' baseball team...  Ha ha - for the second straight week it looks like my team managed to have a team batting average of less than .200, and to top things off, 2 of my pitchers have now been put on the 15-day disabled list...  Cliff Lee and Daniel Hudson are the 2 dinged-up gunslingers, my 3rd and 12th round draft picks, respectively.  I am currently sitting in 8th or 9th out of the 10 teams in the league, but it is still only April.  It's just one of those things...  My team COLLECTIVELY had failed to steal a base in over a week, and then I had three stolen bases on Saturday...  :)  On that note, I was disappointed that the Yankees/Red Sox game was rained out last night, because I was off of work and would have been able to watch it.  The Red Sox squad against my fantasy team would be a great divisional race right now...  :)  Thank you for stopping by to visit my little blog - as of today, the view count at 'Bikini Hill' is going to surpass the 6,400 mark...  I think that sometime before I move to the desert I am going to do a 'test post' from my smartphone to see what it comes out like, in case I don't have immediate internet service when I move out to Vegas and want to post something.  I would like to stick with my Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule of posting (I recently found a Las Vegas-based blog authored by a funny gal named Linda Lou who posts on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays - WHO would picks those days?!)...  :)  Anyway, I am happy with my current schedule and am interested in seeing if I can reach my predicted 20,000 views by the end of this year, but this will be a lot easier if I don't miss posts due to being unable to write...  If you happen to be new here, I just love making predictions...  ;)  As I'm typing this, I wonder if any of my blogging friends have ever attempted to make a post from their phone - I would appreciate you mentioning if you have done so...  All I know is that the keys on my phone are REALLY SMALL compared to these keys that I am punching right now.  I hope that you have a great Monday and I will be back with a breakdown about living in Las Vegas on Wednesday - have a good one!
       

All The Sports

Good afternoon everyone.  I've decided that I'll give a short little paragraph to all of the sports today since so much is going on in the sports world.  We'll start with hockey since the skaters are currently in the first round of their playoffs.  The thing that I like about this year's hockey playoffs is that none of the teams got swept out of the first round.  There are eight first-round series in the quarterfinals.  Five of the series are currently 3-1, while the other 3 series are currently tied at 2-2.  My predictions are just a little ahead of the curve at this point as 3 of the 5 teams with 3-1 leads are ones that I picked to win.  I will give you my second-round predictions as the matchups become available since those series will not all start at the same time.

The NBA will be winding down its crazy and condensed regular season on Thursday.  My first-round NBA predictions will make up my blog next Friday since the playoffs will begin next Saturday.  Dwight Howard, another casualty to injuries, is supposed to have back surgery according to Yahoo! Sports and will miss the rest of the season.  If you find yourself bored right now, go back and compare my regular season predictions for this season's standings to the current standings - I'm going to be really close on a lot of them...  ;)

The NFL will be holding their annual draft starting on Thursday - YES!!!!!  I am such a football junkie now that I freely admit that even the prospect of the draft gets me excited now...  I was even posting on my facebook the other day to let everyone know that this season's NFL schedule was being released...  :)  At this point everything is still a go for me moving back to the desert this summer, and I am looking forward to wagering on football games at will when September rolls around (in addition to playing poker at will)...  ;)

Baseball, ah baseball...  This has been a wonderful month of April so far...  My beloved Red Sox have managed to lose a game 18-3, and my fantasy team is currently getting THROTTLED...  I will usually give my fantasy baseball updates on Mondays because the fantasy week plays out Monday-Sunday, but I wanted to take a moment here to mention that the Bikini Hill Giants are currently sitting in 8th out of the 10 teams that make up my league.  I knew that I wanted to mention my team here last night when they hit a WHOPPING .105 for the day.  Having a .105 batting average is not like getting a perfect score on a test and then getting the extra credit question correct also.  It's more like (no, it's pretty much EXACTLY LIKE) getting 1 hit in every 10 at bats.  This is my hand picked "fantasy team" mind you...  Ahem...  My team is 1st in ERA and 2nd in WHIP (walks/hits allowed per innings pitched), and that is about all of the good news that I have right now.  As a result of my team's .216 batting average for the season to this point, I am not stealing any bases or scoring any runs either (since no one is getting on base).  I can type all of this with a smile since I do not give up and there is a lot of baseball to be played.  Hopefully my team starts playing some of it (that goes for you too Red Sox)...

I will be back on Monday with my ramble.  Have a great weekend!  ;)
 

    

The Evil Hand

Good afternoon everyone.  The 'evil hand' refers to the poker hand that I nicknamed while I was living in Las Vegas.  This happened when I was playing in a tournament at the Sahara one day, which is actually where I played a lot of tournaments when I lived in the desert.  I'm not saying that I played the Sahara tournament on a daily basis, but I have played more tournaments there than I have ever played anywhere else.  My notes on this particular tournament have me holding the 'evil hand', the Queen-Ten (of hearts in this instance, although the hand doesn't have to be hearts, or suited for that matter).  In conversations that I have had with my friends since this fateful day, 'evil hand suited' is how I now refer to queen-ten suited...  Anyway, there were 58 entrants in this tournament, and we were down to the final 18 when the blinds were at 1,000 and 2,000, and I was in the big blind.  I had 3,500 left in chips before the hand, so now 2,000 of those were in the big blind when I looked down at my queen-ten of hearts.  I ended up all-in preflop against (surprise, surprise) a bigger queen, the king-queen.  The board came out Q x x Q K and I was done for the tournament in 18th place.  I don't think that my play was horrible here considering that I was almost out of chips, but then I decided to enter the next tournament that the Sahara had on tap for that evening.  This tournament saw me as a runner for about an hour.  I limped with the 'evil hand' this time, and a queen came on the flop.  Have you ever played against one of those opponents that just LOOKS like they're bluffing?  They just have that look about them that they would try to bluff you...  Well, this hand ended up being called down all the way to the river, where my opponent ended up showing queen-jack (in retrospect, I have thought that maybe the villain had that look about him because he wasn't too sure about his jack kicker).  Let me interject here that a jack kicker is WORLDS BETTER than a ten kicker...  So, for the second time in about an hour, I was eliminated from my second-straight Sahara tournament by the 'evil hand'.  I took this story to work with me, and to the tables with my poker playing friends, and now I share it here with you, so all of you know that whenever I refer to the 'evil hand', I am talking about the queen-ten.  It looks kind of pretty (sort of), you "have to play it" (according to one of my friends) if it's suited, because you're 2/5 of the way to a royal flush, but BEWARE, it can get you into all kinds of trouble (imagine ominous background music here)...  In the future I will address my LEAST FAVORITE HAND, which is actually NOT the 'evil hand'.  I hope that all of you have a great day, that you don't call down players while you're holding the second-best hand just because they look 'sketchy', and I will see you again on Friday.