Review Week - Part 2

More fun last night.... As usual, I looked forward and played in the Weekly Mook. Always a good time... except for when you finish 55th out 55 players.. DOH!!!!!

I don't remember who it was but they limped UTG and I believe the button and SB also limped. I had KJs and checked (early in the tourney). Flop comes Jxx and bet out and get min raised by UTG. Turn comes x and I check raise and get called. River comes J and I insta push. UTG pauses for a bit; but calls with AJ and IGHN. Good Times.

I also played 1 SNG last night and find myself with a huge lead on the bubble. I finished... uh.. yep.. 4th... on the bubble..

Also playing a 5/10 table and low and behold find myself stuck $250 on beats like AQ losing to AJ, TPTK losing to flush on river.. set losing to straight... etc... etc... luckily I found my way back to make $2 overall in ring play. Woohoo!!!

I also lost $4,000 playing BlackJack... luckily it was just a time filler while I was listening to my college basketball team (Missouri State) lose another game to Creighton and it was only play money... ;-). Play money aside, it is kind of fun to play 3 handed at $200 a piece and doubling down with 7 against a 6. Obviously, it doesn't always work out; but again, it was play money.


So why again to we play this game called poker?

Enough of this silly poker talk... This is review week and since I'm obviously not in a poker mood, I will make my SNG Training site review the last of the 3 reviews that I will do. So much like our buddy 3Jacks and his CineJax, I am going to throw a movie review in for good measure.

Let it be known, that I don't get to see as many movies as I used to since Baby Wonka 1 and 2 arrived on the scene other than Pixar and Disney type movies (not that there is anything wrong with that); but me and Mrs Wonka finally got a chance to go see a movie and the movie of choice was Rocky Balboa.

A little disclosure. I am a huge, huge Rocky fan (even more so that Wonka). I have watched the previous 5 movies more times that I care to remember. I even proposed to my wife in front of the tiger cage in the Philadelphia zoo and re-enacted the Rocky proposing to Adrian scene from Rocky II. There were also 4 TV news cameras and 2 Newspaper crews to follow the action. Our 15 minutes of fame, I guess.

Anyway, I went into the movie with very low expectations because I too believe that these have carried on too long. Having said that, I still wanted to see it. Funny thing, this movie was actually getting pretty good reviews (as per imdb.com).. in fact it was being rated as the 2nd best Rocky Movie.

On to the Review... The movie more or less starts out with a retired Rocky working in his resteraunt called Adrians which is obvioulsy named for his wife... his late wife as it turns out. What, a Rocky movie without Adrian... say it ain't so. OK, it's so. Rocky Jr has also grown up and is on his own in the business world. Pauly is still the same Pauly.

One night in the resteraunt, they are showing something from ESPN that has a virtual boxing match against the current champ, Mason "the Line" Dixon and Rocky and without surprise Rocky wins which of course this spurs on speculation that the current champ should fight the 60 year old Rocky. In fact, AJ Benza (from High Stakes Poker) is the promoter of the fight. So, if you can get past that "thing", then I think you will really enjoy the movie. It brings back a couple of characters from the original movie (Spider Rico and Marie) and does a great job in closing the Rocky book.

Marie actually becomes a big part of the movie and at some points, it looked like there was going to be some romance there which of course would have been a huge mistake... but Rocky perhaps gets the wrong idea and says something like ... "Yo, Adrian may be dead, buy she really isn't dead to me..." so that threw away any kind of story line there and it went back to more of a father daughter thing which for me... worked.

Without question, my favorite part of the movie are the moments after the fight. I won't go into details or spoil the ending; but for me it did exactly what it should have done. A fine finish to a great story. As usual, the music is good. The training scenes aren't quite the same; but the guy is a bit aged so I didn't expect much out of the training and fight scenes.

5 stars out of 5... Of course that is a little biased..