Vote early, vote often

[peterbirks]

It's local election day today and the Labour and LibDem parties have continued their blitz on the ward. I'm tempted to split my votes between them on the grounds that, if you have three votes, you might as well use them wisely. Look at this, I'm a genuine "make up my mind at the last minute" voter. Never been known before.

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And so the second series of "Lost" kicks off in the UK -- gloriously incomprehensible, and now with added non-linearity. The "end" of episode one only reappeared two-thirds of the way through episode two. The obvious candidate to blame for thrusting this style into the mainstream is Pulp Fiction, although I'm sure that it had been used many times before by directors with less of a flare for publicity.

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I've actually had a couple of interesting three-way hands recently (one went right, one went wrong) which I might post, as they neatly illustrate some recent points made. Although the end of last month/start of this contained a couple of, well, fairly horrible days, I've been pleased with my game. Three improvements: (1) Not trying to "run over" a game after suffering a couple of bad beats; (2) Not making anywhere near as many crying calls - being willing to pass top pair on the river (I did some analysis on this to confirm that my hunch was correct); (3) exploiting the new craze for relentless value-betting.

These seem to be offering an improvement of a couple of bets an hour per table at the moment (i.e., I note the situations where they have saved me a bet), but you have to allow for the fact that every so often a crying call that you do not make would have won, which shifts back the gain by quite a lump.

Comments

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

I think Lost is a work of genius. By making the search for explanations all-consuming but then refusing to provide those explanations or by just providing fresh questions, they produce circumstances that are completely unrealistic. Life isn't like this, even on desert islands, but the writers suspend disbelief brilliantly. It's like a whole series of Jumping the Shark episodes.

We have actually seen the first 12 or 13 episodes of series two and even know what happens a bit further on. So if you want the suspense of not finding out some of the explanations, stop here.

The major non-surprise is you don't get any satisfactory explanations to anything, with the honourable exception of episode 18 which does actually explain everything.

[simong-uk.livejournal.com]

Despite having poker tracker etc I wsn't sure how to capture the crying call aspect, because I can't see a good way of measuring the negative contribution that folding a winning hand makes.

So, for a while (and I generally only do this when running bad, maybe human nature or laziness but when running well I don't worry so much about the fine tuning) I just kept a manual tally of heads-up crying calls on the end. I didn't evaluate 3-way play on the river because I find it infinitely easier to throw away top pair decent kicker on the turn when faced with hostility from sane players and a co-ordinated board.

So for several sessions, I made the call on the end H/U each and every time, even when the board had 4 parts to the flush etc. I don't still have the numbers to share, but it was pretty obvious on the sites I was playing that if the pot had more than a few bets in it then far from being a crying call it was a value call to say the least. All 4-6 handed limit holdem, I was amazed at how many people tried to "set up plays" by coming to life on the turn and river. If someone is trying this as much as one time in 5 or 6, you pretty much have to pucker up and call.

Many of the books recommend saving bets on the end, but from the loose empirical work that I did, I make these calls A LOT, even to bluff raises on the end, which is a play I rarely make myself. This maybe partly accounted for in my playing style (I play a lot of hands preflop but get away from undesirable hands long before the river, hands that reach the river usually merit a call.) But if there is $100 in the pot in a $5/10 game, as far as I can see this is long term money in the bank. Quite obviously, you can make plenty more call mistakes than you can fold mistakes.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that the fewer crying calls is always right. And note that I did not say that I was making no crying calls at all. I'm just folding to a final bet a bit more often than I had been doing before. If I had to call the "margin", it is in the region of: "I'm fairly sure that I am beaten here but I'm getting six/seven/eight/nine-to-one, so I'll have a look in case he is up to something".

I just went through hands this year where I was in this kind of mood, and, basically, I lost every time, except for Saturday mornings my time, when you basically always call.

Now, a number of factors can cause the difference between our experiences. One is the obvious one - ring play vs 6-pacs. The second is the stake level. The third is the image that we are projecting, and the fourth is the standard of hand we have when we are thinking of making the crying call. Because I push harder on the flop and the turn (because I am trying to take down the pot a lot of the time before the river arrives) I often find myself with a call decision on the river which is exceedingly marginal.

Let's take a typical situation:

I have A-T suited in the cut-off and I raise first in. I am just called by the Big Blind, a tightish player who is willing to give up his BB to a raise. He is likely to call here with any pair, any ace, Kx suited, KQ, QJ, any suited connector, that kind of stuff.


Flop comes K76 with two of my suit. he checks, I bet.
Turn comes a 10, giving me second pair and a flush draw. He checks. There are arguments in favour of me checking and for me betting here.

Let's suppose I bet. He raises. I call. River is a brick. He bets. Do I make the crying call on the grounds that he might have been making a check-raise semi-bluff on the turn? It's a possibility, but at the levels that I play and during the day, in a ring game, it's not worth a call.

Let's suppose I check the turn. The river is a brick. He bets. Do I call?

This one is tougher and in the past I think that I would nearly always have called. These days I've brought it down to about 50%.

The "empirical" part of this is that my calls have a goodly proportion of correctness about them. From winning one in 20 of these, or whatever, I'm chopping off about one in five. In other words, my gut instinct (or experience, or whatever), is paying off.

I'm not advocating a general style; just saying what tweaks I have implemented that look at the moment as if they have improved my own win-rate.

PJ

Election Day

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Peter,

How come you don't really throw a monkey wrench (spanner to you I guess) into the works and vote Tory?

BluffTHIS!

[simong-uk.livejournal.com]

Your example hand for me is player dependent. If you bet the turn and got raised, I would think about putting the hand down unless the player has form.
If you check the turn and the river is a genuine brick I think you have to call on the end, if for no other reason than your check has probably helped induce his action.

As to perceived styles, back to the old DAI mantra! I have had a player b1tch about me constantly stealing (stealing and got lucky when played with I seem to remember)and yet I won the next 2 hands uncontested pre-flop, so perception is not something I pay too much mind to online unless something really significant has just happened at the table. I have even had a player say "you are PFR 37% at the moment you fish" whilst merrily folding again..

Having different experiences all seems perfectly natural to me. I like to discuss hands with players that have diffeent experiences, not because I want to play like them, but just because I may not understand where they (and most importantly my opponents with a similar mindset)are coming from in a situation when I am seeing the flipside.

Re: Election Day

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

I would think that in Lewisham this would be as close to a wasted vote as it is possible to imagine ;) although I suppose Lewisham Hill is "sort of almost" Blackheath so might have some Tory aspirations. But I doubt it, from my experience of living in one of the (probably) two genuinely wealthy wards in Greenwich, where even an active Tory candidate couldn't get beyond the two Labour guys. Now Lib Dem (the new party of the left?) may be an altogether different proposition. I don't really know if the SE13 electorate is that sophisticated.

All told, I'd expect it to be about as worthwhile as me voting Lib Dem in Bexley.

Re: Election Day

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, would you adam and eve it - just had Lab Party around again. I've looked at the ward on the map and I can see why this could be serious marginal LibDem/Lab country. There's the Pagoda Gardens Council Estate on the right and the Bennett Estate on the left, and Lewisham Hill, Eliot Hill, Blackheath Rise and Granville Park in the middle. Since Eliot Hill and Granville Park are two of the wealthiest streets in Lewisham (outside of Blackheath ward, which probably has a few to beat it,), I can see why Labour might be worried that the ward would go LibDem. Interesting to see that we might be one of the rare urban wards with roads that have hardly any buildings on them at all - viz, Mounts Pond Road, which is mainly bordered by grassland.

Conservatives, I fear, are not in the hunt. They haven't even bothered to campaign round here.

PJ

Not actually that much of a spoiler

[ceemage.livejournal.com]

Erm, in terms of spoilers, I would guess this ranks about equal with "...and in next week's episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk beams down to a strange planet and falls in love with a beautiful woman..."