Battle of the Bands, I mean Blinds
Aug. 28th, 2006 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksSerious attempts to get Reading and Leeds onto DVD are proving complex -- the introduction of BBC Interactive means that you have a lot more material to play with, but editing it down to avoid duplication is time-consuming. Say what you like, though, Muse rock.
Dave Downing commented in his blog on the Stars HORSE games that he was often playing short-handed Hold'em and Omaha because players were sitting out of these rounds. This clearly shows what is happening at the higher levels (and it will trickle down to the lower levels) of HORSE on Stars. The stud players have moved over en masse to take the money of Hold 'em players, but have no intention of playing Hold 'em type games themselves. This rather defeats the objective of the game, I think, but it's the kind of thing that I would expect stud specialists to do -- I remember the stud players from Vegas before the game died amidst a series of collapsing zimmer frames.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but one would be, if the software allowed, to "lock in" anyone who sits down for a set of five rounds. No sitting out of the blinds because you don't like the game, you stud-specialist piece of slime. Play the game of Horse as it's meant to be played.
Anyway, Dave D observed that he hit a 170BB downswing and that part of this was due to having to play a lot of Hold'em and Omaha short-handed, the stud specialists having gone off to watch Coronation Street or listen to James Last, or whatever it is they do when they aren't playing stud. Dave said that:
Whereas I have a vague clue how to play 4 or 5 handed limit holdem – as opposed to the Omaha equivalent – I just don’t like it. Too much play “feels” like being a fish. In fact the levels of aggression are so pumped up and calling to the river very thin is so common it was hard to tell chump from champ. Time and again I would button raise, continuation bet against the BB caller and he would take a card off with just one overcard and no other draw. Whether this is right or not, I don’t really know. It may very well be the right play. I just don’t like playing poker like that.
In the end I think it comes down to the blinds. When the game becomes a fundamental scramble for that blind money, I’m just not as effective. It turns me into an alternating tight passive – insane aggro fish. Back to NL.
(http://internetpokerpro.blogspot.com/)
I've been practising short-handed on Poker Academy, but the artificiality of it makes things a bit too easy. With constant opponents it's easy to get a line on their play fairly quickly. It isn't much challenge when you know with absolute certainty what players will do with particular hands. However, it was a bit of a help, and a little experiment at 50c-$1 yesterday was not a complete disaster. I think that my major mistake was that I was overcompensating for the short-handedness of the game. Eric Three-Bet also weighed in on the matter of 6-max games: What he writes is always worth reading, so it was nice to see that he not only agreed with me, but basically hit the nail on the head with his comment about the rake.
I made my triumphant return to limit this morning, playing 5/10 and 10/20 6max. Wow what a silly game. I actually won (despite more rivered two-outers than I care to think about) but I still think it was just silly.
Bet, call, bet, call, bet, call, showdown, hand after hand after hand. No one folds a pair or A-high. I got called by K-high a couple times. You'd think games like that would be like printing money, but it's limit! They almost always either have odds or nearly do. And Party's RNG doesn't help things either.
And wow, the rake. Brutal--I played about 1400 hands, had a decent winning session, but still paid more rake than I won.
(http://threebet33.blogspot.com/)
Yes, the rake. Not for nothing are short-handed games the best way to work off deposit bonuses -- you are paying bucketloads of rake to work them off.
So, at short-handed, the skilled ring player faces the following disadvantages:
(a) much of what bad players do in ring games cease to be mistakes in short-handed (see Dave's point about "chump or champ?")
(b) you are paying probably 50% to 75% more rake, partly because you have to be involved in more hands, and partly because you will be going to a showdown more often.
(c) your variance will be higher, meaning that for a given level, you need a larger bankroll to avoid risk of ruin.
So, why on earth play it? Well, for the same reason I play Party with its bad beat rake and higher rake per hand average compared with FTP or Stars. If the players are sufficiently bad, this can more than compensate for the money that you "give up" by sitting at a short-handed table.
There's another factor -- I think that short-handed games suit some "good" players' style. Not mine, not Dave's, but some people's. I would think, for example, that Ribbo would be a better short-handed hold'em player than ring player, because what rewards you is knowing your thin values and being willing to bet them. Because of the aggression, people think there is more "theft" in short-handed, but in fact there is more utter larceny in the ring game, where you can take down any number of pots because people give you credit for a hand that you just don't have. In short-handed, they don't give you credit, so you can't steal. I would think that a large majority of so-called "steals" in 6-max are in fact correct bets for value, forcing a slightly weaker hand to fold.
++++++++++
It wouldn't be my blog without a hurricane commentary, would it?
Ernesto looks set to cause some damage in Cuba (cheers from Cuban exiles) and might then restrengthen (well, almost certainly will restrengthen) before bashing into Miami. Woo Hoo. See how the Cuban exiles like THAT. More interesting is that it looks to be the first potentially strong hurricane that will mimic Hurricane Andrew, which struck in, er, 1992 I think.
That's the great thing about hurricanes -- you really don't know precisely what they are going to do until the last minute, and just a fraction of a degree can make a huge difference. If Ernesto continues a relatively straighter path then the Keys get hit badly (what else is new?) but then the landmass of Florida serves to reduce the impact to just strong winds and rain in the rest of Florida.
BUT, if the hurricane curves to the right a fraction more, and then straightens up a bit, you get the "nightmare" scenario for Florida, where the epicentre of the hurricane is still at sea (gathering strength from the Atlantic Ocean to the East) while the edge of the hurricane on the left batters the east Florida coast. Theoretically this can continue right the way up the Atlantic US coast, although to do so would be a bit like rolling consecutive sixes on a die again and again. The odds favour the hurricane shifting right and east, back out into the Atlantic.
Of course, that could end up with Bermuda taking a massive hit.....
+++++++++++++
Dave Downing commented in his blog on the Stars HORSE games that he was often playing short-handed Hold'em and Omaha because players were sitting out of these rounds. This clearly shows what is happening at the higher levels (and it will trickle down to the lower levels) of HORSE on Stars. The stud players have moved over en masse to take the money of Hold 'em players, but have no intention of playing Hold 'em type games themselves. This rather defeats the objective of the game, I think, but it's the kind of thing that I would expect stud specialists to do -- I remember the stud players from Vegas before the game died amidst a series of collapsing zimmer frames.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but one would be, if the software allowed, to "lock in" anyone who sits down for a set of five rounds. No sitting out of the blinds because you don't like the game, you stud-specialist piece of slime. Play the game of Horse as it's meant to be played.
Anyway, Dave D observed that he hit a 170BB downswing and that part of this was due to having to play a lot of Hold'em and Omaha short-handed, the stud specialists having gone off to watch Coronation Street or listen to James Last, or whatever it is they do when they aren't playing stud. Dave said that:
Whereas I have a vague clue how to play 4 or 5 handed limit holdem – as opposed to the Omaha equivalent – I just don’t like it. Too much play “feels” like being a fish. In fact the levels of aggression are so pumped up and calling to the river very thin is so common it was hard to tell chump from champ. Time and again I would button raise, continuation bet against the BB caller and he would take a card off with just one overcard and no other draw. Whether this is right or not, I don’t really know. It may very well be the right play. I just don’t like playing poker like that.
In the end I think it comes down to the blinds. When the game becomes a fundamental scramble for that blind money, I’m just not as effective. It turns me into an alternating tight passive – insane aggro fish. Back to NL.
(http://internetpokerpro.blogspot.com/)
I've been practising short-handed on Poker Academy, but the artificiality of it makes things a bit too easy. With constant opponents it's easy to get a line on their play fairly quickly. It isn't much challenge when you know with absolute certainty what players will do with particular hands. However, it was a bit of a help, and a little experiment at 50c-$1 yesterday was not a complete disaster. I think that my major mistake was that I was overcompensating for the short-handedness of the game. Eric Three-Bet also weighed in on the matter of 6-max games: What he writes is always worth reading, so it was nice to see that he not only agreed with me, but basically hit the nail on the head with his comment about the rake.
I made my triumphant return to limit this morning, playing 5/10 and 10/20 6max. Wow what a silly game. I actually won (despite more rivered two-outers than I care to think about) but I still think it was just silly.
Bet, call, bet, call, bet, call, showdown, hand after hand after hand. No one folds a pair or A-high. I got called by K-high a couple times. You'd think games like that would be like printing money, but it's limit! They almost always either have odds or nearly do. And Party's RNG doesn't help things either.
And wow, the rake. Brutal--I played about 1400 hands, had a decent winning session, but still paid more rake than I won.
(http://threebet33.blogspot.com/)
Yes, the rake. Not for nothing are short-handed games the best way to work off deposit bonuses -- you are paying bucketloads of rake to work them off.
So, at short-handed, the skilled ring player faces the following disadvantages:
(a) much of what bad players do in ring games cease to be mistakes in short-handed (see Dave's point about "chump or champ?")
(b) you are paying probably 50% to 75% more rake, partly because you have to be involved in more hands, and partly because you will be going to a showdown more often.
(c) your variance will be higher, meaning that for a given level, you need a larger bankroll to avoid risk of ruin.
So, why on earth play it? Well, for the same reason I play Party with its bad beat rake and higher rake per hand average compared with FTP or Stars. If the players are sufficiently bad, this can more than compensate for the money that you "give up" by sitting at a short-handed table.
There's another factor -- I think that short-handed games suit some "good" players' style. Not mine, not Dave's, but some people's. I would think, for example, that Ribbo would be a better short-handed hold'em player than ring player, because what rewards you is knowing your thin values and being willing to bet them. Because of the aggression, people think there is more "theft" in short-handed, but in fact there is more utter larceny in the ring game, where you can take down any number of pots because people give you credit for a hand that you just don't have. In short-handed, they don't give you credit, so you can't steal. I would think that a large majority of so-called "steals" in 6-max are in fact correct bets for value, forcing a slightly weaker hand to fold.
++++++++++
It wouldn't be my blog without a hurricane commentary, would it?
Ernesto looks set to cause some damage in Cuba (cheers from Cuban exiles) and might then restrengthen (well, almost certainly will restrengthen) before bashing into Miami. Woo Hoo. See how the Cuban exiles like THAT. More interesting is that it looks to be the first potentially strong hurricane that will mimic Hurricane Andrew, which struck in, er, 1992 I think.
That's the great thing about hurricanes -- you really don't know precisely what they are going to do until the last minute, and just a fraction of a degree can make a huge difference. If Ernesto continues a relatively straighter path then the Keys get hit badly (what else is new?) but then the landmass of Florida serves to reduce the impact to just strong winds and rain in the rest of Florida.
BUT, if the hurricane curves to the right a fraction more, and then straightens up a bit, you get the "nightmare" scenario for Florida, where the epicentre of the hurricane is still at sea (gathering strength from the Atlantic Ocean to the East) while the edge of the hurricane on the left batters the east Florida coast. Theoretically this can continue right the way up the Atlantic US coast, although to do so would be a bit like rolling consecutive sixes on a die again and again. The odds favour the hurricane shifting right and east, back out into the Atlantic.
Of course, that could end up with Bermuda taking a massive hit.....
+++++++++++++
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hurricanes
Date: 2006-08-28 01:12 pm (UTC)The girls and I will be off to see Muse in November I think. Unless the ebay price gets ridiculously high.
Re: Hurricanes
Date: 2006-08-28 02:17 pm (UTC)There wouldn't be much demand for a market based on a single geographical central location (say, Miami) because the amount of insured damage doesn't go down (or up) in an even proportion as the distance from the designated point increases. Since the basic factor is "how much will it cost the insurance industry" rather than where the damage occurs, there is no market as such for the location of where the hurricane hits.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 05:11 pm (UTC)