Some happy developments

Since Blogs have the irritating habit of putting the last thing you write at the top, I'll get the poker out of the way first, since I am aware that continual bleatings about the unfairness of life will strain even the most loyal readership.

Yesterday was a curate's egg of 90 minutes' play if ever I saw one. I had reassessed my situation and decided that, once again, Jim Feeney could come to my rescue. What I was going to do was focus on each and every play that I made — and I mean really focus. I would make no automatic play whatsoever, but would think for five seconds or so before making any action. This would follow the Feeney principle of just making sure that you make the right plays, and letting the winning (or, possibly, losing) take care of itself. The point would be, if I thought carefully about every play, at least if I lost again, I would know that I had played to the best of my ability.

Anyway, when your first hand is AQs as a poster and you raise, get an Ace on the flop (A73 rainbow), and you are check-raised by a limper in MP2, you are already in the "hmm, let's have a think about this" mode. I'm not folding this hand and, since I can't see this player making this play on any kind of draw, I am either miles in front (against nothing, or Ace with a lower kicker) or miles behind (against a set or two-pair Aces). I think, and decide to call the bet. To be honest, if the guy had a set, I would expect him to check-raise the turn rather than the flop. I'm more inclined to think that he has a dodgy Ace and he is giving himself the extra shot of me folding to his bets with a slightly better Ace.

Turn comes a Jack and he bets again. I call. River is a nine. He bets. I call. he turns over Ace-Nine. So it goes, and we're already $45 in the hole.

Hand two and I get a pair of nines. One limper. I raise. Big blind (who is very short-stacked with just $21) calls. Flop comes J52 a couple of spades. I bet, he raises. Since all the money is going in here, I decide to reraise. In these situations as often as not a short stack that actually has a hand will let the aggressor bet into him. So I reckon the guy is weak.

So, all the money goes in. Turn is an eight and the river is a King. He turns over 88 for a set of eights. Whoops. Now $80 down in two hands, beaten by a three-outer and a two-outer. You can understand the feelings of persecution, can't you.

An hour later I am $150 down, not through anything significant, just the normal run of things. I then pick up 44 on the button. There is a raise from MP2 by a very aggressive player pre-flop whom a couple of times I have seen give up on the turn when people fight back. I'm not flat-calling here. Either I fold or semi-bluff reraise. I reraise. Big Blind calls. Shit. MP2 calls.

I needn't have worried. Flop came 443 rainbow. Not often you have the nuts on the flop against an obviously good hand in the BB and an aggressive player in MP2. I can't remember how the hand went exactly, but I know that I had $115 more in the bank by the end of it.

Then I drifted back down again until I hit AA on the button and got the almost unheard of two limpers. I raised. The blinds fold and the limpers call. Flop comes TTJ two diamonds, which I don't like the look of at all. Two checks to me. I bet and I get two callers. I'm not really any the wiser. I could be up against a made full house here, or a ropey 4-card straight draw.

Turn is a rag. Two checks to me again. I bet, get two callers. Hmm, I would have expected a good hand to check-raise me here. Could I be in front against something like KJ and a medium pair?

It doesn't matter, because the river is a very beautiful Ace. At this point, things erupt. Player one bets, and player two raises. Whoah! Christmas. I call and, as expected, I get a reraise from the initial bettor. I reckon I am up against KQ twice here. Player 2 merely calls, and I now put in my raise. They are both committed to the fourth bet. Player one had, yes, the flopped full house with JT. Player two had KQ for the straight. Birks has the higher full house and picks up a $199 pot.

So, two bad beats and two good beats. The net result was that I was just over $100 up. In other words (well, this is what I told myself) if the good beats and bad beats even out, you can beat this game. Because it was far from fishy. Most of the players saw between 10% and 25% of flops and most of them raised between 6% and 13% of the time pre-flop. In other words, as Krusty The Clown would say "tough crowd".

A very pleasing development.

Huge Elections

Well, it was quite an interesting night. Although the opening spread for the Labour majority was 62-70, and that majority looks like ending up at 68, this hides the fact that at one point the spread had shrunk to 46-54 and within an hour it zooms up to 72-80. Notwithstanding that the IG spread was ridiculously large, it does indicate the volatility of the evening.

The early win of Putney by the Conservatives was the first cause of the spread to fall. we then got a Labour MP for one of the Kent Medway constituencies predicting that he would lose. This could have led to a swathe of north Kent constituencies falling. As it happened, the Medway guy just hung on, as did all the Labour players in this area except for Gravesham.

When Labour held on to Birminghan Edgbaston (which would have fallen by a mile if the Putney swing had been repeated) it became clear that the swing against Labour was focused in London and, to a slightly lesser extent, in the south-east. I suppose that in retrospect this is not that surprising. London not only has a higher percentage of radical middle-class (hence the big swings to the Liberal Democrats in some seats), but it is also the place that has been shafted most royally by this government. Extra public spending shores up job numbers in god-forsaken places like Washington on Tyne (or is it Tees), while the bulk of the extra tax revenues come from where the economy is most vibrant (and private-sector) — London. The anti-Labour vote was a classic "well, what have you done for US?

The swings to the Liberal Democrats in Leeds North-West and Manchester Withington — quite sensational in their own little way — seem to be down to a high student population. Meanwhile in formerly Liberal Democrat Newbury the voters were probably less keen on a party that no-one had previously told them was left-wing. All this made for some interesting variations in swing between three parties — great fun for psephologists.

I got the LD gains about right, although they did not win the seats that I thought they would win. Indeed, had they got the same percentage vote, but with the Tory vote down a couple of per cent and the Labour vote up a couple of per cent, Conservative seats would have fallen in droves. In a tactical sense, therefore, one has to ask whether the Liberal Democrats might not do better to tailor their radical image and go a little bit more for the "Conservatism with a human face" look (fiscally austere, socially liberal, that kind of thing).

I also got the Labour majority about right (I was in the 50-70 range). But, once again, I would have got the precise seats miles wrong.

The only place where I would have ballsed up badly was with the SNP. I fully expected their vote to fall back now that there was a Scottish Assembly. It didn't, and they have an amazing six seats in Westminster from a country where the representation has been slashed.

The night, as usual, threw up some entertaining cameos. Boris Johnson is always good value. Ian Hislop was on form (and Jeremy Paxman wasn't). Shirley Williams continues to think that politics matter, despite her age. So it was perhaps a mistake to sit her between Hislop and Johnson.

And this spray paint map from Gateshead was featured at 10.15pm, and again when there were three or so results in, and that was the last I saw of it before I went to bed at 3am. What happened? Did everyone get fed up and go home? Not one of the BBC's finest television moments.

Whereas Peter Snow, of course, was. I particularly liked his Sony PlayStation animation of three leaders walking along Downing Street. Michael Howard was transformed into some kind of neckless alien, while Charles Kennedy looked like one of those victims in You've Been Tangoed. Utterly insane.

The BBC's production people, most of whom are aged about 12 and who cannot understand that General Elections can be inherently interesting in themselves, are continually looking for things with "visual appeal". Thus we had the farce of an outside broadcast showing a helicopter landing. This, we were assured, was an air-sea rescue helicopter that was commandeered for the night to carry votes from all over the Western Isles to the counting station. So, if you are ever thinking of taking a fragile boat out for a night-fishing trip when on holiday in Western Scotland, don't do it on election night.


Now, who won?