"We are all Londoners Now"

The Salt Lake Tribune wrote in a leader (editorial comment) on Friday that "It is tempting to declare, in the spirit that the rest of the world showed us after 9/11, that we are all Londoners now. But that would be presumptuous of us. London will stand through this outrage, as it has stood through worse. And its courage will stiffen the upper lip of the civilized world.

It would indeed have been presumptuous. Look at this morning's news from the Press Association:

"Thousands of American servicemen and women based in Britain have been banned from entering London in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Members of the US Air Force stationed at two RAF bases in Suffolk were instructed not to go within the M25 until further notice. Matt Tulis, a spokesman at RAF Mildenhall, said the directive was issued to 10,000 personnel in the aftermath of the bombings and was considered the most effective measure to protect their troops."

So much for the "We are not afraid" banners. Pathetic.

I dunno, I had $900 a moment ago

The strange thing about multi-tabling is that, even if you are paying attention to the players and their styles, you can suddenly find yourself $400 down at $5-$10 and say to yourself "hell, where did THAT all go?"

In a way that was what happened to me yesterday (except that by the end of 300 hands I was "only" $270 down). In one (very small) way, this is good. It means that I am concentrating on playing each hand properly, rather than on how much I am up or down. A few times last month I found myself several hundred dollars up and wondered to myself where it had come from.

But this time I was down, so I thought about where it had gone. My stats were interesting. I had 12 pairs in 300 hands (five short of the expected), but with a reasonable distribution of high and low, and the pairs were in profit on both tables (as they should be!). So, no clue there. Then I remembered three hands, one where with 98s I had seen a board of 6-9-9-4-2 and promptly lost to a pair of sixes. Another where my raise with KQ off in MP2 found a flop of QQ3, a turn of a 5 and a river of a 10 and I promptly lost to a player who cold-called a raise with QTs behind me. And a third where I played KJs aggressively, hit a King on the turn after a rag flop and promptly lost to another aggressive player with KTs who hit a ten on the river.

All three were $100+ swings and were "the way it goes". So, in a way, I had at least some explanation.

I also looked at my VPIP% and raising percentage and saw that at one table I had an almost laughable 28% VPIP$ and a raise percentage of 16%, over 150 hands. Now, unless I had suddenly become a semi-maniac without noticing, this meant that I had been getting a lot of those hands that I raise with, but which this time were going nowhere. Quite simply, I kept missing flops and my continuations got bitten off (more than 90% of the time by better hands rather than rebluffs, I hasten to add!) more than they usually do.

And this can happen. It can happen for a long long time.

So, not unhappy, despite my loss for the month now approaching $400.

-----

Another humorous development over the past, well, five months, has been the precipitous decline of sterling against the dollar. As you may know, I have a semi-permanent "dollar hedge" in position to cover my dollar holdings. This is currently running at a hundred quid a cent (put into place at $1.86 and $1.84).

So, although I am sitting here watching the value of my dollar holdings (in sterling terms) rise nicely (last month's profit, for example, was £223 higher than it would have been last December), that doesn't make it any more comfortable when, over four days, I have to lob a grand into my Financial Spreads account to avoid suffering a margin call.

My current contracts expire in September and I was seriously considering "taking that grand back" from the US, but sterling appears to have bottomed out for the moment, recovering a few cents. Stan James seems to be a bit behind the times when it comes to adjusting their currency rates, so perhaps I should shift most of my dollar holdings there back into sterling.

Sense at last

From Bloomberg this afternoon

"The U.S. Air Force today removed a ban on travel to London for its 10,000 service personnel based in the U.K. "

Looks like someone told them what an awful PR move it was.....

It's funny the thngs that bother you, and the things that don't

Just to show that I do have some mental strength when it comes to things going wrong (basically, when it comes to anything going wrong except computers), I have just shrugged off with a wry smile what might have had some people punching the wall with rage.

I began to put back up the shelving in this office, which I had to take down before the ceiling was replaced. The first shelf went up fine, but then the second shelf, which had a vertical piece of wood abutting it, wouldn't fit in. Odd, I thought. Then it struck me. Since the guy had properly replastered the ceiling, it was now half an inch or so lower than it had been before. For certain parts of the room, this would have serious consequences, because some of the shelving (used to) fit exactly between the picture rail and the ceiling.

Except that now, of course, they don't.

This will mean, er, a complete redesign of one of the walls 'twixt picture rail and ceiling. And, well, a lot of work, and time. But, for some curious reason, it didn't bother me. Maybe I like making things. Perhaps I should have been a carpenter. Perhaps you should have been a lady.

So, there you go, some things I can put into perspective without any problem. So long as computers aren't involved.


Oh, and I won that $270 back this evening in an hour. Funny how things go, isn't it?

Harrington On Hold'em

Well, it caused us a few joshes at the time, but we all knew that it was Dan, rather than John.


And then, this result from the WSOP "Big One"


432. John Harrington: Halengen, TX, $16,055

OMG.