Aug. 15th, 2005

peterbirks: (Default)
It remains a serious struggle online at the moment. Once again this morning I made the mistake of granting the opposition too much credit. A typical example. I had AQ off in the big blind. Four limped in and the SB completed for three bucks. There's little point in me raising here. I am out of position and AQ off plays like rubbish in multi-wayers.

Flop comes J66 rainbow. It's checked round. Turn brings a Queen (two spades now on board). Small blind bets.

Well, I say to myself, the guy probably has either a worse queen or a Jack. If he had a six he would check again, because he must reckon that queen helps someone, so that would give him the check-raise.

I want to get rid of any straight or flush or gutshot players behind me (or at least make them pay for the privilege), so I raise. Remember, the important thing about limit is giving other players the opportunity to make a mistake. If I flat call here, then anyone behind me is getting pot odds to chase if they have either a straight draw or a flush draw. If I raise, they are not getting those odds, so if they then call, they are making a mistake. Whether or not they hit their card on the river is, in the long term, irrelevant.

Anyway, all pass back to the small blind (who only sat down two hands previously), who promptly reraises.

At this point I go into some kind of manic 100/200 thinking mode and say to myself "well, he must think that I am making a move. He must have a worse Queen and he thinks I am raising on a Jack, cursing the fact that I didn't bet the flop". So I call. And I call the river bet. And I lose to ten-six.

So, the guy just played it like a 2-4 player. Check the flop and, if no-one bets, then bet the turn. No matter that against nearly every other player at this level a second check on the turn (particularly with a queen appearing) is the better play. It just so happens that the guy was lucky enough to find me, who was thinking about it too deeply.

My raise on the turn is correct, but I can fold to that reraise without hesitation, unless I have strong knowledge that my opponent is good enough to make a semi-bluff reraise. At 5-10, very few of them have that in their armoury.

Luckily I stopped this deep thought, started playing as if my opponents really weren't all that bright, and folded hands where I had clearly been stiffed on the turn. Unfortunately, there were a lot of these... I crawled back to $100 down from a nadir of about $250 in the red, by which time the sequence of loosies all left -- some broke, some winning. So I quit the game. Self-discipline, or what?
peterbirks: (Default)
An interesting comment from the ever-entertaining Lucy Kellaway in this morning's FT: Ostensibly it was about the way that work impinges on your holiday time. I'll admit that I got a certain pleasure from reading that she was on a rainy cold beach in Cornwall. Serves her right for going to the worst county in England, I say. It always rains there in August and the Cornish are the whingiest, most unwelcoming, insular people in the UK. As far as they are concerned, people who are not Cornish have but one function in life, to put money into the pockets of the Cornish. So, any media report that Cornwall is wet and miserable (like, in fact, the Cornish) gets two hip-hurrahs from me.

But, I digress. This was the intersting quote. Last week a hygiene visitor to the FT looked at Kellaway's desk. He reported that the keyboard was virtually a death trap (while the rest of the desk was a nuclear hazard, at best). Lucy observed that:

The man with his silly bag of swabs did prove something to me, though not what he set out to prove. He showed me how our work selves and our home selves are quite different. It would never occur to me to go away for two weeks with dishes unwashed in my kitchen sink. At home I do not leave piles of newspapers and junk mail over every surface. At home I do not drink Diet Coke or coffee. In the two worlds I dress differently, eat differently, behave differently and have different attitudes to such basic things as hygiene.

Well, Lucy might be a completely different person when she leaves the office (and, indeed, a lot of women are), but I think she is way wrong to attribute this attitude to the entire office-working race. I drink coffee at work and I drink coffee at home. Both my home and office desks are tidy. And, believe it or not, I don't dress that differently.

So, why is this? I've always felt a certain affinity with Kellaway. She's a bit younger than me, but we seem to think alike, write similarly, and have a generally consistent "world view". And then I discover that she's one of those bloody people who have a spotless home and a messy workdesk.

I guess that I have a "consistency mode" which is incapable of being two separate people, one when I am in the office, one when I am not. I am me. And I can't help but remain me. I've bought a book called "Watching The English". I did so in a moment of mad optimism that owning this book would help me with all those social niceties at which I am utterly hopeless, like how one should talk about nothing.

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