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Stayed up until 2am last night catching up on some taped stuff on the DVD's hard drive. Decided to test the Andy Ward mention many moons ago about his second monitor working with his laptop and, well, slap my thighs and call it a wednesday, it worked. So I played the £3-£6 on Betfair for a couple of hours (two players at the table seeing 68% and 78% of flops respectively, with one of them having a raise percentage of 48%). This kind of table can be hard work when you have been used to a kind of weak-tight relative competence at Party on wet wednesday afternoons. For a start, you get many more multi-way pots. When I've played this kind of table live in LV I've tended to pick my spots more carefully and limp more often (i.e., more than 0%, so that isn't saying much).
Was happy with my game, despite only copping £31 in a couple of hours. I tried a bit of chaos mentalism, and focused very hard on playing correctly and not worrying about whether the figure for the session was plus or minus.
I've self-imposed another couple of tricks which mean that I can still keep detailed figures, but not focus on them too much. Silly minor things, such as not keeping a running total for the month in view on my Excel sheet (although since I can calculate it by subtracting one easily viewable figure from another easily viewable figure, perhaps a little more work is needed here).
The $200 bonus on Party, which I just signed up for, has one minor drawback -- 1,400 raked hands required instead of 700 for the normal $100 (makes sense, I suppose). That necessitates a fair amount of play this week, particularly since I am single-tabling at the moment in an attempt to get my game back into the groove. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I just received a fairly large writing commission -- I sign the contract on Monday -- with a tight deadline. It's my biggest project to date (about 25,000 words) so I am entering a grey area. It's a bit like a runner stepping up from 5,000 metres to the marathon in one hit. You are pretty sure that you can do it, but you are unsure of what surprises might lurk on the way.
I finally started doing some hand analysis, as BLUFF advised. I'm focusing on a couple of areas -- the expected quality of a hand in various positions when a raise comes in, and my own performance with certain marginal hands where sometimes I will fold and sometimes I will raise. In other words, nuts and bolts pre-flop stuff. For the past year I have been focusing more on my post-flop play (since this is the area which most separates the lower from the middle limits). But going back to basics never did anyone any harm. Already some useful snippets have turned up. I'm compiling the data in an Excel sheet in a quite detailed way. With luck the judicious use of pivot tables (when I've finally compiled enough stats) will throw up even more interesting info.
++++
It looks as if the food and water is finally getting through to New Orleans in an organized fashion and that evacuations are beginning to be instigated in a similar manner, for which much thanks, I guess. Now the political fall-out in Washington begins. Will anything useful or truthful emerge? We shall see. It was interesting to note that an ex-head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency claimed that, subsequent to FEMA being merged into the Department of Homeland Security a few years ago (2002, I think), FEMA had become "a backwater agency" with too much focus put on terrorism and too little on nat cats. But, of course, when it comes to politics, everyone has an agenda. Several "independent" (I put that in quotes not because I deny their independence, but because I really don't know whether they have any other agenda or not) academic commentators have pointed out that the problems with relieving New Orleans were uniquely difficult in logistical terms. Contrariwise, whenever you hear anything from the oldsters on the street who were around for the hurricanes of 1965 and 1969 (Betsy and Camille, if my memory serves me correctly) that hit the Gulf Coast, they are saying that the National Guard response then was much more efficient then than it was this time. Those were the days before FEMA was formed. This one will run and run.
Was happy with my game, despite only copping £31 in a couple of hours. I tried a bit of chaos mentalism, and focused very hard on playing correctly and not worrying about whether the figure for the session was plus or minus.
I've self-imposed another couple of tricks which mean that I can still keep detailed figures, but not focus on them too much. Silly minor things, such as not keeping a running total for the month in view on my Excel sheet (although since I can calculate it by subtracting one easily viewable figure from another easily viewable figure, perhaps a little more work is needed here).
The $200 bonus on Party, which I just signed up for, has one minor drawback -- 1,400 raked hands required instead of 700 for the normal $100 (makes sense, I suppose). That necessitates a fair amount of play this week, particularly since I am single-tabling at the moment in an attempt to get my game back into the groove. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I just received a fairly large writing commission -- I sign the contract on Monday -- with a tight deadline. It's my biggest project to date (about 25,000 words) so I am entering a grey area. It's a bit like a runner stepping up from 5,000 metres to the marathon in one hit. You are pretty sure that you can do it, but you are unsure of what surprises might lurk on the way.
I finally started doing some hand analysis, as BLUFF advised. I'm focusing on a couple of areas -- the expected quality of a hand in various positions when a raise comes in, and my own performance with certain marginal hands where sometimes I will fold and sometimes I will raise. In other words, nuts and bolts pre-flop stuff. For the past year I have been focusing more on my post-flop play (since this is the area which most separates the lower from the middle limits). But going back to basics never did anyone any harm. Already some useful snippets have turned up. I'm compiling the data in an Excel sheet in a quite detailed way. With luck the judicious use of pivot tables (when I've finally compiled enough stats) will throw up even more interesting info.
++++
It looks as if the food and water is finally getting through to New Orleans in an organized fashion and that evacuations are beginning to be instigated in a similar manner, for which much thanks, I guess. Now the political fall-out in Washington begins. Will anything useful or truthful emerge? We shall see. It was interesting to note that an ex-head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency claimed that, subsequent to FEMA being merged into the Department of Homeland Security a few years ago (2002, I think), FEMA had become "a backwater agency" with too much focus put on terrorism and too little on nat cats. But, of course, when it comes to politics, everyone has an agenda. Several "independent" (I put that in quotes not because I deny their independence, but because I really don't know whether they have any other agenda or not) academic commentators have pointed out that the problems with relieving New Orleans were uniquely difficult in logistical terms. Contrariwise, whenever you hear anything from the oldsters on the street who were around for the hurricanes of 1965 and 1969 (Betsy and Camille, if my memory serves me correctly) that hit the Gulf Coast, they are saying that the National Guard response then was much more efficient then than it was this time. Those were the days before FEMA was formed. This one will run and run.
