Cash upfront

I watched the BBC documentary on Johnny Cash last night. It was first shown a couple of years ago and I watched it then, but it was worth seeing again. I wish I could say that I had been a lifelong fan of Johnny Cash, but it wouldn't be true. It was only after I saw the video of "Hurt" that I got hold of the three-CD collection. It was a stunner to hear him do "Frankie He's No Good", which was so left-field compred with what I expected to hear that it took me a few minutes to remember that it was Bruce Springsteen song.

"Hurt" (a song written, apparently, by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) is just one of the great music videos. Perhaps it won't last the test of time. I think that great videos, in that sense, shouldn't. I remember the first time I saw the Bat Out Of Hell video (it was on the Old Grey Whistle Test). I went straight out to buy the album. And it's hard to forget the first time you saw the Bohemian Rhapsody video. Utterly over the top, but intrinsically part of popular culture (see "Wayne's World" for empirical proof thereof). And it was seeing the video of Sledgehammer that confirmed in my eyes my long-held opinion that Peter Gabriel, notwithstanding fucking WOMAD, was a pretentious tosser. Andy Kershaw manages to enthuse about world music without being a dick (or, in the case of a Gabriel video, quite possibly a duck).

Utterly unrecommended is the album Kick! from White Rose Movement. I can only assume that the name (derived from a groups of German resistance youngsters in Munich during World War II) was chosen by marketing types who want to appeal to the Interpol/ Editors fan base and would like to think that the group has inherited the musical tradtion of The Sound and Joy Division. However, as far as I can hear, this is a case of Duran Duran is alive and well. Dreadful.

More interesting is Semifinalists, whose eponymous album is definitely interesting (in that I played it twice straight through) if difficult to classify. perhaps more on them later.

Empire Strikes Back

So, I fired up Empire, just to see if it had added a few bucks to the 23 cents that I had left in there, and what do I see? 42,000 players online, that's what I see. So, back we are in Party Poker land again.

However, all the rakeback deals on Empire seem now to be null & void. But it didn't stop me logging in, even though I have Party on that machine as well. I have to assume that if I was running both Empire and Party simultaneously it would spot the identical IP address. But, given Party's latest "shoot yourself in the foot" accident, that is by no means certain, or even likely.

Kudos to Mat on Gutshot for referring to the STT bot discovery, revealed on the 2+2 forums. The early Party responses to this were laughable in their naivety. In fact one has to wonder if the people at Party in the lower echelons actually know the rules of the game.

No Limit STTs have long been a favourite for botulism becoming rife, mainly because the tactic of push all-in or fold has been delineated by Sklansky abnd the programming involved to get a bot who can beat most STT players is not complicated.

At limit, it's harder, because there are more decisions in the tree. It's far from impossible, but it's less easy.

I've suspected a few players of being bots at the $2-$4 level. Watch for anyone from Burnaby, is my tip. And they have been getting better. But cash limit has a lot more complexity to it than a No Limit STT tournament, so I'm not worried about being outplayed just yet.


Here's the STT bot-list from 2+2.

1 ragra
2 frnchrev
3 lvstrg
4 thathy
5 hnglos
6 sanroad
7 micmonn
8 k1muller
9 trvndrm
10 remick2
11 mdwlrk
12 bmpcch
13 iluvaks
14 rswhlr
15 dabsop
16 josamart
17 cufutbl
18 pbnsub