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Shuffle up, wheel and deal
May. 8th, 2006 05:04 amPresumably as intended by Mr Blair, other matters conspired to push the cabinet reshuffle out of the Birks headlines. Those of us with any sense of history will recall Macmillan's famous "night of the long knives", when he sacked a third of his cabinet and promptly went on to stop being prime minister within a couple of years. His successor was a disaster and the result was the Labour Party being in power for 12 of the following 15 years.
Interesting things about the reshuffle:
1) "The first woman foreign secretary" might have made headlines in the past, but with the increasingly presidential style of government, the role of foreign secretary isn't so important any more. We already have a foreign secretary; it's Tony Blair. However, one can imagine Condoleeza Rice being less than enamoured. "You mean I spent all that time in Black Bourne with a guy and now he's not even foreign secretary any more? What kind of a country are they running over there?" Indeed.
2) Charles Clarke gave away his entire agenda at the end. "I have been loyal to you ..." he wrote to Blair, presumably with the unsaid but pointed accompaniment "but you haven't to me". What this reveals about Clarke is his belief that loyalty is all. In fact, there is the occasional requirement of competence. A major problem in mature companies and in politics is that loyalty is rewarded rather than ability. Clarke is so useless that he can't even see that sometimes something more is needed than saying the right thing to the boss. Being able to do your job comes in useful as well.
3) The appointment of John Reid as Home Secretary is a warning shot to Brown. Once again, drawing parallels with the Macmillan regime, where Brown can be seen as our Rab Butler figure, it would appear that Blair will do anything to stop Brown succeeding him, for reasons that will have to remain locked inside Blair's psyche. Macmillan did the same to his old colleague Butler. It looks as if Reid is being groomed to be ready to stand against Brown when Blair decides to step down. If we push the Macmillan comparison a bit further, what chances do you reckon that Blair's resignation, when it comes, will be attributed to "ill health" (although Macmillan tottered on well into his 90s)?
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I've been attempting to follow Bluff's strategy of reading a bit of a poker book every day, just to keep ideas flowing. I had a quick reread of some of Malmuth's work on bankroll requirements and I noticed that he was talking about a win rate of $30 an hour at a $30-$60 stud game, with, get this, a standard deviation of $910 an hour. Well, I nearly went white, I can tell you.
I'm not sure if this could be called a sign of success or, well, of what, but this year I am knocking up $10 an hour average with a standard deviation of $60 an hour. I really don't think that I could cope with an SD approaching a thousand dollars an hour (well, not for an average win rate of $30 I couldn't).
I suppose that this is an indicator of the fact that, while I have succeeded in pushing up my hourly rate, I have ben more successful in pushing down my volatility (in relative terms). In practice this means that my bankroll requirement is (theoretically) very low (no more than $400 for each site on which I play, actually). In practice, I keep more than that in the sites so that I an (eventually), move up to a higher limit and accept the strains that this entails.
I think that part of the problem in moving up in limits is not just that your win rate can either go nowhere, or actually fall (in the short term, until you get used to the level), but also that your volatility shoots up more than proportionally. So, at $5-$10, I might find myself averaging $8 an hour with a volatility of $200 an hour. And it's the combination of these two factors that pushes you out of your comfort zone, rather than the pure monetary value. If I increase my stake in a forex bet, my volatility in relative terms does not increase at all. It remains my stake/expected return times x. If I step up in levels at poker, my volatility is likely to increase by more than both. It becomes my stake times x times 1.2 (or whatever) and my profit times x times 1.5 (or whatever).
+++++++++
I see that the Gutshot 5,000 euro tournament attracted the grand total of 23 entries. OK, maybe it was a step too far, but this gives us a lot of information. The main part of it is that, for all the talk of people wandering around with wodges of cash in their pocket from poker, the number of players who are willing to pony up for a large buy-in tournament in the UK is relatively small. There are a large number of £500 tourney players, but a very small number of £3,000 tourney players.
This in turn perhaps gives an indication of how much money is actually being made by a lot of the "faces". There are quite a few online players out there for whom a £1,000 tourney wouldn't really dent the petty cash. But in the bricks and mortar world it looks to me as if 50% of the entrants to such a tournament would come from £20 or £50 satellites.
It has ever been thus. No matter where you go in the poker-playing world, there will be more people pretending to be making fortunes, and more people looking to nip, than there will be people who are genuinely shovelling the cake into the bank account. If you are playing online and you feel guilty at making "only" $50 a month this year, console yourself with the fact that you are probably doing better than 50% of the names who are mentioned on the various forums week in, week out.
Interesting things about the reshuffle:
1) "The first woman foreign secretary" might have made headlines in the past, but with the increasingly presidential style of government, the role of foreign secretary isn't so important any more. We already have a foreign secretary; it's Tony Blair. However, one can imagine Condoleeza Rice being less than enamoured. "You mean I spent all that time in Black Bourne with a guy and now he's not even foreign secretary any more? What kind of a country are they running over there?" Indeed.
2) Charles Clarke gave away his entire agenda at the end. "I have been loyal to you ..." he wrote to Blair, presumably with the unsaid but pointed accompaniment "but you haven't to me". What this reveals about Clarke is his belief that loyalty is all. In fact, there is the occasional requirement of competence. A major problem in mature companies and in politics is that loyalty is rewarded rather than ability. Clarke is so useless that he can't even see that sometimes something more is needed than saying the right thing to the boss. Being able to do your job comes in useful as well.
3) The appointment of John Reid as Home Secretary is a warning shot to Brown. Once again, drawing parallels with the Macmillan regime, where Brown can be seen as our Rab Butler figure, it would appear that Blair will do anything to stop Brown succeeding him, for reasons that will have to remain locked inside Blair's psyche. Macmillan did the same to his old colleague Butler. It looks as if Reid is being groomed to be ready to stand against Brown when Blair decides to step down. If we push the Macmillan comparison a bit further, what chances do you reckon that Blair's resignation, when it comes, will be attributed to "ill health" (although Macmillan tottered on well into his 90s)?
+++++
I've been attempting to follow Bluff's strategy of reading a bit of a poker book every day, just to keep ideas flowing. I had a quick reread of some of Malmuth's work on bankroll requirements and I noticed that he was talking about a win rate of $30 an hour at a $30-$60 stud game, with, get this, a standard deviation of $910 an hour. Well, I nearly went white, I can tell you.
I'm not sure if this could be called a sign of success or, well, of what, but this year I am knocking up $10 an hour average with a standard deviation of $60 an hour. I really don't think that I could cope with an SD approaching a thousand dollars an hour (well, not for an average win rate of $30 I couldn't).
I suppose that this is an indicator of the fact that, while I have succeeded in pushing up my hourly rate, I have ben more successful in pushing down my volatility (in relative terms). In practice this means that my bankroll requirement is (theoretically) very low (no more than $400 for each site on which I play, actually). In practice, I keep more than that in the sites so that I an (eventually), move up to a higher limit and accept the strains that this entails.
I think that part of the problem in moving up in limits is not just that your win rate can either go nowhere, or actually fall (in the short term, until you get used to the level), but also that your volatility shoots up more than proportionally. So, at $5-$10, I might find myself averaging $8 an hour with a volatility of $200 an hour. And it's the combination of these two factors that pushes you out of your comfort zone, rather than the pure monetary value. If I increase my stake in a forex bet, my volatility in relative terms does not increase at all. It remains my stake/expected return times x. If I step up in levels at poker, my volatility is likely to increase by more than both. It becomes my stake times x times 1.2 (or whatever) and my profit times x times 1.5 (or whatever).
+++++++++
I see that the Gutshot 5,000 euro tournament attracted the grand total of 23 entries. OK, maybe it was a step too far, but this gives us a lot of information. The main part of it is that, for all the talk of people wandering around with wodges of cash in their pocket from poker, the number of players who are willing to pony up for a large buy-in tournament in the UK is relatively small. There are a large number of £500 tourney players, but a very small number of £3,000 tourney players.
This in turn perhaps gives an indication of how much money is actually being made by a lot of the "faces". There are quite a few online players out there for whom a £1,000 tourney wouldn't really dent the petty cash. But in the bricks and mortar world it looks to me as if 50% of the entrants to such a tournament would come from £20 or £50 satellites.
It has ever been thus. No matter where you go in the poker-playing world, there will be more people pretending to be making fortunes, and more people looking to nip, than there will be people who are genuinely shovelling the cake into the bank account. If you are playing online and you feel guilty at making "only" $50 a month this year, console yourself with the fact that you are probably doing better than 50% of the names who are mentioned on the various forums week in, week out.
