Funding

I don't normally read the Finnacial Times Fund management Monday supplement. generally speaking, fund managers are sheep, petrified of being too far away from the mean, rather than worrying about absolute performance over the long term.

Anyway, Richard Plackett of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, one of those people who charges you 1.5% a year to make investments that you could make yourself, said that skill at the game of Bridge was a better requirement for good fund managers than was skill at Poker.

"Bridge is a complicated form of poker. Bridge is about probability and psychology. It is more sophisticated because it is a partnership game".

Now, you can take this as the bollox that it is, but, surprsingly, I agree with Plackett that, to be a good fund manager, being good at Bridge is probably more of an advantage than being good at Poker.

Where Poker comes into its own is not in fund management, but in trading.

Now, ask your streetwise trader what he thinks of fund managers, and I doubt that the phrasing will be entirely complimentary. But trading (particularly foreign exchange) struck me as being just like a game of poker, with a few exceptions:

1) You didn't know how many players there were
2) You didn't know the stack sizes
3) You didn't know the rules

Apart from that, just like poker. Indeed, the fun part was working out the number of players, the stack sizes (was the Bank of Japan in the game today?) and the rules. Once you thought you had that sussed, making money was a piece of piss.

Oh Pete

"Oh Pete", said the editor of Insurance Day, just after I had sent out the newsletter, in a tone which can only mean "Christ, you've made a god-almighty cock-up that will go down in the anals, I mean annals, of insurance news reporting history as the cock-up of cock-ups, one that, if there were an annual award for cock-ups, would win it every year for a decade".

"What", said I, "What have I done?"

"No, it's nothing. I was just hoping that you would have some news".

I knew what he meant. When you have to resort to Nigerian insurers merging and floods in Mumbai (not to mention minor earthquakes in Mexico that didn't cause any damage), you can be fairly sure that news is thin on the ground in Insurance Land.

So, that means I might have to do some digging for stories tomorrow, which means that I might not have the time or inclination to post up to the blog. So I might as well do it now.

+++++++++++

I'm going to have to be careful on Full Tilt. If things get much worse, I might tilt (appropraite name for the site, really). As it is I can feel myself heading down the Wintermute "this will get your chat privileges revoked" route, as bad beat after bad beat gets laid upon me by players who really shouldn't be allowed to play with crayons, let alone sharp objects, on the grounds that they will almost certainly try to eat the crayons before they try to write with them.

I mean, take a fairly reasonable raise in the cut off with QJs. This gets cold-called by a serial caller on the button. The blinds, being the weak-tight shits that nearly all of them are on this site, fold. Flop comes QJT.

I bet, he raises, I three-bet, he four-bets. Gawd. Has he flat-called me pre-flop with AK?

I go into check-call mode and he turns over ... K9 off.

I mean, given my betting pre-flop and on the flop, he can't rule out me having AK, but this is of no concern to the man.

And so it goes on, with AA now clocking in at 60%, most of them stealing the blinds. KK, garbage that it is, is losing a fortune.

So I just keep Ted Forrest in my mind and say as little as possible, just getting in as few hands as possible so that I still qualify for the Iron Man challenge and keep clocking up the bonus money.

Anyhoo, I looked at the numbers, and how much am I losing? About as much as I have paid in rake, that's how much. When you count the bonus money as a kind of rakeback, I am losing about half what I paid in rake. Good grief, if I can count losing less than I have paid in rake as a "horrific" run, surely I'll get it all back before the $600 bonus is up? well, that's the theory.

The farce is, I'm pissing on them at Party. It's as if I was doing my bollocks every day at $8-$16 in the Bellagio ("Dead Man Walking", they would be uttering, as I entered the room), only to walk over to the Mirage for the afternoon session, play virtually the same players there at $10-$20, and promptly clean up ("Man, he's hot at the moment", say the same crew).

Day after day, for a fortnight.

And it would be a case where I would have to play in the Bellagio because I was on a poker rate, or something.


The 25c-50c NL on Virgin continues its sedate pace. Despite my managing to donk off $31 of my $50 buy-in the first hand at one of the tables (that's what happens when you fire the second barrel into a hand that you are fairly sure is an overpair, but which you think might still lay his hand down) I still finished $10 to the good after an hour. Most of the times the first barrel is all that you need.

On the downside, the rakeback has shrunk to virtually nothing. These guys are looking for an excuse to fold and I keep taking down minuscule pot after minuscule pot. I'm not going to get rakeback rich when the rake per hand averages 10 cents or thereabouts.

When I was playing $5-$10 limit on Virgin (most of the fish seem to have vanished from there, BTW), my 2000 hands a month were paying about $200 in rake. A shift back to $2-$4 saw that number cut in half. But 25c-50c no limit (which generates a not dissimilar profit rate from $2-$4) has a rake about a quarter the size of that. At this rate it'll be December before I get another $50 out of them.

All of which should, I suppose, be seen as good. Less rake paid, more profit for Peter. But that's a bit like the "non-rake sites" and the lower rake on FTP compared with Party. It isn't much use when it comes to the bottom line.

Speaking of which, the Party bad beat was up to 700K earlier. I've worked out what is happening. It's not that the players are fishier -- it's just that they are playing in a fishier way. They are coming in with any suited connector and any pair of 8s or better, even for three bets, on the off-chance that the hand will be a bad beat hand. This requires some adjustment by the thinking player, but, once you have your head round the sitiation, they might as well throw money at you.

Shouldn't have said that -- I'll probably hit a cold streak on Party from now on. Still, if it's exchanged for a hot streak on FTP, I'll take it. At least it might stop me from going megatastically tilty.

And, speaking of streaks, "The Cooler" is on Film 4 at the moment. Let's hope that I haven't ballsed up the DVD recorder.