Access Denied

My company brought in a new filtering system this week that meant I could no longer access most gambling-related sites. Curiously, in most cases, I just didn't really care. Last year a trip to the Hendon Mob site was almost de rigeur first thing in the morning, but these days it mainly feels like most of it has already been said.

Andy Ward's Secrets of the Amateurs was blocked, but Get It Quietly was not. I guess that the filter spots any blog on blogspot with "poker" listed in the metafile.

The most irritating block was Betfair. How am I meant to make my money if I can't check the prices on the cricket? But, well, you can hardly blame the company for blocking it. I'd be hard pushed to justify any visit to the site on the grounds of business research.

Needless to say (and isn't this the way with companies?) my biggest gambling site -- Finspreads -- remains easily accessible, solely because my manic punts are on the value of shares and currencies, not sports.

But it would be nice to have access to Betfair. Does anyone know of a mobile phone contract I can get which will give me easy access to the site and to the prices? (Maybe I should just e-mail Betfair).

The lack of concern at the lack of access to the poker sites is also a product, I think, of a certain alienation from the majority of posters. There are maybe a dozen or so "thinkers" about the game that I know of, while the rest of the stuff on the fora is mainly bollocks from gamblers. Dave D, Aksu, Bluff, ThreeBet, Fargis, Andy Ward, DY (to a degree), and I'm sorry if I missed off your name and you should be here bt I'm in a rush, write thinking stuff. I may often disagree with it, but it's stimulating and the lines taken are invariably a result of logical thought. Felicia writes good stuff for the typical bad gambler. It may come across to us as a primer in how to become a tight player like Felicia, but it's probably a lot more useful in terms of being capable of turning a losing player into a winning player than the material we spew out about metagames and loss-aversion.

Compare this with most of the nonsense that you see, and the wide spread of "group think", and I can understand why the lack of access to what most poker players are writing is of virtually no concern to me.

Some poker thoughts

I made a misjudgement in the baby NL game tonight. Already I appear to have got into a mode of "well, that's obvious", when to my opponent it may not be obvious.

In this case, MP3 raised to 1.50 (blinds 25-50) with 70 in front of him (these are dollars, btw) and I called with QJS. I have 51 in front of me. Then the CO (40 in front of him) raises to 3. Original raiser flat calls and I call.

So, what ranges do we have for our opponents? I don't like the mini-raise from my LHO, whereas the flat call of the mini-reraise from RHO would seem to indicate AK or maybe a mediumish pair like 99 or TT. 9.50 in pot

Flop comes J54 one spade, so I have top pair, bad kicker. RHO bets 2, which looks like a bet to control the size of the pot. I'm tempted to raise here to see what LHO is all about, but these guys are passive and AA might be worried (although he shouldn't be).

I flat call. LHO flat calls. $15 in pot

Next card is the 4 of spades, giving my QJs top pair, mediocre (well, bad) kicker, and a flush draw. Now, RHO bets $2.

Well, this HAS to be an attempt to control the size of the pot with something like AK or (more likely) TT/99. If I raise here a modest amount I might be able to get to see the rest of the hand for free. So, I raise to $7, which LHO promptly calls. Bollocks, that would appear to have him nailed on for AA. And RHO calls as well. $36 in pot.

At this point, I am simply praying for a spade or a Jack or a Queen. It doesn't come. Instead we have some poxy red deuce. RHO checks, I check and LHO now springs to life with a $10 bet. RHO calls after some thought and I chuck my hand away.

LHO shows the expected AA and RHO shows KK.

Well, the whole thing had me kind of puzzled. The $2 bet from RHO on the turn into a $15 pot prices me in virtually no matter what I have, which was why I decided he could not have KK. But, well, he did have KK, which made my $5 raise a mistake. I could probably have got away with flat-calling and saved myself $5.

Then again, I get 2-1 for that $5, and I do have 12 outs, so it's not THAT enormously negative EV. But, an irritating misjudgement nevertheless, because it was my old bugbear of giving the opposition too much credit.

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I'm still working on how to play this frequently seen hand of you (having raised in middle position) vs a defending blind and a raggy flop of (say) 953 rainbow. He checks, you continuation bet and he raises. You have AK. A rag comes on the turn. He bets and you fold. He might well have bluffed you out here.

There's a number of counter-measures to this. One is that you check the AK on the flop and just fold when he bets the turn. Another is that you bet the flop and then three-bet his check-raise. And a third that I am tinkering with is this. You check behind, and he bets the turn, at which point you raise him, because this time you checked behind with KK.

As soon as opponents know that there is a possibility that you will check behind with the overpair as well as with AK/AQ, their bet on the turn begins to look a lot dodgier.

I'm still thinking about the numbers on this (what percentage of times you check behind with the overpair, what percentage of times you continuation bet with the AK/AQ on a rag board) and what type of players you could try this against. But it's a third string to the bow apart from the "three-bet" and "check/fold". There is a fourth string, the check-call all the way to the end just with AK, but I'm not happy about that one, apart from the fact that it would at least give you a proper violin.


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Played a few rounds of HORSE. Lost $40. Conclusion. I suck at new games. But then, I knew that anyway, so why in heaven's name do I play them? I have no instinct for what is a good hand, no instinct for when I should raise, when i should fold and when I should call. Sure, the completely good hands and the completely bad hands are obvious, but with anything marginal, I am lost. Razz is OK, but the Seven Stud 8ob and the omaha are impossible. Still, nowhere near the $350 Royal Hold'em disaster.

Give me three years, and I'll be pissing the $10-$20 Mixed Game.

Except that it probably won't exist by then.