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Changing Opinion
Jan. 13th, 2007 01:58 pmThere is an interesting piece in The Guardian today by Zadie Smith. In it she writes about the craft of novel-writing, and she comes up with the telling line It is very hard to get writers to speak frankly about their own work, particularly in a literary market where they are required to be not only writers, but also hucksters selling product.
Companies have finally worked out that sales staff have been overused to such an extent that they have lost what little credibility they once had. So now they want "indpendent" people to be the sales staff. Informa would much rather have me pushing my product than a salesperson, because, as an 'amateur' in the sales world, any faith that I show in my own product is likely to have more credibility. Of course, "bad money drives out good" and in the end, not only have non-sales people been trained to become salespeople, but they have less time to do what they are really good at, because their agent wants them out there, selling.
The Zadie Smith piece struck me because this morning, while idling past the books on special offer at Tesco (i.e., the best-selling paperbacks, all sold for £3.73) I espied The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins. A blub on the front called it "a superior page-turner", and a puff on the back called it "action-packed". Enough, one might think, to send you straight past the book in the direction of toilet-paper and recyclable black sacks.
But, hold on, I said to myself. Paul Watkins? Surely this is the man who wrote Calm At Sunset, Calm At Dawn and The Story Of My Disappearance, two exceptional novels from a then sparkling young talent? A few years ago he turned up with The Forger, a marvellous tale of Paris during the Second World War, which brought him slightly more into the public eye. This man, I said to myself, would not hack out "a superior page-turner".
So, did Watkins sit down, at the age of 40, and decide to write a best-seller? Was he fed up with spending 18 months writing 200-page novels that were carefully honed, books that had me wondering whether he might in maturity reach the levels of the modern British greats (Boyd, McEwan)? Or is it a great novel disguised as a popular novel, one of those guerilla attacks on popular taste where, by mistake, the mass readership gets conned into reading something that's very good, thinking that it's another Jeffrey Archer hackmobile?
I dunno. I shall read it and let you know.
Nice to see Boyd's Restless gaining major recognitionwith the Orange Prize for Fiction, or Whitbred Prize for Fiction, or somesuch. I've got the first edition (good), but a small accident with a very large and full glass of red wine (entirely my fault, although not my red wine) has led to a small red wine stain discolouring the bottom of the book (bad). So it goes. At least the huge stain that threatened the cream-coloured carpet has been removed.
+++++++
You often watch masterpieces of television and say to yourself, of young actors who appeared in them, "Whatever did happen to (insert name here)"? One of these was Phoebe Nicholls, who played Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited. She kind of vanished off the face of the planet, only to reappear a few months ago in a small role in a TV play, considerably thinner and more poised than in her Cordelia-acting days of 1982.
I looked her up on IMDB and it transpired that one reason for her relative obscurity was that she had married the director of Brideshead. But now, presumably with kids off her hands and with a bit of spare time, she's back in the acting fray with a vengeance. This week she appears as Cherie Booth opposite the magnificent Robert Lindsay (if any of you in the US get the chance to see Alan Bleasdale's GBH, don't miss the chance to watch it) in "The Trial Of Tony Blair".
++++++++
One of the inevitable consequences of the online games becoming tougher is that more players will resort to cheating. They were once winners; they aren't now. So they do "whatever it takes". On 2+2 there is a thread about a league of colluders, playing from different IP addresses but in the same room and at the same 6-max tables. Perhaps some of our European friends would care to look it up and see what country they are from. Don't say that I didn't tell you a year ago.
But I have also experienced "the new cheating" personally. Twice this week at low stakes games I have suffered a deliberate disconnect from another player for an all-in. And I'm not talking about Virgin here, but Stars and Noble. The first case was an AK off pre-flop, while the second was an underpair post-flop on a rag board. In effect the first case gets the hand all-in on the draw, while in the second the money is all-in in a well-behind/well-ahead situation. These things are going to become more common and, as if things aren't tough enough already for the honest player, we have this to cope with.
I was wondering about the EV of the deliberate disconnect in the case of the underpair post flop (i.e, how much as a cheater do you gain by "using up" your disconnect and possibly damaging your reputation with the poker site, as well as with other players?)
Suppose you are in the Big blind in a $2-$4 game and a typical TAG raises three off the button. It's folded round to your 33. If you fold here, your expectation is minus $2 for the hand. However, let's assume that you call and the flop comes 954 rainbow. $9 in the pot.
If we give the TAG raiser a range of AA to 77, AKs to A8s, KQs to K9s, QJs to QTs, JTs, AKo to ATo, KQ to KJo, then the pair of threes has a "hot and cold" EV of 53.4% on this flop. If we assume that TAG raiser will continue to bet on the flop, a deliberate disconnect here has an EV of ($9 x 0.534) or $4.81. This equals a profit of 81¢ on the hand, compared with the minus $2 if BB had folded pre-flop. If BB folds now, his expectation for the hand is minus $4.
What's BB's EV if he flat-calls?
Much of this depends on whether TAG will bet the turn and BB's decision given a range of turn cards. Let's assume that BB will check-call any card on the turn. (Even if an Ace comes on the turn BBs hot-and cold EV is 36%, and he is putting in $4 to win $13 on the turn and/or $8 to win $17 by the end).
Let's also assume that TAG will bet the turn but will give up on the river if he fails to improve.
There's a range of other possibhlities (BB could bet out if the board pairs on the turn, or he could check-raise). But the general maths of this are:
Just over half the time, BB will check-call the flop and turn and win after the river goes unbet. Just under half the time, BB will check-call the flop, turn and river and will lose.
So we get a net for the hand of +$10 (after rake) 55% of the time, and a net for the hand of minus $14 (after rake) 45% of the time. This gives an EV of minus 80¢.
Now, this is slightly misleading because, if TAG always gave up on the river when he missed, BB could always fold when TAG bet the river. So TAG has to bluff some of the time on the river. If we suppose that he does this 10% of the time, then 4.5 times in 100, BB makes an extra $4, giving a net of 18¢ a hand. That reduces the EV to minus 62¢.
So, with the underpair, a fold preflop has an EV for the hand of minus $2 (the cost of the Blind), while a call and a check-call down to the end (given the rag flop) gives an EV of minus 62¢. Meanwhile a call and a disconnect gives an EV of plus 81¢. The deliberate disconnect gives a net expected gain of about $1.43, or 0.357 of a Big Bet. You can only use it once a day (and even that will eventually get you into trouble), but the net of it (if you play every day for a month) is 10 Big Bets.
Those Big Bets have to come from somewhere. Suppose you were an honest player two-tabling on a site such as, oooh, Virgin, where all of your opponents were using this strategy. And suppose you played two hours a day. That makes 18 opponents (net 15, allowing for other multi-tablers and comings and goings) and you could expect to face 1.25 deliberate disconnects every session, costing you $1.78 a session, or just under half a big bet. If you played 300 days a year, that would be 150 big bets over the course of the year.
Now, things aren't that extreme, but it's some indication of the threat which an increased use of deliberate disconnects poses for honest players. You could e-mail Boss Media until you were blue in the face, but they wouldn't worry about the fact that cheats were stealing this money from honest players. On the other sites, it's just a matter of being aware and reporting even the slightest suspicion of a dishonest disconnect.
Companies have finally worked out that sales staff have been overused to such an extent that they have lost what little credibility they once had. So now they want "indpendent" people to be the sales staff. Informa would much rather have me pushing my product than a salesperson, because, as an 'amateur' in the sales world, any faith that I show in my own product is likely to have more credibility. Of course, "bad money drives out good" and in the end, not only have non-sales people been trained to become salespeople, but they have less time to do what they are really good at, because their agent wants them out there, selling.
The Zadie Smith piece struck me because this morning, while idling past the books on special offer at Tesco (i.e., the best-selling paperbacks, all sold for £3.73) I espied The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins. A blub on the front called it "a superior page-turner", and a puff on the back called it "action-packed". Enough, one might think, to send you straight past the book in the direction of toilet-paper and recyclable black sacks.
But, hold on, I said to myself. Paul Watkins? Surely this is the man who wrote Calm At Sunset, Calm At Dawn and The Story Of My Disappearance, two exceptional novels from a then sparkling young talent? A few years ago he turned up with The Forger, a marvellous tale of Paris during the Second World War, which brought him slightly more into the public eye. This man, I said to myself, would not hack out "a superior page-turner".
So, did Watkins sit down, at the age of 40, and decide to write a best-seller? Was he fed up with spending 18 months writing 200-page novels that were carefully honed, books that had me wondering whether he might in maturity reach the levels of the modern British greats (Boyd, McEwan)? Or is it a great novel disguised as a popular novel, one of those guerilla attacks on popular taste where, by mistake, the mass readership gets conned into reading something that's very good, thinking that it's another Jeffrey Archer hackmobile?
I dunno. I shall read it and let you know.
Nice to see Boyd's Restless gaining major recognitionwith the Orange Prize for Fiction, or Whitbred Prize for Fiction, or somesuch. I've got the first edition (good), but a small accident with a very large and full glass of red wine (entirely my fault, although not my red wine) has led to a small red wine stain discolouring the bottom of the book (bad). So it goes. At least the huge stain that threatened the cream-coloured carpet has been removed.
+++++++
You often watch masterpieces of television and say to yourself, of young actors who appeared in them, "Whatever did happen to (insert name here)"? One of these was Phoebe Nicholls, who played Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited. She kind of vanished off the face of the planet, only to reappear a few months ago in a small role in a TV play, considerably thinner and more poised than in her Cordelia-acting days of 1982.
I looked her up on IMDB and it transpired that one reason for her relative obscurity was that she had married the director of Brideshead. But now, presumably with kids off her hands and with a bit of spare time, she's back in the acting fray with a vengeance. This week she appears as Cherie Booth opposite the magnificent Robert Lindsay (if any of you in the US get the chance to see Alan Bleasdale's GBH, don't miss the chance to watch it) in "The Trial Of Tony Blair".
++++++++
One of the inevitable consequences of the online games becoming tougher is that more players will resort to cheating. They were once winners; they aren't now. So they do "whatever it takes". On 2+2 there is a thread about a league of colluders, playing from different IP addresses but in the same room and at the same 6-max tables. Perhaps some of our European friends would care to look it up and see what country they are from. Don't say that I didn't tell you a year ago.
But I have also experienced "the new cheating" personally. Twice this week at low stakes games I have suffered a deliberate disconnect from another player for an all-in. And I'm not talking about Virgin here, but Stars and Noble. The first case was an AK off pre-flop, while the second was an underpair post-flop on a rag board. In effect the first case gets the hand all-in on the draw, while in the second the money is all-in in a well-behind/well-ahead situation. These things are going to become more common and, as if things aren't tough enough already for the honest player, we have this to cope with.
I was wondering about the EV of the deliberate disconnect in the case of the underpair post flop (i.e, how much as a cheater do you gain by "using up" your disconnect and possibly damaging your reputation with the poker site, as well as with other players?)
Suppose you are in the Big blind in a $2-$4 game and a typical TAG raises three off the button. It's folded round to your 33. If you fold here, your expectation is minus $2 for the hand. However, let's assume that you call and the flop comes 954 rainbow. $9 in the pot.
If we give the TAG raiser a range of AA to 77, AKs to A8s, KQs to K9s, QJs to QTs, JTs, AKo to ATo, KQ to KJo, then the pair of threes has a "hot and cold" EV of 53.4% on this flop. If we assume that TAG raiser will continue to bet on the flop, a deliberate disconnect here has an EV of ($9 x 0.534) or $4.81. This equals a profit of 81¢ on the hand, compared with the minus $2 if BB had folded pre-flop. If BB folds now, his expectation for the hand is minus $4.
What's BB's EV if he flat-calls?
Much of this depends on whether TAG will bet the turn and BB's decision given a range of turn cards. Let's assume that BB will check-call any card on the turn. (Even if an Ace comes on the turn BBs hot-and cold EV is 36%, and he is putting in $4 to win $13 on the turn and/or $8 to win $17 by the end).
Let's also assume that TAG will bet the turn but will give up on the river if he fails to improve.
There's a range of other possibhlities (BB could bet out if the board pairs on the turn, or he could check-raise). But the general maths of this are:
Just over half the time, BB will check-call the flop and turn and win after the river goes unbet. Just under half the time, BB will check-call the flop, turn and river and will lose.
So we get a net for the hand of +$10 (after rake) 55% of the time, and a net for the hand of minus $14 (after rake) 45% of the time. This gives an EV of minus 80¢.
Now, this is slightly misleading because, if TAG always gave up on the river when he missed, BB could always fold when TAG bet the river. So TAG has to bluff some of the time on the river. If we suppose that he does this 10% of the time, then 4.5 times in 100, BB makes an extra $4, giving a net of 18¢ a hand. That reduces the EV to minus 62¢.
So, with the underpair, a fold preflop has an EV for the hand of minus $2 (the cost of the Blind), while a call and a check-call down to the end (given the rag flop) gives an EV of minus 62¢. Meanwhile a call and a disconnect gives an EV of plus 81¢. The deliberate disconnect gives a net expected gain of about $1.43, or 0.357 of a Big Bet. You can only use it once a day (and even that will eventually get you into trouble), but the net of it (if you play every day for a month) is 10 Big Bets.
Those Big Bets have to come from somewhere. Suppose you were an honest player two-tabling on a site such as, oooh, Virgin, where all of your opponents were using this strategy. And suppose you played two hours a day. That makes 18 opponents (net 15, allowing for other multi-tablers and comings and goings) and you could expect to face 1.25 deliberate disconnects every session, costing you $1.78 a session, or just under half a big bet. If you played 300 days a year, that would be 150 big bets over the course of the year.
Now, things aren't that extreme, but it's some indication of the threat which an increased use of deliberate disconnects poses for honest players. You could e-mail Boss Media until you were blue in the face, but they wouldn't worry about the fact that cheats were stealing this money from honest players. On the other sites, it's just a matter of being aware and reporting even the slightest suspicion of a dishonest disconnect.
