Unlucky For Some?

I've long been of the opinion that our formative experiences at various types of poker dictate our specialties. I can throw out countless reasons why I play cash rather than tournaments, including the "I don't like the timetable" aspect of it, plus the "the problem with tournaments is that you virtually always walk away from it feeling pissed off at your elimination" factor.

However, I reckon that the main reason for my preference for cash games is that, when I came back into poker (in a serious way) in 1999, I was unlucky in tournaments. When I started playing limit online on Paradise in 2000, I was lucky. So, short-term variance dictated long-term commitment.

And this becomes self-reinforcing. I became more practised at cash games, so I got better. Meanwhile, my tournament skills did not improve at the same pace. Sure, I read the theory, but nothing beats constant practice for a 'feel' for the game.

So I approached yesterday's freeroll on Paradise (I have 2,500 Players' Club Points that I want to use up ASAP so that I can get away from the place forever) without much enthusiasm. About 400 runners, only five places paid. Then again, it was a $1,000 prize pool. Is it worth me turning up for these things with an EV of about $2.50? God knows.


Things actually went well for an hour or so. I picked up a big pair and eliminated another guy with a reraise of his standard raise, committing just over half his stack. He reraised all-in (which was the idea behind my raise) and I virtually doubled through (KK held up against AK with two cards to come. Amazing.)

Then I picked up AA in MP2, was trying to work out how much to raise, only for a player to go all-in in front of me (he had an M of about, ooooh, 20). It says something about how tournaments normally go for me to report that I think this is the first time this has happened to me in seven years. I reraised with my extra $300 (I can't be bothered with any fancy plays here) and my AA beat KQ. Amazing again.

In the second hour, another 80% shot held up to push me up to $9,500 from the original $1,500, and I found myself 18th out of the 90 players left.

Then I went card-dead and gradually the blinds increased. Bearing in mind the "start going all-in sooner rather than later" concept with which I started the tourney, I found myself with 97o on the button, a stack of $9,000, and blinds of 150-300 and 50 antes. I had SB and BB outstacked. It was passed round to me and I shoved it in.

Small blind thinks for a nano-second and calls with AJo. Oh well, I thought, I just need to get lucky,

No good, and I'm down to $3,000. So I'm just about shoving in at the first opportunity if no-one comes in in front of me. This situation arrived a couple of hands later and I put it all-in with my J5o. This time I get called on the button with .... J8s.


Maybe I played it wrong. I didn't really care that much. Life is too short and I was watching a movie at the same time, so I don't give these tourneys a lot of attention and I don't really care about going out (42nd of the 400, by the way). But I do seem to get zero rub of the green on the rare times that I foray into tournament land. I'm sure that other players tend to run well and, as a matter of course, come to expect to run well. I've never, absolutely never, had that kind of streak in tournaments.

One reason, of course, is that I no longer play them often enough for such a streak to appear.

I think that if I focused on MTTs, I would make money. The players seemed to make lots of mistakes, even in my half-attention mode. I tend to do better if I don't force things, but this time I decided to play a "force things" game. Not because it's more fun (for a player like me, this kind of bet is less fun, because it's aesthetically repulsive) but because I know that, with such a lop-sided payout, it's the most positive EV play. When it goes wrong, negative reinforcement rears its head, and it's tempting to draw back to the wrong "I'll just wait for a good hand" kind of play.

I still think that the 97o bet was right. Perhaps I should do some PokerStove to prove it to myself. But, then again, I don't really care if it was wrong. Tournaments just fail to engage me. Weird.

Pointing The Way

I have damp coming into the bathroom. I've figured out why. The side of the house is in serious need of repointing.

Although I live in a "terrace", the fronts of the houses on one side are split apart by one-metre gap, with the two houses only joining at the rear. It's an odd configuration, and this has caused a problem. Access to the side of the house is difficult when it comes to scaffolding. Which is probably why the rest of the house has been repointed (about 30 years ago, I guess), but this bit hasn't.

I'm aware that nearly all of you are fucking useless when it comes to stuff like this. "Get someone in to do it" is followed by "we did, and it was a disaster...."

But, I did a little bit of research, and discovered some interesting facts.

First, brickies hate repointing. It's mind-numbingly boring, and you have to get rid of the old mortar to a depth of 12mm to get it done properly, but, because it's so boring and because most customers have no idea about houses, brickies often only do 6mm or so. If you are lucky enough to find a good brickie who is willing to do it properly, you are probably looking at a bill in excess of £20 a square metre. I have no idea how many square metres are involved, so I shall think of a number and treble it. That gives me 700 for the whole house. Christ, surely not.

Why the whole house, and not just the side? This brings me to the "secondly". That being, I'm fairly sure the repointing done 30 years ago used portland cement-based mortar, rather than the proper lime mortar. The Portland mortar is too strong, too inflexible. So it causes fractures or even disintegration in the brick, which has to take the strain of the cement mortar's inflexibility. Some of the red brick at the front of the house (it has provincial red brick and London yellow brick in various places -- part of the design) is flaking away, and this could be caused by cement pointing.


Lime mortar is, needless to say, pricier.

None of this means the house is falling down, but it does make for potential problems that I could either bodge up or fix properly. I don't do "bodge-ups", so it looks like a proper fix. Unfortunately, this will mean talking to the solicitor who lives next door again, because access to the side of my house requires putting scaffolding on her land. Shit.


Anyhoo, none of this is really depressing me, although I suppose it should. Challenges like this are fun, in their own way. It's part and parcel of owning an old house, and there's a certain pride involved. "A home, not a house", as they say.

I came across a nice quote from an American site....

Rick Roger's two-story Georgian has stood for more than 80 years in the prosperous suburb of Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago.

Which is an interesting definition of the term "Georgian". Never let it be said that the Americans have no sense of history.

They do; they just haven't any idea when it was. Or perhaps the house stood somewhere else for 140 years, before being moved to Evanston. Somehow, I doubt it.


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I went to the doctor's for my inoculations this morning, and they had a print of the wall of Lewisham Hill, circa 1825, looking down towards Lewisham from the edge of Blackheath. I had no idea that my road was so old! As you may be aware (and, if you aren't, I'll post a photo of it one day), Lewisham Hill is an oddity, because the pavements run about three metres higher than the road, with brick walls on either side of the road.

The print shows that this "through-cut" was in place in 1825, and it looked fairly old there. No houses on my side of the road, though. On the opposite side were what looked rather like the fishermen's cottages you see in Chatham and Gilligham. Real Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son/David Copperfield stuff. Fascinating.

I still can't see why the road was cut lower than the promenade. The only guess I can come up with was that this prevented strollers going from Lewisham up to Blackheath from being splashed with mud as carriages and horses passed by.


Cool, or what?

And note that, not content with using one proper word (pavement) that will have some Americans scratching their heads, I then used another (strollers) which will get them thinking along entirely the wrong lines. Oh, yes, I know that it's easy targets, that kind of thing. But allow an old man some fun....

The inoculations were a doddle, given the dire warnings expressed by some people (and by the nurse) that I might feel "fluey". Pah! For a start the injections went unnoticed. After you've had your face filled with enough novocaine to kill an elephant, merely for the extraction of baby teeth (if I had any more to be extracted, I'd cut the local anasthetic required by a factor of 10) a couple of poxy jabs in the arm were, literally, not even felt. "Oh, have you done it?" I said.

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The network at work went down today, just as I was sending out the second newsletter (from home). Chaos all round. We actually had to resort to the telephone (quaint instrument....) because the e-mail system was fucked. Finally got the newsletter to the punters by 1pm -- which was a bit irritating, since I had finished it at 10.30am. So it goes.


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