Time, Slipping Away

So, why no post yesterday? Good question. I categorized my day.

5.30am: Up. Bath. Get ready for work. Make sandwiches.
6.15am: Leave for station.
7.03am: Arrive At work
9am: Send out first newsletter (1600 words)
11am: Send out second newsletter (3,200 words). Upload stories to web.
11.10am: Gym. 20 mins cross-trainer. Biceps, triceps, anterior deltoids on the weights. 20 mins on rowing machine. Cool down exercises. Shower.
12.30pm: Borders. Buy three books
12.55pm: Back in office. Archive stories. Rewrite interview with Insurer CEO after comments from their people in "marketing communications" (opinion deleted).
2pm: Research web for stories for Wedensday
2.50pm: Write up some stuff.
3.45pm: Leave office
4.40pm: Arrive home. Check e-mails.
5pm: Take nap
6.30pm: Get up. Make coffee.
6.45pm: Iron (should have done it over weekend, but didn't). Watch an episode of Spiral.
8pm: Play an hour and a bit on IPoker Network (not very well). Down $38.
9.10pm: Practise piano
9.30pm: Cook rice, heat up curry made over the weekend. Wash up.
10pm: Half an hour on Party Poker. Get medium-stacked guy all-in on flop of QJT. I have KK and he has J9. Jack comes on turn. So it goes. Still finish up $24.
10.30pm: One final run-through of a TOm Waits song on piano (headphones on, allows louder playing, Yay.)
10.50pm: Bed.


So, there you go, that's what I "do with my time". There's no time there for sasnding down the kitchen door (should do half an hour a day), or a myriad of other things (such as writing this blog, reading other blogs, reading books, etc). Life is just one long sequence of trying to catch up.

Whic, because I've spent 20 minutes typing this, is what I have to start doing now...

Botulism

Well, all those thoughts that I had about NL being safe from bots appears to have been misplaced. See http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=10298242&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1&nt=43 for the verified proof (well, it's proof enough for me) about a bot scam at work on Full Tilt, $200 NL buy-in.

On the plus side, it looks as if the current programs are exploitable. On the minus side, the bots will soon improve.

I'm not a "sky is falling" person. Indeed, I've often said that I have no objection to playing computer opponents, provided they are clearly labelled as such. It's the deception, not the tools used, as far as I am concerned.

Something struck me this evening as I played about three hands on Party before the phone rang. There were four short stacks at the table, of whom three were German and one was Austrian. Now, if we remember the "M" theory in tournaments, and we take chip equity to be roughly similar to cash equity when the "push or fold" situation comes into play, it would seem to make sense (to me) for a short-stacked player who has been whittled down to an M of 7 or 8 (i.e, less than half his original minimum buy-in) to play in a similar mode in a cash game. But they don't. They continue playing "ultra-tight". Is there a flaw in my analysis here? (There might well be. It's late, and I'm tired.)

Regular EHAL contributor Bluff This! has also weighed in with a bot-thread on 2+2, advocating various guerilla strategies. The respondents to Bluff's post point out the inherent difficulties in battling bots, and part of the blame definitely lies at the door of the poker sites. As one poster in the original thread above notes, it's in the interest of the sites to appear to be anti-bot, while in fact doing as little as possible about it. This serves to keep the fish happy ("we are fighting bots") while maximising rake. As this poster sagely observed, the ideal for poker sites would be to have bots and bots only, because you would still be generating the rake, but wouldn't have to put up with humans playing the game and complaining about "doom switches" and the like.

2+2 has done a sterling job here, in that the focus is solidly on the poker sites. Party is doing nothing about the bots on its limit tables (indeed, would limit be surviving on Party without them?) and the games are gradually dying as a result. I don't want to play limit at a site where every ring game available has four of the same opponents.

I badly misplayed AA tonight, although, thinking back through the hand, the net cost was only about $8 (a $43 loss instead of a $35 loss, out of a $50 stack). In addition, I learnt something about how to play a set when you have position. He bet the hand perfectly to catch me, including only betting $18 into my $25 stack at the end (offering me odds of 3-to-1 on my call, which was just about right, I felt, if he had either KK or AA as well. In fact he had QQ for a set, which he had hit on the turn after a flop of 963 two diamonds. I'm on the wrong machine to post a hand history, and there were a couple of other interesting hands as well - where I dind't play so atrociously. So perhaps I'll put them up tomorrow night. It wasn't a bad night overall.) Learning curves can be fun, so long as you are not doing your bollocks at the same time. Luckily, I'm not.

+++++

Last year I was a lone voice predicting a quiet hurricane season, and ever since December I've been saying that this year will be a humdinger:

Now we have this report :

Subtropical Storm Andrea, the first named storm of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, has formed off the southeastern U.S. coast, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm comes more than three weeks ahead of the season's official June 1 start.

Last year, the first named storm did not form until June 10, and it was August before the first named hurricane-force storm (which missed land by a mile). This one looks as if it might give the Carolinas a soaking, and maybe a bit of wind damage.

It's The Day After Tomorrow, this year, mark my words. Yellowstone blowing up, San Francisco sinking, and a hurricane hitting New York. Man The Lifeboats!