The handicaps of live play

Every time that I have an idle thought about returning to play live tournaments, a comment appears online which convinces me that I was right to walk away from them: Here's Mr Trumper's observation of a not atypical experience:

Next to me is a player called Mick Jagger , his nickname is Lips . I happen to notice what looks like a rolled up piece of paper behind his ear , i am wondering how it got there or if it is has a purpose when i finally decide to ask , Mick then says " oh i forgot , that is my chewing gum , i put it there when i drink my coffee " he then put it back in his mouth assuring me he had showered before leaving home.

I rest my case.

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How to become a successful company, part two.

There's been much criticism of Vladimir Putin for his increasingly autocratic government and what has been termed "creeping renationalisation", which kind of reached its peak this week with the final death of Yukos.

Rosneft, the state-controlled oil company, seems to have turned itself into a $90bn company, after being worth just $6bn a few years ago, on capital investment of just $2bn. Top quality management, you might think. Well, no. It's just inherited Yukos.

But look at this another way. When people look at the wealth of today's Russian super-rich, just ask yourself how many of them got it. One thing is for sure, it was not through working lots of overtime.

The period under Yeltsin was a time of Russia being run by a clown who was surrounded by "entrepreneurs" who knew how to get their hands on the bulk of the wealth that was being privatised. Theoretically "the people" should have benefited from this denationalisation. After all, it was their property that we being denationalised. In practice, the so-called robbber barons absolutely cleaned up on the back of investor ignorance (shares in companies were bought from workers for a pittance) bureaucratic incompetence and/or government corruption.

If you look at it this way, the actions of the Putin government don't look so bad. This isn't a case of forcing the peasants off their land with no compensation. It's a case of taking back what Yeltsin and his cohorts effectively gave away. What became Yukos was obtained by Mikhail Khodorkovsky for just $300m in 1995 when, curously, it was the only bidder. Even at a most conservative estimate, he bought the business for 10% of its "real" value.

Now, the Russian government can't put it in these terms, so it calls it tax fraud confiscation. Royal Dutch Shell is also crying foul over a move which effectively forced them to sell a venture of theirs to Gazprom at a serious discount to the venture's real value.

I'm not saying that the Putin oligarchy is whiter than white, merely that this is a case of various clans, some working within government and some working outside it, fighting for control of Russia's huge natural resources. The politics of "Blood Diamond" are closer here than one would think. Where there is huge natural wealth, guns tend to follow. Russia has managed to avoid that, but the civil war is still being played out behind the scenes, or sometimes in the courts.

The question is, what will happen when Putin goes? Will the current cock of the north, Rosneft, stay on top, or will the more conservative Gazprom make a move? Or will the foreign players, who have been comprehensively outmanoeuvred (pardon me if I don't shed a tear for Royal Dutch Shell here, a company that is hardly a babe in arms when it comes to political manoeuvring) get back on top.

Fun times.

Embottered

Well, the 2+2 debate rages on. The interesting thing here is that I mentioned the "faux bot" concept quite a few months ago, and now 2+2ers are struggling with the philosophical problems involved. I kind of like my "reverse Turing test", and, if it's true that these are bots with a human supervisor some of the time, then you are entering weird territory.

Clearly the defenders are claiming that it's a sweatshop, with loads of poorly paid humans following a template, with a "supervisor" coming in to add a higher level of play should the situation demand it. The reason the defenders are claiming this is that it is probably just on the right side of legal, if not moral. This is one reason to doubt this explanation. I still like the original bot system theory, with a supervisor moving in to play as a human when the situation demands.

One point here that separates it from the standard bot-script donkeys is that we probably have one or two players here who can really play, but who are earning more by running less than efficient bots over many many tables ("a more productive use of time", so to speak).

I've prejudices against sites that allow data-mining. But this creates a problem for me, because it seems clear that the only way to statistically prove that bots are playing is to use datamining. If you could only gather data when you were sitting at the table, you could just not gain the statistical proof.

However, this did lead me to look at the "overcards" site and to take note of what many 2+2ers are probably doing, and I wonder how far this pushes things over the line. Autohotkey, automatically sitting out when it gets to a certain number of players, and various other "automating" factors make it possible to play 8 to 12 tables, and 2+2ers see nothing wrong with this, even though a number of their decisions are taken "automatically".

So, you can see where I am heading. Although I have my own "line in the sand" about what I think is acceptable, and another (slightly further out) line in the sand about what facilities I will use (for example, at higher stakes, I would use datamining if it was available, while at lower stakes I might stretch the line to certain scripts such as autohotkey, even though I think that both are against the spirit of online poker, and I would prefer it if they were banned).

All of it is very difficult. I think that pokertracker is fine, but perhaps this is because I have used it for so long. But is a stat overlay on the table "fine"? Here I am less sure, although I use GameTime all the time. Where do I draw my own line and where do I draw the bot line?

In a way, it's not hard. Any script that makes an "action" during a hand is cheating, I feel, even if that script is "fold 7-2".

I also feel that any script that automatically decides whether or not you are dealt in is cheating. To play or not to play is something which should be decided by a human, and to argue that "I never play with five players or fewer, so automating it is fine" is so close to "I never play 7-2, so automating it is fine" as to make little difference. You are, as it were, sitting at a table, and saying "deal me out". That constitutes part of playing poker, I feel, so to automate it is beyond the pale.

How about automated waiting list requests? Well, that's a tough one. I really can't decide.

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Some bad times with the work computer today. I was happily typing away, ignoring the Windows Update notification, when an urgent e-mail was sent out from work stating "DO NOT INSTALL THE UPDATE".

Apparently it was causing a conflict with some of the company's wide-ranging software shit, installed by overkeen IT geeks who are not happy unless they can fuck up your life. And this was causing all Microsoft Office programs to freeze.


Anyhoo, I thought no more about this, apart from congratulating myself for not installing the update, and, after sending out the newsletters, I went shopping.

Upon my return, I discovered that the updates had been installed automatically. Jesus shit, my computer never used to do that. And, guess what, Excel promptly froze on me. Indeed, one of my poker files was corrupted almost beyond repair.

So, I rebuilt the file, and then it froze on me again, although not corrupting itself.

Hmm, what to do?

Well, "System Restore" is a favourite of IT geeks, and, impersonating said geeks, that's what I went for.

The problem here was that the updates still installed themselves automatically. Fuck.

So, I went to the updates part of the control panel, only to find it all greyed out.

Yes, the IT people had set it so that we mere users could not alter the update settings. Great.

So, this was a serious problem if I wanted to do any work in Excel or Word over the weekend on the office machine (i.e., the machine I have at home that connects to the Virtual Private Network).

Serious times call for serious measures, I decided, and off I trotted into RegEdit. There's a couple of settings in here that dictate whether the Windows Update is greyed out or not, that allow you to bypass the administrator requirements. A quick alteration, and back I was in the main menu.

Smack in System Restore again to get rid of the updates, and I should be fine.

I think you can see the flaw in this line. Not only did the Restore get rid of the Windows Update, but it also got rid of my change to the Registry Settings. Whoops.

So, what I had to do was, System Restore back to before the Updates, then change the Registry settings before the update kicked in automatically, then turn the machine off again, reboot, and, voila, I'm back in pre-fuck-up state, without automatic updating enabled.

I actually had a lot of fun looking at some other "Run" commands that change this whole updating scenario from within the Registry. Windows Updates are the spawn of the devil, but the problem would never have arisen if our own IT people hadn't been so keen on controlling everything that users do, down to the air we breathe. And, on top of that, IF we had up-to-date versions of Office, rather than Excel-fucking-2002, the situation would not have arisen either.

Right, let's do some ironing.