![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I had half-contemplated doing an "around the blogs" piece, but, since I can no longer access anything vaguely interesting from work, I will have to leave that for another time.
Part of my motivation for this came from reading some of the stuff being spouted about the World Series, which just left me thinking "well, if this is what these people think, then there must be hope for me on the tournament circuit". The Pokerstars blog played the game of setting up an easy target and then shooting it down, with Otis saying (and I have to quote from memory here) that he always laughed when people said that poker was a game of luck. Otis then went on to "disprove" this theory (one that I haven't actually read anywhere) by citing the performance of Humberto Brenes in this year's World Series.
Now, what people say, is not that poker is a game of luck, but that there is a lot more luck in tournaments than people like to accept. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Fooled By Randomness would know that the "evidence" produced by Otis (viz, the performance of one player who is good) does not disprove this theory at all. Indeed, one could claim that, if poker were purely random, at least one player would be likely to have performed as well as Humberto. Of course, poker isn't purely random, and I don't recall reading recently of anyone who claimed that it was. But if you want to disprove such a (non-existent) claim, at least do so on firmer statistical ground than "this guy has done really well this year, so it must be a game of skill".
Meanwhile the folding by Katja Thater of a pair of Queens pre-flop because the TV final table was imminent generated some commentary on 50 Outs Twice. I'm less unhappy about the analysis that Katja was right to fold to a 50K raise from a tight player (both had about 350K in front of them), despite the fact that Katja had position, because Jan's point that "the (televised part of) the final table was more important than the extra 70K she would probably have won from the hand". I'm less unhappy about this because, in metagame terms, Jan is probably right. This was only a thousand dollar buy-in tournament. Andy Ward, had he been his own auntie, wouldn't have bothered getting out of bed for it. The prize money, in this sense, probably was less important than the value to Katja for getting to the final table as a representative of Pokerstars. This is yet one more example of how sponsorship can distort the game. But, since a tournament is a distortion of the cash game on which it was originally based, one can't really moan.
++++++++
I had one of those shitty days on the forex yesterday where my timing was all wrong. My trading style means that I get out without suffering too much damage, but it's irritating when you cut your losses, only to see the market immediately spring back in the direction on which you had originally punted. When it happens three times in a day, you get the right hump.
+++++++
I spend several hours a year moaning at how hopeless the BBC Six o'Clock News is, so I will not complain that there will be no feature by it today on perhaps the most significant news item of the day, for the ordinary person on the street.
This was the news that HSBC, which had attempted to cut back on its "highly competitive" mortgage offers (i.e., loss leaders for new customers) had seen its share of the mortgage market devastated. HSBC duly retreated.
However, the significant part of this story was the background. A large number of lenders in the early years of the decade lent out a lot of money at high interest rates that they had borrowed at low interest rates. The catch was, the money they lent was on unsecured credit cards. Eventually the bad debts started to mount up.
So, one Monday morning, LendBundles Bank had a board meeting, and discussed what they could do with all this money that they wanted to lend.
"I know", said one bright spark, "Let's make it secured lending!"
"Brilliant!" said the CEO of LendBundles Bank. So, that's what they did.
Unfortunately, the boards of PushIt! Online Bank, Germany's GelassenKreditBank, and newly formed AnyJobWillDo Specialist Lenders, all had the same idea that same Monday morning.
The result was a flood of easy borrowing if you have anything on which to secure your loan and a regular salary (never mind how much). The downside is that, just because a loan is "secured", there is still a catch. Because the security is an illiquid asset. One would have thought that the banks would have learnt this before, but I guess that everyone who was around in the early 1990s has left by now.
Part of my motivation for this came from reading some of the stuff being spouted about the World Series, which just left me thinking "well, if this is what these people think, then there must be hope for me on the tournament circuit". The Pokerstars blog played the game of setting up an easy target and then shooting it down, with Otis saying (and I have to quote from memory here) that he always laughed when people said that poker was a game of luck. Otis then went on to "disprove" this theory (one that I haven't actually read anywhere) by citing the performance of Humberto Brenes in this year's World Series.
Now, what people say, is not that poker is a game of luck, but that there is a lot more luck in tournaments than people like to accept. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Fooled By Randomness would know that the "evidence" produced by Otis (viz, the performance of one player who is good) does not disprove this theory at all. Indeed, one could claim that, if poker were purely random, at least one player would be likely to have performed as well as Humberto. Of course, poker isn't purely random, and I don't recall reading recently of anyone who claimed that it was. But if you want to disprove such a (non-existent) claim, at least do so on firmer statistical ground than "this guy has done really well this year, so it must be a game of skill".
Meanwhile the folding by Katja Thater of a pair of Queens pre-flop because the TV final table was imminent generated some commentary on 50 Outs Twice. I'm less unhappy about the analysis that Katja was right to fold to a 50K raise from a tight player (both had about 350K in front of them), despite the fact that Katja had position, because Jan's point that "the (televised part of) the final table was more important than the extra 70K she would probably have won from the hand". I'm less unhappy about this because, in metagame terms, Jan is probably right. This was only a thousand dollar buy-in tournament. Andy Ward, had he been his own auntie, wouldn't have bothered getting out of bed for it. The prize money, in this sense, probably was less important than the value to Katja for getting to the final table as a representative of Pokerstars. This is yet one more example of how sponsorship can distort the game. But, since a tournament is a distortion of the cash game on which it was originally based, one can't really moan.
++++++++
I had one of those shitty days on the forex yesterday where my timing was all wrong. My trading style means that I get out without suffering too much damage, but it's irritating when you cut your losses, only to see the market immediately spring back in the direction on which you had originally punted. When it happens three times in a day, you get the right hump.
+++++++
I spend several hours a year moaning at how hopeless the BBC Six o'Clock News is, so I will not complain that there will be no feature by it today on perhaps the most significant news item of the day, for the ordinary person on the street.
This was the news that HSBC, which had attempted to cut back on its "highly competitive" mortgage offers (i.e., loss leaders for new customers) had seen its share of the mortgage market devastated. HSBC duly retreated.
However, the significant part of this story was the background. A large number of lenders in the early years of the decade lent out a lot of money at high interest rates that they had borrowed at low interest rates. The catch was, the money they lent was on unsecured credit cards. Eventually the bad debts started to mount up.
So, one Monday morning, LendBundles Bank had a board meeting, and discussed what they could do with all this money that they wanted to lend.
"I know", said one bright spark, "Let's make it secured lending!"
"Brilliant!" said the CEO of LendBundles Bank. So, that's what they did.
Unfortunately, the boards of PushIt! Online Bank, Germany's GelassenKreditBank, and newly formed AnyJobWillDo Specialist Lenders, all had the same idea that same Monday morning.
The result was a flood of easy borrowing if you have anything on which to secure your loan and a regular salary (never mind how much). The downside is that, just because a loan is "secured", there is still a catch. Because the security is an illiquid asset. One would have thought that the banks would have learnt this before, but I guess that everyone who was around in the early 1990s has left by now.
