(no subject)

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

Actually, I don't. But that was such a great paragraph with which to start a chapter (and I bet that no-one gets where it is from) that I felt obliged to quote it.

I'm not sure what I want to talk about really. I liked the line from the CEO of Germany's West LNB, where he described the current money market situation and lack of willing lenders as "not uncritical overall".

Well, that's a nice spin on the matter.

Then Barclays had to/chose to borrow more than £300m under the BoE emergency facility, but I thought that was less interesting (UK-wise) than HBOS's statement that it was providing financing for its Grampian Financing unit "until such a time as market pricinfg improves". The point here is that HBOS's cash is not in a bottomless pit. As one analyst put it, its position is "constrained".

But, panic over? The money markets turned around yesterday. Did the arbitragers move in to save the day? Quite possibly. One month bills back up 87 basis points to 2.98% (a move of such a size that until last Friday it would probably have made the headlines) and, in a topsy-turvy nuthouse of an economy we have at the moment, the hilarious situation of there being an auction of government debt (remember, the debt that bankers were killing each other to buy last Thursday and Friday?) where there was hardly enough interest to buy the $32bn of securities on offer. Now, since about $50bn of commercial asset paper matures every business day, one has to assume that quite a large proortion of that was renewed -- by someone.

And that's also an indication that the buyers are appearing. One forced seller of loans offloaded the debt at 95 cents on the dollar. Fairly poor if you think that they could probably have sold it at 99 cents on the dollar a couple of weeks ago, but a lot better than "no buyers at any price".

I think that all the big money was made on Friday, Monday and yesterday, and now all that we have to see is how far the appetite for risk has unwound at a fundamental level. In other words, what will the spread of charged rates be between T-Bills and single A securities, and between single A and "junk", when the dust settles? And, perhaps equally importantly, will the lenders develop new ways to assess risk, now that the credibility of the rating gencies has been shot to hell?

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Some questions I've been asking myself.

If I am in the Big Blind, and the button raises first-in to 4x the BB, what are my ranges for

(a) calling and (b) reraising,

given the following scenarios: (I have a full stack of 100 BBs in all the situations).

Button raises 50%: Button is full stack
Button raises 50%: Button is half stack

Button raises 30%: Button is full stack
Button raises 30%: Button is half stack

Button raises 20%: Button is full stack
Button raises 20%: Button is half stack
Button raises 20%: Button is short stack

Part Two:

If I reraise, I'm invariably leading out. But if I call, what should I do in the following situations for all the above scenarios.

a) I flop top pair mediocre kicker
b) I flop complete air (percentage check-fold, percentage bet out, percentage check raise?)
d) I flop a vulnerable overpair
e) I flop an eight or nine-out draw to the near-nuts or nuts, but which could be vulnerable to a redraw.

These are situations that arise fairly frequently and I think that at the moment I am giving up my blind far too often.

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