Sideways

A trip to the Tate Modern yesterday, where I decided to buy a small Rothko. Unfortunately, it's the wrong shape for the wall where I plan to hang it, so I shall turn it sideways. I doubt that he would have minded.

Also, a very nice contemporary piece by an artist whose name I forget, but which was entirely the wrong colour for my wallpaper. I intend to e-mail her and ask her whether she would consider repainting it with a yellow theme, rather than red.


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Here's an interesting experiment you can play at home. Take quotes from US candidate's campaign speeches. Mix 'em up, and see if you can ascribe a single quote to a single speaker.

Let's try these:

"Reclaiming the American Dream"

"Are we going to go backwards or go forwards"

"I have the ability to bring the people together"

"Together we're going to take back America because I see an America where our economy works for everyone, not just those at the top, where prosperity is shared and we create good jobs that stay right here in America."


"I see an America where when a young man or woman signs up to serve our country, we sign up to serve them too."


"I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges -- from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics. "

"That's the America I see -- that's the America we will build together."


Well, the first half is Obama, the second half, Clinton. But the point is that the rhetoric in the same. What does "are we going to go backwards or forwards?" mean as a question. I'm sorry, I hadn't heard any candidate say "backwards is the way forward".


Interestingly, at least the republicans appear to be sticking to issues rather than rhetoric, even if you disagree with them. You can't imagine Obama or Clinton saying the following:

"A couple of days before I arrived in Baghdad, a suicide car bomb destroyed a large, busy marketplace. It was a bit unusual, because new U.S. and Iraqi security measures in Baghdad have reduced the number of car bomb attacks. But this time the terrorists had a new tactic: they drove their car to a security checkpoint and were waved through because there were two small children in the back seat. The terrorists then walked away from the car, leaving the children inside it, and triggered the explosion."

If anyone but McCain had said that, I might have doubted it. I might disagree with some of the stuff he says. But, hell, at least he doesn't reside in platitudes and an attitude of "I'll say anything that sounds good, so long as I don't have to commit myself".

Huckabee, too, may be just this side of commitable (in the other sense of the word", but, hell, at least he doesn't try to keep it a secret.


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Decorators should start today...

Organizing

"Have you booked?" my friend asked as we were walking into the centre of Greenwich on Saturday night for a meal.

"No", I replied.

"Oh. So you think that we'll get a table, on a Saturday night?"

"Sure", I said, with a confidence that I didn't actually feel.

I would like to pretend that this was some kind of progress in my psych -- that I had managed to resist my temptation to over-organize; that, indeed, I had achieved a kind of Harrington/Challinger Nirvana.

But none of this was true. It was just pure incompetence on my part. Greenwich, I had observed, was full of restaurants. How hard could it be to find a table?

Well, surprisingly, not all that hard, given that the first three restaurants we passed were all packed solid. Although the Indian that we went into had a maitre'd who immediately asked "Have you booked?" his response to the negative was, well, just seat yourselves downstairs at the bar and wait. And it was only about 15 minutes.

So, disorganization rocks.

Actually, it was quite a disorganized kind of place. The food turned out to be much nicer than it was at the Taste Of India (the rather larger Indian in Greenwich on the other side of the road), but your chance of getting what you ordered rather than what someone else had ordered seemed slight. Within 10 seconds of us sitting down we were presented with poppadums and pickles. Wow, I thought. That's frighteningly efficient. But, no, it was the wrong table.

Then the table on our left and the table on our right received the wrong meals. Perhaps they haven't worked out what number each table is. Or perhaps (see an earlier post) they just use the Indian numbering system. That would explain a lot.

We over-ordered. The starters were yummy; the poppadums and pickles were scrumptious. And I was full.

So, I topped my new found "not-organizing" style with my "can I have a doggy bag" style. And they brought us one. With food in it.

Plus point: It was in a microwaveable plastic container.
Minus point: Only the chicken and the spinach was in there. No sign of my lamb dish (which I was looking forward to eating when I wasn't already stuffed to the gills) and no sign of the rice.

And then they presented the bill, only to come back 30 seconds later in a panic, taking it back, and returning with something added to it that they had forgotten in the first place. Perhaps I should have checked it. I probably paid for the table next to me as well....

And I ate the chicken and spinach tonight (with, I think, some paneer or tofu in it as well) and it was yummy. I shall return there when less full and report back on its name and whether they've got the hang of the more technical bits of running a restaurant besides the actual cooking, which is top-notch.

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Lovers of Arcade Fire obviously include British Sea Power, who were on Jools on Friday night. I got the feeling that they sat down one Wednesday evening in the pub and said (a bit like Marc Bolan probably did when he'd had two years in Tyrannosaurous Rex) "look, it's all very well having a cult following and cult status, but it doesn't pay the bills, does it? Shall we make a hit album?" And so the pseudo Arcade Fire/Flaming Lips/Polyphonic Spree version of BSP was born. Cool.

I've found another set of Jools Holland episodes on video -- the late 1998 series. I transferred one of those episodes onto DVD tonight and it struck me how Jools featured Robbie Williams quite often, despite his "naff" status at the time. In retrospect, you can see why. Robbie Williams was remarkably good. Perhaps it's with the benefit of later knowledge that you can see (or imagine that you see) the mental strain he was under. But you can't fault the energy of his performances.

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I don't like to write much about pre-flop play, because I think that this is where most of the money is won or lost -- not on difficult river decisions. Although, speaking of the latter, I was very interested in a post by a guy who said that he was deliberately setting up river plays where his opponent could make an all-in pot-sized bet on the river against his own TPTK, with ehich he would immediately call. This is precisely the scenario that FMM have said you ought to avoid, because it is a "tricky decision". But that is bollocks, because if opponent on average bluffs too often, then you win by always calling, whereas if he bluffs to rarely, then you win by always folding to his bets. It's only if opponent bets to the saddle point that you are in trouble. And not many opponents do that at the $100 and $200 buy-in levels.

Anyway, as this blogger observed, if you make this set-up play against the people who can't resist a bluff on the river, then you make more money by giving yourself the theoretically difficult decision than if you make things easy for yourself through different betting levels on earlier rounds (which is the FMM recommendation in order to avoid the "tough decision" on the river).

I'd come to this conclusion myself (that there was no intrinsic advantage to giving yourself "easy" decisions on later street) and it was nice to read this somewhere else. (I daresay there's somewhere in the FMMM book, probably a small footnote, that mentions the above scenario, because they often seem to put "exceptions" in the footnotes. But the point here is that it's too common a scnario to be treated as an exception. It's approaching a fundamental strategy.)

Anyhoo, back to a preflop decision.


50c/$1 NL
SB: Irrelevant
BB: Not much known, looks like 30/6 on a few numbers: Has only $11.50 left
MP1: Not much known, full stack
MP2 Not much known. short stack
You: Just posted: Dealt 9s 7s


MP1 limps. MP2 limps. You check. Button folds. SB folds. Big blind goes all in for his last $10.50. MP1 folds, MP2 folds. Do you call?

I was soooo marginal on this. I later poker-stoved it and it looks like my "marginal" instincts were correct. I was getting 16.50-to-9.50 for my bet, and I made myself about 35% against his range when running it through pokerstove. In metagame terms, that's probably a call, even if you are slightly negative EV.

But I'd be interested if some people think it an automatic call. I would say that it only becomes that if you think opponent is going all-in more than 30% of the time. My guess was somewhere in the region of 20% to 25%. The odd thing is, as opponent's all-in range loosens, things don't get that much better for you if you have 97-suited, because the hands that then come into the mix are the hands which have you dominated.

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Oh, and one final thing for the less worldy among you.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS V-DAY, or VDAY, or V DAY.

It's a contraction pushed upon you by marketers and the like who think you are too stupid to cope with a word as long as "Valentine". Disabuse them of their foolishness. Boycott the term V-Day. I shall name and shame any blogs that I find using it.

After all, the sentence "Will you be my Valentine?" makes sense.

The sentence "Will you be my V?" sounds merely slightly obscene.

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