Jan. 3rd, 2011

peterbirks: (Default)
A curious start to the New Year. I put some focus into actually winning some cash at the tables on stars, so stuck to six tables. Result. Win. On FTP I had a bit of a stinker yesterday, but all within the standard scheme of things. Result. Small loss. And so this evening I put in some "training" at the low stakes 25c-50c 6-Max on Party. Result after an hour - down nearly six buy-ins. Once again my mistake was in believing what I read on 2+2, rather than following my own gut instincts. How many times will I ignore my long-learnt dictum that 90%+ of all poker advice is shit?

Still, $300 isn't much in the grand scheme of things, and I expected to lose money while learning opponents' general ranges. Well, I certainly did that tonight. As a general rule, it's just like full ring for most players. If the money goes in, then they have the hand. All these ideas that players are pushing thin value are, at this level, not particularly true. Well, they aren't true at all. It's just like playing the reg-tags on Stars. I would have done far better just to play my normal Full Ring game, ignoring the first three positions.

Part of the handicap that I have to overcome in 6-Max is that in Full Ring I do relatively well from early position and relatively poorly from middle position. Since early position is what is "taken out" of the 6-max game, I have to try to improve my middle position game to compensate. To be frank, all of the stuff you read about the differences in FR vs 6-Max between button vs either of the blinds, or reraises from button over cut-off, are overstated, and it was the assumption by me that opponents would be generally looser and more aggressive in these situations that caused me to come unstuck. If I'd played my normal FR game in these scenarious, I would have saved a lot of money.

Anyhow, moving from a couple of hundred up to a hundred down because of a bad hour at a "low-stakes" game, rather pissed me off. So I went back to FR on Party, first at 50c-$1 and, when the seats became available, at $1-$2. It only took an hour to win back $160 of the $300 I'd lost, and that was enough to ameliorate the feelings of annoyance -- not least because it was nice to feel confident at $1-$2 again -- something that the excessive volatility of last March/April had rather battered out of me.

So, the bankroll is static, concealing the pleasing news of beating the Stars 50c-$1 in open play for a couple of days, a comfortable perfomance at $1-$2 on Party, and a complete fucking disaster (but a learning experience) at 6-Max. As long as I stay away from reading the hand histories on 2+2, I'll be okay.

________
peterbirks: (Default)
"VAT will hit families - Milliband", says the BBC headline, noting that Ed Milliband had calculated the cost of the VAT increase to the "average family". It's always the family, isn't it? Never mind the fact that half of all meals eaten in the UK are now eaten alone, and that a third of the population live in single-occupancy homes. Never mind that the average size of the household in the UK is now less than 2.5. Never mind the fact that "the average family" is a mythical concept beloved by politicians and indicative of how far behind the times they are when it comes to assessing the reality of the world.

If you add in the number of people who share flats or houses but don't consider themselves to be a family, and then add on to that the number of people (mainly elderly) living in what some might call care homes andd other might call institutions, then you have a situation where the "family as economic unit" is in a distinct minority.

As I watch and listen to the BBC and politicians I get the feeling that "the family" is some kind of holy grail. If we are moving away from it, we want to get back to it. And even if it's an uncommon occurrence now rather than a common one, politicians and the media are still going to see it as "the norm", no matter what the evidence to the contrary.

Why not say what the impact of the VAT rise is on "the average household"? Or, even better, on "the average person"? Perhaps the last shows the stupidity of the entire affair, because there is no such thing as "the average person". However, the media (and politicians) still subscribe to the mythical concept of an "average family". It conjures up an image in the brain. And it's a nice, comfortable, "England that we have lost" image. It's relentlessly middle class - suburban, comfortable but not ostentatious. It is, in other words, a version of a concept which politicians in England have relied on for centuries - Albion.

That's one of the sweet things about England, I suppose. While in the US the old saying is "it's a country where anyone born here can grow up to become President" (passim the George Washington myth), in England - or, rather, Albion – the height of ambition is a wife/husband, a couple of well-groomed kids, a decent saloon car (nothing too flash, mind), and a semi-detached in Purley. In terms of aspirations, England doesn't shoot for the moon; it shoots for Stevenage.

No wonder so many young English people can't wait to travel the world. In a country like ours, where ambition remains so restricted, anyone with a dream of greater things has to get out as quickly as possible.

Not that everyone does want to escape. There's a wonderful line in the play Jerusalem where one of the characters (the one who complains vociferously that South Wales is now included in the regional news programme "Points West", asking what on earth someone in Wiltshire would care about what was happening in Wales) is confronted with the life ahead of him, a life of working in a dead-end job from nine-to-five, getting pissed on a Friday night, going to a League Two game on Saturday afternoon, getting pissed on Saturday night, and recovering on Sunday beore the whole cycle repeats itself the following week. His response was "Sign me up!!!".

The more I look at the news these days (which, to be fair, is less and less), the more I am reminded of news stories of decades gone by. The police haven't moved on from Victorian times in their naive belief in some kind of "criminal underclass". The politicians haven't moved on from Victorian times in their concerns at "young hooligans". And the public most certainly haven't moved on from Victorian times when they talk about "bloody foreigners". People are still concerned about the minuscules of class, and they still have an image of an ideal family that might be right out of the pages of the Rupert Bear annual.

Will Ed Milliband ever say that he is concerned about the impact of VAT increases on the 19-year-old unemployed black kid in Deptford who gets involved in drug dealing because, well, what else is there to do and, hey, you gotta make a bob or two, haven't you? I think not. He will talk about the "problem" of this situation, and what can be done to fix it, but the distinction is clear. The "family" is the aspiration, a part of English society, whereas to the politicians and the media the young black kid (perhaps with a kid or two of his own already) is not a part of society. He is part of a problem that needs to be fixed (perhaps by giving him adult education classes so that, if all goes well, he will "settle down and start a family").

Is it any wonder that it isn't just single people like me who feel increasingly alienated from the country that we live in? For all the talk of "inclusivity" (a favourite platitude) the situation hasn't changed in societal, economic or socio-economic terms for decades. Some people are on the inside, and some people aren't. And that isn't a matter of race or wealth. It's a matter of the unspoken "this is the way you should want to be, and if you don't want to be that way, then you are a problem. Let us help you".

Sod that for a lark. Sounds a bit like the "cures" they have for homosexuality in the more benighted parts of the US.

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