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Books and stuff
Feb. 10th, 2011 01:42 pmAfter the sheer effort of will required to read the (ultimately rewarding) Infinite Jest it came as little surprise that a mere 280-pager from Ian McEwan would not take long. Sadly, I found Ian McEwan's Solar a bit of a disappointment.
I think that I tend to judge fiction writers these days on the level of "could I have written this?" Books such as McEwan's On Chesil Beach, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Boyd's New Confessions and, yes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest get a resounding "no" (although I like to think that if I was mad enough and willing to devote the time, I could put together an opus like Wallace's book).
But with Solar I don't feel that McEwan produced anything spectacular. There are of course the occasionally superb descriptive phrases, but the book as a whole struck me as an episodic description of an anti-hero, as if no-one had ever written a book with an anti-hero before. I was at times reminded (unfavourably) of Burgess's Enderby trilogy, or (less unfavourably) of Amis's One Fat Englishman. And even the plot development was rather predictable. By the end, McEwan is laying the anti-hero stuff on so thickly that you feel like crying "enough, already!"
Now, bad McEwan is better than good most-other-writers-in-English. But when he comes out with such masterpieces as Atonement and On Chesil Beach, I suppose I come to expect better from him than the likes of Saturday and Solar.
+++++++
I cleared the Full Tilt Ironman six-monthly bonus yesterday, for a welcome $350. I had been considering emptying the account at that point (about $2.5k) and trying to rebuild through freerolls with my Ironman medals (some 600 in the bank I think) and full tilt points (about 52,000 in the bank). Spending any of these while getting rakeback is a marginally bad EV move (because it cuts into your RB even if you don't cash), which is why they have been building up. However, FTP cunningly decided to let me run OK for a few days - just to drag me back in.
Although the quality of play on FTP is probably slightly worse than Pokerstars, it's a site where there seems to be a large proportion of disbelievers and flat callers pre-flop. That leads to a situation where, if you are a fairly aggressive raiser, you really do have to hit some flops to win money. And I suspect that the volatility is concomitantly higher. If you add to that the fact that I play fewer hands on FTP than on Stars, it's little surprise that I can "feel" as if I am going through a much worse run (say, 8 losing days on the trot) than I really am.
Focusing as I am on stack sizes and opponents' tendencies rather than "do I think I am in front?", I've managed to reduce the number of difficult decisions per session. This has led to a style which I suspect many of the regs on 50c-$1 NL find decidedly odd. My continuation bet in or out of position has probably fallen from 75% to 60%, while my check-call percentage has risen in equal proportion. Instead of the strategy of "build the pot if you think you are in front and make the guy pay to draw", I am tending more towards a "build the pot if you already know precisely what you are going to do if opponent reraises big, and if you know he has a habit of reraising big, only CB an overpair if you are willing to go to an all-in showdown on just that".
This varies from opponent to opponent and from day to day. Sometimes I'll go for the all-in "gamble" (say KK vs a laggyish opponent on a dry board), other times I'll play smaller ball and check-call both KK and AKs with a backdoor straight and flush draw.
The interesting thing about this is that, although a bet can cause someone to semi-bluff-raise KQ on a board such as J95, when you check into them, they often check behind, and your AK gets to showdown (and wins), particularly if you snap check-call any flop bet (just as you do with an overpair).
Then, with the overpair, you can also check-call the flop, check-check the turn and put in a 3/4 pot bet on the rag river in a way that looks all the world like an AK trying to steal against a smaller pair.
+++++++++
That said, it all remains a struggle. It's now all about giving your regular opponents opportunities to make a mistake. If you give them more opportunities to make mistakes than they give you, then it's likely that you will win money off them. There are two exceptions to this. The first is that if your opponent gives you fewer oppoertunities, but they are for bigger money, then he might end up taking money from you. The second is that some guys simply don't make many mistakes at all (i.e., they make fewer than you do), and they are skilled at turning a position where you gave them an opportunity to make a mistake into one where they give you that opportunity (the all-in four-bet being a standard example).
All this is very different from playing the fish at the weekend. There is no need to give these guys opportunities to make mistakes, because they will find such opportunities without your help. So you play in a much more ABC style and wait for them to fuck up. Chances are that they will give their money to someone else, but every so often they will give it to you. I see so many regs playing "subtly" against these weaker players and then berating them because such subtlety has gone over their heads. Yesterday, for example, I raised pre-flop with TT and was called in the big blind. Flop came T52 rainbow and after six raises we were both all-in. He had A2 no flush draw. No need for subtlety there.
_____________________
I think that I tend to judge fiction writers these days on the level of "could I have written this?" Books such as McEwan's On Chesil Beach, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Boyd's New Confessions and, yes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest get a resounding "no" (although I like to think that if I was mad enough and willing to devote the time, I could put together an opus like Wallace's book).
But with Solar I don't feel that McEwan produced anything spectacular. There are of course the occasionally superb descriptive phrases, but the book as a whole struck me as an episodic description of an anti-hero, as if no-one had ever written a book with an anti-hero before. I was at times reminded (unfavourably) of Burgess's Enderby trilogy, or (less unfavourably) of Amis's One Fat Englishman. And even the plot development was rather predictable. By the end, McEwan is laying the anti-hero stuff on so thickly that you feel like crying "enough, already!"
Now, bad McEwan is better than good most-other-writers-in-English. But when he comes out with such masterpieces as Atonement and On Chesil Beach, I suppose I come to expect better from him than the likes of Saturday and Solar.
+++++++
I cleared the Full Tilt Ironman six-monthly bonus yesterday, for a welcome $350. I had been considering emptying the account at that point (about $2.5k) and trying to rebuild through freerolls with my Ironman medals (some 600 in the bank I think) and full tilt points (about 52,000 in the bank). Spending any of these while getting rakeback is a marginally bad EV move (because it cuts into your RB even if you don't cash), which is why they have been building up. However, FTP cunningly decided to let me run OK for a few days - just to drag me back in.
Although the quality of play on FTP is probably slightly worse than Pokerstars, it's a site where there seems to be a large proportion of disbelievers and flat callers pre-flop. That leads to a situation where, if you are a fairly aggressive raiser, you really do have to hit some flops to win money. And I suspect that the volatility is concomitantly higher. If you add to that the fact that I play fewer hands on FTP than on Stars, it's little surprise that I can "feel" as if I am going through a much worse run (say, 8 losing days on the trot) than I really am.
Focusing as I am on stack sizes and opponents' tendencies rather than "do I think I am in front?", I've managed to reduce the number of difficult decisions per session. This has led to a style which I suspect many of the regs on 50c-$1 NL find decidedly odd. My continuation bet in or out of position has probably fallen from 75% to 60%, while my check-call percentage has risen in equal proportion. Instead of the strategy of "build the pot if you think you are in front and make the guy pay to draw", I am tending more towards a "build the pot if you already know precisely what you are going to do if opponent reraises big, and if you know he has a habit of reraising big, only CB an overpair if you are willing to go to an all-in showdown on just that".
This varies from opponent to opponent and from day to day. Sometimes I'll go for the all-in "gamble" (say KK vs a laggyish opponent on a dry board), other times I'll play smaller ball and check-call both KK and AKs with a backdoor straight and flush draw.
The interesting thing about this is that, although a bet can cause someone to semi-bluff-raise KQ on a board such as J95, when you check into them, they often check behind, and your AK gets to showdown (and wins), particularly if you snap check-call any flop bet (just as you do with an overpair).
Then, with the overpair, you can also check-call the flop, check-check the turn and put in a 3/4 pot bet on the rag river in a way that looks all the world like an AK trying to steal against a smaller pair.
+++++++++
That said, it all remains a struggle. It's now all about giving your regular opponents opportunities to make a mistake. If you give them more opportunities to make mistakes than they give you, then it's likely that you will win money off them. There are two exceptions to this. The first is that if your opponent gives you fewer oppoertunities, but they are for bigger money, then he might end up taking money from you. The second is that some guys simply don't make many mistakes at all (i.e., they make fewer than you do), and they are skilled at turning a position where you gave them an opportunity to make a mistake into one where they give you that opportunity (the all-in four-bet being a standard example).
All this is very different from playing the fish at the weekend. There is no need to give these guys opportunities to make mistakes, because they will find such opportunities without your help. So you play in a much more ABC style and wait for them to fuck up. Chances are that they will give their money to someone else, but every so often they will give it to you. I see so many regs playing "subtly" against these weaker players and then berating them because such subtlety has gone over their heads. Yesterday, for example, I raised pre-flop with TT and was called in the big blind. Flop came T52 rainbow and after six raises we were both all-in. He had A2 no flush draw. No need for subtlety there.
_____________________
