looking for astronauts
May. 27th, 2007 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksSometimes people look in the wrong places for things. If you are going to go looking for astronauts, the best place to look is not in space ("because that's where astronauts go") but in the NASA training centre. OK, sure, anyone that you find in space is very likely to be an astronaut. But, in the words of that great 20th century philosopher Douglas Adams, space is very big, unbelievably big. You could spend many lifetimes trawling space and not finding anyone. So, while the conditional probability if you find someone in space of them being an astronaut is 1, and while a large number of the people you find at the NASA training centre might not be astronauts (making the conditional probability nearer to 1% than to 100%), you best bet is still to go to the NASA training centre rather than into space in your astronaut hunt.
It's also cheaper.
I'm sure that I started this with the plan of moving onto some poker-related tale and how sometimes it was best to look where there were lots of things, a few of which were what you wanted, rather than where there were very few things, all of which were what you wanted. You know, kind of like the "Prayer For Today" on Radio Four each morning, where our token religious person starts off talking about something ordinary, before mentioning God about thirty seconds in. If you are bored and have spent the night with someone who doesn't mind doing over-unders, set your spread at 29 seconds to 35 seconds on when either "God", "Jesus" or "The Bible" will first be mentioned. It's as if the people speaking know that to start their talk with those phrases will turn people off. Personally, I preferred the old types of Prayer For Today, before they started importing all kinds of other religions with that ghastly all-encompassing liberal culture which is the epitome of the BBC. Yes, I preferred those talks that started "YOU WILL ALL BURN IN HELLLLL!!!!!" I miss Calvinism.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, starting off on one topic and then relating it to another one. Well, one drawback in doing this is that sometimes you focus so much on your lead-in that you forget what you were leading into. So it goes.
The all-encompassing BBC is a real piss-off sometimes. I see that Andrew Marr is doing his best to retain that "British" bit of it with his new series on post-war Britain. Now, Andrew Marr is very good. He is also Scottish. As has been observed many times, the one country that the British government can't afford to give a referendum on independence to is the English, so that we could cut ourselves off from West Lothian and other such places. If there were referenda, the Scottish would vote to stay in the Union, and the English would vote to leave, or so the cynical saying goes.
Of course, in true James Bolam style, from a superb polemic he gave in an episode of "The Likely Lads", my own independence campaign would probably eliminate most of the rest of England as well. I'd half thought that I'd like independence for London, but then I thought that maybe that was too broad. South London perhaps. Then, like the Scots and Welsh, we could copy Ireland and go cap-in-hand to Brussels for subsidies. That way we might get a decent transport infrastructure.
+++++
Damn, I meant to do a summary of other blogs. Tony Holden has started a PokerStars-sponsored blog at http://www.biggerdeal.com. Worth reading if only for the fact that you can get stuff from Al Alvarez. Nice to see Al maintaining the hyphen in "on-line", by the way. It kind of looks like "to-day" and "to-morrow". And yet I recall back in 1996 we actually had a style discussion on the format of the word "email", and I was the only one to argue for no hyphen.
In other areas I remain obstinately old-fashioned. I still favour 'flu over flu, for example. Sometimes I'm even tempted to mount a one-man campaign to bring back the word 'bus.
+++++++
Top post of the week was Dr Pauly's post of an email he sent to a friend who was struggling at online poker. (http://taopoker.blogspot.com). Absolutely spot on in so many places.
Masterful.
I was talking to Richard (Gryko) at Andy Ward's balla-bash a month or so ago and Richard said that the year that he played the tournament circuit, he did okay, but he still ended the year broke. As he said, he could have stayed in flop-houses (rather than top hotels) and lived frugally (rather than balla'd it up) and walked away at with a wedge. But, as he said, "then... what would be the point?" The high lifestyle is, in this sense, a balanced lifestyle.
++++++
Paradise Poker has completed its migration to the Boss Network. The FPP tournaments still seem to be there, and they've maintained the four-colour deck (I think ... I would have noticed otherwise). OK, Boss Media have fairly crappy software, and you do feel like writing an email to Sporting Bet (offices in Wardour Street, I think) and asking them whether the person in charge of the purchase of Paradise for more than $100m is still with the company, given the nightmare that ensued. SportingBet may try to blame the UIGEA, but it wasn't just that. Paradise was falling behind and the price paid was too high. Sad to think, though, that the site on which I played my formative years, and which was for quite a while easily the biggest site going, is no more. Even now the Paradise software, out-of-date that it is, is a reminder of how good it was in 2000, compared with, say, Planet. Incredible that the people running that company dropped the ball and let Party Poker pick it up. Then again, they did get out of it with many millions of dollars.
A quick glance at PokerSiteScout shows a worrying trend. Svenska Spel, run by the Swedish government, and which only allows Swedish plaers, is now the seventh-busiest site. One of the great things which came out of online poker was its globalisation. For once, styles from different countries could compete. But, now the states are reasserting themselves. It would be a sad day indeed if online poker was dragged back into petty country-restricted domains. It was that kind of petty small-mindedness that exemplified UK casinos. Only the advent of global internet poker forced the stick-in-the-mud UK casinos to change their way of running things. A re-emergence of country-specific poker might be no less profitable for me (to be honest, UK opponents are probably a bit below average) but it would be bad for the game.
++++++++
BlueScouse (http://88percent.blogspot.com/index.html) came up with a classic post last night. He describes one hand where he has T6 in the Big Blind which is, well, amazing. He's taken out the 90K that he had "stashed away". It's down to 69K already. People are emailing him telling him to stop, but perhaps the best way to bring some kind of sense into him would be to email him and ask him where he's next going to play, because you want his money before anyone else gets it. Ed clearly won a lot of his money because people gave his bets too much respect. They no longer give his bets any respect, and he's doing his bollocks as a result. What baffles me is that a long post (so clearly he has a good memory for hands, unless Betfair now has a good hand history system) shows no perception that his opponents will not play him like they play other people. So, in the T6 hand, he says that raiser "might" be on a steal. So then he reraises with his T6. It goes downhill from there.
+++++++++
Andy Ward is chopping it off left, right and centre. Fortunately I follow the Pauly motto and bear no resentment or jealousy to a man averaging an hourly rate probably ten times mine. There are many many more players with an hourly rate far worse than mine.
And I continue to read some blogs from "name" players who, it seems to me, don't really have that much of a clue. Johnny Chan gets criticised for "not giving anything back" (as if he owes the poker world anything), while Phil Ivey suffers for being shrewd enough to realize that he was a fish at golf, and then to come back with a bit of re-hustling. But who are the winners? I mean, the real winners? If I had to punt at this, I'd give the following names:
Ted Forrest
Chris Ferguson
Barry Greenstein
Texas Limit King
and add (at poker) Phil Ivey (although possibly with bad leaks outside of poker)
(I've probably forgotten some names and I probably don't know a few others, because these guys don't normally crave publicity).
If you add in outside business intersts, it grieves me to say it, but Hellmuth is probably making up for the cash he is donking off at the tables. Matusow will always end up broke. Negreanu has far less than he likes to make out he has. Most of the others are little more than hustlers, looking for bucks from "the man" wherever they can, be they "boot camps", endorsements, books, etc. Their actual earnings from poker cannot be that great, because they are focusing so much on stuff that it outside poker.
+++++
I'm sure that Iggy posted a link to a great piece written by an old-time pro, a man who knew all the tricks (sanding the edges of cards, the drawing pin used inside a plaster to mark a deck, collusion, second-dealing, etc etc), but the damn man is posting so often these days that I can't find the link. Darn it.
Oh well, all the rest at http://guinnessandpoker.blogspot.com/ is worth reading anyway.
++++++
Slightly un-poker-related (well, VERY un-poker-related), I am always bemused by the one-time young bucks who change so dramatically when they have children (particularly fathers who have daughters). Their entire attitude to life seems to undergo a damascene conversion.
Anyhow, and this is a slightly serious topic. Everyone knows that a father's love for his children knows no bounds, that he has desperate difficulties coping with thet child's transition to adulthood (particularly if it's a daughter), and that double-standards abound when "what I did with young" is compared with "what my daughter's friends can do when young".
But, and here's the serious point. Whenever there's a paedophile situation, the hatred for the perpetrators knows no bounds. My question is, how does a father react if his daughter or son turns out, not to be a victim, but to be a perpetrator? Which instinct takes over? The hatred for those who abuse children? Or the natural and unbounded love a parent has for his child?
I ask this because, whenever there are posts on the web, it normally begins "As a parent myself..." But perpetrators of these crimes had parents too. Obviously, these people are not posting letters to newspapers starting "As the parent of a murderer myself..." so we don't get that viewpoint. My guess is that the protectiveness would win out over the hatred of those who abuse children. But I just don't know for sure.
+++++++
I managed to get into a five buy-in downswing on Noble, with only one major hand. The rest were just a third of a buy-in here, a third of a buy-in there. As is the way of things, it was counterbalanced by a decent run on Pokerstars.
I definitely have problems playing on Friday and Saturday nights. My win rate is probably okay, but I feel that it should be better. The problem for me is that, after playing a couple of thousand hands against low-limit grinders during the week, it's hard to adjust to the sheer lunacy you occasionaly see at the weekend. This doesn't mean that you should call much more often. As DY mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago, just because they are idiots does not mean that they can't get a hand, and usually when they bet big, they have a hand. But it does mean that you can bet bigger on all streets and get calls. After the midweek series of being cagey when milking tight players for "just what they will stand", it's hard to immediately switch to "bet the lot, because you will get called often enough to make that bet worthwhile".
Basically, while the low-limit NL grinders during the week fail to appreciate when they are getting pot odds to call (so they fold to smallish bets when they should call), so the low-limit players at the weekend often fail to appreciate when they are not getting pot odds to call (so they call when they should fold). It's pointless making an opponent play marginally badly (calling when folding is marginally the right decision) when a bigger bet would get them to play very badly (calling when folding is very much the right decision). Just because something cost you a dollar to buy, don't charge a buck-fifty for it if someone is willing to pay a five-spot.
Much of the downswing came from those irritating flopped flushes or straights that lose on the river (after all or nearly all of the opponent's money has gone in) when the board pairs. I don't really mind these. The odds are in my favour and I managed to get as much money in as possible when I was a good favourite.
More irritating are hands where I wonder whether I should have done something differently. Usually these involve the old favourite, top pair top kicker. But, I had a look at my Noble stats, and something interesting has appeared.
I am in front with AQo, AJo, ATo, A9o, but I am behind with AQs, AJs, ATs and A9s. I'll have a closer look at the hands to work out exactly why this is, but I already have a fairly good idea.
________________________________
It's also cheaper.
I'm sure that I started this with the plan of moving onto some poker-related tale and how sometimes it was best to look where there were lots of things, a few of which were what you wanted, rather than where there were very few things, all of which were what you wanted. You know, kind of like the "Prayer For Today" on Radio Four each morning, where our token religious person starts off talking about something ordinary, before mentioning God about thirty seconds in. If you are bored and have spent the night with someone who doesn't mind doing over-unders, set your spread at 29 seconds to 35 seconds on when either "God", "Jesus" or "The Bible" will first be mentioned. It's as if the people speaking know that to start their talk with those phrases will turn people off. Personally, I preferred the old types of Prayer For Today, before they started importing all kinds of other religions with that ghastly all-encompassing liberal culture which is the epitome of the BBC. Yes, I preferred those talks that started "YOU WILL ALL BURN IN HELLLLL!!!!!" I miss Calvinism.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, starting off on one topic and then relating it to another one. Well, one drawback in doing this is that sometimes you focus so much on your lead-in that you forget what you were leading into. So it goes.
The all-encompassing BBC is a real piss-off sometimes. I see that Andrew Marr is doing his best to retain that "British" bit of it with his new series on post-war Britain. Now, Andrew Marr is very good. He is also Scottish. As has been observed many times, the one country that the British government can't afford to give a referendum on independence to is the English, so that we could cut ourselves off from West Lothian and other such places. If there were referenda, the Scottish would vote to stay in the Union, and the English would vote to leave, or so the cynical saying goes.
Of course, in true James Bolam style, from a superb polemic he gave in an episode of "The Likely Lads", my own independence campaign would probably eliminate most of the rest of England as well. I'd half thought that I'd like independence for London, but then I thought that maybe that was too broad. South London perhaps. Then, like the Scots and Welsh, we could copy Ireland and go cap-in-hand to Brussels for subsidies. That way we might get a decent transport infrastructure.
+++++
Damn, I meant to do a summary of other blogs. Tony Holden has started a PokerStars-sponsored blog at http://www.biggerdeal.com. Worth reading if only for the fact that you can get stuff from Al Alvarez. Nice to see Al maintaining the hyphen in "on-line", by the way. It kind of looks like "to-day" and "to-morrow". And yet I recall back in 1996 we actually had a style discussion on the format of the word "email", and I was the only one to argue for no hyphen.
In other areas I remain obstinately old-fashioned. I still favour 'flu over flu, for example. Sometimes I'm even tempted to mount a one-man campaign to bring back the word 'bus.
+++++++
Top post of the week was Dr Pauly's post of an email he sent to a friend who was struggling at online poker. (http://taopoker.blogspot.com). Absolutely spot on in so many places.
"Players are more concerned about what's going to make them look cool instead of making intelligent decisions. That's all the entire advertising industry is... to prey on your low self-esteem and trick you into buy their product because you think it might make you look cooler than you actually are. .... I'm not surprised more people don't go on more rampages and mass killing sprees since you can't surf the web, change the channel on the TV, or drive down the street without a constant reminder that you suck... so buy this because others will think you are cool and you'll finally get laid. .... The poker table is the last place in the world you should be working out unresolved behavioral and self-esteem issues or trying to correct a miserable childhood."
Masterful.
I was talking to Richard (Gryko) at Andy Ward's balla-bash a month or so ago and Richard said that the year that he played the tournament circuit, he did okay, but he still ended the year broke. As he said, he could have stayed in flop-houses (rather than top hotels) and lived frugally (rather than balla'd it up) and walked away at with a wedge. But, as he said, "then... what would be the point?" The high lifestyle is, in this sense, a balanced lifestyle.
++++++
Paradise Poker has completed its migration to the Boss Network. The FPP tournaments still seem to be there, and they've maintained the four-colour deck (I think ... I would have noticed otherwise). OK, Boss Media have fairly crappy software, and you do feel like writing an email to Sporting Bet (offices in Wardour Street, I think) and asking them whether the person in charge of the purchase of Paradise for more than $100m is still with the company, given the nightmare that ensued. SportingBet may try to blame the UIGEA, but it wasn't just that. Paradise was falling behind and the price paid was too high. Sad to think, though, that the site on which I played my formative years, and which was for quite a while easily the biggest site going, is no more. Even now the Paradise software, out-of-date that it is, is a reminder of how good it was in 2000, compared with, say, Planet. Incredible that the people running that company dropped the ball and let Party Poker pick it up. Then again, they did get out of it with many millions of dollars.
A quick glance at PokerSiteScout shows a worrying trend. Svenska Spel, run by the Swedish government, and which only allows Swedish plaers, is now the seventh-busiest site. One of the great things which came out of online poker was its globalisation. For once, styles from different countries could compete. But, now the states are reasserting themselves. It would be a sad day indeed if online poker was dragged back into petty country-restricted domains. It was that kind of petty small-mindedness that exemplified UK casinos. Only the advent of global internet poker forced the stick-in-the-mud UK casinos to change their way of running things. A re-emergence of country-specific poker might be no less profitable for me (to be honest, UK opponents are probably a bit below average) but it would be bad for the game.
++++++++
BlueScouse (http://88percent.blogspot.com/index.html) came up with a classic post last night. He describes one hand where he has T6 in the Big Blind which is, well, amazing. He's taken out the 90K that he had "stashed away". It's down to 69K already. People are emailing him telling him to stop, but perhaps the best way to bring some kind of sense into him would be to email him and ask him where he's next going to play, because you want his money before anyone else gets it. Ed clearly won a lot of his money because people gave his bets too much respect. They no longer give his bets any respect, and he's doing his bollocks as a result. What baffles me is that a long post (so clearly he has a good memory for hands, unless Betfair now has a good hand history system) shows no perception that his opponents will not play him like they play other people. So, in the T6 hand, he says that raiser "might" be on a steal. So then he reraises with his T6. It goes downhill from there.
$25/$50 6 seater betfair. i'm in the bb playing a $7400 stack. i'm in for like $9k/$10k and tilted, big tilted. it's folded round to the button who 'could' be stealing. so i re-raise the pot to $550 in the bb (the sb passes). i've got 106o. he calls and the flop comes down Js Ad 9s. i bet $900 and he calls. turn is a 6h. i check, he bets $1777 and i call. the river is the 7h. i check, he puts me all in for $4205. i can't really fold here i've caught a pair. so i call and lose to AJ in a $14,886 pot.
+++++++++
Andy Ward is chopping it off left, right and centre. Fortunately I follow the Pauly motto and bear no resentment or jealousy to a man averaging an hourly rate probably ten times mine. There are many many more players with an hourly rate far worse than mine.
And I continue to read some blogs from "name" players who, it seems to me, don't really have that much of a clue. Johnny Chan gets criticised for "not giving anything back" (as if he owes the poker world anything), while Phil Ivey suffers for being shrewd enough to realize that he was a fish at golf, and then to come back with a bit of re-hustling. But who are the winners? I mean, the real winners? If I had to punt at this, I'd give the following names:
Ted Forrest
Chris Ferguson
Barry Greenstein
Texas Limit King
and add (at poker) Phil Ivey (although possibly with bad leaks outside of poker)
(I've probably forgotten some names and I probably don't know a few others, because these guys don't normally crave publicity).
If you add in outside business intersts, it grieves me to say it, but Hellmuth is probably making up for the cash he is donking off at the tables. Matusow will always end up broke. Negreanu has far less than he likes to make out he has. Most of the others are little more than hustlers, looking for bucks from "the man" wherever they can, be they "boot camps", endorsements, books, etc. Their actual earnings from poker cannot be that great, because they are focusing so much on stuff that it outside poker.
+++++
I'm sure that Iggy posted a link to a great piece written by an old-time pro, a man who knew all the tricks (sanding the edges of cards, the drawing pin used inside a plaster to mark a deck, collusion, second-dealing, etc etc), but the damn man is posting so often these days that I can't find the link. Darn it.
Oh well, all the rest at http://guinnessandpoker.blogspot.com/ is worth reading anyway.
++++++
Slightly un-poker-related (well, VERY un-poker-related), I am always bemused by the one-time young bucks who change so dramatically when they have children (particularly fathers who have daughters). Their entire attitude to life seems to undergo a damascene conversion.
Anyhow, and this is a slightly serious topic. Everyone knows that a father's love for his children knows no bounds, that he has desperate difficulties coping with thet child's transition to adulthood (particularly if it's a daughter), and that double-standards abound when "what I did with young" is compared with "what my daughter's friends can do when young".
But, and here's the serious point. Whenever there's a paedophile situation, the hatred for the perpetrators knows no bounds. My question is, how does a father react if his daughter or son turns out, not to be a victim, but to be a perpetrator? Which instinct takes over? The hatred for those who abuse children? Or the natural and unbounded love a parent has for his child?
I ask this because, whenever there are posts on the web, it normally begins "As a parent myself..." But perpetrators of these crimes had parents too. Obviously, these people are not posting letters to newspapers starting "As the parent of a murderer myself..." so we don't get that viewpoint. My guess is that the protectiveness would win out over the hatred of those who abuse children. But I just don't know for sure.
+++++++
I managed to get into a five buy-in downswing on Noble, with only one major hand. The rest were just a third of a buy-in here, a third of a buy-in there. As is the way of things, it was counterbalanced by a decent run on Pokerstars.
I definitely have problems playing on Friday and Saturday nights. My win rate is probably okay, but I feel that it should be better. The problem for me is that, after playing a couple of thousand hands against low-limit grinders during the week, it's hard to adjust to the sheer lunacy you occasionaly see at the weekend. This doesn't mean that you should call much more often. As DY mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago, just because they are idiots does not mean that they can't get a hand, and usually when they bet big, they have a hand. But it does mean that you can bet bigger on all streets and get calls. After the midweek series of being cagey when milking tight players for "just what they will stand", it's hard to immediately switch to "bet the lot, because you will get called often enough to make that bet worthwhile".
Basically, while the low-limit NL grinders during the week fail to appreciate when they are getting pot odds to call (so they fold to smallish bets when they should call), so the low-limit players at the weekend often fail to appreciate when they are not getting pot odds to call (so they call when they should fold). It's pointless making an opponent play marginally badly (calling when folding is marginally the right decision) when a bigger bet would get them to play very badly (calling when folding is very much the right decision). Just because something cost you a dollar to buy, don't charge a buck-fifty for it if someone is willing to pay a five-spot.
Much of the downswing came from those irritating flopped flushes or straights that lose on the river (after all or nearly all of the opponent's money has gone in) when the board pairs. I don't really mind these. The odds are in my favour and I managed to get as much money in as possible when I was a good favourite.
More irritating are hands where I wonder whether I should have done something differently. Usually these involve the old favourite, top pair top kicker. But, I had a look at my Noble stats, and something interesting has appeared.
I am in front with AQo, AJo, ATo, A9o, but I am behind with AQs, AJs, ATs and A9s. I'll have a closer look at the hands to work out exactly why this is, but I already have a fairly good idea.
________________________________
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Andrew Marr
Date: 2007-05-27 12:02 pm (UTC)I find that everyone you talk to has this history hole in their lives which occupies around the 20 years before their birth and the 10 years afterwards, about which they know so little.
Of course Andrew Marr will get on to those scary bits which I learned as current affairs but which are now quintessentially history. The girls have 'learned' about the period from Gorbachev coming to power and the fall of the Berlin wall. Nicki had to write an essay on "How crucial was the shift from Ulbricht to Honecker for the development of the GDR?" which was great stuff. Steph's been studying the recent release of Brigitte Mohnhaupt in the context of the Red Army Faction. One of these days I'm going back to get myself an actual degree and it'll probably be Modern History.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-27 12:08 pm (UTC)Editor, edit thyself!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-28 09:31 am (UTC)The middle ground is definitely the way to go. My ingrained caution prevents me from attaining Gryko-esque balla status but when you're running good (as I am right now, with bells on, I know GIQ) you might as well spend some of the extra on nice things or doing cool stuff, provided you maintain sufficient core bankroll for your bread & butter game. What the hell, maybe not even that. We all die broke. When I was reading about Dpommo & co with their £600 jeans and £20K nights out, I did think, they might as well seeing as they'll go broke at some point anyway. Bluescouse is going to do the lot without ever having left his bedroom. I'm off to Vegas next week and I will not be counting the cents when it comes to expenses. Got to spend it on something.
Meanwhile on 2+2, yesterday I was provoked somewhat into losing my reserve by that lunatic Oliver Tse. He tried to justify Humberto Brenes' appallingly disrespectful table behaviour by saying it got him a deal, wait for it, writing for a website ! FFS. I'm with you on this one. When I see people whoring it up with the sponsors, I can't help asking myself, you really prefer to do this over playing poker ? How could that possibly be ? The only explanation is that they have to do it. To my mind anyway.
And more, so much to write about ! The hysteria over Madeleine McCann is just bizarre. I was at the play-off final at Wembley yesterday, and a full two minutes of half-time was devoted to a big-screen "Find Madeleine" video. Sure, if I see her at Wembley Park tube or in Enfield High Street I'll let you know. And it's not just the perpetrators who have parents. It's also the guy who is unfortunate enough to be over 30, single, maybe something of a loner, and spotted in the general area at the wrong time. One day on the front of the tabloids and gg life. The fact that he's cleared two days later doesn't help him much.
Finally, thanks for your comments on my blog. I'll respond in place. Briefly I sympathize but I'm not quite cynical enough to give up on the whole human race just yet ! When you forget about all the cunts who have elbowed their way to the top in the public eye, maybe I'm a naive hippy but I think most people are decent enough. See you in the week,
Andy.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 11:56 am (UTC)PJ