Blagging

[peterbirks]

Well, the Snyder and the Stoxtrader poker books arrived this morning. Just what the novice No-Limit player needs, eh? Books on high-stakes short-handed limit and a formula for success in tournaments.

Actually, you'd be surprised how useful such things can be. Although there are big differences between tournament, limit, no limit, pot limit, high and high-low, I'm sure that people underestimate the useful things that can be gleaned from one area and can then be applied to another.

The surgeon telephoned me yesterday, all apologetic, and now I'm booked in for Next Thursday (surgeon) and Friday (orthodontist). Oh, and someone is meant to be coming to fix the washing machine on Friday. And the man phoned up about the bathroom. And I've done my pieces on the currency - currently retired hurt until I'm bag in the zone again.




Texas Hold'em NL $0.50/$1.00

Seat 2: belemonth ($89.40 in chips)
Seat 3: Hero ($108.60 in chips) DEALER
Seat 4: Onnistud ($99.00 in chips)
Seat 5: TTMLY ($37.00 in chips)
Seat 6: predator101 ($72.84 in chips)
Seat 7: Complete Fish ($125.90 in chips)
Seat 8: ihatepantz ($100.00 in chips)
Seat 9: p4ndor4 ($20.00 in chips)
Seat 10: BenjaminLinus ($96.05 in chips)
Onnistud: Post SB $0.50
TTMLY: Post BB $1.00

Dealt to Hero [4♡ 4♣]

predator101: Call $1.00
Complete Fish: Call $1.00
ihatepantz: Fold
p4ndor4: Fold
BenjaminLinus: Fold
belemonth: Fold
Hero: Raise $3.00

speculative. It’s a passive game.

Onnistud: Fold
TTMLY: Fold
predator101: Call $2.00
Complete Fish: Call $2.00

*** FLOP *** [6♠ T◊ A◊]

predator101: Check
Complete Fish: Check
Hero: Bet $7.00
predator101: Fold
Complete Fish: Call $7.00

*** TURN *** [4♠]
Complete Fish: Check
Hero: Bet $25.00
Complete Fish: Call $25.00

*** RIVER *** [K♡]
Complete Fish: Check
Hero: Allin $73.60
Complete Fish: Fold

Should I bet less here?

*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $145.10 Rake $3.00
Hero: wins $145.10


Not much comment on this following hand, apart from the fact that everything worked out nicely. It really played itself.

HAND 2
Texas Hold'em NL $0.50/$1.00 2007-08-16

Seat 1: Hero ($112.65 in chips) DEALER
Seat 3: DonkiLand ($100.50 in chips)
Seat 4: frankdetank81 ($96.50 in chips)
Seat 5: TTMLY ($50.95 in chips)
Seat 6: sessa ($66.65 in chips)
Seat 7: Another Complete Fish ($20.05 in chips)
Seat 8: Villain ($47.50 in chips)
Seat 9: foldurchite ($135.75 in chips)
Seat 10: Gizd4lord ($98.45 in chips)
DonkiLand: Post SB $0.50
frankdetank81: Post BB $1.00

Dealt to Villain [J◊ J♠]
Dealt to Hero [7♠ 7♡]
Dealt to Another Complete Fish [6♠ 9♠]
TTMLY: Fold
sessa: Fold
Another Complete Fish: Raise $4.00
Villain: Call $4.00
foldurchite: Fold
Gizd4lord: Fold
Hero: Call $4.00
DonkiLand: Fold
frankdetank81: Fold

*** FLOP *** [3♠ 4♣ 7♣]

Another Complete Fish: Bet $6.00
Villain: Raise $12.00
Hero: Raise $22.00
Another Complete Fish: Allin $10.05
Villain: Allin $31.50
Hero: Call $21.50

*** TURN *** [A♠]

*** RIVER *** [2♣]

*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $113.55 Rake $3.00
Hero: wins $113.55

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

I thought Snyder on position in no-limit was worth the cost of the book on its own. It's worth investing $11 or so in a donkament and trying the covered-hole-card-play-position-only thing, just to see what happens. I found it enlightening.

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

Guru Birks,

Poker:

Isn't buying poker books a waste of time?

a) You should know it all already.

b) Why follow the herd? Contrarians are more likely to better.

If you must buy books, I have a load going really cheap on Amazon Market Place. Some signed by Spanier and Alvarez.

Money:

Central banks are pumping money into the markets following sub-primers going south. Isn't that throwing bad money after worse? Seeing as money was printed for the original loans and now more is printed because the "types" they lent the money to had no hope of growing wealth to give value to the original printed wealth. So we have devalued our money twice over.

JayBee

[andy-ward-uk.livejournal.com]

"b) Why follow the herd? Contrarians are more likely to better."

So you buy the book to see what you're being contrary against ! Really.

Andy.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Mr Butler...

You can't be a contrarian without knowing what the herd is doing. If you carry on in ignorance, you are "ploughing your own furrow".

But the other point is, I actually enjoy reading poker books -- well, most of them. It's nice to see other points of view, if they are well-expressed. I might say that an initial reading of the first three chapters of Stoxtrader's work is that it is very impressive. He sets out his stall, and explains his reasoning. And he also is not scared to point out instances where, oddly, things haven't panned out as planned (Short-handed Limit, 33 and 22 in the small blind heads up pre-flop anyone?)

PJ

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

"So you buy the book to see what you're being contrary against ! Really.

Andy."

I bought the book because I was a know nothing. Still am so I am clearing shelves.

Deck of cards, 50p?

JayBee

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JayBee,

Central banks are just releasing reserves, they're not "printing" money. No it isnt throwing it away because they're lending it short-term in the money-markets to create liquidity. Central banks weren't doing any lending to dodgy homeowners in the first place so they didnt print any money for the original loans either.

All that's happened is that very low quality debt has been cunningly passed off as mediocre debt and the mugs who bought it have to swallow their losses.

A contrarian would currently be looking to buy sub-prime mortgage securities by the shedload.

matt

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

Thanks,

JayBee

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, there's two sides to this. Or possibly three. And, basically, it just goes to show how shitty most financial reporting is, even in the broadsheet business papers, because all I've read so far is "The ECB and the Feds are releasing X squillion into the markets," which is obviously fairly meaningless.

Mind you, when the education pages publish little gems like "Shock! Horror! 40% of kids at the age of eleven are below average in the core subjects," there's obviously not much of an audience out there for reasoned and informative comment. Leaving aside what variety of average this might be, the stated POV of the journalist in question is, essentially, meaningless at best and self-contradictory at worst.

You are obviously correct in that the money pumped in has been targeted at short-term loans (and by short-term, we're probably talking days, not months, although obviously this will rotate).

You are equally obviously correct in that the central banks aren't buying Confederate scrip ... er ... mortgages in the trailer parks of south Florida. Well, except for the German central bank and IKB, that is. Funny how the Germans can be so anal about inflation (yeah yeah, 1923 and all that) and so casual about flinging money at a busted flush.

What's interesting to me is that I never knew any of this in advance. In terms of economics I am a Complete Fish. All I've done is read the various articles, join the dots and cross the t's, and figure out the basis of what's going on. One would think that a financial journalist should be able to do this for me. I suspect that most of them grew up as wonks, shunning personal contact, and just aren't very good at communicating with actual human beings.

Which is frustrating, because I would like to know the details on all this. Presumably there is a spread on rates for the injected liquidity. Presumably the collective genius of the central banks is an improvement on the brilliant Brown decision to dump half of Britain's gold reserves on the market at a period when gold was at an all-time low. Presumably the central bank spread is distinctly more attractive than the (no doubt) astronomical spread offered by what few short-term institutional lenders are still there. Possibly (but no longer presumably -- see IKB and general panic, above), this spread is still good enough to make the central banks very happy when the short-term loans stop rotating.

I mean, there's a lot to this story, and all we're getting is scare-mongering crap.

PS on Birks' first hand, I'd be interested to know what people's views are on the size of the bet. Thinking as a Complete Fish, I'm assuming that CF had Ax or paint-ten to start with, otherwise the calls make little sense. (I think.) Thinking again as a Complete Fish, I'm going to crap in my chinos when I see the size of the raise on the river. Since CF is the only hand left standing, and since CF has (inexplicably) checked, I would have thought that you throw out all poker sense at this point and make like a fish -- whatever that might be. Raising $25, perhaps?

Are there any poker books out there on how fish think?

I think Mr Chen says

[slowjoe.livejournal.com]

On bet sizing, I dimly recall that MOP says that if you have the nuts or a bluff in NL, you should bet ~41% of the pot, which is about $28-29. That was in the optimal/unexploitable section.

But let's see how this differs from the current hand:
1. I suspect you are playing to exploit
2. You are several hands away from the nuts. (Straight, trip-aces, trip-kings, trip-tens and trip-sixes all beat you.
3. I'm not sure that you'd fire on the river with a bust.

What do these changes mean? I'm not sure. I shall get the book out over the weekend, and see if I can learn something.

Re: I think Mr Chen says

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, the Chen thing doesn't really apply here because I'm not really in "make my bet unexploitable" territory -- partly because this guy is far too bad to know how to exploit. As I think I've written before -- if you are playing opponents at this level against whom you have to play unexploitably, then the best thing for you to do is find another game.

I'm stone-cold certain that I'm winning here. The only way that I am losing is if my opponent has misread his hand (and, yes, that has happened to me in the past) or I have forgotten the rules (and that's happened as well).

So my question is more "what size bet will get called sufficiently often enough by a losing hand within opponent's range to make it the profit-maximising amount?"

In other words, a $73 bet only needs to be called half as often as a $36 bet to be equally profitable.

Against most players at this level the "fold" level kicks in somewhere about half to 2/3 the size of the pot if opponent has a marginal call. Anything less than half the pot and they tend to call with all hands that can beat a bluff. Any more than 2/3 and they tend to fold with anything that isn't near the nuts.

But this guy was a fish, so I guessed that he might call the max bet with a marginal hand.

I'm fairly sure that in fact he had garbage (a missed draw) and was folding to any bet I made. So the question is doubly hypothetical.




PJ

[(Anonymous)]

Here is the Telegraph's article on recent turmoil http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/08/17/bcndow17.xml

It has a plethora of quotes from fund managers, analysts, economists etc and some analysis of the possible knock-on effects for various parties.

By contrast the Guardian offers up an opinion piece so bizarre that it could have been written by a disaffected teenager or 1st year Politics student. Amazingly Larry Elliott has apparently been the paper's economics editor for the last 11 years. I could easily write 5000 words myself on how utterly wrong-headed his take is, but fortunately don't have to as most of my points are well covered in the numerous readers comments - some of which are delicious.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/larry_elliott/2007/08/the_global_financial_markets_h.html

matt