(no subject)
Aug. 17th, 2007 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksIT may be a hostage to fortune when posting in the middle of a five buy-in downswing (I'm glad that it started mid-session, so that the Excel graph doesn't look so horrible, but pokergrapher doesn't lie...) but I've been thinking a lot about how much to raise in late position, with what hands.
Although I had been doing it somewhat instinctively, a glance at my records shows that I've been changing my raising habits against tight short-stacked players in the blinds who have won a couple of pots. In $100 buy in (50c-$1 blinds) this would mean that they have between $22 and $33 - something like that.
Before I talk about this kind of player, let's have a brief look at the other likely opponents in $100-max games.
1) Tight short-stack with less than $20
2) Tight aggressive deep stack ($60 or more, usually in the $100 region)
3) Loose passive small stack
4) loose passive big stack
5) loose aggressive big stack
I'll perhaps come back to these at a later time. Each seems to me to demand a different kind of hand ranking and a different kind of raise-sizing.
But, for our player with $22 to $33, I seem to have been having considerable success with raises of a level that effectively commits them to the hand, but which I can get away from if my hand isn't strong enough to call a reraise.
This level appears to be about a between a fifth and a quarter of their stack. Effectively that means that any reraise from them has to be a shove. But if they do shove, they risk quite a lot if I wake up with a hand. Say I'm raising 30% of the time in the Cut-off against this kind of player, and I'm raising $5 to $6 every time I raise. What happens?
Well, 95% of the time, at this level, they bottle it. Sometimes the Small blind pokes his nose in and very rarely I get cold called or reraised from the button. I would imagine that as I move up in stakes, these irritants would occur more often (plus reraises from button and Small blind). At this level, it's about a 1-in-10 event that someone fights back (given that the Big Blind is as I described and that I don't have a "Never Fold" player (say, 90% VPIP or more) on the Button or in the SB).
So, even if my raise is in the upper range ($6), I'm taking down the $1.50, 9 times in 10. My fear is that this is exploitable. It won't be long before people catch on to what I am doing and counterplay it. The obvvious counterplay is to reraise more lightly. At the moment they are falling into the trap of waiting for a hand and then cold-calling my raise. That gives me the flop as an escape route if I am raising light.
But, with only $22 to $33 in front of them, my liability isn't that nightmarish anyway, provided I get to see a flop.
And, if I am raising with 30% of hands and the Big blind elects to shove, I can call the shove with ... what? I think I am getting too tight here and that I should be calling the shove with at least a third of the hands with which I raise.
The other counterplay which I haven't come across, but which would cause me a problem, is a "stop and go". Suppose the big blind calls about half the time. Then he pushes all in on a flop such as Paint-x-x. Or Pair-x? Plus, of course, he pushes all in on any flop when he actually makes a hand.
But I haven't come across this play yet. I assume that I have to call very thin in these situations, perhaps with as little as Ace high and a backdoor flush draw.
Washing machine update. Still fucked despite an hour and a half of fun this morning. Another man coming tomorrow (Saturdday). Wet clothes everywhere.
Life is hard.
Although I had been doing it somewhat instinctively, a glance at my records shows that I've been changing my raising habits against tight short-stacked players in the blinds who have won a couple of pots. In $100 buy in (50c-$1 blinds) this would mean that they have between $22 and $33 - something like that.
Before I talk about this kind of player, let's have a brief look at the other likely opponents in $100-max games.
1) Tight short-stack with less than $20
2) Tight aggressive deep stack ($60 or more, usually in the $100 region)
3) Loose passive small stack
4) loose passive big stack
5) loose aggressive big stack
I'll perhaps come back to these at a later time. Each seems to me to demand a different kind of hand ranking and a different kind of raise-sizing.
But, for our player with $22 to $33, I seem to have been having considerable success with raises of a level that effectively commits them to the hand, but which I can get away from if my hand isn't strong enough to call a reraise.
This level appears to be about a between a fifth and a quarter of their stack. Effectively that means that any reraise from them has to be a shove. But if they do shove, they risk quite a lot if I wake up with a hand. Say I'm raising 30% of the time in the Cut-off against this kind of player, and I'm raising $5 to $6 every time I raise. What happens?
Well, 95% of the time, at this level, they bottle it. Sometimes the Small blind pokes his nose in and very rarely I get cold called or reraised from the button. I would imagine that as I move up in stakes, these irritants would occur more often (plus reraises from button and Small blind). At this level, it's about a 1-in-10 event that someone fights back (given that the Big Blind is as I described and that I don't have a "Never Fold" player (say, 90% VPIP or more) on the Button or in the SB).
So, even if my raise is in the upper range ($6), I'm taking down the $1.50, 9 times in 10. My fear is that this is exploitable. It won't be long before people catch on to what I am doing and counterplay it. The obvvious counterplay is to reraise more lightly. At the moment they are falling into the trap of waiting for a hand and then cold-calling my raise. That gives me the flop as an escape route if I am raising light.
But, with only $22 to $33 in front of them, my liability isn't that nightmarish anyway, provided I get to see a flop.
And, if I am raising with 30% of hands and the Big blind elects to shove, I can call the shove with ... what? I think I am getting too tight here and that I should be calling the shove with at least a third of the hands with which I raise.
The other counterplay which I haven't come across, but which would cause me a problem, is a "stop and go". Suppose the big blind calls about half the time. Then he pushes all in on a flop such as Paint-x-x. Or Pair-x? Plus, of course, he pushes all in on any flop when he actually makes a hand.
But I haven't come across this play yet. I assume that I have to call very thin in these situations, perhaps with as little as Ace high and a backdoor flush draw.
Washing machine update. Still fucked despite an hour and a half of fun this morning. Another man coming tomorrow (Saturdday). Wet clothes everywhere.
Life is hard.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
My Beautiful Laundrette
Date: 2007-08-17 08:30 pm (UTC)Possibly Lewisham isn't quite up there in the frou-frou stakes. Oh well, that's Britain for you.
Re: My Beautiful Laundrette
Date: 2007-08-18 08:54 am (UTC)Both seem inimitably preferable.
I had a friend who, when she was in New York, went to the laundrette. Apparently you had to sit on the machine to stop your clothes being stolen. Good for female orgasms, bad for the back, apparently.
PJ
sic transit gloria rossi
Date: 2007-08-18 09:26 am (UTC)What happened to the old, fire-brand edition Birks that we all used to know and fear/love -- he of the part-time Kent Uni academic and socialist theorist existence?
(Oh, right. As we've learnt from our chums Stalin and Blair, poor/academic and socialist don't mix. And, curiously, it is impossible to find a laundrette in Sweden. So even democratic socialism is out.)
And incidentally, why does nobody ever grow up a convinced, dingbat-dyed-blue-in-the-tweed Tory, only to convert to Pol Pottyism at the age of thirty five?
Form follows function, dear boy. The only difference between your washing machine and a laundrette is that you have to pay three quid to use the latter. Well, that and the fact that the laundrette almost certainly offers a far better engineered machine that does a proper job.
I wish I'd read that bit about your friend sitting on a washing machine in New York before I drifted off to sleep, so I could have done something with it. In the spirit of reciprocity, I should point out that apparently playing the piano has a similar effect (presumably without the back-ache). Keep practising that chopsticks thing.
Anyway, since the bloke has presumably come round and fixed the machine this is all ... what's the word? Socialist?
... academic.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 08:14 am (UTC)f.n.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 08:50 am (UTC)That's part of the problem with the democratization of the production process in Word-Land-- much though I am in favour of it in principle. The more stupid amongst the consumers expect as much work from, say, me, as they do from the blog of an FT journalist. Whereas it's part of his job, and this isn't part of mine.
And the FT this morning has about a dozen different stories; it all depends where you want to come at the story from.
Was yesterday a fool's rally? Well, in some places, yes, in others, no. As per usual, what I think were the two most significant events of the day were rather glossed over.
One was that it looks incerasingly likely that Hurricane Dean will hit the Gulf of Mexico (and the economic losses can be as great in the Gulf as on land, particularly with oil already at a high price) and the second was the quite staggering change over the week in the yield on US three-month Treasuries. If anyone wants to see why the dollar has recovered over the past few days, then this was it. Fuck the change in the price in equities -- that's mainly a knock-on effect. But that change in yield (i.e., from 2.94% to 4.62%, I think) was what pushed the Fed into acting as it did yesterday.
As for equities, Mr Daoubleday said a couple of weeks ago that the time had come to move away from M&A targets, and away from leveraged companies attempting to expand through debt. Back into favour will come the old Buffett staples -- big, cash-generative, relatively low gearing.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 10:28 am (UTC)I think you're wrong on the democratisation of comment. Don't mistake me -- there are huge problems with the whole phenomenon, and they range from privacy issues, through mental illness, all the way to matters of simple good taste. Weighting comment through perceived dollar value is not one of them, though. Just ignore the cunts.
The basic problem is the signal-to-noise ratio. If I buy a paper (say the Times, or the Guardian, both of which were once aardvark staples) and it starts feeding me shit, then I stop buying it. There is a demand-driven incentive for the paper to perform. And yes, I realise that there are effectively no national newspapers in the US, which sounds like it dents my theory. It doesn't. It just means that a huge proportion of Americans are either incurious or actually functionally illiterate.
Blogging, on the other hand, is a fundamentally different medium. I doubt that most people who read blogs are aware of this. The nut of it is, as I think you've mentioned yourself (in re fanzines; again, an entirely diferent medium), that a newspaper reporter/columnist consciously writes for other people (or at least the editor and the paycheck), whereas all bloggers write unconsciously for themselves.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 10:42 am (UTC)There was a flight to quality during the week.
On Monday the yield on 4-week (not 3-month) T Bills was 4.62%
By Friday the yield was 2.94%,
PJ
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 10:50 am (UTC)Incidentally, if debt leverage is so hard to come by these days, what about all those companies who are already leveraged up their ass on carry-trade rates? I'm thinking of Centrica and the like. Can't they just issue their own paper, based upon the favourable position they're in, and in effect offer their own debt to the, now presumably desperate, buyers out there?
And what the hell is China going to buy next? Now would be a good time for, say, Wal-Mart. Or failing that, they could turn contrarian, and lump money at the more ludicrously distressed parts of the US economy.
Are the slanty-eyed fools quick enough on their feet to take advantage of all this?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 02:48 pm (UTC)West Bromwicvh (the building society, not the footy team) appears to have abandoned a securitisation on those very grounds. People are averse to risk, so WB thinks it might as well hold onto the risk on its own balance sheet -- which many people (myself included) have said is where banks and building societies should have kept it in the first place.
The other players who functioned on the "no savers, lots of lenders" principle (step forward Northern Rock are, to put it bluntly, in a bit of shit. Not because their past risks and liabilities are in trouble (they've hived all that risk off) but because their business model going forward looks somewhat shaky.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 06:35 pm (UTC)Could you explain briefly the impact of the figures you cite befote I short the ftse?
cheers
f.n.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 07:50 pm (UTC)However, since everyone has suddenly become an expert in interest rates (I never thought I'd see the distinction between the discount rate and the base rate being mentioned on the front page of The Guardian) I should point out something that has not been mentioned.
It's all very well cutting the base rate by half a percent (or, in the case of the UK, not raising it), but that makes little difference to companies wanting to borrow money when risk aversion has returned, because credit spreads widen by far more than the interest rate is cut.
In other words, the rate cut would help the companies that don't really need it. If credit spreads widen between triple A rated companies and single A rated companies from 200bs to 500bps (i.e., by 3%), then a half point cut in the base rate doesn't matter a flying fuck. It will still cost your less-than-rock-solid company an extra 2.5% to borrow cash (I pluck these numbers somewhat out of thin air, mainly to illustrate the point that the base rate is not the be-all and end-all of how much you have to pay to borrow money).
This could be bad news indeed for companies that love issuing corporate bonds to finance deals and expansion. More will focus on companies that actually make profits from what they are doing at the moment, rather than on what companies are promising they will do next year.
This could exacerbate the shift in favour of non-indebted blue-chips and against expansive highly-indebted "jam tomorrow" companies. If you have to have a bet with the spread-betting companies, then I would advise shorting the FTSE 350.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2007-08-19 09:19 am (UTC)