I dunno, I had $900 a moment ago
Jul. 12th, 2005 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksThe strange thing about multi-tabling is that, even if you are paying attention to the players and their styles, you can suddenly find yourself $400 down at $5-$10 and say to yourself "hell, where did THAT all go?"
In a way that was what happened to me yesterday (except that by the end of 300 hands I was "only" $270 down). In one (very small) way, this is good. It means that I am concentrating on playing each hand properly, rather than on how much I am up or down. A few times last month I found myself several hundred dollars up and wondered to myself where it had come from.
But this time I was down, so I thought about where it had gone. My stats were interesting. I had 12 pairs in 300 hands (five short of the expected), but with a reasonable distribution of high and low, and the pairs were in profit on both tables (as they should be!). So, no clue there. Then I remembered three hands, one where with 98s I had seen a board of 6-9-9-4-2 and promptly lost to a pair of sixes. Another where my raise with KQ off in MP2 found a flop of QQ3, a turn of a 5 and a river of a 10 and I promptly lost to a player who cold-called a raise with QTs behind me. And a third where I played KJs aggressively, hit a King on the turn after a rag flop and promptly lost to another aggressive player with KTs who hit a ten on the river.
All three were $100+ swings and were "the way it goes". So, in a way, I had at least some explanation.
I also looked at my VPIP% and raising percentage and saw that at one table I had an almost laughable 28% VPIP$ and a raise percentage of 16%, over 150 hands. Now, unless I had suddenly become a semi-maniac without noticing, this meant that I had been getting a lot of those hands that I raise with, but which this time were going nowhere. Quite simply, I kept missing flops and my continuations got bitten off (more than 90% of the time by better hands rather than rebluffs, I hasten to add!) more than they usually do.
And this can happen. It can happen for a long long time.
So, not unhappy, despite my loss for the month now approaching $400.
-----
Another humorous development over the past, well, five months, has been the precipitous decline of sterling against the dollar. As you may know, I have a semi-permanent "dollar hedge" in position to cover my dollar holdings. This is currently running at a hundred quid a cent (put into place at $1.86 and $1.84).
So, although I am sitting here watching the value of my dollar holdings (in sterling terms) rise nicely (last month's profit, for example, was £223 higher than it would have been last December), that doesn't make it any more comfortable when, over four days, I have to lob a grand into my Financial Spreads account to avoid suffering a margin call.
My current contracts expire in September and I was seriously considering "taking that grand back" from the US, but sterling appears to have bottomed out for the moment, recovering a few cents. Stan James seems to be a bit behind the times when it comes to adjusting their currency rates, so perhaps I should shift most of my dollar holdings there back into sterling.
In a way that was what happened to me yesterday (except that by the end of 300 hands I was "only" $270 down). In one (very small) way, this is good. It means that I am concentrating on playing each hand properly, rather than on how much I am up or down. A few times last month I found myself several hundred dollars up and wondered to myself where it had come from.
But this time I was down, so I thought about where it had gone. My stats were interesting. I had 12 pairs in 300 hands (five short of the expected), but with a reasonable distribution of high and low, and the pairs were in profit on both tables (as they should be!). So, no clue there. Then I remembered three hands, one where with 98s I had seen a board of 6-9-9-4-2 and promptly lost to a pair of sixes. Another where my raise with KQ off in MP2 found a flop of QQ3, a turn of a 5 and a river of a 10 and I promptly lost to a player who cold-called a raise with QTs behind me. And a third where I played KJs aggressively, hit a King on the turn after a rag flop and promptly lost to another aggressive player with KTs who hit a ten on the river.
All three were $100+ swings and were "the way it goes". So, in a way, I had at least some explanation.
I also looked at my VPIP% and raising percentage and saw that at one table I had an almost laughable 28% VPIP$ and a raise percentage of 16%, over 150 hands. Now, unless I had suddenly become a semi-maniac without noticing, this meant that I had been getting a lot of those hands that I raise with, but which this time were going nowhere. Quite simply, I kept missing flops and my continuations got bitten off (more than 90% of the time by better hands rather than rebluffs, I hasten to add!) more than they usually do.
And this can happen. It can happen for a long long time.
So, not unhappy, despite my loss for the month now approaching $400.
-----
Another humorous development over the past, well, five months, has been the precipitous decline of sterling against the dollar. As you may know, I have a semi-permanent "dollar hedge" in position to cover my dollar holdings. This is currently running at a hundred quid a cent (put into place at $1.86 and $1.84).
So, although I am sitting here watching the value of my dollar holdings (in sterling terms) rise nicely (last month's profit, for example, was £223 higher than it would have been last December), that doesn't make it any more comfortable when, over four days, I have to lob a grand into my Financial Spreads account to avoid suffering a margin call.
My current contracts expire in September and I was seriously considering "taking that grand back" from the US, but sterling appears to have bottomed out for the moment, recovering a few cents. Stan James seems to be a bit behind the times when it comes to adjusting their currency rates, so perhaps I should shift most of my dollar holdings there back into sterling.
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Dollar trends
Date: 2005-07-12 03:26 pm (UTC)So now I find we're dealing with a $1.75 pound instead of the $1.90 we hit not that long ago. But still much better than the last time we were there. And the best part of our holiday costs have been pre-paid, ever since I worked out I could plan the holiday better and for £1,000 less than my specialist North American travel agent managed. This tells you something about travel agent profit margins. Yes we'd not have had to pay on the nose for stuff booked online, but now it turns out it was definitely the right move currency-wise.
See you on the Strip?
Re: See you on the strip
Date: 2005-07-12 03:37 pm (UTC)A small tip, if you are going to be there at that time and plan to spend any time in the actual casinos, take a jumper. They ratchet up the air-conditioning to warp factor 20.
Flight to Vegas in December. I'll persuade Woodhouse yet....
Re: See you on the strip
Date: 2005-07-12 07:11 pm (UTC)Re: See you on the strip
Date: 2005-07-15 04:43 pm (UTC)