smatterings

[peterbirks]

I couldn't get on to Betfair to lay the draw at lunchtime yesterday -- bloody site wouldn't load. So I missed whatever price was available, somewhere around 7-to-4 I suspect. Needless to say the day continued exactly as I anticipated, with England spraying the ball in all directions until they missed it or mis-hit it, at which point they were out. The 7-to-2 available the draw at the moment isn't worth laying. Perhaps if the rain persists today the draw-backers might re-emerge. The game won't last four days, let alone five, so a lost day will be no problem.

++++++++

I know it's cruel, but I'm afraid that when I saw the headline yesterday "Brain-dead woman gives birth", my immediate reaction was "And your point is...?"

+++++++++

I discovered another US city plagiarism yesterday. We all know about Paris, Texas and I reckon most online poker players know about Athens, Georgia; Rome, New York, Moscow, er, Idaho; St Petersburg, Florida, Vienna, Missouri and Berlin, Wisconsin (There are other cases of some of these, I know). But until yesterday I was unaware of Belgrade, Montana. One does have to wonder what kind of population shift took place in the 19th or perhaps early 20th century to result in a bunch of Serbians not only ending up in Montana, but actually being there in large enough numbers to name their town after their capital. But, and this is what gets me, why not call it Beograd? Why the English version?

+++++++++++


Left house yesterday morning. Shit. It's raining. Rush back indoors, grab raincoat, put it on, leave house. Try to button it up. Notice that I have managed to grab my other blazer. So, I'm now wearing a blazer OVER a blazer. Go back into house again. Miss train. So it goes.

The only reason I could manage this is that I bought one blazer when I was a stone heavier than when I bought the other. Now I am a stone lighter again, so my (newer) blazer is now a bit too large. I didn't realize that I could get it on over the smaller blazer, though.

Comments

Re GH269

[iadams.livejournal.com]

You report late 1976 as probably one of the first mentions of Hold 'Em in print in the UK. I have a copy of 'Play Poker to Win' (Amarillo Slim, ghosted by Bill G Cox - ISBN0330243721) which has a whole chpater on Hold 'Em. My copy was published in 1975, but notes that it was first published in the UK in 1974.

Cheers.

[(Anonymous)]

Well Peter, you know how we americans are. The next step in the city-name plagiarization will be to trademark those names and then sue those euro cities for trademark infringement. Once the Hague makes a ruling in our favor, euros will be scrambling to come up with new names to replace the ones that they used for a thousand years. Tough luck, but that's just more aggressive american imperialism.

BluffTHIS!

Trademark infringement

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, this would be very worrying if it happened, and I would never rule anything out when lawyers come into the picture.

Of course, all the people who named these places weren't Americans, or at least they didn't consider themselves as such. One can hardly blame them for failing to foresee the development of online poker and the ensuing confusion when you see that a person is from "Moscow", which turns out to be some hick burg in the north-western US, rather than the capital of Russia.

A cynic might blame the naming on a lack of imaginiation, but an anthropologist would point out that it ran deeper than that — consisting of a need to identify a place as "home". And, in purely practical terms, it was a useful way to inform outsiders where a lot of people in the town came from.

[andy-ward-uk.livejournal.com]

Did you know that if you had laid the draw, and then presumably bet it back again at 100-1 or whatever, and then the match had been tied, your carefully locked up sure thing would have been whisked away because in the event of a tie "all Match Odds bets are void".

Now _that_ would have been a bad beat !

Andy.

the tie

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I was frantically looking for the rule on the tie but couldn't find it. Really it should have been a dead heat between two results with the draw a loser. I was tempted to lay the tie at 7/1 but pulled back because it went against my principle of not backing anything seriously odds-on.

BTW, Kasprowicz (caught Jones) should have been not out, a point which I spotted at the time, but neither C4 commentator did. "Yes, it caught the glove", the commentator said when looking at the slow-mo, apparently utterly unaware of the rule that, if the hand is no longer in contact with the bat, then the glove doesn't count -- for catching purposes. Bah, call themselves professional commentators?

This was one of the tightest test match wins in my memory, certainly the tightest involving England. I thought that the England win by three runs about 22 years ago was tense, but this one ran it close and probably beat it. Cricket, boring? How can they say that?


I made a grand profit of 81p on the test match. This did not quite outweigh the $351 I lost on Betfair at $10-$20 yesterday in a half-hour of outdrawing hell. Three, yes THREE, players who seemed incapable of folding pre-flop, good cards, and about as close as you can get to being permanently cold-decked as is possible. I went back to play again an hour or so later but, unsurprisingly, the game had collapsed. A couple of the loosies were playing in the $5-$10, so I joined that, and scrabbled fifty bucks of it back before they busted out.

Re: the tie

[(Anonymous)]

I was listening on the Internet radio feed and watching the odds on Betfair at the same time. No one on the radio questioned the decision but BBC Sport reports :

"TV replays showed that the dismissal should not have been given, Kasprowicz taking his lower hand off the bat before ball hit glove."

It will be interesting to see what the press make of this. If the glove had been on the other hand, I would certainly expect a torrent of whingeing.

What was funny was that the Internet feed is delayed compared to Betfair so as Harmison was running in (on the feed), Betfair promptly suspended the match odds. So I knew that the upcoming ball was either going to take a wicket or go for four. Now that's an exciting finish !

Andy.