40 Years is A Long Time
Mar. 9th, 2005 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksIn the summer of 1966, before the World Cup, I went on a school journey holiday to the Isle of Wight. This was in the days before the fear of being sued led to most school journeys being abandoned. On the Saturday of that school journey Everton beat Sheffield Wednesday 3-2 in the FA Cup Final. But it's the Wednesday before that that I recall (or, at least, I think I recall. Perhaps it was another school trip, perhaps it was another year). Chelsea went to Barcelona for an Inter-Cities Fairs Cup semi-final tie and got stomped 5-1. It seriously hurt.
So, revenge was sweet last night. No matter that none of the players were born and that the managers were either not born or too young to remember.No matter that neither team was managed by a native to that team's country. No matter that the winning goal quite clearly involved a foul on the goalkeeper (mysteriously missed by both commentators at the time, but thankfully spotted by Terry Venables). No matter to all these things. WE GOT THE BASTARDS BACK.
That I was spunking away $140 online at the time was a minor irritant, I must admit. I played the mini-blind game on UB. The weird thing is -- I have played this game before (the Flamingo used to run it), so you would think that I would do well. But it took me a while to get a feel for the game. I turned an initial loss of $120 into a loss of just $40. Not bad for what is effectively $4-$8. And near the end I got the feeling that I knew how the game differed from a standard blind structure, whereas most of my opponents didn't.
No time to go into all the details, but clearly there is a minor shift towards pot limit style pre-flop, with implied odds for a call being greater if there is no raise. Position becomes more important and "steals" offer a lower reward to risk ratio. A frequent scenario was where three people limped and the board was checked on the flop. This gave a $10 pot (less rake). The turn bet is now $8 - effectively a pot-size bet. Clearly this is a great position to be in front if there are chasers in the house.
I then had a look at the "beat the Mob" game, but had no interest when I saw something like 250 runners. So I returned to Ultimate and lost another $90 at $2-$4. And I didn't play particularly badly. Typical occurrences were my QJ on a board of JT53 (call from button, call on flop, raise on turn, called by one loose opponent) being beaten on the river by J2. Aces promptly got cracked by a Josh Arieh soundalike on a board of J83 (he had JJ). And so it went on. These nights happen. Down to £30 up on the month. Irritating.
So, revenge was sweet last night. No matter that none of the players were born and that the managers were either not born or too young to remember.No matter that neither team was managed by a native to that team's country. No matter that the winning goal quite clearly involved a foul on the goalkeeper (mysteriously missed by both commentators at the time, but thankfully spotted by Terry Venables). No matter to all these things. WE GOT THE BASTARDS BACK.
That I was spunking away $140 online at the time was a minor irritant, I must admit. I played the mini-blind game on UB. The weird thing is -- I have played this game before (the Flamingo used to run it), so you would think that I would do well. But it took me a while to get a feel for the game. I turned an initial loss of $120 into a loss of just $40. Not bad for what is effectively $4-$8. And near the end I got the feeling that I knew how the game differed from a standard blind structure, whereas most of my opponents didn't.
No time to go into all the details, but clearly there is a minor shift towards pot limit style pre-flop, with implied odds for a call being greater if there is no raise. Position becomes more important and "steals" offer a lower reward to risk ratio. A frequent scenario was where three people limped and the board was checked on the flop. This gave a $10 pot (less rake). The turn bet is now $8 - effectively a pot-size bet. Clearly this is a great position to be in front if there are chasers in the house.
I then had a look at the "beat the Mob" game, but had no interest when I saw something like 250 runners. So I returned to Ultimate and lost another $90 at $2-$4. And I didn't play particularly badly. Typical occurrences were my QJ on a board of JT53 (call from button, call on flop, raise on turn, called by one loose opponent) being beaten on the river by J2. Aces promptly got cracked by a Josh Arieh soundalike on a board of J83 (he had JJ). And so it went on. These nights happen. Down to £30 up on the month. Irritating.
Re: The squadron leader's banter
Date: 2005-03-09 10:13 am (UTC)About the ATT4 hand. Don't limp if you cannot take the heat with it in one of the best possible flops. You may have been against underset or 2-3pair in which case you were a huge favourite.
nice blog, Aksu
Re: The squadron leader's banter
Date: 2005-03-09 11:39 am (UTC)On JPRP's point (and I realize that it's a comment not a criticism), I fear that shorthand incomprehensibility is a necessity, since, if I am typing an early-morning entry, I really already ought to be researching stories rather than writing a blog! The time-pressure necessitates a certain shorthand style. This really is a blog rather than a collection of articles, so the choices in areas with which you are unfamiliar are (a) gradually immerse yourself in it until the meaning becomes clear or (b) don't bother, and allow other fools to dicuss things in their own incomprehensible way.
On the Omaha hand, this raises such a lot of interesting general points that I shall witter on further.
1) BDD seemed to misread my previous comments as being my view at the time of writing, rather than a summary of my feelings at the time of playing. I fully accepted that those contemporaneous feelings might have been wrong (just as I fully accept that my, different, subsequent conclusions might be wrong). Remember, I have played about 200 Omaha hands in the past three years, compared with 100,000 or so Hold 'em hands. It's a learning curve.
2) I learn my lessons cheaply. Only once was a poker lesson seriously expensive, and that was over 20 years ago when I was playing a particularly wild game and I forgot one of the rules. That cost me £300, or about two grand in today's money. My "wrong" play of the ATsT4 cost me a maximum "lost gain" of $20 (assuming that I win the pot and that my opponent can be conned into putting in all his chips). Throw in the mathematical uncertainties and I reckon that my "real" expected loss as a result of folding rather than "taking the heat" (the play I now think is correct) is probably no more than three bucks. I can live with that! In other words, I might play like an idiot, but I learn, and I don't go broke.
3) Having written that, none of you were there! This is a difficult point to justify and may be totally up in the air, but after four years of playing online I have developed a keen instinct for situations. The one spanner in this argument is that this instinct might have gone totally awry in a new game (it's the omaha factor AND the pot limit factor, remember - I reckon I could do well at limit omaha!) However, I have not only played a lot of Hold em online, but I've actually day-traded currencies online. That is rather like playing poker online except that you aren't quite sure what the rules are, or how many people are playing, or how much money they are bringing to the table. All that experience adds up to a lot, and I just FELT bad in this particular instance. I suspect that I should have overruled that feeling on the grounds that (a) even if I was wrong, it wouldn't cost me more than $25 and (b) this was a new game, and the way to learn new games is to play hands, not to fold them.
Looking at the jargon again, yes. Limpers, checkers, and "chasers in the house". Sounds like a 1960s stage farce at the Whitehall Theatre. "One For The Pot", anyone?
BTW. JPRP asked in an e-mail if there were ay easy way to save the entries. To which my response is, why bother? We need less permanent stuff clogging up our storage systems, I feel, because at the moment we are reaching the stage where we are recording everything for future reference, and then never referring back to it. It's a temporary blog, like a conversation in the pub. Let the stuff expire into the aether and become the misremembered past. Then we can look forward rather than back. At least, that's what I keep trying (and failing abysmally) to do with my life.
SOS (Save Our Scribblings)
Date: 2005-03-10 06:54 am (UTC)Clogging up? Eh? Compared with all the photos and now videos that I find myself storing, text storage and retrieval is a trivial problem. I save all text as a matter of course. The cost is negligible and I don't feel at all clogged up.
Old-fashioned writing on paper is a different matter, and I do feel weighed down by all the old bits of paper piled up in this house. If I had it all neatly filed on the computer instead, what a relief that would be.
It's occurred to me by now that I could probably get a complete backup of a LiveJournal as a PDF file by using Adobe Acrobat's Web Capture facility; but I don't have Acrobat installed at the moment: I'm waiting for the latest version to arrive. I'll have to test it later.
Jonathan, near Barcelona
Re: SOS (Save Our Scribblings)
Date: 2005-03-10 09:24 am (UTC)Why?
Presumably so that you can refer to it again "if you need to". But is this a good way to live? Perpetually keeping a record of all that we write, all that we do (via photographs) and (in the case of Tony Benn) all that we say?
I'm just as guilty of this in certain areas myself (see videos and the like), but I do worry about the point of it. For example, how much TIME does it take (when you could be living for the moment) to store and categorise everything? Perhaps you are very efficient and it takes you no time at all, or you consider that the time it does takes is worthwhile. But this is what we used to have archivists and librarians for.
I don't really want to be my own archivist, storing details of all the things I've written and done so that I can (but probably won't) refer to them at some future date. I've decided that nothing I write is important enough to need to refer back to just to make sure that I am not repeating or contradicting myself. I have stored most of my past GHs electronically, for decades now, and not once have I needed to print out another copy, or cut and paste something that I have previously written.
I guess that the question here is -- is the time taken in storing and categorising this stuff worth it? In other words, suppose I don't bother (which, believe me, would be a blessed relief)? What is the chance that, at some time in the future, I will desperately regret not bothering? Fairly small, I reckon. Is that a risk I am willing to take? I'm not sure. But saving everything I write on a computer "as a matter of course"? I mean, once again. Why? Let the past go and worry about the now.
Pete
Re: SOS (Save Our Scribblings)
Date: 2005-03-10 03:10 pm (UTC)Admittedly, to back up a LiveJournal would take a few moments of personal attention. I suppose I'd do it every month or two, whenever I back up my personal files to CD.
What takes more serious time is keeping a daily diary (I keep a private one at home and a non-private one at work) and keeping a record of all my expenditures. The value of the latter is reduced because my wife doesn't keep a record, but she spends most of the money! I know how much she spends, but in most cases I don't know what she spends it on.
I think the diary-keeping is useful enough to be worth doing. I have a poor memory and can easily forget what happened yesterday. The diary acts as a memory supplement and it's generally the recent entries that are most useful, though entries from 30 years ago can be entertaining when looked at occasionally.
At work, I can occasionally answer a question by digging out of my records things that happened a year or two ago that everyone has forgotten by now. More to the point, I use it as a basis for the timesheet I have to prepare every month, showing which projects I worked on when and for how long.
Jonathan, near Barcelona