Deposited $100 on PS to toy around w/ while drinking heavily and occasionally studying for exams. Obviously doing the run good and rescuing my Sharkscope from life tilt that occurred a few years back:
I'm also making the transition from NL50 to NL100. Did a bit of the run good at NL100 so that's happy, but I'll probably continue to NL50 it up as I think I'm pretty weak in 6-max cash. Otherwise running and playing pretty well in sundry other games. Mainly beasting / running good at NL50 HU and in assorted 6-max / HU SNGs. BR is staying afloat and increasing. Don't care much about the money and don't really expect to ever win enough money at poker for it be more than a diversion with some cash flying around. Nonetheless I'm pretty obsessed and constantly watching CR videos and running numbers so hopefully I'll achieve a low degree of mastery.
Rest of life sucks and is running pretty much way below or exactly at expectation. Can't really decide which. I really hate studying and can never bring myself to do it for more than an hour or two so expected happiness is going way down over the next couple weeks as I deal with finals
was watching a myth CR video and i had an epiphany. i used to think i was a nit at heart. i'm actually a station. i don't like making so many blogs but this is such a huge revelation for me that i've gotta make a note here in case i one day become extremely famous. then i can look back and be like "yeah see, poker changed my life. right here i discovered i was a station when i thought i was a nit. and this changes everything."
Roommate's brother was over. Guy basically runs like Jesus. Won some 9-man SNG playing any two all-in all day. I was jealous since I'm still running like death at 6-max so I asked him what was up. At some point in the conversation my roommate wanted to take the brother's car to another town so he could get to church tomorrow. I was playing 6-max at the time and spewing money like a Jew recently turned hedonist. To help assuage my frustration I naturally lashed out at my roommate's religiosity. I made fun of him for a while and as I began to run worse my comments veered heavily into the blasphemous.
At some point it was suggested that my lack of faith was a possible cause for my bad run. I sensed opportunity. I offered God a propbet: If my luck turned around and I ended up at neutral or better, before midnight, I would be at church on Sunday. As of 11:58 my BR was +$6.
God 1 - 0 me.
Ship a capital G and me at church. Well-played sir.
I usually feel confident in my NL50 HU. I typically run pretty good (compared to my atrocious 6-max luck) and the players on FTP aren't typically playing like geniuses. Today was mostly the same way but there was one guy I played for an hour or two before dinner and he totally raped me. Never felt my soul being sucked from my chest before. I even sucked out on him once and he still slammed me for like 3 BI. He was like a dementor from harry potter or whatever. All-in-all a good but expensive experience.
In other news Charter Telecommunications or whatever needs to go ahead and file for fucking Chapter 11. I hate the fucking company and if I could ever clone myself, some of my clones would definitely go on murderous rampages against Charter. As usual Charter fucked with me all day long, pretending my internet was fixed and then patiently waiting... probably in a perch with binoculars... staring at my screen, waiting ever so patiently for me to flop the absolute nuts... waiting for me to be on the verge of coolering someone in a 200bb pot... and then pulling the plug, only to restore the internet moments later so I could savor my hand flying into the muck
I fucking hate Charter. Just one more way for me to run way below expectation at 6-max. I don't know if the government has granted Charter a fucking monopoly but I hate the government too just in case it did. God will give me justice.
TWO lines diverged on a Cartesian-plane
And I took the one oft bitched about
And it is LAME.
I REALLY do not like NL25 and will probably REFUSE to return to it even if my BR continues to get ravaged so please stop shitting on me! It's either bad run outs shitting on my redline or suck outs shitting on my showdown winnings or it's bad beats just shitting all over my whole being. I really don't think I was running THAT good before, but I'd gladly go back to the positive profit range and run a little below EV or around EV or a little above or WAY WAY WAY above EV like there's an awesome rubber band effect that's going to make these lines converge and then the bold one shoot WAY over the light one.
UGH, I'm more covered in full tilt's shit than that kid in Slumdog Millionaire.
Anyway, I REPENT of my previous posts and I HATE everyone who said I was running good because you have DOOMSWITCHED me HARD, and being 8 BI below EV is lame PLUS getting coolered / sucked out upon / blah blah and I am NOT EVEN BLUFFING ABOUT RUNNING BAD IN THESE OTHER AREAS. I AM SO UPSET WITH EVERYONE WHO SAID I WAS RUNNING GOOD. In fact if I knew how to underline "SO" in HTML I would spam that SO MUCH just so you understood that I am NOT happy.
I like to bet, but it seems to be a bad strategy at the moment. I think I'm charging headlong into the top of my opponent's ranges AND impaling myself without them having to lift a finger. Still, I like charging so it's lame for them to bayonet me.
On the other hand, I'm wondering if I'm ACTUALLY running into the top of their ranges, and I'll probably do some more review to make sure I'm not leveling myself into shipping too light. I should probably post some hands to get some comments.
I decided Yomer was definitely right about me spewing while trying to imitate Durrr. I'm trying to curtail my excitement at playing poker again, tightening up a bit etc.
I feel like I've improved a bit in the last couple days in several areas: some of my PF spew has been cut off; I've begun to handle 3bets and 3bet pots significantly better; and the quality of my bluffs has increased in sizing, timing and spot selection.
All that said, I'm getting crushed pretty hardcore in ALL-IN EV, about 6 BI or so under as I approach the 10k hand mark. The beats were rather demoralizing at first but quickly became comical as no single beat was THAT painful but instead the bad luck mostly occurred in pots against half stacks so it was something like a running succession of losing 65:35s, 75:25s, and 80:20s.
One thing I realized pretty quickly this time around is that pretty much no session is likely to be be perfect as the probabilities in hold 'em are often 80-90% chance of victory at best. Following that epiphany I realized that I would be agonizing over the inevitable if I was upset about bad beats/coolers etc. Hopefully that will be easily internalized so I can enjoy playing.
Anyway as for my results, they weren't good. I'm actually about 2BI below where I started (although surprisingly most of my losses have come post-tightening so my experiment with loose play COULD be termed a success - though I think educational would be a better term than successful). Atop the poor ALL-IN EV, I had a REALLY high frequency of hideous run outs for my big pairs, and actually very little action on big pairs overall. Also had a surprising number of suck outs by draws and random over cards calling down for one or even two streets. I also made some weird hero calls and perhaps even more hero bluffs, but I feel that both were pretty educational and wasn't altogether upset about losing/winning in those spots. Finally the collisions with what I believed to be the tops of my opponents' ranges were quite expensive.
Overall I guess this would be termed a standard swing, but it was distressing because every aspect of my game was completely ravaged rather than just my weaknesses. The only thing I was relatively happy with was that I didn't become a crazy tilt monkey at any point and didn't make many more than the sort of amateurish mistakes that are to be expected.
I quit poker a while back for what must have been the third time. I was playing NL50 and doing pretty well over a sample size of around 10k or so. Overall I was pretty happy to have progressed from NL25 to NL50, and to have managed a reasonable win rate at NL50.
More importantly, by the time I quit I could confidently say that I was better than most NL50 players on FTP at the time. Although beating NL50, and having a theoretical advantage at NL50 is not really a point of pride for me, I want to acknowledge that it's possible for me to have run good over the 10k hand sample(or any finite sample size) and achieve a much higher win rate than my actual expectation. Since actual win rate doesn't necessarily reflect expected winnings, and expected winnings are the true reflection of a player's ability, I think that it's important to have some theoretic idea about how your game compares with your opponents' games. Incidentally I think theory is a much more certain and cost efficient way to learn games of uncertainty than to play to whatever you can to consider a significant sample and then compare your win rate to what people suggest is a good win rate. I'd like to hear opinions on gauging your game by theoretic results versus actual results over a long sample. To clarify: I don't mean ALL-IN EV versus winnings because it's possible to run really hot card-wise and of course ALL-IN EV can't reflect the possibility that you're basically playing the top of your range all day long).
Anyway, I quit like half a year ago... Probably some time in September. I'm such a mercurial asshole that I became obsessed with Starcraft for a few weeks and abandoned poker for that. Then when I recognized I hated every job associated with my undergrad in economics, I decided to get a Ph.D... so I studied for the GRE etc and worked up a bunch of applications. In the mean time I pretty much forgot about poker.
I was reading LP about a month ago and I saw the big hand between Greenstein and Durrr in some thread. I bought Ace on the River years ago with my first PS points and finally read it like a year ago, so naturally I'm a pretty big Greenstein fan and automatically had to see the Greenstein versus Durrr pot... I was really impressed by Durrr's ability to take a 500k beat so I watched all the episodes of High Stakes Season 5 and was motivated to start playing again.
I suddenly remembered that I had around 1.3k sitting around on FTP. I'm not rich so I have no idea why I was just letting 1.3k sit for half a year on FTP. Anyway I'm totally irrational so as soon I remembered the money I thought "LOL 1.3k that I didn't remember. Certainly won't care if I lose it all. Let's go play NL50 like I'm Durrr!"
I used to be on the nitty side of TAG so I decided that I would just double my VPIP/PFR. I told myself that if I spewed a few hundred $ I'd probably feel a lot like cashing out the rest. So anyway it's an ongoing experiment but here are my first results:
I've been playing only a couple tables so my volume is low, and of course that makes running a bit under ALL-IN EV to be sort of a bummer, but it's not too discouraging since I'm still winning. My last few sessions have also been gay as I've had to fold way more than I like and my red line has plummeted accordingly. All-in-all though, it's liberating to play a more loose game on less tables because I enjoy the game and that makes up for the lower income per session.
I guess I'm finding that my desire for money (barring a massive windfall) is pretty low so I'm content to play a lower volume. This is sort of a surprise for me as I'd always imagined that I'd want more money as I grew older and "toys" became more expensive. Just the opposite has happened however as much of what I want is actually pretty cheap. Well anyway, I'd love to hear people's opinions on loose play at low stakes and on evaluating play from a theoretic perspective rather than a statistic perspective.
As most of you know, November 4th, we'll be having a massive cluster fuck of the unproductive in my nation. But aside from the lost GDP, and the consequent exacerbation of our fickle economic situation, there's something more at stake here. A bunch of people with no clue what the fuck is going on will be casting their votes for politicians who have pandered to the lowest common denominator with campaign platforms such that one can only resignedly say, "yes, we ALL want houses, we ALL want health care - and not just for ourselves, but for others, too - we ALL want a strong economy, we ALL want things, in general, to get better. Thank you for saying so. BUT, tell me more: how do you plan to do it? Why are experts in your respective fields projecting estimates for your plans that have margins of error in the trillions of dollars? The question here isn't so much ideological as it is: do you actually have know how to do ANY of what you're proposing?"
And what slogan is encouraging ignorant Americans to vote for apparently hollow politicians?
"If you don't vote, you can't complain."
Enumerated in our very bill of rights, in fact in our very first amendment is the right to unlimited complaint, which we as Americans hold so dear. Do not be deceived. All is not lost. Here is a revision of that dread slogan and a tribute:
"
So, on November 4th, if you are so unfortunate as to wake up and discover yourself in a voting booth, boldly write "none of the above is acceptable."
I have no idea what represents victory for other lp.nettians, but my first serious poker goal has been realized today. It almost goes without saying that I'm still quite bad, but it is probably STILL worth saying just to save time in the long run. Like with most things, the more I learn, the more I feel ignorant. I've nothing else to do, and so I'm typing up a time line of my poker learning experience. I'm curious how others learn, and of course I'd love if anyone interested in teaching/coaching were to take an interest in helping me. I also enjoy talking about poker and would really like to make some acquaintances both above and below my level. If anyone's interested PM me and here's a summary of my own poker =]
Time line
- [HIGH SCHOOL (~5+ years ago)] Some weekends of playing for fun
- [EARLY UNIVERSITY (3 years ago)] Two years wanting to play poker, putting some money on a site and getting frustrated within a couple weeks after a couple days of bad luck. This period leaves a LOT to be regretted. I had pretty much FREE unlimited access to Myth, Midian, ApocPLZ, and MezPLZ via AIM but never prioritized poker so while Myth left NL100, Midian left NL50, ApocPLZ left life for WoW, and Mez went from a 25k roll to winning like half a million in a month... I pretty much played 0 serious poker and never progressed at all. Obviously any practical person who's interested in poker would say that this is a sick waste of ultra valuable resources, and of course they'd be right. In an economic sense, I've forfeited like $200+/hr coaching, and probably even better as there's probably more understanding to gain from studying alongside other people who are learning than from being coached by someone who already knows. But on a completely subjective level I really regret not having an opportunity to get to know those four guys a lot better, especially Mez and Myth who seem like awesome people but whom I didn't get to know well at all.
- [THIS SUMMER] This 4th of July in China I had a weird experience where my friends and I decided to party quite hard. I inadvertently took a combination of E and Meth that left me awake for an extra twenty-four hours. After realizing, scared as hell, that I was losing most of my ties with reality (I took quite a bit too much because of a misunderstanding; language barrier, etc.), I ended up returning home and freezing myself out for a few hours to calm down. For whatever reason I decided to log on to lp.net little over a day rabidly studied pretty much every major/interesting hand discussion on lp. This is not a recommended way to understand poker, but for me it worked wonders. Before this experience I was absolutely horrible at poker. I was pretty much a robotic level zero or level one thinker who suffered from robotic play intermingled with a bunch of misconceptions. And worst of all I didn't understand the logic underlying poker, so I had no means of extricating myself aside from trying to piece together other people's strategies and plays into a misleading playbook.
Anyway, as I was reading, I began to understand poker in an entirely different sense. About nine months ago, Myth described poker to me as a game where the only thing required to win was a particular logic. This sounds completely cliche, but as I read some post by Rekrul in midstakes (probably the single informative post he made all year) and some mathematical analysis of a CTS blog that Myth had worked up, I began to see exactly what Myth meant by the logic comment (at the time he said it, the comment was bewildering and frustrating, so I remembered it). Consequently I began to see what was required in order to develop a logic for understanding poker and then the plays necessary to execute it.
- [MID-AUGUST] I got back in the states, and it was a heart-breaking experience. I've lived in semi-rural Alabama my whole life (worst place ever in my estimation), and my experience in Kunming was my first semi-long term living experience anywhere else. Needless to say China is QUITE different from what I was used to - Kunming is a VERY awesome place =] - and it was a soul-rape to come back. It was quite crushing how EMPTY everything here is. It's spatially empty because there's just SO MUCH SPACE and so many fewer people. But more so this place is absolutely void of the sense of bewilderment, interest, and purpose that I felt everywhere in China. Coming home was my most bittersweet experience, because I was resigning myself to one final year at a mediocre university where almost all other students and I have nothing in common; a town I've lived in my entire life that holds no interest for me; and an environment that I once felt so comfortable in and yet on returning, I felt so completely apart from. At the same time I was seeing my family and friends again, and it's easy to feel like there shouldn't be much more to life than that.
- [LATE AUGUST] I finally began playing poker. I ran hotter than the sun for a while, then about neutral and finally had another solar flare before plunging into a 20k hand doomswitch the likes of which I'd never imagined during my previous dabbling with the game. The doomswitch-period was exacerbated by some pain killers for a carpal tunnel surgery and an unhealthy urge to just build a BR by 18-tabling NL25 for rakeback and a marginal winrate. To end the doomswitch and the soulrape that was 18-tabling, I finally took about a week off and resolved to come back and 4-table NL50. Since then I've been playing 4-6 tables of NL50 on FTP thanks to Myth for helping me shift some money.
- [LATE-SEPTEMEBER] So 4-6 tables of NL50 is what I've done for the last few weeks, and it's been much better for my soul, not to mention my poker play. AND! I've achieved my first sincere poker goal =]
5+PTBB/100 over 10k hands
Graph
Of course I've had some help from new/previous poker contacts, and I feel like I should shout out to them for absolutely no reason at all. So thanks soyukkusenman, crownroyal, myth, k2o4, vegable and mayzerg, who i've just recently met
Anyone else who's interested in poker and wants to talk or review hands, my AIM is JeffH578 and my MSN is jeff.haynes@hotmail.com or PM me =]
Edit: Also a shoutout to XEMcontemplate (hope that's his LP.net name) who I've met via lp.net and would feel really bad to have neglected =]
I posted a long response to k2o4's blog, and I'd mentioned putting up a sort of conservative-equivalent of brett's blog a while back. Unfortunately, politics make me sad, and I'm neither particularly conservative nor liberal sooooo this won't really fit the bill of an anti-liberal blog. Instead, I'll probably just make this one post (pardon the title) to try and elicit a little LP.net discussion with a slightly conservative slant to the initial rant
From k2o4's blog:
i think that the republican point of view warrants some explaining. one of my friends is a staunch conservative who is very involved with the mccain campaign in the southeast. yesterday he was talking about the mccain campaign's decision to try to trash obama's image
the point conservatives are most adamant about, recently anyway, is that they aren't responsible for the current state of the economy, and secondly that they were not in favor of the bail out bill.
- on the bailout bill: according to the conservative strategists, the only way that mccain could have even the slimmest chance of winning the election in november was for the republican side of congress to pass the bail out bill. the irony of the situation is that conservatives thought that the bill was bad for the US but that obama being elected would be even worse for both the nation and of course the republican party.
so, the republicans openly supported the bill (though maybe without the enthusiasm of democrats) out of necessity.
- on the economy (my own opinion): it's entirely disingenuous for the democrats (who hold a significant majority in congress) to blame the bush administration for the recent stock market / banking meltdown. Wiki: The Fed has a lot of the explanation: basically Bush's administration appoints much of the oversight, but all of the appointees have been confirmed by the Senate and are subject to a degree of Senatorial oversight, meaning that a democratic congress (read senate: obama/biden) is equally culpable for the financial situation. And beyond all this, much of the central banking system is privately handled, so at least some responsibility falls outside the government structure.
I think it's got to be equally clear regarding the war in iraq that while democrats may disagree with it on moral grounds, the current economic description of the war is entirely misleading. The correlation between US gov. debt and market / financial institution erosion is entirely misleading. Government spending, in most macro economical models typically improves the nation's GDP and unemployment (because the government is generally employing its citizens in some capacity with its spending). And unemployment is a leading economic indicator(s). SO, the oblique references made by democrats to government spending for the war on terror as a major cause for economic complaint is not well-grounded.
i guess other big problems with the democrats and the economy are that socialism is not a sound economic system because it does not, generally speaking, maximize the utility (value, basically) of either the private or public sector. it reduces real income in pretty much every model and yet, the recent bail out bill basically has a bunch of "riders" that are rapidly working to socialize the united states' financial institutions. largely these riders are the product of a democratic congress who was largely in favor of the bill. to say that the country's financial institutions require more oversight is a far cry from a 4 page bail out bill being frantically rewritten into a 100+ page document that no one has time to read or evaluate (especially not US congressmen)
another problem with barack's economic policies is socialized health care. yes it has achieved some good in other nations, and yes some of the complaints against it are wildly speculative, but the serious flaws inherent in socialism (and any system that defies market-clearing prices) are present. what's worse, is that socializing health care, as the industry currently stands, ignores that there is currently a serious problem with health care pricing, and that the problem is growing rapidly. the problem currently is a lack of market-clearing price levels (for which the government is largely responsible). the enormity of the central government in the united states has lent itself to a lot of "rent-seeking" by medical company representatives seeking special privileges (which are often granted). so pretty much, my argument is that the government really must move to effect a market-solution to discover the "actual value" of health care as it is currently supplied and demanded before moving to create a socialized system (if a socialized system is a good idea), and that obama's plan appears like it will compound the problems of sky-rocketing health care prices while shifting the burden from the consumer to an already indebted government.
ugh okay i've cleared interjected a lot more of my own analysis than i wanted, but anyway i think i'll end by quickly saying that the republicans have enacted the strategy that they have because they feel so strongly that obama and a democratic congress represent a lot of injury to the united states in the near future. it's more of a desperation tactic where the ends are thought to justify the means (which as someone else alluded, is a conservative hallmark).
i personally think that if more people were better educated as to the issues of this 2008 election, the campaigning would have to take a very different form on both sides. to my eyes, both sides are very sensationalist and it's sad to see that it works so well on our biased electorate.
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