If the Halifax former building society want to be treated like a bank, they should act like one. There we are with a hundred quid in silver, saved up over many years in a Cadbury's Roses jar, and she's all like "only five bags a day". It does say this on the counter too. But I mean, how much effort is it really? They don't count the coins. They don't even have to pour them into a sorting machine. She took my five bags behind a partition and presumably weighed them, as the whole thing only took about 30 seconds - including the walk. It might have taken 40 seconds if she'd accepted my full deposit.
Apparently this restriction doesn't apply to kids' accounts. Clearly high revenue earners for the banks, children. Especially the ones who have a freaking mortgage with them, like me.
I'm not done though. Sorry, there's more.
PayPal. For crying out loud.
Last week I attempted to get a refund on a transaction from a seller that has proved to be less than honest. Claire found a nice little sideline in used printer cartridges, buying them from eBay and either recycling at a profit, or sending them to Tesco for 100 Green Clubcard points each - that's £4 a pop if you use the points towards a Virgin holiday to you know where, or some other Clubcard Deals. I paid through PayPal using my MBNA credit card to earn BMI diamond club miles, towards yet another holiday to you know where.
I have no problem with naming and shaming here. Hopefully search engines will pick this up so that anybody who wants to check out the seller will find our story: Image Warehouse (eBay name imagewarehouse) sold a box of empty Lexmark inkjet cartridges that were just not up to the job. Listed as virgin (not yet refilled) and official, they were mostly neither - a box full of poor quality "compatible" cartridges that were in no state to be recycled. Some of them had literally fallen apart.
The seller agreed that we could return the box for a refund, which in itself cost about £60. Since then he's not responded to a single email, despite still apparently doing a healthy business on eBay. Right now, he's had 17 negative comments in the last month, but he shifts enough stuff that this only equates to a 99.3% positive feedback rating. Most buyers wouldn't even look any further than that.
The problem with PayPal - for buyers dealing with another country, at least - lies in the fact that they will only open a dispute within 45 days of purchase. These cartridges were sent surface mail from the USA so took about five weeks to arrive. After sending them back, it was clearly way past 45 days before we could be sure that the guy was ripping us off. PayPal won't help and Mastercard won't start a chargeback over a "quality of goods issue", even though I have emails stating he would refund and proof of shipping. That just encourages honest citizens to lie to their bank and say that it's a fraudulent transaction, surely? Telling the truth sure as hell doesn't do any good when the "buyer protection" policies just aren't worth a damn. We're pretty much screwed on this one.
On the other hand...
I've also been on the seller side of a dispute. A web site I took over a few years ago included a store that sells downloadable software and web traffic. It's far from being a retirement plan, but it does get the occasional order. The software sales work just fine, but since it's way down my priority list, I've not bothered to keep up to date with traffic prices from various suppliers that I'd resell from and I've not accepted an order for some time. I actually care about this web site so little that, rather than hack about with a mess of a web site, I just decided to put a message at the top of the page saying that these products weren't unavailable. Unashamedly cheap, but I thought it might do the job.
Still, I got an order last month for $129.95 and about an hour later - as it didn't instantly arrive - the buyer put in a complaint with PayPal. Doing so locked those funds pending a review so I couldn't use them, even to send a refund. As the buyer clearly couldn't be bothered to read the massive red text warning, as far as I was concerned he could wait a little while for his refund now - I wasn't going to make a deposit in order to pay him back and then wait weeks while PayPal decided if I could have my money back, or if he'd actually get refunded twice.
The only option for any kind of communication open to me was to submit tracking information for the sale. I did this, selecting delivery method "online" and tracking number "none", and wrote a message in the comments field to explain that this actually wasn't tracking information, but it was all I could do. The email confirmation they sent after submitting the information did not contain the comments I'd entered, nor were they visible anywhere in the PayPal screens. I'm not sure if anyone ever read these - it doesn't look like it - and obviously I don't have an exact copy, but from memory it went a little something like this:
"This product ordered is not available at present, as is stated clearly on the order page. Buyer needs to pay more attention before entering payment details online. Please refund the buyer in full - I cannot do this as the funds in my account are frozen."
Weeks pass, and I hear nothing. Then this:
"According to the User Agreement, PayPal's Buyer Complaint Policy applies only to the postage of goods and not to services and other intangible goods. For that reason, we are unable to take any action regarding this complaint."
Result? Err... no.
Now it's his turn to be screwed by a brain dead PayPal policy that, really, is an open door to online fraudsters. If someone is prepared to send you money with PayPal for anything that you don't have to ship (software, a web site subscription, an e-book, etc) then you simply do not have to deliver and the buyer has no comeback at all. Why not try it? There's a lot of money to be made if you're that way inclined.
This result in my favour is no consolation to me really. I could keep the $129.95 to offset what I've lost on the other deal, but then I'd be as bad as Ron from Image Warehouse. I'm still going to refund this poor sucker eventualy. First I just want to make sure he knows how fucked up PayPal really is. (*)
(*) I considered censoring my language here, in case it jeopardised search engine indexing, but a quick search for "paypal fucked up" reveals that I'm not the first to say it, and that it's just fine and dandy with Google. Good job.
I've decided to fudge my poker graphs a little, so here's where I fess up to what I've done.
Before
After
You can click the thumbnails for larger versions if you want, but it's pretty clear what happened from these tiny versions anyway.
My doomswitch was flipped a few days ago. Everything I touched turned to shit, and the graph I posted on Friday was only the start of it. I'd already sunk four buy-ins on Poker Stars and I thought a change of scenery might do me good. Especially as I'd already achieved Gold Star status on Stars for next month but was miles away from the next level, earning a few more FPPs wasn't really going to matter.
I found a $25 freebie in my Party Poker account and a $100 reload bonus on Empire. Often I'd just blitz through these on $1/$2 limit, but as I have a no-limit goal right now, what harm could it do to carry on playing for my NL50 target on here? Quite a bit, as it happened.
Five more buy-ins dribbled away before I'd unlocked the bonuses. $250 down for $125 of bonus - not good at all. Though I got lucky on Party to start with, 250 hands wasn't enough to realise that this game plays rather different to what I'd gotten used to. By the end of 1000 hands on Empire, I'd just about figured that out and almost stopped spewing. Almost.
So I've decided to write off the hands on Party and Empire. Quite naughty I know, but it makes my graph look so untidy otherwise, and a little deception is worthwhile if it helps to keep me motivated. My original plan was, after all, to see whether I could beat the NL50 game on Stars in particular so I can tell myself somewhat convincingly that it's not too bad to discard some bad results. OK it's still cheating, but I'm not counting rakeback or bonuses (so far worth at least $600) in my profit figures, so it all cancels out in the end.
The comeback begins now, with only a four buy-in mountain to climb to get back on track, not nine. Suddenly that seems much more achievable.
Saw the Pet Shop Boys last night, in Wolverhampton. It sounded a little something like this.
When I look back upon my lie-uf It's always with a sense of shay-um I've always been the one to blay-um
The fact that this clip is the best I could find from about twenty thousand cellphone bootlegs on YouTube is surely reason enough to allow people to take decent recording equipment to concerts these days.
If a whole bunch of people are going to stand in front of me holding their phones up in the air, rush home and see who can be first to upload a tiny, shaky recording of half a song with terrible sound that's not even in sync with what video you can see, I'd much rather they were getting in my way with a decent camera and a boom mic. At least that way I'd be able to see the bits I missed when I got home.
Anyway, what's so gay about an on stage shiny gold cowboy teaching another cowboy on screen to swing his pants? Am I not allowed to find this entertaining?
Time for a quick poker lesson in how to represent a hand, courtesy of Rickib78.
a/s/l? We assume from the username late twenties, and probably male but using a cool or deliberately feminised form of Richard. PokerStars tells me he's from Clayton, Victoria. G'day, Dick.
Representing a hand is simple, apparently. Just bet and raise wildly and then your opponent has to assume that you currently hold the best hand available with the community cards that are showing.
Here's the example :-
Poker Stars - No Limit Hold'em Cash Game - $0.25/$0.50 Blinds - 9 Players - (LegoPoker HH Converter)
So I folded the best hand. He proudly showed QJo, thinking he'd pushed me off a big hand and not, in fact, the weak pair and busted draw that I had.
luckydonut said, "wow u misread ur hand" Rickib78 said, "looool" Rickib78 said, "did u have a straight?" luckydonut said, "you think i folded a straight?" luckydonut said, "lol" Rickib78 said, "loool" luckydonut said, "looooooool" luckydonut said, "whats this, lol envy?" Rickib78 said, "well i represented a flush !!!!" luckydonut said, "you did?" Rickib78 said, "3 spades on the table" luckydonut said, "oh so you represented what on the turn, before you decided to represent the flush, exactly?" Rickib78 said, "on the turn it was a straigh" Rickib78 said, "looooooooooooool"
Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooool. I win.
But really, I don't know what's so funny. Clearly I have a lot to learn to take on a player who is good enough to represent a different hand on each and every betting round.
It's my last work trip to London, for a while at least. Pros: no more 6.30 alarms. Cons: no more compilmentary at-seat breakfasts on a free first class ticket.
Thanks to the Virgin Traveller programme, which I "qualified" for by booking eight return tickets to Cheltenham, I've been able to sit in a slightly bigger seat for free on any Monday morning or Friday evening journey. It's already more than paid for itself - entry to the programme cost about £500, and every morning journey I've made to London would have cost £54, in a cheap seat, without breakfast. I didn't even need to go to Cheltenham.
Membership has its benefits: two first class weekend return tickets to anywhere on the network. I always book both seats, even if I'm travelling alone. That way the seat reservations are always for a proper four-seat table, not a one-on-one table.
That's the theory at least, but seat reservations appear to mean very little, particularly to people who pay £150 to get to work. At least in standard class you see people looking a bit shifty when they know they're sitting in someone else's seat, ready to get up and avoid embarassment as soon anyone looks like they're going to confront them.
The real problem is that I'm absolutely hopeless this early in the morning. So when I see two ladies sliding into opposite corners of my table just ahead of me, one saying "you go that side so you can spread out a bit", I'm in no fit state to politely and, more important, coherently point out that one would actually be spreading into my seat, would you mind letting me sit there, and it has to be the window seat so I can use my laptop, and by the way can't you read the fucking sign?
What's that... is it a monster? No, it's just me before I've had my third cup of coffee and luke warm hash brown. I decide it's best not to engage them.
What do you say? "Hey, you're in my seat". So she lets me sit next to her and opposite her friend and I get caught in some crossfire talk about shopping or periods or whatever while I'm eating a particularly chewy sausage.
Do I really whip out the second ticket and say "I pwn your seat too"? The best that can happen then is she moves over to the other side of the table and I have to face her for the next hour and a half. Hell hath no fury like a woman asked to move seats by a fat dude?
All I want to do is curl up and zone out until my rubber bacon arrives.
So here I am squatting in some other bastard's single seat - I know this because it says "reserved" above it, it's not hard - and winding myself up because I only got one seat for free, not two.
I'll try to calm down a little when I get off the train and to Costa Coffee. Even though I know they'll assume I want milk in my Americano. No. Thank you.
Poker Stars dealt their ten billionth hand this evening.
It played out at a 1c/2c blind, no limit hold'em table. The winner, justine0003, had a stack of $0.82c at the start of the hand, and dragged down a mammoth $100,003.31 pot with an eight-three suited.
For this promotion, Poker Stars were paying everybody dealt into the hand a $10,000 bonus, and the winner hand of hand #10,000,000,000 got their bonus upgraded to a cool hundred large.
These awards were to be increased further based upon your rank within the VIP program. Conspiracy theorists may note not only that it's impossible to earn any frequent player points (and therefore progress through the VIP program) at the stakes played on the chosen table, but that it was also 6-handed table, not the usual 9-handed. The cost to PokerStars was precisely $150,000 - not to be sniffed at, but on a full ring mid or high stakes game it could have cost almost double that.
The winner's suited garbage made a flush on the turn to beat a five-four offsuit, a nine-ten suited and one other hand that was mucked and is not visible in the hand history. Four players were all in before the flop. Two folded pre-flop.
Those two players probably made the worse mistake in online poker, ever.
Players inwooke and XTedForrestX, sitting on stacks of $1.73 and $2.95 respectively, folded after the first player to act moved all in with his $4.83. An astute move by Rechargeable, because with a hundred grand at stake you're going to play, but you want to be racing off your cards against as few players as possible. You'd think nobody will fold here ever, but at least you can give them a chance to get it wrong.
Here's what getting it wrong fold cost them: for a saving of $2.95 (let's take the worst case scenario) they gave up a one-sixth theoretical share of $90,000 additional money. That's an expected return of $15,000, not to mention the few dollars in the actual pot itself. It's over 30,500 to 1 pot odds, and and even with a hopeless hand you're surely no worse off than a 20-1 shot to strike it rich.
Playing scared is one thing. Winning ten grand for nothing but then not wanting to risk three bucks on the best lottery ticket you'll ever get defies logic.
I haven't followed football for a while now, but I know it's cup final day because Sporting Index sent me a fifty quid free bet offer as long as I tried out their mobile phone software.
I'll review it in one word. Infuriating.
It needed to access the internet more often than I blink, and each time it did it popped up a security warning and I had to say that it's OK to go online. This is probably a phone feature rather than anything specifically in their software, but it's still annoying as hell. If it was OK last time, it's fine this time if you wantr go and get the same stuff from the same site. It isn't just when you go to a new screen, if you stay watching the same screen for 10 seconds or more it tries to refresh. So anything you have to type, you have to do quickly or it's too late. Scroll down the list of bets but do it fast, otherwise it'll get hidden by the popup message before you have time to digest what's on offer. I would say that perhaps being able to digest the bets that are on offer is more useful than making sure the prices displayed are bang up to date. They'll always be sure to let you know if a market has moved before you get your money out, so this is a bit too clever for its own good.
My main gripe though is that apparently my phone's keypad isn't good enough. You can't enter numbers or letters using the phone, instead you have to use a crappy small and unresponsive touchscreen soft keyboard. Once you're logged in (and after the first time, you only need a numeric PIN), the only things you should need to type in are numbers for the bet amount. What phone doesn't have a numeric keypad? Mine not only also has a full keyboard, it also has its own built in soft keyboard which works a hell of a lot better than the one in the Sporting Index software. No input method works right except their own keyboard, and even that doesn't work very well.
In fact, on the Sporting Index online games (I had another refund promo yesterday, lost as usual - I'm not saying it's rigged or owt, but I'm 0 for 7 on those now) they only let you select bet amounts using the mouse by clicking up and down arrow keys. Most computers have a keyboard, so I don't know what their aversion to using them is.
I ended up buying Man Utd in the Win Index at £4/point at 13 points. It's 25 for a win, 10 for a draw and 0 if they lose, so I lose £2 of non-refundable real money if they lose. No big deal considering I stand to win up to £48 on the free bet, but the reason I made it a nice round £4 and not £3.85 for a completely risk-free bet was only because I couldn't get anything at all to enter into the pence part of the stake input. Two separate boxes for pounds and pence isn't a bad idea if most users will enter numbers on a phone keypad but (a) they're not and (b) it doesn't work anyway.
It's not like I'm going to watch the match - It's still double player points at PokerStars today and the ten billionth hand bonus is fast approaching. But come on you reds, I guess.
EDIT: 0-0 after 90 minutes, so I lost £12 and had £38 still to play risk-free. So I had to go through it all over again with an extra time bet. That one lost.
I don't remember the last time I misspelled a word so badly it got the better of a spellchecker. I mean really fooled it into not having the first clue what you're on about.
This is quite impressive. I was just one letter out on the British English spelling of "stabilise", and two letters away from the more computer-friendly "stabilize". The suggestions all contain a "b" and an "l", but otherwise they're strong candidates for the worst random spelling guesswork in the world ever.
Nope, nothing really interesting happened. Still, it's less than ten weeks before I'll be in Vegas.. bear with me during the dark weeks
7. Pocket pairs
I play 93.6% of pocket pairs, and raise them preflop 43.3%. I do have negative lines for 77, 66, 44 and 22 though. I don't see any major problems, just a few big pots I lost with a set against a rivered flush, or a full house against quads, etc. I do still think I might need to dump small pairs in early position because I often struggle to get a big enough payoff when it gets raised ahead of me and I do flop a set.
8. Suited connectors
Profitable to the tune of 9BB/100. I cold called with a suited connector only 12 times, mostly KQs and QJs. Overall I lost, but it's a pretty small sample size. The hands I played were almost all only for a tiny raise and in position. Doesn't feel like there's much wrong here.
9. Unsuited connectors
Leak. Only a small one, but I'm losing 1BB/100 with unsuited connectors. This includes AKo, which I'm nearly $90 down on. That's because of some big pots I lost with top pair vs a set or two pair. I'm getting more confident playing AK now, and feel like I lose less when I'm beaten, so I expect this figure to improve. I've cold-called unsuited connectors 11 times and won once. Seven times it was with JTo and the one pot I did win was very small. Mental note made.
10. Postflop aggression
Wow, I c-bet a lot. After a preflop raise, I bet or raise the flop 77.8% of the time. Is that too high, if the guide I'm referring to says "at least 40%"? Well I don't think so, because filtering my hands on just these situations, I've made 122BB/100 when I continuation bet and when they lead out and I get to raise, the win rate soars to a phenominal 191BB/100. I can live with that.
My overall postflop aggression factor is 2.83. Plenty. However this is mostly from my flop play: 4.12 on the flop, 1.83 on the turn and 1.90 on the river. It's not exactly passive on the later streets, but I wonder if this shows that I slow down a little too quickly and could be betting and raising a little more.
11. Check-raising
I've check-raised 111 times, 1.11% in total. Every one of them, naturally, felt great. I'm not doing it excessively, and overall the hands where I've check-raised show my biggest win rate: 449BB/100. Of course this figure is pretty meaningless, because I'm usually only check-raising with my strongest hands and by its nature a check-raise builds nice big pots. Still, it looks good just to finish with such an impressive figure!
What better way to chill out at night when working away from home than to analyze your Poker Tracker stats? I'd even set up GoToMyPc especially so I could get at PT and drill down whenever I felt it necessary to get into the nitty gritty of my play.
Well I thought it would be a good idea, but I crashed out after a heavy night of partying. And by partying, I actually mean lugging server hardware from one floor of a datacenter to another.
Here's the first part anyway. I based the analysis on this guide, and answered each point in turn. I'll do the same thing after another 25k hands.
1. Do I have sufficient preflop aggression?
Apparantly not. On the button and two seats behind I'm raising about half the hands I play, but everywhere else it's lower. I already think I play too many weak hands out of position so eliminating them would improve this figure - not by raising more, but by calling less.
2. Am I positionally aware?
Indeed I am. My VP$IP figure on the button is 26.21, whereas under the gun it's 13.13. So I'm very close indeed to playing twice as many hands in the best position as in the worst.
3. How's my stealing?
My attempts to steal the blinds figure is 33.55%. When filtering my hands only for steal attempts, my win rate is $59 per 100 hands. Not too shabby, and much more than double my overall win rate - in fact more than ten times bigger! I think there are other areas I can look to improve ahead of this.
4. Defending the blinds
This is good and bad. The magic number, so they say, is a loss of 0.375BB/100. Anything worse than this and you may as well just check/fold every blind. My number is is virtually the same figure, but positive: 0.37BB/100. It's reassuring. I don't make money from the blinds overall (nobody does) but when I decide to pay to play from these positions, it's been profitbale. But it could be more profitable. I'm at -0.46BB/100 when facing a blind steal. Defend less, then.
5. Heads-up play
This was a pleasant surprise: I've won 7BB/100 when heads up going to the flop. I certainly didn't expect this figure to any higher than my overall win rate. Continuation bets apparently do rock. However, when I filter only the hands where I didn't raise, it's a loss of 6BB/100. I'm not profitable when limping with weak hands. Most likely it's small pocket pairs and suited aces when I'm out of position (given that I already know I raise a wide range in late position) and I suspected this.
6. Multiway pots
I'm winning 5BB/100 in multiway pots overall, and 3BB/100 when limping. Guess there's nothing wrong with that.
This is already long enough, so I've split the analysis into two parts. Two blog entries for the price of one - bargain! Some may say it's a cheap trick to make readers come back for more, but given the content is really all for my benefit and not at all interesting to anyone else, that's hardly the case. I'm just getting bogged down in all those lovely figures.
You never know, something interesting may happen that I just have to write about in the meantime. Doubtful though.
I don't very often, in fact almost never, watch or listen to the news. I admit that I often don't have much of an idea about what's going on in the world.
Today's "top story" on Radio 1's news reminded me why I should take an interest.
It turns out that people have been attempting to use an online auction site to sell things. The damn nerve.
This weekend, the radio station trundles off to Preston in the closest thing to what the kids of today have to the good old Radio 1 Roadshow. No more trucks along the coast. Now it's two tents in a city. There's urban, and then there's Preston...
Like the roadshows, it's all free. But rather than just piling onto the beach to watch the Hairy Cornflake play some records or wait for Smiley Miley to appear and ask everyone to guess how far he drove today, these days you have to win a ticket lottery to enjoy the delights of Scissor Sisters, Razorlight, Natasha Bedingfield and Mark Ronson on a bizarrely diverse bill.
Tickets for Radio 1's Big Weekend are selling on eBay for hundreds of quid. The station asked them to pull the auctions and eBay said no. They've even got an MP involved, and BBC News proper covered it in this article, which impressively managed to capitalize eBay in three different ways.
For obvious reasons, I decided to choose my own password when upgrading my Poker Tracker database. Thank you though, PostgreSQL installer, it's the thought that counts.
T
(9 Players)
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