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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.
What an amazingly spoilt start to the week.
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.
This is big news, apparently.
Never mind the impending leadership battle that will determine the country’s next Prime Minister, or all those people that are going crazy over a little girl that went missing in Portugal.
Or even that Chris Tarrant apparently threw a spoon at someone or something.
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.
I’ve already jinxed myself by doing something as results-oriented as actually having a win goal and writing about it here. I’ve just further done myself damage by waiting until the very second I passed the half way mark to take a screenshot of my graph.
A few minutes ago, I passed $1000 in profit playing only $50 NL on PokerStars. The magic number was $1000.10, in fact. Out came Poker Grapher, and here’s the story so far. All you graph lovers can click on it for the full size version.
As you’d expect, I’ve since dropped back under a grand.
My win rate is clearly lower than it was at the last checkpoint. It took under 6,000 hands to win the first $500, but over twice as many to make it to $1000. My overall win rate just clears $5 per 100 hands. I’m getting very close to 20,000 hands played now, which is starting to resemble a decent sample size. I don’t know whether I should assume I ran hot to start, have just had worse than average cards for a while, or if overall 5BB/100 about right and it all evens out in the end.
The main thing though is that the line has kept on moving in the right direction. 🙂
Plenty of added value at Stars right now too. Seeing as I only started playing $50 NL there to clear a bonus, I was pretty plesed to see another $150 reload bonus come along today. This time it’s because of the impending momentous occasion of their 10 billionth dealt hand. In addition, there’s a money aded tournament every hour, and FPPs clock up at twice their normal rate.
I’ll easily make it to Gold Star this month now. Double rakeback too. Given that I’ve paid just over $300 in rake this month for enough FPPs to buy about £20 in Amazon gift certificates, I figure it’s usually about 12% rakeback for a Silver Star player. Should be about 16% for Gold Star. Not the best by any means, but not a bad deal considering you don’t have to jump through any hoops to get rakeback.
It’s as close to official as it can get. Sounds like nobody was meant to say anything but Peter Hook let it slip last week, and confirmed it on his MySpace page yesterday:
"so i went on and lo and behold mentioned the N>O> split so i suppose because it was me sayin it it was out at last. im relieved really hated carryin on as normal with an awful secret"
So how do I pick one song to post to mark the passing of my all time favourite group of all time?
If I had a recording of it, I’d post the dreadful version of State of the Nation that "my band" performed at Kirby Muxloe Church Hall circa 1991. With a bonus added rap – I kid you not. There’s many reasons I don’t have a career in music. For this travesty, even though it was a one-off, I’m very very sorry indeed.
Thankfully, this will have to do. Incidentally, this is also the song I want played at my funeral.
On that happy note…
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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.
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