Rants

This is not a blog, I don't post pictures of my lunch. Forgive my typos, I don't use a spell-checker.

The older rants are semi-regularly moved off this page. You can always read the old rants here (or here ) if you're a masochist. If Google sent you here, it's wrong. You can see some of my photos at Yahoo .

07-27-06

I should start an online pay service with zero commission. You easily make enough money from interest on the "float", and can make some more money from fees for improper usage. I could put paypal/neteller/etc. out of business.

07-25-06

There is no such thing as "not gambling". There are only different levels of risk. The wise person does not choose "not to gamble", rather they look at the risk/reward of various options and choose appropriately. Choosing the lowest risk option usually means sacrificing a lot of EV, which may or may not be wise.

07-22-06 [poker]

Consider a simple "pushbot" situation. I'll just assume a cash game or early in an MTT so payout structures don't matter, just chip EV.

Folded to you on the button. Only the blinds remain. You have C chips (in units of big blinds) and the blinds cover you (effective stacks all C). If you can only push or fold, should you push?

The correct way to do this is to guess some push range for you. Then assume the blinds know your push range and compute the correct call range for them. Then iteratively trying changing your push range, so that you find your push range that maximizes your EV over the whole range. (in each case assume the blinds know your range and make the perfect decision).

To see if you should push a hole H, you see if H is in the optimal range for you.

Okay, so as far as I know that's just review. In order to compute this you have to iterate many times over all holes for each person because you try a range for yourself, then try all calling ranges for both blinds to compute their optimal actions, then tweak your range & repeat until it stabilizes.

Here's an idea I had for a simple approximation :

It's folded to you on the button and you look down and see hand H. Assume your push range is all hands >= H. Now compute what the blinds should do given that range for you. Now consider pushing the actual hand H against the blinds' calling ranges. If it's +EV, then push, if not, don't.

Now, obviously this is an approximation and it doesn't get the actual EV right at all, but does it get the range right? I think it's very close and it's hard for me to see how/where it could fail.

Say for example in a given situation the correct push range is hands >= AQo. Folds to you and you have AQo, you'll make the right decision of course. What if you have AJo ? This should show up as -EV to push because if it was +EV it would've been added to the correct range, so we should get this right. What if you have QQ? We'll assume your range is only QQ+ so the blinds will fold much more, but it still should show up as a +EV push and tell you the right answer.

Anyone have an idea how this approximate procedure could yield a different result than the correct procedure?

BTW this is different than the Sklansky-Chubukov numbers because I'm assuming the blinds know your exact push range and make the perfect decision, but they don't know your actual hole cards.

07-22-06

Our apartment in SF is right near where the Mexican day laborers stand for jobs. I was thinking of just renting a U-Haul or something and grabbing some of them to unload it. (ala Stephen Colbert:) Great idea, or greatest idea?

Oh yeah, we got approved on the Mission apartment; woo hoo, sort of. It's small for two people, we're going to have to get along well! I'm not sure if my bed (Queen) is going to even fit in the bedroom.

07-21-06

I found this really simple beautiful Ode to the SF Bike Messenger .

Bicycle Film Festival in SF in September. Woot.

07-21-06

I guess we're gonna have a garage sale Sunday morning. The small stuff is free to anyone I know, so come on by.

07-20-06

OMFG I think I might be delirious and spending too much time in online message boards, but this might be the funniest thing I've ever read :

Your post sucks because:

[ ] It is in the wrong forum
[ ] It's a donkament beat - lol
[ ] No one cares you can only SIIHP w/ your sister
[X] You forgot to turn your sarcasm meter on
[ ] You folded KK pf
[ ] You just fell off the turnip truck
[ ] Should have used roflcopter not lollerskates

07-20-06

The kids tell me Marvin Spectrum is fun. Meh, I'd rather play poker. It does make me miss Fusion Frenzy games though.

07-20-06

While in SF I thought of two pieces of software I'd like to have.

One is an apartment layout tool (you could use it for houses & offices and anything else too). First, you roughly draft the floor plan of the place; it tells you square feet, so you can rough sketch it with a few measurements and tweak to get it close. Then you draw some simple shapes for your furniture. Then you can drag them around and rotate them to try different layouts. Obviously you could just use something like Maya (any modeler) to do this, but those are very difficult for the average person (like me). I want to just be able to draw the outline of the space then drag some walls, etc.

Addendum : Scott pointed me at this which is not bad. I wish I could free draw my layout, and just draw the furniture, not select from Ikea pieces, but meh, it's not bad.

The other is a traffic layout and simulation tool. Going over the Bay Bridge the traffic is awful, but oddly the traffic on the bridge itself is not bad at all, it's just leading up to the bridge that it's bad, because of some badly designed merges. Perhaps some small changes could be made which would cost very little but improve the flow of those merges? The idea is to have a tool that's sort of like a fluid-pipe flow analysis tool. You have these incoming pipes (roads) and outgoing pipes. At each edge, you can set the flux : the rate of cars going through (# per minute) & the average speed. You lay out the road in between with some simple splining tool, then the system simulates the car flow, using perhaps a particle system, or something that reasonably well approximates actual traffic interaction. You can then visually see the flow, see where it's clogging and slowing down. Then you can try little things, like adding an extra lane for a merge area, things like that.

07-19-06 [poker]

There are a lot of advantages to playing a low variance style. In theory, EV and variance are two separate aspects of a style - you might play a very +EV style that's very high variance. In practice, it's very hard to maximize EV with a high variance style.

There are two big problems with playing high variance :

1. It makes it harder to self-adjust. Poker is all about constantly adjusting, finding your leaks and fixing them. With a high variance style it's much much harder to really know when you're making mistakes or not because you will be going up & down all the time. This makes it harder to fix your game or make the right adjustments, which can lead you into bad play patterns.

2. It's much harder psychologically to stay in top form at all times. Because you'll be winning big and losing big all the time, when you lose big it will be hard to stay mentally fresh (avoid tilt). Even if you have the self control to just stop playing after some brutal beats, that means you're not playing when you could be, which is -EV.

The result is that even if embracing a bit more variance could be more +EV, often in practice you're better off giving up some value to keep your variance lower and have better control of your game.

note : this is a totally different issue than Risk/Reward in investing. That principle applies to poker as well, but is a totally different thing. In that case you're trying to balance risk just because you want to avoid ruin ("busto"), and because you might need to get that money for other things.

07-19-06

I think the stock market is ridiculously over-reacting to the Israel/Lebanon thing. This is not WW3. Things will go back to relative normal conditions. OTOH I have been predicting for a long time that the US economy was headed for the crapper, and this is sort of the right correction if for the wrong reason. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to play the prediction that the economy was F'ed. Someone wiser could have told me to play that prediction by buying Gold, which would've worked very well. At the moment, I think Gold may now be too high because of over-reaction to Israel/Lebanon, and you could even short it if you're bold. In the unlikely event that the shit really does hit the fan, I wonder if I should try to sell out of all my positions. Surely there would be a rush to sell and the markets would be F'ed.

I'm finding myself more and more just anti-Israel. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for them and understand why they act that way. I used to see it more like Northern Ireland, where it's a hard problem and you can't really make everyone happy. Now I just feel more like Israel are the invaders who are smashing the poor locals with their iron fist; for every small attack they respond a hundred fold, even when their soldiers are attacked they don't respond by attacking military targets, they simply destroy civilian homes and infrastructure. They believe they have the right to visciously retaliate to any offense, but their opponents are "murderers" or "terrorists" if they retaliate in the slightest. I have the same problem with many American Jews' position on Israel. The New York Times spoke out against Israel's current offensive - not because of the killing and damage to innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, that wasn't mentioned at all - their objection was solely that the offensive would create more terrorists in the long term which would wind up reducing Israel's security. This moral relativism - the idea that any killing by you is justified, but any killing by them is an atrocity - destroys any righteousness. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the opposition's side is any better, they intentionally put their fighters in civilian neighborhoods, and no one is more blind to ambiguity than a Jihadi, etc. etc. I'm just saying it's hard for me to sympathize with either side these days.

07-18-06

Owning property and renting it out is like an amazing cash cow. For one thing, the property is just a good investment that appreciates similar to stock. Then you get the rental income on top of that which is just like a bonus that good growth stocks don't have. It's like combining a good growth stock with a stock that pays a big dividend, which is unheard of. The problem in CA is that rental income is very low compared to mortgage, but in places were mortage:rent is around 1:1, buying property to rent is very easy and very profitable. All you need is a little nest egg to cover the down payment, and then it pays for itself and you get to keep the appreciation. Of course if the area totally crashes you get a double whammy - you might not be able to find a renter (or the rental price will plummet), and the value of property itself plummets.

07-18-06

We wound up putting down applications on two apartments. Oddly enough they both wound up being ones that weren't even listed on Craigslist. We found them by going to see other listed ones, then the property manager mentioned he had these other ones that weren't on the market yet and we went for them. All the ones we found on craigslist were either real shitty or already had like 100 applications in if they were nice & in good neighborhoods.

One is at 21st at Guerrerro in the Mission District, close to the Park and Valencia St, but in a nice/safe part of that area. It's a pretty swank location, but the apartment itself is a bit shitty and small.

The other is at at Taylor St at Green St in North Beach (sort of up Russian Hill - I guess it's called "Amber Hill"). It's a slightly bigger apartment and it's in an old building with cool character. The location is convenient to cool Chinatown asian markets and North Beach seems kinda cool, but it's a much more touristy area and not as many real good restaurants/cafes/etc.

So, I think the 21st St. is our first choice and the Amber Hill is a fallback.

07-18-06

We just got back to San Luis Obispo late last night. It was a long drive down from SF, and rolling into San Luis, the town felt strange and foreign, like returning to the town where you want to high school, many years later. It was about 11 PM when we got here and the town was dead silent, the streets were deserted, and it felt almost eerie. The streets also just felt so wide and empty, like I could drive half asleep, not watching for pedestrians jumping off the curb, taxis swerving into my lane, or pot holes popping up in the road. But, the most striking thing was the smell. We rolled down the windows as far as they could go and just breathed in - the air was slightly damp, but clean and sweet, heavy with the perfume of thousands of flowers, the scent of the orange blossoms, the hibiscus, the jacarandas, in all the well-loved yards in this gardener's paradise.

07-17-06

So we're up in the bay looking for places and it's a total nightmare. When the good places have an open house, like 20 people will show up. One thing I hadn't anticipated was trying to impress the landlord with an application. Everywhere I've rented a place before, if you can pay first+last month they're happy to take you. Here you have to compete with others and look professional and responsible and all that, which I don't really at the moment, what with my independent status.

The landlords here also are ridiculously uninformed about their own properties. Nobody know square feet, and nobody has a floor plan. WTF!? You have to have those things for taxes / surveying, etc. how can you own a place and not have that information !? We asked one lady and she cocked her head and said totally dead pan "I don't have a tape measure".

We wound up doing "Rental Resumes" on recommendation from Jen; we did this one . That was cool for the people who were just individuals renting places, but most of the places are run by a property management company, and they won't take them, nor are they impressed, they just want you to fill out their own form. I also printed out our own free copies of our credit reports. That didn't help at all, nobody even wanted to look at them. They all just pay $20 to some service to check your credit. WTF do they think I'm going to forge this 10 page credit history thing !?

One thing that really disturbs me is the amount of information you have to give out. I usually don't worry too much about identify theft, since it's usually pretty isolated - eg. someone might use your credit card, okay you can stop those charges and cancel the card. These forms, however, contain all your ID numbers, your address history, info on all your credit cards - once thye get your credit report they have everything about you. It's enough information to do almost anything - get new credit cards in your name for example, apply for unemployment, get into your bank accounts, etc. I'm a little worried and if I don't get lazy I think I'm going to change all my account numbers on my credit cards & banks.

07-13-06

Fucking "housingmaps.com" piece of crap seems to be a few days out of date with craigslist. That makes it almost useless in SF because turnover is so fast. Thanks a lot, you useless pieces of non-good-programming turds. Why can't you just pull the craigslist data on the fly !? Furthermore, why do the craigslist apartment listings have to suck so bad? They don't have standardized fields for square footage, parking, appliances, when available, etc. etc. so I can't filter my searches based on anything useful. I also can't define a set of neighborhoods to search and save that query. WTF, it's the 21st century and we're still using these punch-card-ass systems !?! ARG

I think an electric stove might be a no-go for me.

07-13-06

A lot of people have asked me about the House bill to ban online gambling. At this point almost everyone agrees the chance of it becoming law is < 1%. It's basically another stupid election year grand-standing move, just like the nonsense about flag burning, violence in video games, gay marriage, etc. etc. - they make a stink about issues that they won't do anything about just to stir up the crazies and get them to the polls. So, what will the real effects of this be? I'm not sure. It might scare some people away in the short term thinking they don't want to put money in the sites. In the longer term, it may actually attract more people, because it's a ton of publicity. There are articles about it in all the newspapers, it's really getting the word out.

07-13-06

I thought "Match Point" was rather well constructed, but the two leads (Rhys-something and Scarlett Jojo) are both really awful actors, absolutely stiff and forced (unlike the British actors in smaller parts who are excellent), and it sort of ruins the movie.

I realized that I really like Woody Allen as an actor even more than I like him as a director. He's the past master of the neurotic hypochondriac self-obsessed liberal Jewish shtick.

07-13-06

re moving : Scholz also wisely points out that I could just move to the suburbs of Austin and buy a house. That would be sweet, but then I'd have to live way out in the suburbs of Austin which isn't ideal.

07-12-06

I'm trying to give away my old station wagon, but none of the charities want it ;( It's a 1985 Chevy, but it's in pretty good shape. Snooty bastards, my wagon's not good enough for you! I was thinking I might put a "Free Car" sign out on the street.

I checked my credit report so I could bring it to rental applications. I found there's a "bad credit" dealie on there that just showed up last month for a bill I supposedly didn't pay back in 2001 in Austin. First of all, I wasn't in Austin in 2001 (I don't think), I was in Seattle, so it must be from even before then. Second of all, WTF, a late bill from 2001 gets posted on my credit report in June of 2006 !? There must be some statute of limitations for debt collection, no !?

07-12-06

If anybody knows the poop about bay area neighborhoods, drop me a line please. Here's what I've figured out so far :

Nice places in the city to live (for me that means not too expensive, not too gentrified, cool people & some street life, but not crazy dense noisy city) seem to be in an almost continuous strip from like Richmond, down through Haight and Hayes/Castro to the west side of the Mission and Noe Valley. I guess another nice patch is around Russian Hill - Telegraph Hill but I think that might be out of my price range except in the shittier parts in the middle.

In the East Bay, the trick is to find the nicer areas that aren't totally yuppied out. I'd like to live near one of the little hipster shopping strips so I can walk to cafes/groceries/etc. So, Berkely seems okay, but I don't know much about living there. There are decent parts of Oakland around Lake Merrit towards Piedmont, but I don't really know that area at all.

Scholz had an interesting idea of living up in the Redwoods on the peninsula, in Felton or something like that. Plus : it's lovely up there and cheaper than the cities, Minus : long drive to work/city and little things like shopping are a pain, also the people who live up there are mostly yuppies or white trash.

07-12-06

I've discovered the secrets to The One True Omelette. First of all, you need a non-stick 10" pan. A standard 9" pan is not as good, but you can use it if you want to eat filth like you usually do. Second, use only TWO eggs, not three or four or whatever, certainly not extra whites or anything vile like egg beaters. Whisk the eggs well in a bowl, and do NOT, DO NOT add water or milk or anything; do add salt & pepper at this point. Get the pan medium hot, butter it (not too hot that the butter insta-browns), and add the eggs. Now the third secret : do NOT touch the eggs. Do not stir, don't do that thing where you lift the edges and let some raw egg go underneath the cooked part. Just sit and let it cook and never touch it. Pretend you're cooking a crepe. It should get semi-solid quickly. Before it's all the way solid, add the cheese and other fillings. Do NOT stuff it full of all kinds of crap. I recommend only ham and cheese. It's crucial to use a good ham and cheese; one choice is the Niman Ranch smoked ham with a true aged English Cheddar, another good choice is a Manchego cheese with a Serrano ham. The ham should've been browned & warmed in another pan, perhaps with a tiny bit of oil if the ham's not fatty enough to give off it's own lube. Fold the omelette and top with some chopped parsely.

07-11-06

I was thinking today that anyone buying a house in CA right now is foolish. The only reason they can get away with these insane prices is because people are willing to pay it. The reason people will pay it is they see it partly as an investment that will appreciate. It's a standard pyramid scheme / bull market type of thing. Then of course I realized I've been thinking that for the past few years and I've been wrong so far.

The funny thing I realized is that in bubble markets, like the current housing market (especially in CA), and the internet stock boom, is almost nobody is actually smart & rational about it. You have the "irrationally exhuberant" people who think it's just going to keep going up. They might recognize it's a bubble, but they think it won't pop badly, maybe it will just plateau. They rationalize all sorts of ridiculous reasons why the valuations should really be so high. On the other hand you have the people who see that it is indeed a bubble, but irrationally think that that's a good reason to stay out of the market. Not so, bubbles are a great time to ride the market and take a huge profit. Very few people actually identify the bubble and try to ride it smartly.

07-10-06

How depressing. If I move to SF I'll be paying more than I am now ($1300) for some shitty little studio apartment. Then I have my cats to worry about, they're outside cats will go absolutely ape shit if I have them locked in an apartment all the time. Sigh. To cap it all off, I'm reminded what a moron I've been for not buying a house which just makes me sick, and stocks are not doing well so my nest egg is dwindling and I'm going to have to tap it to pay for moving expenses, etc. Shit.

Looks like stuff in my price range is around 500 square feet. My computer desk is almost 500 square feet!

I've gotta get rid of a bunch of stuff that won't fit in a tiny apartment. If anybody wants a surf board, a rowing machine, a punching bag, or two cats, let me know.

07-10-06

To cheer up, watch William Shatner doing Rocket Man

07-10-06

My landlord is kicking me out. I'm renting a house, and my one year lease expired a while ago, so I've just been paying monthly rent without a lease since then. My landlord just gave me a 30 day notice to move out. Seems to me I'm just F'ed, I have no choice but to leave, right? Pretty uncool thing of him to do, I've always paid rent on time, never been a problem. He wants to sell the house, so it's not like I can talk him into a new lease. The house will probably go for around $800k, up from about $500k when I moved in four years go :(

So, I guess I'll move to the bay area. The really shitty thing is I have to find a place and move in 30 days which is going to be tough. My landlord is a fucking bastard for not letting me know sooner, he must've been thinking about this for a while. Unfortunately there's not really anything I can do, it's his house, he gave me 30 days which is all the law requires.

07-05-06

There should a "Pronouncicon" web site with audio of people saying lots of words. Dan tells me Allen Ginsberg is pronounced like the drink Gin, not a hard "G" as in "give".

This type of nonsense is why some people hate artists.

07-04-06

Something seems seriously out of whack when it's profitable to melt down gold jewelry to make gold bars. The price of gold is not being driven by the market demand for gold, but rather the demand of investors who are A) trying to ride the hysteria/bubble or B) buying up gold bars to stash under their bed because they're kooks that don't believe in cash.

07-01-06

The MS desfragmenter is no longer defragging my disk. I run it and the before & after graphs look identical, both full of frags. I have a 60 GB disk and 10 GB free, so there should be plenty of free space for it to work in. Is there some better defragger that actually works?

The "contig" program from SysInternals seems to work, but it only works on one file. I guess I could just recurse all files and run that.

07-01-06

The taskbar on the side is cool, but it's too wide, it should be adjustable. At 88 pixels it takes too much real estate :

1832 x 1200 < 1920 x 1172

by about 51k pixels

Addendum : turns out it's just cuz I was using the "Desktop menu" thing, which seems to muck up the tastkbar functionality. Take that out and it resizes fine.

06-27-06 [poker]

HoldemReview has some nice Party mods.

06-27-06

Anybody know a lightweight screen capture program that can grab overlay windows? I like "MadCap" but apparently it can't get overlays.

06-27-06

Swallow Formations

06-26-06

Dan and I went mountain biking up on top of the Cuesta Grade yesterday. We went East off the top of the 101 up the dirt road and along the top of the ridge. It's a pretty easy ride and it's just amazing up there, I had no idea!

Anyhoo, I took a bad crash, which is idiotic because it's just a dirt road, not tricky at all, I'm a moron. I cut my knee on my pedal, it sliced it down to the bone of the knee cap and I had to go to the ER. It was tough riding down after the injury because your body gets all stiff and shaky.

I found a cool medical web site that's intended for doctors and thus actually has real information. They describe Laceration treatment . I'm thinking I might remove my stitched myself. You just snip them and pull them out, right? I don't need to go wait in a doctor's office for that.

06-23-06 [poker]

I've been thinking about short stacking with the Sklansky-Chubukov concept. The idea is that you can push all in and turn your cards face up and your move can still be profitable. Your opponents call with any cards that are good for the pot odds against you, they fold hands that aren't. Obviously if you shove AA they fold everything. If you shove AQ, they fold AJ, but can call with 22. This allows them to play perfectly, and yet it's still profitable in many situations because of how often they have to fold (and even when they do call, you're usually not in bad shape).

Now, obviously you're not actually exposing your cards when you push. You get AA and obviously push - they're going to call sometimes. When they do, they are making a mistake (in the true Fundamental Theorem of Poker sense - they're making a different play than they would if they could see your cards), and you get extra value. So, if you push only when Sklansky-Chubukov says you should, any time they make the play they *should* make (if they could see your cards) - you're still profitable, and often they will make other plays, and those just give you extra value.

The nice thing about this push is that it cannot possibly be wrong. It's gauranteed +EV. However, it may not be even close to the most +EV thing you can do. With a given hand where pushing is +EV by this measure, all that tells you is that you shouldn't fold it. You could push, but limping or making a smaller raise might be much more +EV.

Furthermore, there may be hands you can push that are not +EV by Sklansky-Chubukov, but are +EV in practice. For example, with a 20 BB stack, pushing AQo in this way is -EV because you are called by AK and any pair. In reality, it's much better, because your opponents can't see your exact cards. They will fold the baby pairs, which is good for you (more folds), and they might call with AJ.

In reality if you have some push range {PR} and they have some call range {CR}, you can optimize against each other, eg. you pick your pushes to be the most +EV things to push against their call range, and they pick what to call with based on your push range. The only thing we can say for sure is your push range is >= the Sklansky-Chubukov pushes.

06-22-06

Wow, I didn't know you could POP gmail, that's awesome.

06-22-06 [poker]

Some interesting river betting :

Hero is SB with Th Tc

PreFlop
UTG folds, CO Calls, Button folds
Hero RAISES ($4.5), BB folds, CO Calls

(2 players) FLOP: 8s 7h 5s  ( Pot Size:  $11.00 )
Hero BETS ($8), CO Calls

(2 players) TURN: 7d ( Pot Size:  $27.00 )
Hero BETS ($18), CO Calls

(2 players) RIVER: Ts ( Pot Size:  $63.00 )
Hero BETS ($21), ...

(I intentionally bet abnormally small on the river here; something like $40 would be a normal value bet). Villain here has one of two things : something like 99 or A8 where he'll only call a small bet on the river. Or, he has a flush. Often when Villain has one of two hands you can't really maximize against both, you just have to pick the one that will pay you off better and try to maximize against that. But this river is perfect to maximize against both. If he had the flush draw, he just made it, and I made a house. I can make a small "fake blocking bet", and if he has the flush he'll think I'm scared of it and raise. (in fact, if he's aggressive he might even raise without it to represent the flush).

Here's another interesting one that's sort of backwards from the first :

Pre-flop: (6 players) Hero is BB with 5c 4s
3 folds, Button limps, SB folds, Hero checks.

Flop: 3c Qc 6h ($2.50, 2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets $2, Hero raises to $7, Button calls ($5).

Turn: 2d ($16.50, 2 players)
Hero bets $14, Button calls.

River: Qd ($44.50, 2 players)
Hero checks ...

Again Villain has one of two hands : either he has Qx , something like KQ, and just made trips, or he has a flush draw, two clubs, and he just missed his flush draw. I have a straight and can maximize against both by checking. If I just bet here, he probably calls with Qx, or maybe raises, and he just folds his missed flush draw. If I check, he might be his flush draw, he also certainly bets his Qx. I then check-raise all in. He of course folds his missed flush draws, but I already got a bet out of them, and he probably calls the check-raise with a good Qx like KQ or AQ, which gets more out of them since they might just call if I lead the river.

06-21-06

The stock market has an annual oscillation where it goes down in June-July and goes up in Nov-Dec. That means if possible you should try to buy in to the market in the summer and sell in the winter. Unfortunately I need to sell now when it's down :(

06-21-06

Soccer needs a rule that if you fall down and moan and flop about in pain, you have to leave the field for at least 5 minutes. That would cut down on all the fake flopping trying to get calls.

06-19-06

The Connie Chung video is unbelievable. Around minute 1:40 make sure you watch the piano dismount.

The Castle Illusion

How to fold a shirt

06-19-06

I think I just saw an American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis). They're gorgeous and have a weird song; a breeding pair just flew into the yard, the cat started to stalk it, and they took off. Hmm, apparently they're very common and it's no big deal - well I've never seen one before! (that I noticed) I guess it's their brooding season now (one of the few birds to do it in June-July) and they're in their radiant summer feathers after spring molting.

06-19-06 [poker]

Tony G's performance in the International Poker Challenge (IPC) was pretty awesome. The goal in poker is to play better than your opponents and there are two general schools on how to do this - first is you both just play your "A" game, and you try to play better than they can; you think your logic and reading, etc. can beat theirs and you'll win over time. The other school is to make them play worse than their A game. Maybe their A game would beat you, maybe not, but your goal is not to beat their best game, it's to bring down their play by getting in their head. There are two general ways of doing this - one is through table talk & persona, the other is through your own play. Guys like Tony G (and Scotty Nguyen and Phil Helmuth) talk a lot and have a persona that puts opponents on tilt, but they actually play really vanilla basic solid poker. Their goal is to make opponents think they're playing more crazy than they really are and to get opponents to take shots at them with lesser hands. The other way is to tilt them through strange play - by playing in a weird way, you can confuse and disorient people, especially the "table coaches" who get angry when you win a hand that you weren't "supposed to". The strange style on its own may be -EV, but people adjust to it so badly it becomes very +EV. People who do this are Gus Hansen, and Alan Goehring, for example.

06-19-06

One of the best ways to encourage employment in the U.S. would be to have the government cover medical & pension expenses. Currently, employers cover salary, as well as health care, retirement/pension, and pay the unemployment taxes, etc. For a worker of salary X, these other costs are often X again or more. If instead the government covered all of these, not only would employee change be easier (see my previous rant on this), but also the cost of employment would be greatly reduced, making it more appealing to have more employees. Currently you have almost ridiculous measures in automation to try to reduce the number of employees because the cost of having employees is so high. (one that comes to mind is garbage trucks with these fancy robotic arms so that they can have just 1 person driving - there's no way that saves money compared to a basic truck with 2 humans, unless the cost of that human is just ridiculous).

Where would this money come from? The general tax fund of course. Similarly, there's this talk of adding an extra tax on "windfall" profits from oil companies, and complaints about executive pay. That's sort of ridiculous and unnecessary. Instead you should just have a very steep progressive tax on corporate profits and salaries. If some executive wants to give himself a $100M salary, okay, that's fine, but the income above $10M should be taxed at 50% or something. Similarly, corporate profits over $1B or so could be taxed at a very high rate.

Now, the idea that this would be restrict the economy is ridiculous. In recent years the Bush tax cuts have gotten some credit for stimulating economic growth. That's absolutely preposterous. If the tax cuts did have any stimulating power at all (which is dubious), it's over a longer period as markets and companies adjust. 99% of the short term growth and liquidity has come from the Fed - the Fed interest rate is a much more powerful and immediate tool for economic stimulus. Low interest rates and a booming housing market and defecit spending have created a glut of capital.

If you really want to stimulate the economy you should eliminate all the little ridiculous taxes. Sales tax should go completely. All taxes on small transaction like that should go. Import & Export taxes should go, though that's more complicated and you may have to add "taxes" to compensate for certain costs (as I'm about to describe). Similarly, to make a capitalist system run properly, certain costs should be attached to the goods that create those costs. For example, a gasoline "fee" should be added which covers the estimated cost of removing the CO2 and pollution caused by that gallon of gas (as well as health care costs).

06-18-06

It's often said that Brazil plays a "beautiful" game. I think this is reffering to how well they flop and lie on the ground and moan and cry and pretend to be in pain when no one actually touched them. Beautiful cry baby brat fakers!

06-18-06 [poker]

It's a funny truth that one-card quads is more profitable than two-card quads. If you have TT and flop quads on a board like TTA, even someone with an ace will be scared you have the trips with Tx. On the other hand, on a board like TTTA anyone with an ace will go completely nuts because they think "there's only one T out there, how can he have it?" when in fact any Tx makes quads and there are tons of Tx hands (48 or so).

06-18-06

Fucking Neteller scum charge a 2% fee to transfer money between accounts. Basically they're charging you to run an "add" and a "sub" instruction on two numbers on a computer.

So, the trick to transfering money between neteller accounts is to use a poker site. Persons A & B both have poker accounts. Neteller <-> poker transactions are free, and poker <-> poker transactions are free. (actually neteller charges a fee for neteller <-> poker transactions, but the site covers it).

06-16-06

There is an ant colony living in my vegetable garden and I don't know how to get rid of them !!

06-16-06

I've talked to a few people and I should follow up on the thing I wrote about warming. Obviously I'm no expert on this so you should search around the net, but there's a key addendum I didn't know at the time.

Warming goes faster and faster as I described previously, but over a longer period (thousands of years) another factor kicks in : so much polar ice melts that a layer of fresh water forms on top of the northern oceans. This screws up all kinds of ocean current flow which is complicated and I won't fully go into. Among other things it actually causes the Gulf stream to reverse (!!). Warm water no longer flows north and the caps actually become cooler again. So, even though the Earth overall has warmed, the caps cool again and you have a very extreme state with heat trapped around the equator and cold caps. The ice caps reform and a cooling cycle begins. Now, cooling is also self-accelerating due to various factors, one of which is that ice is very reflective and reduces the amount of solar energy absorbed. A big factor here is that ocean mixing and ocean current changes is a very slow process (it takes thousands of years), while these other factors are much quicker (hundreds of years). The ocean response is a stabilizing counteracting force but it takes much longer to kick in, it's like a weight on a very loose spring - you shoot one way and it takes a long time to repond, then it way overshoots, then it swings way back the other way. Once the earth kicks into a cooling cycle, that's a much more stable state and the earth can stay in an ice age for a long time. The temperate/warming states are very unstable and the temperature can rapidly oscillate until it kicks back into an icy state.

Aside from our contribution to global warming, etc. at some point we'll have to think about the Earth's own natural temperature variations, and if we don't want to live in a drastically different environment, we'll have to do something very major to try to control the climate and keep the Earth in the unstable temperate state we like.

06-16-06

Argentina looks really good in the World Cup. All the other favorites look a little messy and out of sync to me (including Brazil). You never know how the teams will evolve as they play more, but at the moment I like Argentina to win it.

06-16-06

I need to get a big chunk of money out of stock and I'm wondering when to do it. I don't usually try to play short term variation, but it seems like it could make a big difference here. Even if I can just do it after some good news comes out and the market goes up 1% that would be big. One problem is it's all in mutual funds and there's a pretty big transaction delay (for me, but not for the hedge fund traders who "time" my funds, bastard corrupt system).

06-15-06 [poker]

Some gems :

1. Difficult decisions do not affect your EV
2. Min raises give you excellent pot odds for a bluff; if they work 50% of the time
3. Check-raising the river is good when he can either have a missed draw or a very good hand
4. There's a different type of "pot odds" involving stack sizes; eg. you must consider what they have behind, not just their bet.
When you consider calling on the flop, you almost care more about these "stack odds" than just "pot odds".
5. Trying to call down with hands with reverse implied odds is very very bad.  eg. hands like TPWK or middle pair.  You want to have
either dominating hands or hands that can improve.
6. If he's either on a good hand or a draw - you must fold.  SA/WB
7. The more stable player always wins.  A TAG against a LAG who are equal in skill, eg. 0 EV - the TAG will win if they have finite bankrolls,
because eventually the LAG will have a big swing and go bust.

06-14-06

Yikes, stocks have gone down the crapper. Almost all the gains of the last year have disappeared in one month. And it may yet get much worse. I've been predicting for a while that various factors are approaching to create a perfect storm for a nasty recession : pop in the housing bubble destroying consumer buying power and the real estate engine, rising oil prices undermining industry, raises in the Fed's interest rates constricting the economy, huge federal budget and trade defecits, consumer debt piling up constricting consumer buying power (undermining by no longer having home value to refinance), continuing growth of India & China in skill jobs, etc. etc.

06-09-06

WTF is up with Self Employment tax ? An extra 15% tax for being self employed!? That's just a BS tax on the middle class so far as I can tell. The rich who are self-employed create corporations and make themselves employees or shareholders & pay themselves dividends which are hardly taxed at all these days. B-Fucking-S.

06-09-06

It's a basic truth that insurance is -EV. That's almost in the definition of insurance : the insurer takes a profit to reduce your risk. What that means to you is any sort of reasonably cheap insurance you should pass up. Travel insurance, postal package insurance, dental insurance, etc. etc. all are -EV. The only things you should insure are when the unlikely bad event carries risk of ruin.

06-09-06

I'm thinking of selling the Prelude and getting a new (well not new, but new to me) car. I want something I can camp & offroad in - I've been taking the 'Lude but it's not good for it, and I've been in some difficult spots with it. The ideal car for me is the Audi Allroad. I hate driving something huge and sitting up high, I don't want an SUV. The Allroad can raise & lower for offroad or onroad driving, it's pretty fast, etc. Unfortunately it costs a fortune, around $100k new and $40k used. That's a little more than I'd like to spend.

The next step down in coolness would be a Subaru WRX Wagon with a rally offroad kit.

06-09-06

I planted some Basil & mint a while ago, and it just wont grow. The seedlings came up, but they're like 2 inches tall and have been that size for weeks now. Anyone have an idea what's going on, and how I can kick them in?

06-09-06

Hmm... I guess I need to pay quarterly taxes on my poker winnings and I haven't done so. Whoops!

06-09-06

I like watching Darts just because British sports announcers are so awesome. One huundred AND EEEEIIIGGHTTYYY !!! Then there's the one guy who just yells everything at a super-excited pitch even if it's totally mundane.

06-08-06

What's up with pointless live shows? Like NFL Live and World Cup Live ? They're just news/commentary that could easily be taped ahead and they could do a better job and edit out the nonsense.

06-08-06

The story of how Jerry Buss got his fortune is pretty amazing. He was a physical chemist on a small salary, and the family just saved and saved and bought real estate. He got lucky and was buying in a big slump in LA values, and was able to buy lots of apartments over the years which provided income and equity. With that money he bought up the seedy Sunset Strip, which then turned around and he made a mint. I can't find any more details online, if you can, drop me a link.

06-07-06

"Head over heels" is almost the opposite of what it means; it should be "heels over head" ! like the Brittish expression "arse over elbow".

06-05-06

I'd always heard there were a ton of rattlesnakes around here, but I'd never seen one (despite extensive hiking), until recently. I the last few weeks Dan and I have seen 4 or 5. Several times we've almost stepped right on them before noticing them; their camouflage is good and they just lie still in trails. I've seen a lot out on the road in the country just hanging out in the bike lane. I guess it's a good spot to sun themselves as long as they don't get run over. Scary!

06-05-06

My new thing in poker is trying to control my mind so I don't think about the hands as opportunities to get lucky. That thought process causes you to think your winning & losing is all in the cards & leads to bad things like overplaying big pairs, just giving up on pocket pairs if you miss your set, etc. Instead, I want to look at each holding as just a pair of cards to play. It's an opportunity to make the best decision possible at each juncture. I get AA? Okay, those are cards to play and make good decisions with. Those decisions might involve folding; that's okay, I had the opportunity to make the right decision and I did, yay me.

06-05-06

Diet Coke & Mentos

06-04-06

There are two things about Global Warming that you may not be aware of and are horrific.

1. Pollution from burning fossil fuels is not only adding CO2 and such to the atmosphere, which contributes to Global Warming via the greenhouse effect, they also add a huge amount of particulate pollution, which has greatly increased the cloud cover of the Earth in the last 50 years. The cloud cover has lowered the temperature. What that means is if not for the particles, the warming would be much greater. What's worse, we can remove and control the particles much more easily than the CO2; the particle-cloud-formation effect is relatively short term, but the CO2/green house effect sticks around. If we were to stop using fossil fuels right now, the earth would very quickly get *much warmer* as the particulate pollution settles out. (this is called "Global Dimming")

2. Warming is a self-accelerating effect (positive feedback). The more we warm the earth, the more it warms itself. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this. One is glacier sliding - as they melt, they develop a layer of water under the glacier which makes it slide faster into the sea. As it gets warmer still, arctic glaciers will start to break apart. Melting ice and permafrost releases large amounts of trapped carbon. Also supposedly once we get up another 5 degrees or so there's this catastrophic thing that happens where hydrocarbons at the bottom of the sea come out and we get a big acceleration of the process.

The self-accelerating nature of the warming seems to be a natural thing that has happened many times in the history of the Earth. Most of the time has been spent in an ice age. For some reason after 200,000 years or so of ice age, the Earth kicks itself into a warming phase, and it rapidly warms over a few thousand year period up to our current temperature, then rapidly gets warmer and warmer, and once it gets a bit warmer than where we are now, it kicks itself back to an ice age.

From some quick web browsing I can't actually find why the earth oscillates between these warming and cooling snaps. One thing is clear - once it's warming or cool it tends to self-perpetuate, and it's a very delicate system, it can easily be kicked into warming or colling from outside forces. It's suspected that in the past warming & cooling phases have been kicked off by variation in the sun's output, by major volcanic eruptions (from the particles blocking the sun), etc. Another factor seems to be small variations of the Earth's orbit caused by gravitational interactions with the other planets. The more I read about it the more complicated I see it is.

UCSD has an okay site and The Wikipedia article is good as ever. It's hip to trash wikipedia these days, but only morons do it; if the wiki's wrong, you can fix it!

06-04-06

I don't know much about Vonage's business, but the way their stock has plummeted recently, it must be a good investment, based on my guiding investment principle that "all of y'all are morans".

Similarly, I think there may be a good sports bet against Brazil in the World Cup. Brazil are rightly the favorite, but I suspect they may be over-favored. I watched the UEFA Champion's League final with Arsenal vs. Real Madrid, and in it Ronaldinho really stunk it up. It seemed like he was trying too hard to do something amazing - all his passes were one-time-touches, he was all flair and no control. He got several free kicks and blew them all, shooting crazy curving looping balls that were off target, rather than just straight well aimed controlled kicks. Now, obviously Brazil still has the most talent (there are players who are perhaps more significant than ROnaldinho, like the aging Roberto Carlos), but maybe they'll be over-favored.

06-01-06

My huge downswing continues and it's just getting ridiculous. There are many types of bad luck in poker and they feel very different.

06-01-06

I discovered a new tasty drink. Take a glass of wine and pour a shot of port in it. It makes the wine a little sweeter and adds a little alcohol note, it's quite nice for like an after dinner drink that's not as rich as pure port.

06-01-06

When your homie says "Yo, you wants to play some Scrable?" the only response is "Word."

06-01-06

http://ants.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/12tet_totalact_medium.mov

06-01-06

This woman kicks some major ass http://thatvideosite.com/view/380.html There some awesome highlights, such as - "Please don't show me that at this point in time" (so eloquent!) and the cop car that just drives by http://thatvideosite.com/view/1670.html

05-31-06

Today is my birthday. (I'm 29)

05-30-06

The poker cash games have been ridiculously swingy for me recently. Last week I made $2000 in two days, then lost $1000 over the next two days. Yeah, that's just variance, it happens, but those are some of the biggest ups and downs I've ever had, weird to have them right in a row. The downswing at the end was pretty brutal and put me on tilt so I blew off more than I needed to; I probably had like $500 in bad beats then blew off another $500 playing bad. Since then I've been taking a break to try to get my head back on straight.

05-28-06

Is it just me or is Amazon's web site like The Worst !? It's such a mess of unrelated garbage all over the place I can hardly find my way around to buy the things I want.

05-27-06

"La Ley de Herodes" is a delightful semi-absurdist satire of Mexican politics in around 1950. The visual style is striking, the characters iconic, it has the flavor of a fable, I was pleasantly surprised. All the reviews I find on the web are moronic, they say the characters are unrealistic, the story is too simple, the painting too broad; that's the point, you goofs, a fable is about archetypes.

05-27-06

My tomatos are coming along well. We harvested the lettuce and stir fry greens; it'll soon be too hot and dry to grow any more leafy greens here. The carrots and beets are almost ready. I got started late this year, so everything is behind where it should be. For example, I've gone some Snap Peas that are just now flowering; I really should have harvested them already as they like the cool weather here; hopefully they'll come to maturity quickly before the summer arrives. It's been quite cold and windy here recently, very annoying for someone wanting to bicycle. I planted marigold, onion, and garlic around the garden this year, which are supposed to be natural pest repellants, so we'll see if that works. I also put copper tape around the border which supposedly keeps snails out, and that seems to be working. The other day a slug came into the house and wandered all around on the carpet, which left this nasty shiny trail of mucus all over the carpet in strange patterns as he seemed to wander aimlessly.

05-27-06

This dude Lomont is making these 3D LED Cubes . It would be really cool to take one of those to Burning Man and hook it up to some real-time sound response.

05-27-06

My veterinarian is a whore. I took my cat in because he's been limping for a few days and I wanted to make sure he didn't have an infection or a broken bone or something. They immediately start giving him all kinds of treatments without asking me and there's this guilt pressure that if you don't do this and that you're a bad pet owner, how dare you not shell out for all sorts of unnecessary crap. Money-grubbing bastards. Most vets also try to encourage you to make your cats inside-only cats which is a crime akin to having a pet bird in a cage. Turns out there was nothing detectable wrong with my cat, probably just a sprain, but the visit cost me two hundo.

05-27-06

From the MSDN documentation on layered windows :

Most end users expect smooth transition effects. It's not natural for information to just pop right in your face. Television does a great job of using fades and slides to give a context of where the new information is going to appear. Computers haven't yet been able to incorporate these effects into the UI very effectively. Just think what a difference there is between the existing UI and the cool UI you constantly see in the movies. Layered windows give the product designers a lot of power to bring "cool" UI closer to reality.

Dear god, no wonder their GUI's are so unusable, they idolize the interfaces in movies like Jurrasic Park where you put on a VR head set and fly around the "file system". It's the Lorne Lanning / George Lucas school of visual effects - what we need are more fancy transition effects!

Anyhoo, I'm drawing overlays using WS_EX_LAYERED windows, and it seems to be a huge performance dog. I've tested the code and made sure I only call UpdateLayeredWindow() once in a while for changes, it's simply having the layered window around at all which seems to be bad. I'm using WS_EX_TRANSPARENT which means that it's not hit-testing mouse clicks against the alpha channel, so that's not it, so far as I can tell it's just the compositor itself that's slow. I guess the Windows GUI doesn't use hardware acceleration so it's doing CPU alpha blending. Also pretty much all my alpha is boolean, transparent or opaque, but they don't have a fast special case for that, so they're probably doing the full multiply per pixel.

05-24-06

Hmm.. seems like you should Convert your IRA to a Roth IRA . I wasn't able to do this in the past because my income was > 100k, but now it's not (and Bush has killed that rule, anyway). Also my income is low right now so my taxes will be low. The only way it would be a losing situation is if the crazy Republicans stay in power, they might just cancel the tax on IRA withdrawals altogether. Hell there might be not taxes on any kind of investments in the future.

05-23-06

The dollar is headed into the shitter as I predicted a while ago, but I just realized something funny about it. I anticipated the dollar's dive by moving a bunch of my investments overseas. Investments in foreign stocks, if they keep going up at say a 5% rate in their own currency will go up much faster in dollars a the dollar falls. The funny thing is that a falling dollar actually helps American industry and hurts most foreign industry. Most successful foreign businesses export to America, so a falling dollar makes their goods more expensive here which hurts their sales. On the other hand American exporters become more competetive overseas so the American companies actually do better. This trend works exactly against the exchange rate.

05-22-06

I just realized that poker is like Roshambo :

Calling Station beats Bluffer
Bluffer beats Nit
Nit beats Calling Station

05-22-06

I haven't ever really seen it discussed, but financial traders must drive up the price of goods. There's some product, and the market buys it eventually. If that was just sold from the producer to the consumer in a competetive market, the price would be minimized. Instead, the producer is a public company. It has a stock that pays dividends and makes profit for shareholders. It's goods are perhaps traded in a futures/commodities market, or through a trader like Enron. All of these traders are making big profits. Where is that money coming from? In the end it must be coming from the consumer, by driving up prices. The idea that financial markets and trading is good for the consumer must be nonsense.

05-21-06

Nova the other day about the "Scab Lands" was pretty freaking awesome. This is a decent web site about it. The whole idea of the giant glacial lakes and floods is so cool.

05-21-06

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela can sound sort of crazy sometimes with his talk of American plots to overthrow him, and yet right next door in Colombia the U.S. supports the right wing political parties and the drug-trafficking paramilitaries; those paramilitaries for years have assassinated and terrorized journalists, leftist politicians, the marxist uprising, etc. - forces that the U.S. opposes because they don't cooperate with the international power structure. I heard a funny thing somewhere recently, that the last 5 years have been a time of great reform and freedom in Latin America because the US is distracted elsewhere and not interfering as much as we normally do.

05-14-06

Kyle Cease is funny.

05-11-06

Housing is a great investment because of 1) the tax deductions and 2) the leverage. Hardly anyone who invests in real estate understands this. Other than those factors, jumping in a rising market is just like trying to jump into oil or gold or anything like that, but housing is much worse for riding a bubble because it's much harder to get in & out, and the transaction costs are huge. On the other hand I've written before about how awesome the power of leveraging is in a rising market. The great thing about housing is that you can make a risky leveraged investment and the government subsidizes the risk.

05-10-06

We went camping at Figueroa Mountain last weekend. It's a part of Los Padres just north of Los Olivos. It's really beautiful up there in the spring, all green with wild flowers scattered on the paths and meadows. We camped at Davy Brown which was really nice, with a stream running right by camp, just deep enough to have some little swimming holes.

05-07-06

Audium in San Francisco looks pretty cool. Anyone been there?

Wild Fennel grows like crazy around here. It's this really airy ferny stuff. It grows along the highways, and when the county crews mow over it, it explodes with this liqourice smell. It's totally edible, but it doesn't have the nice root bulb like cultivated fennel. The leaves are edible raw in salads, the stalks need to be cooked well.

05-05-06

"South Park" is clever social commentary for people who are wowed by "Animal Farm".

05-05-06

If Clinton's word was "pander", Bush's word is "conflate".

05-05-06 [poker]

Certain straight draws are better than others. Obviously drawing to the low end of a straight sucks. Also, drawing to a gutshot when it will put a 3-straight on the board sucks, such as if you hold 56 and there's an 89 on the board, if a 7 hit the 789 on the board will be very scary, you'd much rather have 57 so that a 6 makes your draw and a 689 is not so scary.

The other factor I'm aware of is when your draw can make second best hands that will pay you off. Any time you're drawing to a straight where an A makes the straight, that's pretty cool. For example if you have KQ and there's a JT on the board, the A makes you and a hand like AJ will pay you off bigtime. Another is if there's a 234 on the board you have a 6. If a 5 hits, anyone with an ace has a wheel, but you have the higher straight. Another good one is if a card will make a straight on the board but give you the nuts, like if you have 89 and the board is 3456, if a 7 hits there will be a straight on the board and people will go crazy, and you can win a big pot.

05-04-06

StevePA won the Pokerstars Carribean Adventure, which was yesterday's broadcast WPT. He's an online semi-pro, he's pretty good, he plays lots of online tourneys. (that link is his poker blog)

05-04-06

I wonder if there is somewhere decent where I could buy a place and have a farm, and be able to at least survive or lose money slowly. It would have to be cheap. It's pretty awesome with solar power and such these days, you can almost stick a house anywhere there's water, get satellite internet and have all the comforts of modern man.

Last week we went and hung out with the family that runs the Rinconada Dairy out near Pozo. (read the article there). They're still pretty small scale, but losing money with about 80 sheep now; soon they'll have a bit more sheep and will make a small profit. They have a Mexican family that lives in a trailer on their property that does most of the hard labor, but they work a pretty full day themselves. I'm sure it's cost millions to get the property and the operation set up, and they'll never make enough to pay that back, though that's not the idea, it's just a nice way to retire basically. They plan on hosting farm stay guests and weddings and things like that, which will actually bring in more money than the cheese making. It's just crazy how unprofitable agriculture is.

05-04-06

Juk continues to make free apps that have some of the features of GoldBullion. You can get it here - Party Resizer

05-04-06

Some French guys have an awesome site for Will Oldham (aka B.P.B.) tablature. Sometimes I find sites and just marvel at the glory that is the internet. Matt Sweeney's guitar on "Superwolf" is the bomb.

05-04-06

A lot of Mortgage Douches play poker these days and donate their earnings to the pros like me. It's nice that their redistributing their ill-gotten gains a bit. Not that I have anything against Mortgage Douches, but they basically do zero work and take a huge profit which is primarily subsidized by the government (taxpayers) via the Fannie Mae system which assumes all the financial risk of their loans.

There are a lot of day traders, too, who play while sitting at their computer watching their stocks. I feel good about taking their money too, since they're leeches just like poker players - contributing nothing to society, just playing a game for money better than other people do.

05-04-06

Well, Party just released a new version of the client which has anti-bot measures. Once an hour they pop one of those human-verifier things with numbers and letters in a bitmap all messed up with hash marks and stuff, and you have to type in the code you see.

05-03-06

The environmental/recycling movement has really not made much progress. The problem is the fat bastard American public doesn't want to make any real sacrifices. The daily recycling we do is okay, but we could make a far far bigger impact by not producing so much waste and throw-away products in the first place. Stop using paper towels, use regular towels. Don't use kleenex, use handkercheifs. Bottled water of any kind should be banned, aside from the plastic waste, the privatization of water is horrible (and the amount spent on bottled water could've easily just improved our drinking water for everyone). Make junk mail illegal. Read newspapers and magazines online. Stop corporations from printing out so much paper that just goes in the garbage. Get rid of disposable plates, diapers, etc. etc. basically all one time use disposable products.

As usual, a lot of the problem is that our system is not capitalist, the government actually subsidizes wasteful products by providing cheap waste sites and not charging waste companies or natural resource harvesters a fair fee. Disposable products should have a tax applied which charges for their disposal. The disposal charge would include a large surcharge for the long term destruction of land via land fills.

04-29-06 [poker]

If I can make you feel like you need a big hand to go to war with me, then I've won.

04-29-06 [poker]

Today is an *awesome* day to sign up on Party Poker. There are TWO reload bonuses - TOPBUCKS40 and TOPBUCKS50. Start a new account on my affiliate, get the $100 initial bonus, then get two more $100 bonuses for $300 total free bonus! Also the fishies come out in droves when the bonuses are rolling. (there's also the "Magic Card" promotion for more free money)

Use sign up bonus code "CBPARTY" to make sure you're tracked and get your 20% to $100 bonus.

04-29-06 [poker]

I think I identified my problem at $200NL, which is the first step to fixing it (knowing is half the battle). People play back a lot more, and that got me feeling like I was getting bluffed a lot and had to defend my hands more, so I would go down with hands like KK. That's very bad, that's exactly what they want you to do. They jab a lot, make little raises, attack, just trying to get you to over-commit to a hand like that. Then you decide to stand up for yourself, and they just back away unless they have the goods. That of course is the type of game that I try to play, and I've been falling right into their trap. The correct response is to still use pot control, only go down with big hands, try to make big hands and trap them into bluffing into you, and to rebluff. Use pressure bets to test them and see if they're just attacking or if they have the goods, and fold if they have the goods.

04-28-06

Bill Kristol made a good point, and I actually like Nancy Pelosi, but she could really fuck up the Democrats' chances in 2008. She is one of those liberals that can come across as sort of a crazy hippy, and can say things that don't sound good at all in sound bites, she's a bit off the handle and doesn't have good "message control" and all that political shite the Republicans are so good at.

04-28-06

Exxon's quarterly profit was $10 billion. So for the year that's $40 billion. Estimate for all the oil companies, somewhere in the $100-$200 billion range. Let's divide by the number of heavy drivers in the world, maybe 1 billion? Maybe a bit less. That's about $200 profit per person. (I also haven't really counted all the other profit-takers along the way). How many gallons of gas does each person use per year? I guess around 1000. So that's about $0.20 (20 cents) per gallon of profit.

04-28-06 [poker]

It's good to be really aggressive on flops with flush draws. For one thing, when you have the flush draw, you want to jam, and by always being aggressive, it hides what you're doing. For another, your opponents will call huge bets with draws, so you may as well bet your made hands. Also, your opponents will push their draws, so go ahead and bet big and try to get them to push. Pushing your big made hands is good too because people will think it's a flush draw. Then don't be so aggressive if there isn't a flush draw on the flop.

04-27-06 [poker]

The daytime games on Party are starting to really suck. I need to get me some late night drunken donator action.

04-27-06 [poker]

Some different ways to think about hands : your goal in each hand is just to put pressure on the pot and take it down. Basically you're going to raise and cbet. You don't really look at your hole & the board until your opponent decides he's not folding to your cbet (that's not actually true, of course you look, but let's pretend). So, your opponent calls your cbet, or maybe he raised preflop. Now you look at your cards. 90% of the time you're just going to give up because he's decided he's not giving up the pot, but sometimes you look down and find you've actually got something - a set, a straight, aces. Then you say "okay, I'll play with you". Other times you think he's just playing back and play like you have a set even though you don't.

Most of your EV on every hand you play just comes from taking down the pot with little pressure. Why not just play every hand? Well, for one you need to play tight just so people will see you as tight and give you credit and fold. Also, if you just fold every time someone plays back, you'll be folding too much, you need to be able to defend your hand part of the time. To do that, you need to have hit something part of the time. Better hole cards help there, though they aren't crucial, since junk cards can hit two pairs and trips and such too.

Think about it this way - you get 88. Don't think, oo I have a pair of 8's. Think, okay, I have two cards, I'll make a raise and put pressure on the pot. Now, if you get put to the test, you have some nice insurance where you don't just have to fold, depending on the board maybe you can try to get to a cheap showdown with just your 8's, or if you have a set you can try to play for a whole stack.

04-26-06 [poker]

There's nothing like the WSOP freerolls to make you frustrated. If you play half decent you're going to get all in as a huge favorite, like AA vs. K9 , AK vs A5, etc.. but the chance of surviving every race you have to run is tiny with the 3500 entrants.

04-26-06

Tom sent me this link a long time ago - free Japanese shooters for Windows with gamepad. They're not bad, but somehow they don't do it for me; maybe I'm just a snob and don't like to play with programmer art.

04-26-06

Iocaine Powder is one of the first strong Roshambo bots. It's pretty simple and clever, fun to read the techniques there.

04-26-06 [poker]

I had a really bad day at the poker tables yesterday. I played in the morning, as I like to, after Dan went to work. I pretty quickly went up three stacks ($600), and then proceeded to run into horrible luck and a lot of bad decisions and lost it all. I wound up break-even for the day, but it made me feel sick and angry at myself that I blew it. I never got over it and it ruined my whole day. Those are the times that I really think poker might be a bad idea - if a downswing can make me so upset and make me waste a day, that sort of spoils the whole advantage of only having to work a few hours of the day.

I'm trying to move back up to 200 NL. I went down to 100 and crushed it, so I'm trying to move up again. I'm finding it a lot harder to beat. When I hit a set, I don't stack a guy, and people are much more aggressive about bluffing and testing you. Generally you have to play back at bluffs a lot more, and you have to be more tricky with made hands in order to stack people. Down at 100 people generally let you know when they have a hand, and you can either stack them or fold depending on whether you have a big hand or not.

04-25-06

I thought maybe "Dick Hyman" was a funny fake name for Woody Allen (since it sounds like some strange anatomical part), but apparently he's a real guy .

04-25-06 [poker]

I took my first shot at a WSOP seat. It was a $50 satellite ($55), and over 1000 people were in it, so that meant the top 5 players got seats. So, 5/1000 = 1/200 , I figure my chance at a seat is maybe 1/100 ? I hate playing events like that where 99% of the time you get nothing, the variance is just huge. Anyway I got knocked out when I ran my AA into K9. People play super-nutty in these things, so they're clearly +EV, but it's still annoying that I could easily play 100 times (for $5500) and not get a seat. For some reason the fact that it's a big satellite just makes everyone go insane. They think they need to gamble it up to get a high finish, which is partly true, but of course you shouldn't be taking -EV gambles, just +EV gambles just like you always do. If anything I wind up playing tighter than normal in these things because everyone is such a nut you can just wait for big pairs and get in against two undercards.

04-25-06 [poker]

The "next level" for me is to get away from pre-plans for hands and get into the ability to really evaluate my position in the hand from instant to instant. Newbies will look at their hole and decide how to play it before anything happens in the hand. eg. they see AA and plan to get all in with it. Decent players can look at the board on each street and change their plan, but will still make plans overall like "try to play a big pot" or "try to get to showdown cheap". Slightly better players can change their opinion if their opponent does something obvious to let them know they're beat. My goal is to get away from any kind of longer-term thinking and get into more "instantaneous" thinking. eg. for each time it's my turn I make a fresh decision about where I stand and what I should do.

If you have a pre-plan, one of the bad things you do is sort of bet weakly or fail to value bet with a marginal hand. In some cases you should just fold that hand, but in some cases you should bet hard with it. I want to be able to stop on a dime, like going bet-bet-bet, and then just fold when I know my hand is no good any more.

Sort of a classic example of this is when a draw makes. Say you have something like AA and the flop is K72 with two spades. You bet the flop and turn. The river is a spade. A lot of people want to check here so they can call and see a showdown. What you should do is go ahead and bet as much as you think Kx will call. Now if you're raised, even min-raised, you just fold. You bet like your hand is the nuts until you know it's no good, and then you just fold.

04-25-06 [poker]

No Limit is a game of big pots. You can play 99 out of 100 hands well and still be a losing player. I would gladly give up 10% of my skill for tilt-lessness and patience.

04-24-06 [poker]

I have my own internal "slider" that goes between "weak/tight" and "maniac". One of the hardest things in playing a poker session is trying to tweak that slider. When I first sit down to play it's almost always at one end or the other, either a total maniac or a total weak nit. I have to play a hundred hands or so, and as I do it I'm tweaking my internal brain mechanics trying to get it to the right spot.

04-24-06 [poker]

One of the characteristics of better players and higher games is getting away from playing medium strength hands for value. In poker there's a spectrum of hands from "junk" to "monsters". In low level games with bad players, a hands like ATo is somewhere in between, and you can sort of play it for value. In the higher games, the hands become more separated, it's more black and white, and a hand like ATo goes squarely in the junk category. That doesn't mean you fold ATo , but it means you play it more as a bluff. You might open raise with it, but your goal there is representing AA. You might even reraise with it, but that's just to snap off someone else opening something like AT.

04-23-06 [poker]

"Protecting" your hand is generally over-rated. The key question is whether they will put more money in the pot later if they don't improve. If they will only put money in the pot if they improve, then you should bet to "protect" sooner than later. If not, then you are better off waiting until you see whether they improve or not and you can put your money in with more equity.

Say you have a pair and you know your opponent is on a flush draw. It's the turn and he checks to you. You can bet here to charge his draw, and he'll call. Your return on that bet is around 80%. On the other hand, if you check behind him and the river blanks, he might bluff at the river, or check-call with a weaker hand. In that case the money you're putting in on the river has a return of 100%.

Now, if you could get both returns that would be even better, but usually they are exclusive, you can either get the 80% or the 100%, and you should take the 100%.

04-21-06 [poker]

The only interesting hand for me last night :

Pete or someone like that limps in for $0.50. I raise to $4 in the Hijack spot with [ Tc 8c ]. Most of the table is on scared money and I can take the pot, plus nice implied odds. Dustin calls out of the big blind. Dustin has been playing a lot trying to get in the action. I think Pete called too. Flop :

[ Kc Td 8h ] , pot $12.50

All check to me, I bet $9.

Dustin calls, Pete folds. Hmm.. now, I rule out a set because I have the bottom two locked up, and KK he would have reraised preflop. I was thinking QJ or 9J are his most likely hands, or even something like KQ or AK. KT is also possible. The turn is :

[ 6s ] , pot $30.50

That looks pretty safe. Dustin bets $12. Odd. That's kind of a small bet, but Dustin likes to bet his draws, and he could also be probing with one king. I call. The river is :

[ Jd ] , pot $54.50

Dustin bets $20. Again kind of a small bet, looks like he wants to get called. AQ and Q9 just made straights, and I can't rule out Q9 because Dustin will draw to gutshots. On the other hand, some of the hands I put him on like QJ just made a pair and he might be betting just a J. Anyway, I call $20 and he shows :

[ 7h 9h ]

For the turned nut straight.

I could've bet a little more on the flop, but I don't think I can really get away from the hand. I think Dustin's preflop call is pretty sick for a few reasons (1. it's 8 BB, the implied odds can't even make up for such a big call, 2. he's out of position, 3. I'm likely just on a steal so won't pay off even if he hits), but other than that he played it well. I probably would have called a bigger bet on the turn, but I'm sure he didn't think I was so strong. As it turned out he hit just about the only board where he can win a pot from me, the miracle 68T board. I of course wanted the miracle 679 board.

The live game's pretty frustrating, with people not paying attention and taking forever. I think I maybe got 50-100 hands in over about 5 hours. Online I would've had about 1500 hands in that time span. I don't play the live game for the money, I like to just mess around and hang out (though I still like to play a +EV game overall, I'll make some silly -EV moves once in a while just for fun), but it's not so much fun when it's just so slow.

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04-20-06

You can judge the general education level of a nation by how many of its citizens are named "Anfernee". It's a different problem that so many semi-educated middle class people think "Shawn" is a good name.

04-20-06 [poker]

I've written about this a bit before, but there's a key point about drawing in NL : you can draw to good draws (like the nut flush) for big bets, eg. pot size bets, but ONLY if you know your opponent has a hand and so will pay you off when you hit. If you already have information telling you he has a hand, then go ahead and call down. If not, you must either raise or fold. You can NOT draw when he might be on a bluff. By raising, you might fold higher draws that would stack you if you hit (eg. higher flush draws), and you also make sure he folds junk so you're up against a hand.

Consider for example : he bets $4 on the flop, you call, he bets $8 on the turn, you call. If you hit, that's nice, but he might actually just be bluffing here or also have a draw.

For the same amount of money : he bets $4 on the flop, you raise to $12, he calls. He checks turn, you check.

You put in the same amount of money for your draw, but in the second case he'll fold the pure junk, so if you hit your draw, he has some kind of hand and is much more likely to pay you off, so your implied odds are way better. Of course this only works in position.

04-19-06

Emergency Room admission consent forms should be illegal. You have some sort of trauma or other major problem, you're trying to get care, and they hand you this giant form with all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo, including things like "any tissues extracted from you or procedures practiced on you are property of the hospital", "we may conduct risky experimental and educational procedures", "interns who have been awake for 24 hours and just barely passed medschool may do major unsupervised work on you", "you won't sue us, even when we accidentally stitch you up with scalpels still inside, or give you estrogen pills instead of antibiotics", etc. etc. Of course you sign, you can't read it, you have a fever of 105 and can barely even focus on anything. It's a form of blackmail - sign our crazy form or we'll just let you die.

04-18-06

Wow, I'm getting sick amazing job offers these days totally unsolicited. How can I not take them? I must be crazy...

04-18-06 [poker]

It's an interesting idea to just jam the pot with great hands. Like just push all in preflop with AA and KK. Push later with the nuts or near the nuts. The first time you do this you're surely giving up value because people will just fold, but if you get lucky enough to get a rush and get a few good hands in a row, people will be suspicious the second time and may call with very bad hands. Probably a rush is too rare to make this +EV overall.

04-18-06

I bought some cheap ink cartridges over the internet for my printer and they work like complete garbage. The heads are crappy, they leave gaps and streaks. I guess I'm shelling out for new HP branded cartridges next time.

04-18-06 [poker]

There's a big difference between assuming that an unknown player plays like an average opponent, vs. assigning some chance that he's playing in a wide variety of styles. That is, say there are 10 possible styles. Each one is equally common among random opponents. In a hand vs. an unknown what you should do is give a 10% chance that he's playing each of those styles, not a 100% chance that he's playing in a way that's the "average" of them.

04-18-06

My god, who recommended "Be Good, Smile Pretty" to me? You owe me an hour of my life. What a god-awful piece of schlock. If I had a Network of Trust I'd down-grade the link which provided that information (actually I'd just rate the movie badly and the network would automatically decrease my trust in that information provider in that category).

04-17-06

So, I have enough Party Points now to get an iPod Shuffle (25k points). Should I get that, or hold out for an iPod Nano (which is like a ton more points that will take me a while to get, 50k points) ???

04-17-06 [poker]

When you're losing money at poker it's usually because you have some bad luck, you have some good luck, and you make some mistakes. Maybe you hit a lucky hand and make +$100. You make a few mistakes that total -$50. You hit some bad luck and take a beat for -$100. When you look at your session, you think "if not for that bad luck, I'd be up" , or "I should've been up +$50 but that stupid bad beat took me down". Of course the reality is the luck swings up & down and cancelled out here, but you blew off -$50 in mistakes. Psychologically we count the good luck as part of what our skill "earned us", when you draw out you think "I was due because I'm way better than this guy".

04-16-06

Try the new exciting game Plantasia !!! It's "Easier than gardening at home" !!

04-16-06 [poker]

Wow, apparently Mahatma (Prahlad) and Phil Ivey played a series of $50/$100 NLHE heads up matches online. I'm trying to find some kind of record of them, will post more when I find it...

Mahatma has an awesome ability to get paid off when he hits a hand. Presumably this is because he bluffs so much.

04-16-06 [poker]

I'm in a bit of a dry spell in the cash game and it's making me question very basic strategy.

1. Playing big pairs : the standard line is that you must reraise solid preflop to get heads up, and to charge them to outflop you. The problem is this makes you hand very obvious and means they'll only play with you if you're beat. For example :

Blind $1. UTG raises to $4. You're in UTG+1 with KK. You make it $12. All fold to UTG who calls the $8.
Flop is [ 3 7 8 ] with two spades.
UTG checks to you.
You continuation bet $18

This is all well and good, but you only get action from a set here, or possible from like 9T of spades. You really want action from hands like 99 or TT but you've told them they're beat and you won't get action.

2. Playing sets on dry boards. Common wisdom is to continuation bet just like you always would. The problem is on dry boards they likely have nothing and just fold.

04-15-06 [poker]

I'll keep you up to date on the juicest new online gossip : UltimateBet recently started spreading a $50/$100 (blinds) PLO (Pot Limit Omaha) game. That's very high, it's the highest PLO game online, and PLO runs a lot hotter than hold'em, so it swings more than 50/100 no limit hold'em. (all the big games are on Prima or UltimateBet). A lot of top pros have been playing it, and Mike Matusow has been losing money as usual. Gus Hansen plays it as well as a lot of scary Scandanavians, and Marcel Luske, all of whom are experienced at Omaha. Anyway, yesterday this guy "idahopotato" sat in the game. Apparently he's a pretty good online pro who plays $300/$600 limit hold'em and does well. He proceeded to play the Omaha game like a maniac, playing every hand. The top pros all gathered like sharks and the waiting list at his table filled up. He kept losing and losing and managed to blow $500k in a few hours. That's 50 buy-ins - the guy went bust and rebought 50 times.

04-15-06 [poker]

Party Poker offers deals for tournaments, and they have an automatic algorithm which is nice, but it's wrong. I've written about it before, they use just a chip % split, and the correct way is an ICM. The Party way of doing it gives too much money to the chip leader and badly penalizes the short stacks. If you ever find yourself in a tournament deal on Party, if you are the chip leader a deal is very favorable for you, and if you're a low stack you have to reject the deal because it's very unfair.

04-14-06 [poker]

One thing I have to remind myself of all the time is this meta-principle : any time you have a truly tough decision where you can't figure out what the best move was - it doesn't matter. That's assuming it's actually a tough situation, not that there was a clearly right move and you can't see it. That is, if two or more moves have almost identical EV, then just pick one and don't agonize about it. Oddly enough, these are the very hands that I tend to agonize over the most.

Say for example someone pushes preflop you know they push with only AA or 22. Eg. they have the nuts or are bluffing. You have JJ, do you call? The answer is it basically doesn't matter. You might fold and they show 22 and you feel awful, or you call and they show AA and you feel awful, but it really didn't matter. More realistically this happens a lot when you put your opponent on a range and the optimal play against various parts of his range are slightly different. Like if you have a set on the river and you read that he either has a busted flush (you should check to induce a bluff) or a weak pair (you should bet small to get a crying call). If he has one or the other, just pick one and it's not a big deal which one you picked.

All of these "hard" decisions have a very tiny affect on your long term results (though they tend to be the hands that have a huge affect on your short term results). So, don't agonize over them, and worry about your actual important big mistakes. Eliminate the hands where you look back and go "omg, what was I thinking? that's just awful!?"

04-14-06

One of the brilliant recent Republican moves is to just constantly counter the facts with the opposite (eg. some specific lie). The media never comes out and just says "the Republicans are clearly spouting garbage so we'll laugh at their statement", instead they present them as two legitimate opposing views. Then the next time it comes up the Republicans say there's "debate" about that issue, that it's not resolved. And in fact if you look at newspapers you'll think there is debate since both sides are presented, even though one side is saying "2+2=4" and the other side claims "2+2=frog".

04-14-06 [poker]

When chasing flushes, if you're just thinking about your immediate odds, you don't need to worry about dominating too much. If you're thinking about implied odds, you should worry about domination. Say you have a flush draw on the flop and someone puts you all in. You can call with any flush draw and not worry much about higher flushes because higher flushes are a very small part of opponent's range. On the other hand, if you're considering what happens when you *make* your flush and your opponent pays off a big bet, what is his calling range after the scary flush card hits? Now his range is very small, maybe 20 hands, and higher flushes are a significant portion of it, even if there are only like 10 hands that make higher flushes.

04-14-06

My girlfriend Dan wants to use my computer all the time, just to browse the web or whatever. I don't want to be an ass and lock her out, but on the other hand I kind of don't want her on my computer. Really I've never liked having anyone touch any of my computers ever. I didn't even like the tech guys touching my computer at any of the various places I've worked. People can just screw things up way too easily. Even when the tech guys were good they'd often do little funny things like change my monitor res, which would mess up my icon placement, etc. My little brother James is pretty computer-savvy, but always had this bad habit of being heavy-fingered with the mouse and accidentally dragging icons into folders and other icons. Whenever he's use my computer I'd discover that some file had disappeared and was now inside a folder next to it. I kind of want to have a no computer rule, but I know Dan won't understand and will think I'm an ass for not trusting her (even though I've provided her with her own computer). I'd like to trust people to not mess up my machine, but in the end, I just don't trust anyone, hell, I don't trust the most computer savvy of friends on my machine because they seem to be always installing CVS and Mozilla and shite like that which I don't want either. I let them browse the web for a minute and when I come back, they're like "hey, I set you up to boot to Linux, isn't that cool?" Hell no that's not cool.

04-14-06 [poker]

I thought I'd go over my tournament win yesterday since I want to gloat ;)

The first hundred hands - nothing much happened for me. I did a lot of folding. I made little steals and folded to reraises or when I missed the flop. I got KK once and raised it and got no action. I stole a few blinds and took down some flops. I folded good hands like 55 and QJs to heat. All the while I was watching and developing reads.

I got KQs, raised it, flopped a Q and doubled up vs. a nutter calling me down.

Another nutter pushed all-in preflop with A5o and I called with AQo and doubled up. (he had just pushed the last hand with T7o)

I got 77 and raised, all folded. I got KK and reraised an opener, he folded. I was playing real tight, so getting lots of folds. I opened with A8 and got two calls. I flopped middle pair and bet continuation and all folded. I opened with A9s and a guy pushed and I folded. I raised TT in the CO and the blinds folded. So with all this I managed to be about an average stack for the tournament and the field was whittling down. I was developing careful reads on everyone so I knew when to go with a big hand or not. Then this wierd hand came up :

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t1200 (10 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)

BB (t14338)
Hero (t24551)
UTG+1 (t26308)
UTG+2 (t10204)
MP1 (t10425)
MP2 (t9006)
MP3 (t40335)
CO (t28693)
Button (t3601)
SB (t9488)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with Ks, Ad.
UTGA raises to t3000, UTG+1 raises to t4800, 8 folds, Hero calls t1800.
(yikes, he min raises me, and he has me covered, I'm worried he has JJ+ in which case I'm in dead trouble)

Flop: (t9600) 5c, Tc, 7s (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets t1200, Hero calls t1200.
(I'd basically given up on the hand here, I figured he had a pair and I need to hit an A or K to win)

Turn: (t12000) 7d (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 checks.

River: (t12000) 6c (2 players)
(interesting, clubs made it, I can represent the flush :)
Hero bets t4000, UTG+1 folds.

Final Pot: t16000

He must've been doing something really weird in this hand, but it wound up being a pretty big pot.

I now have a solid stack. I open on the button and fold to a push. I open in MP with 98o and all fold. A super-short-stack pushes and I call with T9o in the big blind, he wins with AQ. I open AQ on the button, all fold. Now it's the bubble and I want to attack the shorties who are trying to creep into the money. Then this awful hand happens :

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t1600 (10 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)

MP3 (t18638)
Hero (t27550)
Button (t16337)
SB (t10373)
BB (t17450)
UTG (t15957)
UTG+1 (t34335)
UTG+2 (t52645)
MP1 (t3506)
MP2 (t5938)

Preflop: Hero is CO with 6s, 6d.
5 folds,
MP3 raises to t3200,
Hero raises to t8002, (I wanted to get all in with MP3, but wanted to see what happened behind me)
Button raises all in (t16337), (button was a bit of a nut)
3 folds,
Hero calls t8285. (I'm getting like 4:1 , I have to call even if he has an overpair)

Flop: (t19487) Jc, Qd, 8c (2 players)

Turn: (t19487) 9s (2 players)

River: (t19487) Th (2 players)

Final Pot: t19487

Button had KJo !!! Ugh. He can't bluff me there, his stack is too short for me to fold, there's a raise and reraise in from of him, and I have him well covered so he can't threaten me with the bubble. Such an unbelievable bad play, I was sick at the time, I thought I played the hand perfectly and was being punished by the poker gods.

Now I'm a little below average. I get KK and open and all fold. Next hand I get AQ and open, and the big stack pushes. I'm a bit short now and the bubble is passed, I call. He has KK, but I spike an ace to double up. Now I'm back to average. I get KK again; a guy just open-pushes in front of me and I call. He has QJs and had way too many chips to be open-pushing that hand.

A few more hands with little nothing happeneing, then a super-aggressive guy who's been raising a ton raises in the CO. I'm on the button with KQo and I push over the top. He calls with 44, but I win the race and knock him out. The very next hand I fold AJo preflop when a very tight guy opens (he had AK). Then I get 64s and try a resteal, but he pushes over the top and I fold. Then this hand:

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t3000 (7 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)

MP1 (t101298)
Hero (t46655)
CO (t100005)
Button (t24793)
SB (t44261)
BB (t42884)
UTG (t72054)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 5c, 5d.
2 folds, Hero raises to t8000,
1 fold, Button calls t8000, 1 fold, BB calls t5000.

Flop: (t21000) Tc, 6s, 6d (3 players)
BB pushes all in
- here I was thinking of calling BB because he was an aggro nut-job. The problem is Button was still live behind me and he was very tight, so -
Hero folds
Button calls

BB had 44, Button had QQ, and my read is spot on. Okay, lost a few chips, but nice to know I'm reading and making the right moves. Soon after this hand came up :

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t3000 (7 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)

SB (t90098)
Hero (t38430)
UTG (t99780)
MP1 (t59311)
MP2 (t42536)
CO (t16441)
Button (t85354)

Preflop: Hero is BB with Jd, Td.
4 folds, Button raises to t10000, SB calls t8000,
Okay - Button was a very aggressive player, he's likely stealing, SB probably has something weak, this is a perfect spot for a steal, and I have a hand that does well in case someone calls with like 77 or Ax
Hero pushes all in (t38430)
Button calls t28330, SB folds.

Button called with J9s and MHIG (my hand is good). Wow. Now I'm chip leader for the table and can tangle with anyone and not go out. I get 88, call a raise and turn a set, but don't get paid off. I open 94s on the button and fold to a push. A lot of people at my table are nutty and over-aggressive, so I have to sit back a bit, I can't go crazy like I want. Also the guys to my immediate left and right are both rather loose and crazy so I can't steal from them.

I raise A3o on the button, but fold the flop when a blind leads into me. My stack is dwindling as none of my steals are working out. Then I get AQs , a loose guy pushes in front of me and I call. He has 77 and I win the race.

A few more steals and no action hands. I open with 77 on the button, A shorty in the BB pushes and I call. He has AT and spikes an Ace.

I open JT and flop trips and the one caller folds. I open J3 and flop air and the one caller pushes, (I fold). I open 88 and all fold. I defend my blind with 64s and flop two pair, but the super-aggressive guy for some reason doesn't attack this hand. Ugh.

I get AK and just call a raise from the blinds (trapping and wanting to see the flop). I flop an ace and check-raise all in over a continuation bet, he folds. I'm back to #2 stack at the table. We're now at the final table !!

I get AA in the SB but all fold to me. I open for a min raise and he folds the BB to a min raise! Arg!

I get A8s and steal the blinds. I get K8 in the blinds. All fold to the SB who limps. I flop an 8 and win one bet. I get K3 in the SB. All fold to me and I open push to win the big blind. I now have the big stack, but just barely. I'm the chip leader! I open TJo and all fold. I get A5o in the BB. The SB limps and I raise, he folds. Some nuts knock each other out and I just sit back, it's now 4 handed !! Another nut knocks himself out, and it's now 3 handed, and we make a deal.

It's funny going back over it, there aren't many hands where anything much happened to me. I kept chopping away with lots of little steals, but never got the nice double ups with my big hands. I won a few races I needed to win, but never won as a big dog (like running a pair into an over pair). I was all-in very few times, maybe just twice !? I just kind of stayed around average chips the whole way, and avoided going bust with decent hands against tight players. It all sounds so easy when it works out.

Another thing that I think really worked out was just a simple basic principle - stay out of pots with good players, get in pots with bad players. You can play worse hands in the pots with bad players and fold lots of hands vs. good players, and things just work out. The bad players will throw away their chips in crazy situations that just make no sense.

04-14-06

I realized the other day that working on Stranger, being part of the "producing" team that oversaw the design at the end of the game, I felt more connected to the production of the game than I did in all my lead programming before that. Yeah, I met with designers, yeah I did lots of coding and engine design, yeah I talked to Lorne about ideas, but I wasn't really involved in the levels, and, for example, in games like Drakan and Munch, I hardly knew what was in the game until I played them after they came out. Yeah, I tested my code in levels, but they were usually little test levels, or unfinished levels that you couldn't really play. A few take-aways that I learned and tried to apply to Stranger were : 1) Make the game playable and fun as early as possible; do NOT use the technique of having lots of pieces in development that come together in the end; it's important for everyone to be able to actually play the real game as early as possible (unfortunately, some of the other teams didn't really get on this bandwagon with Stranger), and 2) Make sure you can load & play full levels in your debug builds. In Munch & Drakan the engine couldn't load & play full levels in debug. In Stranger we sort of managed to fix that but it still wasn't great and we stell wound up using a lot of test levels, which is bad for the code-design relationship.

Anyhoo, I really saw the appeal of being something like a Producer. You don't personally do anything, but since you aren't doing anything you have the time to see what everyone else is doing.

04-14-06

The weirdest fighting style in "Pride" are the Japanese guys who just go for leg locks. They step towards you, then just flop down on their side or back and kick their legs out at you, trying to grab your legs with theirs and sort of trip you. The goal is to get your legs in a lock and get a hold of your foot. They would love you to try to kick them or stomp on them.

Pride is IMHO the best fighting program (better than UFC, and boxing is just boring and gay), but a lot of the fights still get boring with people in the guard doing nothing. I think allowing groin work would fix that. Being in the guard is a pretty bad disadvantage if groin work is allowed, because the guy on top can just work the balls and the fight is over. I don't really see why not, it's not really dangerous more so than other things they do. The way the stupid rules are now in fights, you should always go for a head-butt or an elbow or a rabbit punch if you're boxing, and in MMA fights you should knee to the groin. At worst you might get a warning or a point off, and your opponent gets brutalized and you have a huge advantage in the fight. It's quite frequent in boxing to see some villain headbutting and punching the back of the neck, the hero gets all fucked up from it, the villain just gets a warning, but the hero is cut and bloody and dazed and the villain winds up knocking him out.

04-14-06

My NAD amp is the only piece of electronics I own that is really well designed. All the buttons are right on the face, you don't have to page through menus on some ass digital screen. The important analog dial, the volume, is a nice big heavy knob that's easy to adjust either very precisely or grossly. When you click a button it responds instantly. In contrast my PC speakers are ass, my Sony DVD player is garbage, my TiVo is some of the worst GUI software ever, etc. etc. All you dumbasses need to go back and read "the design of everyday things", or just get an education in common fucking sense.

Some examples of basic software principles : any time your software is going to do a time-consuming operation, it should give the user any necessary prompts right away up front. Don't run for 15 minutes, then toss up a prompt, then run another 15. Also, you must check for possible failures up front and let the user know about them before you go into your big work. For example, if you're going to do some file IO after a lot of computation, you should open those file handles in advance to make sure you get them and they remain legit. It's intolerable to run a computation for 30 minutes and then fail because the path is no good to save the results or something like that.

04-14-06

The Book Annex on High Street has an awesome selection of old globes. I'm a big fan of cool old globes, I especially like the ones with wooden frames with two axes of rotation, where there's like one hoop of wood around another hoop so you can spin the whole thing, with like degree markers on the hoops. They make me feel like some 19th centure Brittish gadfly planning my trip to all the provinces of the Empire.

I got my tires rotated & oil changed. I wonder how often they take your car into the shop, just don't do anything to it at all, and give it back and charge you $50. Next time I'll put chalk marks on my tires before I go in so I can catch those bastards.

04-14-06

I was thinking I could get a little farm somewhere, play some poker to pay the bills, maybe sell eggs or something. Unfortunately there's no way I can buy a farm anywhere but the shittiest of shit-holes in California, all the land is too expensive. Somewhere out in the mid-west I'm sure it's plenty cheap, but then you have to live in the mid west ;(

04-14-06

Michael Brown (FEMA), and Chertoff (Homeland Security) are absolutely incompetent lying scoundrels and should be in jail. Those who appointed incompetent politicians should also be held accountable (Bush, etc.).

Frontline seems to dwell on the fact that so much critical infrastructure was put in places that could flood. Well, look you morons, most of New Orleans can flood. If you put crucial things in flood-free areas you're basically establishing a heirarchy where valuables go on high ground and poor go on low ground. The big problem goes back to putting a huge city in an incredible flood-prone delta with little protection.

Funny tidbit I didn't know - Andrew Card actually headed the disaster response to Hurricane Andrew under "Bush 41". He was at the time Secretary of Transportation and was appointed because the FEMA director was an incompetent buffoon. Andrew was the biggest hurricane preceding Katrina (eg. there was no bigger hurricane between Andrew and Katrina). It's a shame he wasn't appointed again, or didn't step up and ask to take it over or something.

04-14-06

For some reason "The Holy Girl" didn't engage me at all. It sounds like the kind of movie I should love - slow, realistic, foreign (I'm kind of joking) - but it was just too slow and subtle.

Movies about movie-making are pretty uniformly horrifically bad. Movies about indie-movie making in America are one step worse.

04-14-06 [poker]

Live game kind of sucked last night. I had two tough decisions, both vs. Jim, I'm curious if he remembers them.

First one I was in the small blind with AJs. Blinds were 800/1600 and I had about 15k chips. Jim opened for 5k in middle position (UTG+1 with 6 players). I thought about moving all in, but for some reason I had a pretty strong read on Jim that he was strong. He thought a long time about the raise and then sat way back. On the other hand it's totally possible he has a pair below J or AT. I folded, maybe I should've pushed, especially considering the Gigabet Principle where I want to take a slightly -EV gamble at that point to try to get a big stack.

Second one was also against Jim. I raised in the CO (cutoff) with KQs. Jim in the small blind pushed all in. Blinds were about the same, I raised to about 5k and had about 15k behind, so getting slightly worse than 2:1. Again I folded. Again, he could've easily had something like Ax or a pair below Q's and I should've called for the odds, but there's a lot of hands that have me in trouble there.

04-13-06 [poker]

OMFG. I just finished 2nd in a big online tourney. It was a $55 buy-in with 350 people. I feel like I just played great; I never really got lucky in any hands, but I also didn't get super unlucky (my aces held up, etc.). I won a few races, and lost a few key races that would've given me an easy first place at the end. I folded a lot of big hands in good spots where I would've been knocked out. OMFG. This is my new biggest one day cash. (technically, we did a deal when it was down to 3 handed, and I was 2nd in chips; I feel like I had an edge over both of the players remaining, so I really should've played it out, but the blinds were huge and I didn't feel like just random gambling for a few thousand).

04-13-06 [poker]

Raising preflop is generally more profitable than limping, even with cards that play well multiway and may be a dog to win heads up (like 67s or 22).

Obviously there are a lot of factors involved in this - taking the lead in the hand, building the pot for when you hit, etc. etc. One factor that I don't see mentioned much in general is just the statistical factor of getting in pots with bad players.

Say you have 67s in MP. The table has half good players at about 20% vpip (and tighter to a raise) and half terrible players at 50% vpip (who call raises with junk). If you limp in, it's likely you will play a pot with good players, possible with good players in position on you. If you come in for a raise, it's very likely all the good players will fold behind you, if there are any callers it's far more likely to be the bad players. In a limped pot the chance of an opponent being bad is around 5:2 because of their higher vpip, in a raised pot it's perhaps 4:1 because the good players adjust much tighter to a raise.

Now, regardless of the cards, being in pots with bad players is much more +EV than with good players. This is different than isolating on a bad player, where a bad player enters the pot and then you raise to get heads up with him, I'm talking about when you're opening, or perhaps putting in a button raise after a bunch of limpers - by raising you make it much more likely that you're facing bad opponents.

I'm not talking about the normal reasons to raise or not, cbetting etc. I'm talking about one specific factor which I suspect may be important in why raising certain hands is profitable at SSNL.

For example, if everyone at the table plays the same this factor does not exist; eg. if they're all bad or all good, you may still want to raise certain hands for various reasons, but not for this reason. If the good and bad players at the table don't vary their hands selection based on whether you raise or not this factor doesn't exist.

To be concrete, if a bad player plays 50% of limped pots, and 40% of raised pot, but a good player plays 20% of limped pots and 10% of raised pot, by raising you increase your chance of being against a bad opponent from 5:2 to 4:1.

Also, say there are 4 players behind you. Half are good, half are bad. If you limp, the chance that both good players fold is .8*.8 = 64%, so there's a 36% a good player comes in behind. If you raise, the chance that both good players fold is .9*.9 = 81%, so there's a 19% a good player is in the pot.

04-12-06 [finance]

I've got like 5% of my investments in bonds for "diversification". But bonds suck (unless you juice them like Barry Bonds). This idea of having a little money in bonds is okay if you're planning to never touch your investments at all, but it seems better to just have 100% in stock, then if the market starts to go south, move a big chunk over to bonds. I don't micro-manage my investments at all, but even I could do simple moves like that.

04-12-06

I picked up some "green garlic" at farmer's market the other day. I'd never used it before. It's just young garlic before the heads develop, it looks sort of like fat green onions. It's a bit too potent for me raw, but lightly cooked (like you would green onions - just barely wilted), it has a nice mild garlicy flavor sort of mixed with an onion flavor. I made like a Mongolian Beef dish to highlight it, with tons of green garlic substitued for the onion, green onion, and regular garlic that would usually be used. It was fantastic, I think green garlic is actually the ideal thing for that dish. It was fun sort of working like "Iron Chef", trying to make one dish to highlight the theme ingredient.

04-12-06 [poker]

Lately I've been playing just awesome in small pots (folding when I'm beat, picking up pots, setting up a nit or aggro image), but playing awful in big pots, bluffing huge when they won't fold, calling when I'm way beat, etc.

I realize it's sort of analogous to lots of things in my life.

04-12-06

Apple switching to Intel CPU's is a first step in a good direction for them. Perhaps some day they'll finally give in and just make software and hardware accessories for PC's running Windows. They seem to be pretty good at making nice hardware and GUI software. People would pay a premium for sexy Apple-style PC clones and peripherals. ("Bootcamp" is the right first step, next they just need to drop OSX and make all their software run on Windows and turn "Finder" or whatever into just a Windows enhancement).

04-11-06

I finally did my taxes, and I think I discovered a weird anomaly. Of course, the tax code is fully of loop-holes and there's a huge industry devoted to exploiting them, but this one is just silly and simple. You can deduct your state income tax from your federal income. Okay, that seems simple enough right? Well, the amount you deduct is the amount that was deducted from your income as reported on your W2, *NOT* the actual amount you end up paying in state income tax. What that means is that if you overpay state taxes during the year, you will get a refund from the state at the end, and get a larger deduction on your federal tax. Kim rightly points out that this is not a good dodge, because your state refund counts as income and gets taxed on your next year's federal return.

04-11-06

"High Octane" has got to be one of the great mis-used phrases. It's used to mean "high powered" which is the exact opposite of what it is. I'm just watching the Frontline on meth, and the moron describes it as "the High Octane version of speed (amphetamine)". Umm, so you mean it's a lot slower and smoother? It's less explosive and requires more force to pop? Because that's what high octane means. Read at How stuff works .

The show kinda made we want to try meth. I've always been turned off by it because it makes the users so gross, but I didn't know meth just stimulates the release of Dopamine in your brain. Dopamine is just your body's own natural pleasure chemical, the same thing that makes it feel nice to eat chocolate or have sex. Meth is like an explosion of happiness far greater than anything you could ever feel naturally. How cool is that? (yeah, yeah, I still don't actually want to do meth, there are better things)

The interviews with the pharmaceutical guys are just unreal too. Those guys surely deserve to be brutally tortured and killed. They're pure evil and they cloak it in the political holier-than-thou stance which makes it even worse. 75% of Pseudoephedrine and Ephedrine are sold to methamphetamine producers, and they know it, and they don't want to stop it because it accounts for billion of dollars of profit for them. They'd much rather have a massive drug problem than give up a tiny bit of profit.

This is also a clear breakdown of the myth that corporations left to themselves with competition will wind up doing what's best for the populace (eg. they'll provide what the populace wants, maximize utility, whatever). In this case, pharma doesn't have to pay for the prisons, rehab, DEA, and all the other costs their product incurrs, but they get to keep the profit.

04-10-06

Basketball would be a better spectator sport if there were no fouls. I think eventually what it would evolve into is basically a game with 2-3 "bruisers" (ala Shaq) and 2-3 "shooters". On offense, your bruisers would block their bruisers and your shooters would try to stay behind them and get a shot off, sort of like a fullback blocking for the runner in football. You might have to get rid of dribbling, dribbling might not be possible with people chopping at you all the time, you'd just run the ball down the court and try to get a shot off.

04-10-06

What's up with "Salvia" ? Are kids really smoking sage now? Does it actually do anything besides oxygen deprivation?

Well, it's easy to find the Salvia Divinorum FAQ . It is just a type of Sage. Apparently it's a hallucinogen similar to LSD, but doesn't last long and has no known permanent effects on the brain, which makes it very safe. It's also legal to own, grow and use. It's easy to grow yourself (just like any sage). The great Las Pilitas nursery (near Santa Margarita) has a big page on native California Sage .

04-10-06

Anyone have any idea about the legality of this idea? Any solicitor who comes on my property, can I shoot them with a paintball gun? How about my BB gun? I know in Texas I could shoot them with a real gun thanks to Texas' ridiculous laws, but I dunno about California.

04-09-06

We watched "Battle of Algiers" last night, which is an old movie about the anti-colonial guerilla revolution against the French in Algeria. Of course it's a very different situation than Iraq, but it does strike a few similar notes. For one thing, the French were even more brutal about capturing suspected terrorists and torturing them to try to extract information, and striking back at the populace. These methods have never worked.

It also made me think of an ideal terrorist cell structure. The binary tree described in "Battle of Algiers" is ridiculous. Basically they claim the FLM had a tree structure where each node (a person) knows only his parent and two children. This gives you a minimum knowledge of other people in the structure, so if you are taken out or caught, you spoil a minimum of direct neighbors. That's true, but it also means huge branches of the tree can be easily cut off, if you capture anyone near the top, it severs a big fraction of the tree. It's sort of tricky to improve this and seems like a fun CS problem. The idea is that if someone gets caught, you want to cut him and everyone he can identify out of the tree. Then you want to be able to re-link the tree and keep as much of it intact as possible. The direct neighbors of the caught node can communicate their knowledge to help relink the tree before they themselves are cut.

One idea is just the circularly linked list. Instead of a tree everyone is just in a circular list. There's still a leader, but he just passes his message to each side, and they keep passing it along anonymously. Even if the leader is cut out of the tree it only removes his direct neighbors. When a cut is made, you now just have a linear list. This can be easily fixed by broadcasting a message like "if you only know one neighbor, go to meeting spot X", then two people will go there and establish a link. This seems ideal. If you want the structure to be robust to possibly having 2 simultaneous cuts, you need more links. Probably best is to give each node 3 links - two to direct neighbors in the circular list, and 1 to the opposite on the circle, or perhaps just to a random other node. Now when someone is caught you have to remove 4 nodes, but you easily have enough links to recreate the circle. Obviously in the modern era with computers you don't actually need any direct links at all. Each of your operatives can just be a PGP key. Operatives who are available for missions just broadcast their public key. Commanders issuing orders can broadcast the instructions encrypted. The two can communicate thus without any direct knowledge of each other and won't be able to give the other up if captured.

It also reminded me how strange the image of the French is in this country. Our politicians for some reason paint this picture of the pacifist wussy French who don't stand up to aggressors and are generally weak and limp. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The French have been probably the second most aggressive nation in the world after WW2 (outside their own borders), after only the U.S. (the USSR maybe falls in there too depending on how you define its borders). They've personally fought major wars in WW1, WW2, Algeria, Indochina (long before we got involved). Since then they've been one of the most active western powers (again, after only the US) at sending Special Forces and arms to foment war all over the world, including