CardRunners

we arrived in berlin yesterday morning (time zones are weird) and spent the night at the apartment of a cousin of mine, who was immensely helpful. Today we moved into the place that we're renting for the next two months, which was actually much nicer then our worst-case-based expectations. The picture on the left is of our little kitchen. Living in montreal and not speaking tons of french has made me fairly comfortable in the art of non-verbal communication, but it's still a huge leap, and (if you haven't noticed) I really enjoy being able to talk to people, and it's something of a shock when that isn't possible. Berlin is very english, (compared to paris, for instance) but it's sort of dawning on me that I'm going to be living here, on and off, for the next 5 months, and that is a bit of a shock.

It is also dawning on me that I'm going to end up having to pay for this trip, something I hadn't thought about a great deal. I was raised in a household where money was something you saved, and that is a habit that has stayed with me; I always feel weird when I dip into savings to pay for living expenses, and that is something I'd like to avoid while possible. With that in mind, I'm going to have to start playing at least a little cards again, if only to try and cover my living expenses. I'm not a very accumulation-driven person (which is to say, I don't feel much of a need to have more and bigger things (within reason) and I don't feel the need to earn money for money's sake) and this is something that has often gotten in the way of my poker playing; when I feel I have no real need to make money, I have trouble playing poker, which has very few redemptive qualities outside of the fiscal; but now that I actually have some money-goals, playing poker is more attractive.

On that note, I've been thinking for a while of writing a fairly large (perhaps multi-part) essay on bankroll and money management. Cardrunners doesn't seem to have a section for articles anymore (we used to, didn't we? A year or so ago? I'm terrible at keeping track of these things) so I'm not sure where it would end up, ultimately, but I think it would be a good project. I may end up running it by tyler and seeing what he thinks makes sense.I'm sort of a broken record on this point, but I really do believe that bankroll management is the most important factor in being a winning poker player, and it deserves much more attention then it gets. 

In my last post I mentioned a blog idea I'd discussed in the cardrunners forums; I managed to get that most of the way finished while on christmas vacation at my parents, and I'm going to launch it soon. If you want a sneak peak you can pop over to askcmyr.com.

Happy new years,



colin

I've finally gotten a new drive in and installed, and I'm mostly set up. Looks like I've lost about 3 months of HHs and photos which makes me feel pretty silly, but so it goes. 

I've been playing around the last few days with playing poker on my laptop. It's a small mac, and so I'm using boot-camp to run windows XP on it so I can play and still use pokertracker etc. It's been a really long time since I've been seriously thinking about poker, and the higher stakes games feel intimidating again, which is also sort of fun. I've cashed out a whole lot of my bankroll the last little while both for living expenses and to invest, and so I'm not rolled for anything above 5/10 even if I wanted to be, and I'm not even especially comfortably (by my pretty extreme standards, granted) rolled for that game. This isn't the end of the world or anything, since as I ease back into playing I'm going to be starting out at 2/4 or so, and I won't want to be playing higher unless I've been winning anyway.

I'm starting to get excited about my pending move... I've been making plans with a few friends (wazz particularly) to go hit up a few tournaments/EPT events, and I'm just in general excited to tour aroud and play some cards. I've forgotten how much I enjoy live poker, and so I think that'll be fun.

Since I'm going to want to be traveling and also probably spending more then I might otherwise, playing a bit of poker is hopefully going to become a necessity again. I often have trouble getting motivated to play, so I like to set up little rules where I sort of pay myself a bonus based on my month-to-month performance, which I can spend on whatever.

I'm a pretty strict on money-management and bankroll issues, which I t hink is one of the main reasons I've been able to stay in the games for as long as I have. One of the things I'm most proud of, right now, is how I've managed to have a fairly significant losing year and not really have it affect my quality of ilfe. I'm thinking of perhaps doing a series of short essays on the bankroll management side of the game, especially as it concerns people who want to support themselves for a period playing poker. It's a really important part of the game, and one I don't think very many people think about in enough detail.

I'm also planning on starting up a new little blog project, which I've discussed in the forums. It's just for fun, but I'd like to get it set up sooner rather then later.

I'm off again tomorrow for christmas, and will only be back briefly before I fly out. I hope everyone enjoys their holidays, and I'll be back around in early January.

I got kicked in the pants a few days ago when I tried to boot up my poker machine for the first time in a week or so and was given an I/O error. No more hard-drive for me. This wouldn't be such a big deal if I wasn't fairly itching to play, and if I hadn't sort of slacked off on the backing-up front, which means I lost a few months of pictures and HHs. I'll cope.

I'm starting to think more seriously about my next 5-6 months. I'm going to be in germany in a little over two weeks, and with the exception of a quick trip to dubai/oman to see some family I'm not necessarily going to have a whole lot to do. I'm not planning on bringing a big computer/monitors or anything, so if I'm going to be playing poker I'm going to be limited to what I can do on my Mac Air, in boot camp. I've played around with that and I can 4 table pretty well, so that's not the worst deal ever.

As I haven't been especially excited by poker, I've been thinking about various ways I could make myself more interested. I've been considering a few little day dreams: It might be fun, for instance, to spend a month or so each on a few different games (NL SNGS, limit PLO/8, HU NL, MTTs) and try to make myself a winner over a set period of time. I've also been considering doing some touring around the various euro casino cities, and spending a few days in each playing live. It'd be fun to trip between Amsterdam, Paris, Vienne, etc. and play some poker at the same time. I really enjoy live play and don't get the opportunity to do it much, so that could be fun.

I'm also becoming a bit more financially motivated to play: I've been doing some investing lately and with the markets in a bit of a slump I'd like to be getting as much money as I can available for that, and I've already trimmed down my online bankroll to about the lowest levels I can. I'm also obviously going to want to be spending more when I'm in berlin on travel and food etc. 

To that end, there's a new HDD in the mail that should be here tomorrow, at which point I'll be able to get my PC set up and put in a few days before I leave.  

I have a blog? Whoops.


I've finally wrapped up my little series of videos at party poker, which is a bit of a relief... I'm not great at managing my time or my commitments, generally, and things that fascinate me one week often drive me to boredom the next; at any rate, I hope there's been some interesting content in those videos, and that they've been of value to somebody.


I've been doing a lot of thinking about blogging lately, and I've been a bit turned off of the current CR blogs by my inability to really customize them in any way; I'm a bit of a control freak in that sense, and want to be able to manage my own CSS and layout and things. Apparently new, far better blogs are on the way, so that should be exciting. In the time being, I'm examining the idea of starting a new blog independently, since a great deal of my ramblings aren't particularly poker related anyway; I'd keep my cardrunners blog for things specific to cardrunners material, but would use my personal site for other stuff.

Anyway: If you're reading this and you aren't doing so in an RSS reader of some sort, you're missing out. RSS is a really great technology for aggregating internet "news"; basically you either have a program or a website account (like at google) and then when you find a website you'd like to keep up to date on, you save a link to that website's RSS feed, which will then update you every time there's new content. Lots of people seem to enjoy Google Reader, which works anywhere; I'm really fond of a program called NetNewsWire, which is for Mac, and I also use FeedBurner on my windows machine. If you aren't doing that and you read even a few blogs, you should really check it out.


Other stuff: I'm moving to germany in a little over a month, and I'm going to be there for 5 or so months. Not really sure how much poker I'm going to be playing while I'm in europe; I'm not bringing my PC or a monitor or anything, so if I want to play it'll have to be on my Air. Alternatively if I'm really bored there (which I doubt, somehow) I can buy a dell and a 24" or something and play, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.

I've had a fairly awful year for poker, and losses have bred disinterest. Staking has been far and away my most successful activity the last 12 months, for which I'm thankful; without it I'd probably be fairly uncomfortable at the moment. At some point I'm going to have to start playing again, I imagine, being as I can't afford to retire and I don't have any (particularly) marketable skills; I may also end up going back to school fuller-time next fall, but that's obv. a long ways away. 

Poker is something I'll have to think about in more detail at some future date; first though I'm going to have to think about breakfast. Mmmm, breakfast...

In the summer, my main recreational activities are playing and watching football— that other football, where one uses one's foot and plays with a ball. I had until recently harboured big dreams of playing quite a bit of poker this month, but Euro 08 kicked off saturday I realized that that's going to pose a significant problem; my days are now booked solid from 12noon until 4:30 or 5:00 every afternoon, and three or four days a week I then have a game to play myself at 7:00 or 9:00. On top of that, most of my friends are friends I've made through soccer, and so we inevitably end up getting together to watch the games, and then find our way to the park to kick a ball around and have a few beers, which makes playing cards even more difficult. I think it's important that I manage to put in a few hours a week, however, and so I'm going to have to start examining my situation a bit more closely and try and get together a more appropriate schedule; I normally play cards in the afternoon, but I may have to start playing a bit more in the evening.

The tournament proper (Euro) has been alright so far, although the first really big game goes this afternoon with Italy/Netherlands. France Romania, on as I speak, isn't as good as it promised to be, which is a bit of a downer. Quite a few of the games so far, actually, have seemed a little underwhelming; I'd had high hopes for portugal v. turkey, which was fairly anticlimactic, and both the czech's and the croats seemed pretty mild in their openers. I picked Germany Poland to 1-2 their group in my local pool, and after watching them play I'm feeling really good about that pick. Lukas Podoski, left, looks super awesome for germany (he's wearing a poland shirt after trading jerseys after the game) and he's already first in tournament scoring, another plus since I picked him for the golden boot. Germany and Portugal are the only teams I've seen so far that've looked properly strong. It'll be exciting to see how Italy and the Netherlands look, and then whether or not Spain can live up to expectations on tuesday. Poker? Who needs poker?

I went out for dim-sum with some friends yesterday, and picked up the Sunday Times so I'd have something to do while everyone was trying to talk to me. Two things in particular caught my interest; the first was one of the paper's great info-graphics, this dealing with how Americans are spending their income tax rebates: If you can make it out, in the very bottom right corner, right below "cruise", is the category "gambling", on which a full percent of americans intend to spend their windfall. That one percent is somewhere in the area of a billion dollars entering the gambling economy, the vast majority probably being through things like lottery tickets etc., and only a very small portion making its way to the casino, and a significantly smaller portion then that making its way to the poker table; still, that's pretty serious money. I haven't been to vegas in a year or so, and it's easy to forget just what big business gambling is. No matter which way you cut it, a billion dollars is a decent bit of change, and given that it probably isn't a drop in the barrel of the larger gambling economy, that's pretty silly. I always wonder where all the money on somewhere like FTP comes from, but I've learned to hold my tongue and just believe. It's out there, and it probably isn't going away in a hurry.

The second thing that was neat was an article on the super wealthy's trouble dealing with being slightly less super-wealthy. This is something which I think is a common cause of downfall to newly successful poker-players, especially those that have gone on big fast heaters, and have moved from smallish games to big games in a few months; the expectation that your success will continue indeffinately can cause you alot of problems if you've developed a lifestyle that expects a certain cash-flow. Outside of the very select very few who consistently beat most of the games they play in, I think it's important for most poker players not to let their lifestyle be driven by their current success or lack thereof. In the second half of last year, I was consistently putting in months between the low/mid-five and low-six figures; since december, however, I've more or less broken even. Alot of this will have to do with running badly, but alot of it is also just my getting frustrated and not playing very much; all in all I've probably played less then 40k hands since november, which isn't that outlandish of a breakeven streak, at all.

Yesterday, I tried to play a little session while waiting for some friends to get their shit together, and I ended up sitting at 3-6. I haven't played 3-6 since this time last year, and I'd always assumed I would never play below 5-10 again, outside of learning a new game or messing around with friends. One of the things I pride myself on in my poker game (and in my life in general) is not getting caught up in ego, but it still feels strange to have moved down from 25-50 to 3-6. That said, I put together a proper heater yesterday, and made 7k or so in 200 hands, which was something I'd forgotten you could do, and which definately made me like poker a bit more then I have in a while. Let's see if that helps get me motivated to put in a proper month in June.

So my second video just went up, and one thing I’ve noticed as I’ve been making videos is how much trouble I have talking and playing at the same time. I quite often say the wrong suit when talking about a flush-draw, or misread a board, and it gets more and more difficult as I try and discuss things that don’t have any correlation whatsoever to the hands I’m playing; I’ll often have to stop mid-blather and discuss a hand that’s being played, and then have to go back and try and pick up where I’d left off, which is way more difficult then I’d imagined. I’m kind of against the idea of dubbing your audio after you’ve finished the session, since it really robs the viewer of an accurate insight into how you play a hand as you’re playing it, a very different thing from how you justify your play after the fact. That said, I think that might be a fairly minor complaint, and one which would be offset by the increased quality of the video overall if I was able to do audio while only focusing on audio, and if I were able to do things like retake audio when I mess up. I’d hate to rob the CR community of all the funny errors I make, of course, so I guess I’ll have to give it a bit more thought.

A few expository thoughts on stuff I touched on in the video, that I don’t think was quite clear enough: one of the sort of truisms of PLO is that you really really don’t want to be getting it in as a huge dog very often, and this is one of the main reasons for the idea I make early on concerning flushdraw+overpairs. I think I should restate that point a little bit. When you get it in with a flushdraw and an overpair, especially in a fairly small pot, the reason I would take the NFD over a higher overpair is because you can guarentee with the NFD that you’re never getting it in terribly. That said, getting it in with AA and a weaker FD is also okay, since it’s hard to be too too dominated; an opponent would need TP+ and a higher FD for you to be in really bad shape. Where you get in real trouble, however, is when you get it in with an overpair and a FD and your opponent has a bigger OP and a bigger FD, which is a huge equity sink.

Another point that I wanted to make in this video, and which I forgot to, is a sort of simple test to evaluate which of the two gambling mindsets I touched on here you fall into: over the course of your gambling ‘career’, have you spent most of the time with a largest winning session that was greater then your largest losing session, or vis-versa? It’s by no means a clear ruler or anything, but it’s something I like to refer to, and I think it often offers a pretty good look into your mentality.

So I should probably be working on my next video at the moment—should, infact, have been working on it yesterday—but, you know, it's really nice outside. I'm currently sitting on the screened veranda of a property of my grandfather's, in southwest florida I'm here for a few more days, and then I'm driving his car, which he left here full of stuff, back up to his home, a trip that will take about 24 hours. As I kind of might have agreed to produce a video for the 4th of may, This presents an interesting logistical problem; the Camtasia software has, in my brief experimentation, demonstrated a rather annoying quirk of causing a kernel panic whenever I try to both record the screen and record from the microphone on my laptop, a mac booted into XP. This means that I'm going to have to do the video and audio seperately, alá recent stinger and raptor (those names are pretty funny read side-by-side) videos.

This means mostly that it's going to take me an extra hour or so to do, start to finish, and given that that's an hour I could have spent working on my sunburn or eating grapefruit, I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect. Alas, thus is life.

I have played less poker so far in 2008 then I have in particular months past, a trend I wouldn't mind reversing once I sort of revert to a normal life. The problem, of course, is that it's now summer, a yearly meteorological event significant chiefly because it sort of magically nullifies any lifestyle-normality that might have been incubated in previous months; not only are you now able to go outside in flip-flops at your leisure (yeah, quite sniggering santa barbara) but the constant allure of kicking a soccer-ball around or making a bad batch of sangria with friends tends to quickly make the idea of spending a day in a poorly lit (or even a wonderfully well lit) office playing cards somehow not the most attractive of prospects.

I've really really fallen out of a poker sort of mindset. When I'm walking around, or reading a book, or lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, these days, my thoughts are almost entirely not revolving around flop evaluation and fold equity. I very rarely find myself day-dreaming about elaborate triple barrel bluffs, or preflop 4-betting ranges. This is awesome, in a way, in that the thing that I find chiefly upsetting about poker is the way it manages to invade the rest of my life when I'm playing it, the way I'll spend all night dreaming about cards after putting in a long session— this is something I've now escaped more thoroughly then at any other point in the last three years or so, and that feels really cool. That said, my life as it has existed for the last little while (a life revolving mostly around avoiding school-work and personal hygiene in order to play Call of Duty) has not been some kind of idyllic wonderland, and I'm definitely aware of a certain lack of purpose, lately, and so I've got to do a little bit of something.

I have a few little day-dreams for the summer... I'd like to play cards a bit, obviously, and I'm thinking about vegas, although I'm not sure now when I'm going down or how long I'm going to be staying. I want (like everyone else, I suppose) to do some reading on trading and general investment stuff, and start managing my own money/moving more money out of my bankroll. Back when I was playing more seriously I was trying to make the move up to 25-50, but as I'm playing a bit more casually at the moment I'm going to be focusing on 5-10 or so for a while, and so I can afford to liquidate quite a bit of my roll. I'll keep myself in the money to the extent that a couple good months at 5-10 will have my very very comfortable for 10-20, and if I get right back into it I'll be in position to get back shot-taking at 25-50 in three months or so. The fall, at the moment, is a distant nebulous mist, w/r/t my knowing what exactly I'm going to be doing. And that's more or less how I like it.

So: I'm going to go play a few hours of .25-.5 6max PLO and see if I can find any neat spots for 'yall. It's going to be the first session I've played since the last video I made, at least two weeks ago, so we'll see how it goes.

So: chances are decent that if you’re reading this post, it’s because you’ve just watched my first video (or noticed that I had a first video) and are wondering what’s up. If you’ve spent any semi-serious amount of time over the past 2-3 years at the twoplustwo Omaha forum, you probably have a decent idea who I am—otherwise, though, you’ve likely no idea.

Hi.

My name is colin, and I’ve played an awful lot of PLO. I’ve not played as much PLO as some degens have played hold’em, but over the last few years, I’ve managed to book something approaching a million hands, from 10max .10-.25 through hu 25-50, on pretty much any site that’s spread the game. I am somewhat unique of players in my position, in that I’ve never really played NLHE seriously; aside from a bit of messing around with sng’s when I first got into online poker, I’ve almost exclusively played PLO. This puts me in an interesting situation; all of my knowledge of the game I play has come first hand, developed from my experiences and experiments, and when I started playing PLO cash, I had no misconceptions or ideas carried over from NL that I had to disassemble, something I feel gave me an advantage over players who come to PLO from careers playing and beating NL ring games.

When Brian approached me about helping develop more PLO content for cardrunners, I was a little cautious; the availability of educational PLO material has always been very limited, and much that is available (from Rolf’s recent book to many of the videos floating around the internet already) is either dubiously helpful or downright detrimental to anyone trying to learn the game. This has always been to the advantage to those of us who had spent serious time learning the game, but I’ve come to realize over the last few years that the games are going to change anyway, and a winning player has to count on his ability to adapt and develop his game, rather then hope to maintain a knowledge-gap against constantly changing opposition.

So: over the next few months (and beyond) I’m going to be creating videos focusing on the fundamentals of PLO at the small-to-midstakes level, across a variety of sites and game types. Hopefully I’ll be able to help some of you NL players make the move over to PLO more comfortably, as well as helping players who’ve been grinding lower-stakes PLO for a while see some ways to tweak their play, and take on bigger games.

So I recently started dipping into Lawrence Weschler’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, a neat little book about various thematic echoes and commonalities in disparate works of art. The central idea of that work—that when you start looking for them, these links are everywhere— is something I can pretty readily relate to; I’m a fairly obsessive person, in small ways, and when I have an idea that I’m wrestling with, it seems to relate to everything I experience.

Last night was the first night of the NHL playoffs, and I caught bits and pieces of all four games. I’m not a diehard hockey fan, but I still get interested in the playoffs, and there was some good hockey last night. One particular play sort of caught my interest; in one of the late games, Jerome Iginla of Calgary broke in on San Jose’s goalie Evgeni Nabokov. His shot was stopped, and as he crashed into the net one of his teammates shoveled his rebound past the goal-line. The referee on the scene signaled a goal, but the play was subsequently reviewed by video; Iginla had knocked the net out of position as he crashed into it, and under the rules of the game a goal cannot be scored when the net is out of position. (There's no slow-mo replay online, but you can view the goal here)

The question for the reviewers, then, was whether or not the puck had crossed the line before or after the net came loose. This, from the video provided, is an impossible task. The ability of the video to produce answers is specifically dependent on the frame rate of the film available, and the replay film simply fails to capture the crucial moment. As observers, we can be very very confident (although assuming there is a smallest possible unit of both time and space, there does exist a very small possibility for us to be wrong, although this would introduce all sorts of other problems) that one of the two events (i.e. puck over line v. goal knocked off moorings) occurred first, but our ability to assess which it might have been is dependent on our ability to break a fluid continuous action into finite concrete atoms. With a specially designed camera, for instance (and we’ve all seen the footage of bullets viscerating fruit, or of an inanimate rag-doll driver being pushed back in his seat by a detonating airbag, over the tinsel flare of exploded safety glass) we would be able to turn the (say) 60 frames per second with which we experience the Calgary goal into something like 1000 fps, and a result would begin to emerge; under that sort of resolution, the puck might be a massive ten or twenty frames over the line before the net shifts at all.

To get more theoretical, if we allow that space and time do not allow for infinite subdivision (and it seems that, at least for purposes of measurement, it does not; go google planck unit) then there should be a ground-floor, a smallest possible unit of delineation into which an event could be framed; under this measure, it may turn out that the puck was over the line several million instants prior to the net’s moving, which is to say that it may not be very close at all.

As this thought drifted rather quickly in and out of my head, watching TV with the lights out and the volume down, my girlfriend asleep in bed, I was reminded of a story by Allan Moore— perhaps the most creative and exploratory writer in the conventional comic-book mold— a story that I’d read as part of a collection of his early work for DC Comics. In that rather strange little story, some malignant alien species of the ‘find-and-subjugate’ archetype travel to a new world, which at first seems uninhabited but is host to some strange monolithic statues. Eventually the invaders realize that the statues are actually alive, but operate in a timeframe different from their own: that is, they delineate time into much larger blocks. For them to blink an eye takes ten years in the eyes of the invaders, and to sit up or move around would take centuries. The story is a standard sort of tale about the dangers of hubris, and as I read it for the first time, in a poorly-lit, poorly furnished hotel room in Tunica last January, enduring one of my worst stretches of live-play ever, and having come off my worst losing month ever, I found it vaguely comforting.

If you look at the replay of the Calgary incident, you will see a blur; if you could zoom in indefinitely, you would see either a goal or dislodged net. To take the opposite tack, however, and zoom out, away from the puck and the scramble, and you will see a different picture, entirely; you will simply see Calgary winning the game 3-2. It is important, when examining events, to be able to break them down in a variety of ways; it makes it much more likely that you will find something in them that will be useful to you.