winter 07

Heart Attacks and Pessimism
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Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 11:45pm | Edit Note | Delete
I just read an article that says pessimists are more likely to suffer heart problems. Great, so now I'm going to have a heart attack.
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Flatland Grinder: The Purpose of Posting.
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Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 6:27pm | Delete
For me the purpose of posting is pretty simple. I like to improve my play. Posting my results regularly gives me a point of reference when things are going wrong and helps to identify losing patterns. However it's only helpful when I'm actually posting losing results and analyzing those losses. Currently I'm running pretty bad. I'm on a 6k hand losing streak out of 20k hands. That sounds a lot worse than it is. Essentially I'm down $100 bucks in cash games for the month. With the run I had upon first returning to the game this was expected. Expecting it doesn't make it a whole lot easier though. I try to make a habit of checking my play for mistakes regularly, but it's more of a scan and conscience check when things are going well. It takes an extended run like this for me to really take a close look at things. I found that about 90% of my biggest losses were losses incurred while chasing flushes and straights. There are profitable chases and there are unprofitable chases. Generally when chasing a flush or straight I want to see odds of 2-1 on the flop or 4-1 on the turn to continue. In almost all of the cases, accounting for about 80% of my losses, I had the odds I needed to continue. Unfortunately they were expensive chases, and I've had a long stream of them missing, but that's irrelevant. Poker is a game of numbers. In the long term, playing my draws the way that I have been, I can expect to show a profit. One can even use the old salesman's adage of every miss takes you one step closer to a success. It's purely mathematical and only a matter of time before the numbers shake out. That being said, there is another 20% or so of my recent losses that can't be accounted for by mathematical anomalies. My largest loss was suffered when I chased a flush even after a pair had appeared on the turn. This is a terrible situation to be in with a flush, and unfortunately I hit mine, only to lose to the obvious full house. There are little rules of thumb in no limit hold 'em, and one of the first you learn is to drop your draws when there is a pair on board. That was a clear cut mistake. My other losses were lousy beats. Set vs set, full house vs bigger full house, sets vs straight or flush draw and the opponent sucks out. I felt I needed to take a look at my losses though. J2 have a belief that long losing streaks are pretty common, but when they creep up to the 8k hands streak, it's time so see where you're going wrong. I also tried moving up limits as I've said, and the losses I took up there were higher as a percentage of my bankroll than the wins I've made playing lower limits to claw my way back up. But to put things in perspective, I'm still showing a beautiful 8bb/100 win rate at my $25 pl game. I'm negative EV at the higher limits, but I've only logged about 2k hands there, and I'm only about -3bb/100. I'm going to wait until I have my bankroll rebuilt to move back up though. Some good news to report. I beat out 200 others to take second in a freeroll and win $240 today. I was busted out with the better hand against my opponent too, so I'm very happy with my play. Basically the tourney win brings me positive ev for the month, but I don't like to count those wins as part of my play. Freeroll Tourneys I view more like a lottery win.
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Dammit I've gone too far!
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Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 1:05pm | Edit Note | Delete
In an effort to combat the effects of reduced sunshine in my life I made a few changes around the house. I installed 100 watt light bulbs all over the place. It worked great! I've had increased energy levels, a more positive outlook on life, control over my appetite and I've found the will to stick with my fitness program without much struggle. HOWEVER, there is a problem. Last night I was up until about 3am, and when I finally went to bed I couldn't sleep. What was I doing until 3am? The stuff everybody does in the middle of the night; moving furniture around, reorganizing my CDs and DVDs, writing poetry, starting on my new novel. (This is going to be the one that makes me by God!) I overdosed on wattage and now my body clock is a mess.
Anyway, today I'm crashing. I went to the gym today, but I didn't run yet, and it is a running day. I need a nap though! So I'm going to go and have a SHORT nap, then get up and go for a good snowy run.
As for my new novel, I'm going to work on 2 pages a day, and more if I'm having fun. This one is about my hellacious summer in the sewers. More accurately it's about the group dynamics of blue collar crews, with subplots covering the plight of the artist, our conscious choices versus our subconscious strivings, substance abuse and the place of the classic work ethic in the modern age. My main effort at this stage is in character development, and I'm really raising the bar for myself in this area. My goal is to sketch the characters as quickly and as thoroughly as Henry Miller, the man I consider to be the penultimate master of literature. I might be asking for a kick in the teeth here, but if any of my writing friends feel like doing a character sketch of me I'd love the chance to gain some objectivity on myself. That being said, I'm going the hell to bed for an hour.
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Updated about 9 months ago

Celtic Advance.
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Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 7:51pm | Edit Note | Delete
Oscar Cardozo scored two goals Tuesday to lead Benfica over Shakhtar 2-1 in the Champions League and send Celtic to the second round.
Celtic, which lost to AC Milan 1-0 in the other Group D match, finished second behind the Italian team with nine points, one less than Milan. Shakhtar, which could have advanced with a win, is now eliminated from European play because Benfica took third place with seven points and will drop into the UEFA Cup.
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A Special Type of Pretentious Asshole
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Monday, December 3, 2007 at 11:30pm | Edit Note | Delete
I'm talking about the James Joyce fan, and while I'm at it, James Joyce too.
I read a lot. And I can read just about anything. I'm downright voracious. I particularly enjoy literary fiction. I've made a point of reading the 'great books'. Some I've enjoyed, and others I haven't. I can usually plow through a book or 2 a month. 1000 pages a month is a walk in the park if I'm enjoying the book. But James f@#$% Joyce is killing me. Ulyssess, pfff! His novel Ulysses is close to 1000 pages about a day in the life of the dullest mofo you could ever imagine wandering around Dublin. There is a chapter written in the style of Mallory's works or the Welsh Mabinogi. Another chapter is written in Elizabethan english. Some are written in Irish slang. The chapter I'm currently reading is more than 100 pages of complete nonsense written in the form of a play. I'll read a passage about Bloom (the main character) talking to a whore, and they'll perhaps swap 2 lines. Then I'll flip over to the guidebook to see if I missed some pearl in the exchange, and there will be 10 freaking paragraphs about those 2 lines! The whore shares a name that's derived from Bloom's grandmother's name, and of course his grandmother represents Ireland, and so Bloom flirting with the idea of violating a whore with a vaguely similar name to a character mentioned 500 pages earlier is symbolic of Joyce's own feelings towards Ireland. I have seriously been reading this book (and a guide book to it, and The Odyssey on which it's based) for 9 years now. 9 YEARS! But the thing is, I'm not going to let it beat me. There are all of these pretentious Ulyssess fans around that love to prattle on about what a great piece of work it is, and if you look at them and say "Ulysses sucks" they get all pedantic and condescending and generally accuse you of not having read enough of it. Well screw them. I hate Joyce, and in order to earn the right to publicly hate Joyce I'm going to read AND understand Ulysses, and then tear it to pieces. I have 150 pages left and then I can say with authority that Ulysses blowz and

James Joyce is a l0xer.
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Updated about 9 months ago
A Reason to Get Out of Bed in the Morning.
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Monday, December 3, 2007 at 3:41pm | Edit Note | Delete
I have a 2 and a half year old son. I've written about him before, and of his penchant for crawling into bed with Mommy and I in the middle of the night. Apparently he's been learning Pilates or something, because he does it all night long in his sleep. It starts with a big stretch, one foot in the air, the other pressing into my solar plexus. This is quickly followed by a full rotation on one knee, generally a knee that he's somehow managed to jam into my trachea. Anyway, he crawled into our bed again the other night, and I managed to sleep through it. I felt someone tickling my chin and in my sleep thought it might be Janet perhaps trying to get fresh. When I opened my eyes it was his stinky little foot going for my throat again, but thankfully my windpipe was just out of his reach. There was only about 2 and a half hours of sleep time left, and rather than spend that time trying to force him back into his bed, I figured I could tough it out. I was wrong. This kid has footwork that makes DeLaHoya look slow. I was pummeled all night. Soon it was morning and time to get up, and I was miserable, I mean MIZZZZERRRRRABLE. I got up, threw on a pair of ugly orange sleep pants and matching ugly orange t-shirt, got the kids their breakfast, and had a bowl of raisin bran myself. It was the last of the box, full of crumbs, and I could feel a bunch of the tiny bran flake crumbs sticking to my teeth, but I didn't care. I was TIRED. Instead of getting dressed or cleaning myself up I laid down on the couch in my pjs to get some more sleep. I was so tired that I didn't even bother going back upstairs to get a blanket, I just grabbed my parka and put it on and went to sleep. (Incidentally sleeping in a parka is very comfy!) It was about an hour later...I was in the middle of a pleasant dream of some sort and all cuddly warm when something woke me up. I raised my head, wiping the sleep drool off of my cheek. Someone was knocking at the door. I got up and rushed to the door to answer it. Standing in front of me was this really hot blonde lady, professional looking, classy, nice bright smile. Standing before her was a disheveled man in pajamas and a parka, raisin bran in his teeth and residual drool on his cheek andfrizzy sleep hair matted down on one side and poking out everywhere on the other.
"Hi, I'm your new neighbour!" she smiled. "I was out starting my car and noticed that you left a set of keys hanging out of the lock on your minivan. Just thought I should let you know before someone drives away with it."
I just stood there blinking for a minute, incredulous that I would allow myself to make this sort of first impression on a new neighbor. She then told me her name, and I told her mine and I tried to explain about the boy keeping me up all night, but I think I just looked crazier.
When Janet came home I told her about it and told her that she'd have to go over and explain that I'm usually a pretty clean cut, respectable looking guy. She was laughing until her belly hurt. She kept saying it was even funnier because I'd been so hateful and miserable that morning. I told her that I'd look really stupid if I went over there looking good trying to explain that I usually brush my teeth and my hair and shave and don't wear parkas in the house...she'd think I was hitting on her or something. Anyway, it's given me a reason to get out of bed and get cleaned up first thing even though I don't have to.
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Updated about 9 months ago

Flatland Grinder: Haven't Been Playing.
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Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 11:15pm | Delete
That about says it all. The last entry mentioned moving up limits, and that didn't go so well. I lost about 6 buy ins which is never fun when you're trying to move up. I've logged about 7 losing sessions in a row now, which was bound to happen as I ran about 2 weeks with nothing but wins. I would love to think that I'm above this, and I would love to be above this but I'm not. When I start losing I lose all desire to play. I'm not a gambling man. I find parting with money very difficult, and I tend to step back when I'm losing and take a few days off. Taking a few days off turned into taking a week off this time though. My kids were off school on Friday, so I didn't play at all then, and throughout the earlier part of last week I might have put in about 1000 hands. In all I finished November about 5000 hands short of my goal, or at 75% of my target. Part of the problem is also that I'm finding poker to be a lot more boring than I remembered it. I'm actually looking for a job, and pursuing poker more as a past time than a career for now I think.
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Walkin' (and Drivin' Doin' 360s) In a Winter Wonderland
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Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 10:52pm | Edit Note | Delete
I watched the news tonight and had 2 really terrific memories come back to me. The Lower Mainland is apparently being pummelled by a nasty winter storm. Lots of snow. We here on the prairies have a tendency to chuckle when we see life come to a stop over a little snow in these places. But in Vancouver they don't have a budget for snow removal. They don't have a fleet of trucks that can plow and sand every major thoroughfare within an hour of la neige. A lot of people don't even have all season radials on their cars. They don't know how to drive in snow because they have never had to drive in snow. So naturally it shuts things down. But here's the thing. When everything shuts down in the Lower Mainland, it's a BLAST!
Memory 1:
I was living in Langley and it was snowing like all Hell. They closed the schools that morning, and gradually throughout the day most businesses decided to close as well. I went for a walk and there were no vehicles on the road with the exception of joyriding teenagers and 4X4 heroes trying to justify their SUVs. Later that night I was cocooning with Debra when Mike called us up to go for a drive. He was giggling like a schoolgirl when he picked us up in this huge late 70s Monte Carlo (or something like that) that he had. We went sliding around on the streets, doing 180s here and 360s there, until we got to the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, where I witnessed what I still consider to be one of the most beautiful spontaneous examples of the human spirit that I've ever seen. At the top of the parking lot, the fire lane close to the actual mall building, there were perhaps a dozen cars lined up. The car at the front of the line would wait it's turn, and when the parking lot was clear, they would floor it into the middle of the parking lot where they would try to get in as many spins as stylistically as they could. Then the next car would go, and so on. Just for fun I'd brought along a Tchaikovsky tape with the Nutcracker Suite and Swan Lake and a bunch of other stuff on it. We plugged in Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies and went pirouetting out over the ice at about 60 km/hr spinning around and around on the ice. Cars continued flocking into the parking lot, and it was as much fun watching people trying out different moves as it was to go careening across half the parking lot to the music of a Russian Ballet.
At the other side of the mall, a few rougher looking cars were accelerating towards shopping carts, where they would then go into a power slide and bat the cart with the rear quarter panels of their vehicles. There was one "I Can't Believe It's Not Wood" panelled station wagon that really managed to pull some serious g's.
The other great memory, was when I was living in the West End of Van. I was in the bath when Debra burst in with mittens and a scarf on practically jumping up and down and asked if I wanted to go out and play. There's a real enthusiasm to snowfall when you don't get it all the time. So off we went, down near False Creek somewhere, and we made snowmen. Debra made a nice traditional snowman if I remember right. I made more of a sculpture on the human condition: a snowmother laying on ground with her legs spread, giving birth to a snow baby. She had her back propped up against her own tombstone. And I remember being really enthralled by the fact that the medium for this piece on the transitory nature of existence was so transitory itself. Debra rolled her eyes a lot. But we stayed out for a long time. And we played in the snow.
Funny how my best memories of snow took place in the winters that I had the least of it.
In this note: Mike Dohm (notes), Debra Williams (notes)
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For the Lady in Your Life
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Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 8:47am | Edit Note | Delete
Taser is now making designer models aimed at women. I don't mean that they are actually aiming tasers at women and are going to tase them, I mean they are targeting women...well that's no better is it? MARKETED to women: tasers MARKETED to female consumers. Available in colors to match your iPod. Just don't get the 2 confused. http://www.taser.com/products/consumers/Pages/C2.aspx
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Updated about 9 months ago

A Step Towards Flakiness. (or Flakierness In My Case)
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Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 8:24am | Edit Note | Delete
Janet studied Nutrition at the U of S, which involved a lot of science naturally. Consequently she's highly skeptical about anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested and proven, most notably naturopathic stuff. What bothers her is that a lot of people with illnesses that can blow into something fatal or crippling if not treated forego medical treatment and instead eat a bulb of garlic or snort Mercury or get their ears candled or something like that. She will often cite study after study on how such and such an herb doesn't do a freakin' thing. However a week and a half ago she got what must have been her 19th case of strep throat in the past 2 years. It turns out that one of the women she works with is married to the head of infectious disease control at the U of S. This woman told her husband about our family's strep situation, and asked Janet to go to a clinic, get a strep test and have it sent to him so he could run all kinds of CDC tests on it. The results showed that the strep we've been getting is resistant to a few different antibiotics.
Yesterday she mentioned that she thought she might be getting it again, and I felt it coming on too. So I took the advice of a friend and bought some colloidal silver, and some Oil of Oregano, both purported to fight everything from the common cold to cancer. I've been taking both of them, and Janet has only been taking the silver. Here's an interesting fact about colloidal silver. Results of one recent study showed that when applied to an entire spectrum of common bacteria and viruses in the lab it didn't do jack shit. The other interesting fact; hospitals use the colloidal silver mixture in the eyes of newborns to prevent infection, and it works. Until 1938 when antibiotics really took off, colloidal silver was actually prescribed for most infections. It's absolutely harmless. Well, okay, I guess I can't say that it's completely harmless. If you take too much (and nobody knows how much is too much) it can cause an irreversible condition called argyria, which turns you bluish grey forever. Apparently silver particles in the skin react like film to sunlight and you essentially 'develop' into a negative. Except for the discoloration, the condition is otherwise harmless. For me the jury is still out on this one. You can find people all over the net that say it was the only thing that helped them after years of frustration with doctors. You can also find sites like Quackwatch http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/PhonyAds/silverad.html which offer a different story. In my case, I'm going to give it shot. But only for a week or 2. I don't need to get shiny.