Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[Jon MW]

70% luck is fine by me, 30% is a massive edge.

Decreases over time, im sure someone could write a good equation showing how the luck effect we term variance decreases in a direct relationship to hands played.

It does amuse me slightly, the number of poker players who think variance is purely a poker term. There's a good article on Wikipedia covering it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance - and although it sometimes might not seem like it, this is exactly what the poker use of the term means also.

Anyway I haven't done any proper statistics in a long, long time  - but if anybody wanted to have a crack at it this article points the way towards how you would obtain the equation Alex hypothesises about.

[RED-DOG]

a surly moustached miserable sod


Oi!

[KingPoker]

a surly moustached miserable sod


Oi!

Yeh thats bang out of order tk, oh hang on he does have a moustache!

[77dave]

but with the odd disadvantage..

Late one night in a Luton cash game a punter asks for "Toast with Marmalade please" to the very pleasant waitress from Tallinn.

Ten minutes later she re-appears, with a tray containing a pack of 20 Marlboro Lights...


I agree with the sentiments though

Almost right tighty

He ordered 20 marlboro lights and recieved toast and marmalade instead  and she charged him for it

[tikay]

a surly moustached miserable sod


Oi!

Stand easy Tom. I was not referring to males.

[ericstoner]

I thought Tom had been running bad, and was moonlighting in a greasy spoon near Feltham , till the good times return.

[Woodsey]

I thought Mr Greco's "70% luck" comment was excellent, particularly coming as it did from someone who's won a biggie, usually big winners claim it's more skill than luck. Arise Sir Greco.

But this one from him caught me short.....

As I,m not really a card rack and dont tend to get many big starting hands I have to use my bluffing skills more than I would like.

Now, he may have been saying it tongue-in cheek. Or he may have been saying it "literally" - in that, of course, NONE of us get many big starting hands, there simply aren't enough to go round, that's the whole essence & beauty of the game.

But, well, the notion that some of us get less big starting hands than others? That kite don't fly!

I wouldn't like to try and put a % on these things but I would argue quite strongly that the luck facter is far lower in cash games than a tournament where the luck required in the short term is relatively high.

[tikay]

I thought Mr Greco's "70% luck" comment was excellent, particularly coming as it did from someone who's won a biggie, usually big winners claim it's more skill than luck. Arise Sir Greco.

But this one from him caught me short.....

As I,m not really a card rack and dont tend to get many big starting hands I have to use my bluffing skills more than I would like.

Now, he may have been saying it tongue-in cheek. Or he may have been saying it "literally" - in that, of course, NONE of us get many big starting hands, there simply aren't enough to go round, that's the whole essence & beauty of the game.

But, well, the notion that some of us get less big starting hands than others? That kite don't fly!

I wouldn't like to try and put a % on these things but I would argue quite strongly that the luck facter is far lower in cash games than a tournament where the luck required in the short term is relatively high.

I agree entirely, but Sir Greco, & I, were talking Tourneys. In cash, the figures are reversed, in fact, in the medium term, I'd say a really good player would ALWAYS overcome luck & variance in Cash Games. In the vey short-term, maybe a week, of course, luck would play a part, but not to much degree, maybe 20%.

All just "opinion" of course, there's no way of proving these things 100%.

[Karabiner]

I take it you have been doing quite nicely at cash then Tony 

[tikay]

I take it you have been doing quite nicely at cash then Tony 

Very nicely indeed thank you Ralph. That 20% luck factor comes in handy.

I don't play much Cash in truth, as I need that 70% luck factor that Tourneys give me!

[boldie]

I was thinking about the immigrant thing yesterday morning actually, and thought it was entirely possible, nay probable, that, in London. you can go a whole day about your business (buying coffee, newspaper, shopping, travelling on trains/tube, going to pub etc) without meeting a single person who was born in this country working in a customer service position. All immigrants - hard-working, decent people putting effort in to earn their keep.

And yet, we're seeing now that the children of the earlier waves of immigration, from the Carribean and sub-continent, who were born here and have grown up exposed to as much of our culture as the white kids of similar age, have picked up the fecklessness of youth which is becoming endemic in society.

People who grew up abroad know what struggle and hard work is, and appreciate the quality of life we have here. Those who were born here are spoilt and expect everything to be handed to them on a plate. They don't know what real struggle is. I really do think we need some sort of national service style scheme for teenagers - break their backs doing something for a couple of years, seeing as we're not able to stick them in trenches in the French countryside anymore.

Judging from the East European women who are serving in the coffee shops of London these days, I'd be all in favour of extending the Eurostar to Warsaw, Tallin and Vilnius to persuade more to come over.

I could not agree more with the sentiments of the post.

If all immigrants were to leave the UK right now (or any "western" country for that matter) the entire economy would collapse... and to be fair most of the foreign people I work with are simply better at their job than their UK counterparts..better educated and willing to put in the effort...

In fact I think I'm the only lazy arse immigrant in this country

[tikay]

What seems like months of outrageous good "form" (= luck) is, as I always suspected, a bill I'd have to settle sooner or later, & it seems payment is now being extracted.

You know those hands where you just do NOT wanna hit your set?

I played the excellent value £50 + £50 at Luton tonight. I eventually find  , & get action in two places. We see this flop.....

 

The chips fly in, & Ian "Expressman" is holding the menacing  .

And just when you don't want to catch that set......

Another £100 down the swanee. Plus 50p in the jar.

Dare I play the Sheffield £300 tomorrow?

[tikay]

Managed to drop $2,000 at Omaha (Online) last night, a goodly chunk of it to Jaffa Cake, bless him.

All things taken into account, it's my view that, on the whole, this was probably a bad thing.

[tikay]

I picked up a rather spiffing book by Bill Bryson the other day, "The Thunderbolt Kid", the story of his chiildhood in America, Iowa I believe. It is stunningly funny, & he's such a great writer. One story reminded me of my youth, when we lived in a very cold house - Central Heating was unheard of then - & ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows at night. It was no big thing, we knew no different, & it was the same for everybody in those days. The Bryson tale says it so much better than I ever could, so I reproduce a bit of it here.

By the way, I have a theory that Bill Bryson & Red-Dog are the same person. They both embelliish their tales beautifully, enrich them as it were. They are true, but with knobs on. (As in, below "wardrobe" & "dead horse"), but they do help to paint the picture.

Here Bryson tells the story of staying at his Granparents farmhouse, out in the wilds of Iowa, where it's apparently seriously cold in the winter. If too many folks stayed over, some slept in the "sleeping porch", an unheated affair attached to the back of the house.

The only heat the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It could not have been 1 or 2 degrees warmer than the world outside - and outside was perishing.

So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pyjamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfathers old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woollen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with ear flaps tied beneath the chin.

Then you climbed into bed & were immediately covered with a dozen red blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure they did not lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse.

For the first minute or so, it was unimaginably cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss.

Or at least it was, until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin, and not a micron further. There was not any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen. You had no choice but to stay totally immobilized. It was a strange & oddly wonderful experience, to be trapped between rapture & torment........"

I can't tell you how evocative that piece was to me. Sure, home life was kinda tough for me, well all of us, but there were so many exquisite pleasures within that, and a cold bedroom and a warm bed was one of them.

I've never slept in a heated bedroom in my life, & never will. I actually feel rather sorry for today's pampered generation, they have no idea of some of life's most endearing pleasures. Adversity in youth, nothing can beat it to prepare you for life in the grown-up world.

If I came home from school & tod my Dad someone had hit me, he'd say "so what?, hit them back or learn to run away faster". Today, the parents sue, "my baby (who's 15, & has a goatee) is being bullied". And then they wonder why their kids don't do well in life, or have much by way of backbone.

[bobby1]

I picked up a rather spiffing book by Bill Bryson the other day, "The Thunderbolt Kid", the story of his chiildhood in America, Iowa I believe. It is stunningly funny, & he's such a great writer. One story reminded me of my youth, when we lived in a very cold house - Central Heating was unheard of then - & ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows at night. It was no big thing, we knew no different, & it was the same for everybody in those days. The Bryson tale says it so much better than I ever could, so I reproduce a bit of it here.

By the way, I have a theory that Bill Bryson & Red-Dog are the same person. They both embelliish their tales beautifully, enrich them as it were. They are true, but with knobs on. (As in, below "wardrobe" & "dead horse"), but they do help to paint the picture.

Here Bryson tells the story of staying at his Granparents farmhouse, out in the wilds of Iowa, where it's apparently seriously cold in the winter. If too many folks stayed over, some slept in the "sleeping porch", an unheated affair attached to the back of the house.

The only heat the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It could not have been 1 or 2 degrees warmer than the world outside - and outside was perishing.

So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pyjamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfathers old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woollen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with ear flaps tied beneath the chin.

Then you climbed into bed & were immediately covered with a dozen red blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure they did not lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse.

For the first minute or so, it was unimaginably cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss.

Or at least it was, until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin, and not a micron further. There was not any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen. You had no choice but to stay totally immobilized. It was a strange & oddly wonderful experience, to be trapped between rapture & torment........"

I can't tell you how evocative that piece was to me. Sure, home life was kinda tough for me, well all of us, but there were so many exquisite pleasures within that, and a cold bedroom and a warm bed was one of them.

I've never slept in a heated bedroom in my life, & never will. I actually feel rather sorry for today's pampered generation, they have no idea of some of life's most endearing pleasures. Adversity in youth, nothing can beat it to prepare you for life in the grown-up world.

If I came home from school & tod my Dad someone had hit me, he'd say "so what?, hit them back or learn to run away faster". Today, the parents sue, "my baby (who's 15, & has a goatee) is being bullied". And then they wonder why their kids don't do well in life, or have much by way of backbone.

nice piece Tony, reminds me a lot of sharing a bed with my two brothers in the winter where body heat and breaking wind were the only things that kept us warm.