Consider this blog as practice for my poker book (in the somewhat unlikely event I decide to write it). The format is going to be "Hands with Sauce", borrowed wholesale from the classic bridge book "Bridge with Reese" written by the renowned bridge pro Terrance. The idea is that I take the reader through my thought process, such as it is, in intriguing hands, stopping along the way to touch on various theoretical topics of interest and then, upon further reflection, dissect the plays which result. Without further ado then,
Hands with Sauce #1: 6bet shit-flinging vs AARookie
Stakes: 40/80nl 6-Max. Game was 5-handed
Hero (SB): $33,739.5
(BB): $42,479
UTG: $19,498
CO: $47,508
BTN: $16,000
Pre-flop: 9c6c dealt to Hero (SB) ... UTG folds. MP folds. BTN raises to $178. I 3-bets to $720. Villain 4-bets to $1920. I 5-bet to $5127. Villain 6-bets to $9055. I called.
Flop ($18,288): 8s 2s As I checked. Villain bets $6650. I called.
Turn ($31,588): Qc Check check.
River ($31,588): 4c I shoved. He called with 4d6d.
This hand seems to be fairly infamous across the internetz, and I still get pms asking about it fairly regularly. In the past I've given some one or two sentence answers which seemed to satisfy basically nobody, so here I'll try to do you guys a bit better and go through things piece by piece.
First, in order to get into character for this hand, you have to understand just how insanely aggro AARookie was playing during this session and previous sessions. As far as opening pots and 3betting, Rookie was unspectacular, playing maybe 15% 3b vs steal and then something like 40% steal himself. However, it seems as if Rookie felt he had found the holy grail in the positional 4bet, as I have never seen a sober person 4ball as much as AArookie did during the 20k hands of 40/80 he played in the couple months surrounding this hand. My HUD had him 4betting something in excess of 40%, and while I don't have a stat explicitly counting cold 4bets versus 4bets after opening, it was unmistakeable that his cold 4betting frequency was even more off-kilter than his 4bet after steal frequency. In order to combat this, of course, me and everyone else with half a brain at the table had tightened up our 3betting ranges significantly whenever AARookie had position (even if he was halfway across the table) and yet he was undeterred, and continued to 4bet seemingly everytime he hadn't checked the auto-fold button.
Judging from the opening size of $178 (although I don't remember explicitly), I'm guessing that the opener in this hand was Takechip, aka FLIPokerHer on Full Tilt Poker. At this time, Takechip was playing a curious strategy of opening nearly 100% of buttons, and then folding over 75% of the time to 3bets. He also seemed strangely unresponsive to punishment, so I was laying it on pretty thick and playing a strategy of 30% or so 3bet from the small blind, depending of course on the predilections of the particular bb. In this case I held 9c6c and so I was torn- on the one hand Takechip had offered me 2.2 bbs, but on the other AARookie was lurking behind me. Taking the hand from Takechip's perspective, I decided that he was likely to be especially loose from the button in this exact situation as Rookie was nitty versus steal in the bb, playing something like 40% of hands vs a minraise. Takechip was the type to pick up on this, but he wasn't the type to realize I would pick up on him picking up on this, so I decided to throw in $720 and see what happened.
Unfortunately, Rookie woke up behind me and made it his customary $1920. At this point you could argue that I got overly stubborn; there are certainly more ideal hands to 5bet bluff with than 9c6c. Previous to this action I had made three 3bets at the table, and on all 3 of them Rookie 4bet me, and finding myself with nothing I elected to fold. I believe 2 of 3 were cold 4bets, and I had witnessed a few other cold 4bets made by Rookie. Appraising Rookie's range in light of today's play and his overally splashiness I was confident it contained plenty of fluff and I could justify 5betting. To put a number on it, I guessed he was 4betting this spot with between 12% and 35% of hands. Quantifying my own strategy, my Rookie-avoidance plan was to go ahead and 3bet a fairly polarized 10-14% vs steal. As a rule of thumb, when the guy who puts in the 4th bet has a wider range than the guy putting in the 3rd bet, either the 3bettor plays awful or the 4bettor is putting too much money in too often. So, I knew I would be 5betting a frequently with my range in this spot for high profit, but not having tested Rookie's expansive range yet with one of my bluffs, I decided the time was going to be now since if he gave me credit he could be folding as much as 85% of his range. I made it $5127.
After a bit of thought, Rookie made it $9055. At this point your guess is as good as mine as to his range. I have my particular way of strategy-reading, and one thing I am uncomfortable doing is making intuitive leaps with regard to a range I have never encountered before, and I had never encountered a Rookie 6bet before, certaintly not one with over 300bb stacks. Interestingly, many people who I have talked to about this hand thought Rookie's 6bet was obviously a bluff, but I have to admit that I don't think I could ever make that read, or would want to. But taking his incredibly wide 4betting range as an assumption, I could envision various ways in which he might decide to play, and which were consistent with his overall approach. So I ruled out a strategy where he would fold everything but QQ+ AQs+ to 5bet; he was probably an aware enough player to realize an opponent like me would be coming for him with bluffs at least occasionally and that if he didn't play back his strategy would be easily exploitable. This statement is not in contradiction with my previous paragraph where I conjectured he might fold 85% (all his non premiums), as once I saw the min 6bet against my first 5bet, the Bayesian probability of him playing fit or fold against 5bet goes down a little bit, and perhaps even more than the bare probability sugggests since it was the very first time I had ever 5bet and Rookie might be tempted to draw a line in the sand now in order to continue his putative exploitation of me in the future. I decided to attribute to him a strategy of playing back with between 20% and 80% of his bluffs (quite the wide confidence interval!), roughly 15% of his ATs-AJs, 99-JJ, AQo combos, and then roughly 80% of his QQ+ AQs+ combos. However, since his postflop strategy was also weak, and since occasionally Rookie's strategy might be very tight for 6betting, and since I held a hand with poor equity all in preflop without blockers, I decided not to jam. This was probably not the right choice incidentally, since I risk $28,612 to win $14360 if I jam preflop, and if I have 27% vs a calling range, I must succeed at least 58%. Taking a weighted average of my assumptions, he should fold at least 58%, making a jam +ev. Still, a call may very well be even better. Getting $3928 to $14360, or 3.65 to 1, and being only a 2.57 to 1 dog against a nightmare scenario of TT+ AK+, I felt I couldn't fold, needing to realize only around 2/3 of...
Check out 0-2:00 for Rand Paul's speech, the rest of it isn't really worth watching. I suspect that the 'seven days of food' criterion is probably a bit hyperbolic, but the bottom line is that we are giving our government the power to suspend the liberties of persons suspected of a crime, whether US citizens or not. A good measure of the freedom of a country is how it treats its dissident members, and therefore US is well on its way towards being much less free.
I'm going to refrain from analysis in this blog right now- the views of the people I linked more or less reflect my own. I put all of these recent developments together in order to show that things which I take for granted living in an Open Society- ie that there is such a thing as Truth, that we can rationally deliberate, that morals are not relative, that the government is not able to forcibly detain it's own citizens without trial- are all being eroded rather quickly, and that no one seems to care.
First- there's a famous article by Peter Singer from which most of the arguments in this blog are directly taken or at the very least inspired by. See it here: http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1979----.htm
Peter Singer is a utilitarian. Very broadly speaking, this means that 'the fundamental moral principle is to take actions which maximize general happiness.' What I want to distinguish from the outset here, though, is that whether you are a utilitarian in general or Singer's particular version, or anything else, one of the main arguments in Equality for Animals still holds for you.
That was to get your attention. I mean something a bit more precise. First, if you choose to accept Singer's utilitarianism, then it's abundantly clear that you are committed to not eating meat, at least of "sentient" creatures. Sentience means something like 'the ability to feel pain or pleasure' and presupposes some type of central nervous system with which feeling gets done. Sentient: cows, pigs, goats, chickens, probably some fish. Not sentient: rocks, potatoes, kale etc. Probably not sentient: clams, mussels, bees etc. It should also be noted here, that not all sentient things get "counted" equally here; it's worse to harm a cow than a chicken in virtue of the fact that the cow has a more developed nervous system/emotional apparatus. Singer also makes a strong case that if you call yourself a utilitarian of any flavour, then you are going to be committed to considering the interests of (sentient) animals in some fashion (which might be slightly different from his own).
I don't care (for the purposes of this blog) about any of Singer's arguments which suppose any form of utilitarianism as premise. What I am concerned with is a more modest argument from Equality for Animals which I'll call here the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC).
The AMC is an example of a type of argument I'm calling (and this might be standard, I'm not sure) an argument from consistency. Arguments from consistency take as premises beliefs we already hold and derive from them a contradiction. If we are rational people, we are faced with a dilemma: either one belief or the other leading to the contradiction must go (after all, we can't say we believe 'X and not X'). I think I like arguments from consistency because of my empiricism (their premises are taken from a description of our actual beliefs). They also tend to be straightforward to argue, without a lot of logical filigree.
Preamble aside, here's the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC):
First premise: Making moral judgments on the basis of purely physical properties is unjustified and constitutes a moral wrong. By 'purely physical properties' I am trying to string together some words to gather up all of the "isms" - racism, sexism, etc which we think are wrong. For an example of an unjustified judgment 'Only white males should be able to vote.' Being white and male does not endow one with any praise or blameworthy features (note: you should separate physical characteristics like 'whiteness', 'maleness' from cultural characteristics in order to make this clear) in of itself - for instance white males do not have larger and more sophisticated brains or some special talent at voting well on the basis of their whiteness or maleness. As a corollary to this, we may sometimes assign praise or blame on the basis of other properties (for instance, mental development, intelligence etc). To use the voting example again, we might say that only people who can pass a test on citizenship should be able to vote. Note though, that this corollary is not necessary for the argument, I'm just adding it to round things out a bit!
Second Premise: It's wrong to torture, kill, or eat a mentally disabled human or a human infant.
Third Premise: Eating meat is morally permissible in the ways we currently consume meat: for example buying ground beef in the supermarket for dinner.
Argument: Many of the animals we habitually eat (pigs, cows) have equivalent mental capacities to severely disabled humans and infants/young toddlers. I want to make it clear that this is just a fact- if you want to disagree here go read the relevant science. If we accept premise two, we think it's wrong to do things like factory farm mentally challenged humans for our gustatory pleasure. But if we accept premise three, we think it's totally OK to factory farm things like cows for our gustatory pleasure. But if cows have the same relevant mental capacities as the marginal humans we don't factory farm, then the property with which we decide what to factory farm and what not to factory farm seems to be the property that cows look like cows, and mentally challenged humans look like humans. 'Looking like Cow-ness' and 'Looking like human-ness' are clearly purely physical properties. But if we accept premise one, purely physical properties are not acceptable for making moral judgments (and what/what not to kill for our gustatory pleasure certainly constitutes a moral judgement!).
Conclusion: So by P1, either it's acceptable to grow and eat marginal humans and all animals, or it's acceptable to grow and eat neither. But we hold P2 and P3, which says that it is acceptable to grow/eat all animals but not all marginal humans. Therefore, holding P1, P2 and P3 results in contradiction.
So here's the difficulty. We can resolve our contradiction by giving up P1 P2 or P3, or we can resolve the contradiction by finding a flaw in the argument. Which premise is it easiest for people to give up and remain rational/consistent? Where is the flaw in the argument?
Anytime you face a decision, you should be putting your opponent on your best range possible, and from that range determining the best action for your range. If you see showdown, and the hand your opponent flips over was not in the range that you made to model the final decision point of the hand, then you should be results oriented. Otherwise you shouldn't be.
Q: What's wrong with this advice?
Q: What's (too) vague about this advice?
1) Very cool article- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-...ns-to-mckinsey
If nothing else read the first two paragraphs, "As with changes in the use of language generally, readers and listeners become inured to what were once jarring neologisms or solecisms, while phrases that were once so common as to escape notice become in time unusable."
Seriously, it's a very stylish article.
2) Said article is linked from a very cool blog, my favorite sub-section of which is entitled "authoritarianism and fascism alerts". There's a lot to be alerted to.
3) A great word used in said article: 'sottisier'- A collection of ridiculous remarks or stupidities; a collection of howlers.
Used in a sentence: "Beyond the warped ingenuity of these Heath Robinson schemes to force free competition to happen in closely controlled circumstances, such interest as the White Paper possesses may lie chiefly in its providing a handy compendium of current officialese, a sottisier of econobabble." (Italics mine own)
Against my better judgement, I've started reading the newspaper again. On the one hand, it is sort of interesting to know what is happening in the world on a day to day basis, but on the other hand, what is happening in the world on a day to day basis tends to be depressing. I also tend to get totally enraged upon reading about current events when I see bad logic and poor arguments being paraded around as sound reasons for making important decisions. Here's one of them-
Recently, in New York City, a large group of mostly young people have started a protest called 'Occupy Wall Street' which has received a lot of coverage. In the photo I saw, people dressed up like zombies shove money in their orifices- which I take to mean they think that Wall Streeters are souless and only love money. Criticisms of the protest have focused on the fact that the protesters are not taking any cohesive strategy of civil disobedience, have not articulate any goals for policy change, and are just generally showing dissastisfaction with Wall Street but not presenting any constructive alternative. (It's totally possible I messed up some of this description, but this is the sense I get from the papers)
This protest exemplifies to me what I think is a popular and wrong position right now among (very loosely) average Americans. They seem to think a few things: 1) Wall Street was responsible for the Financial Crash, 2) Wall Street is bad and should be abolished/changed/heavily regulated/at least some smart person should figure out a way so that those moneygrubbing Wall Streeters cannot create another crisis, 3) Investing is good or at least permissable.
It's my contention that 1 is wrong, or at least simplistic enough that it lacks any real explanatory punch (although I could be wrong about this, I'm certainly not an expert), that 2 might be right or wrong and that 3 might be right or wrong. The key point here is that both 2 and 3 cannot both be true at once and therefore the intuitions/opinions of average enraged Americans involve contradiction.
To simplify matters, I'll take a simpler position which assumes 1 is true. P: Institutional investing should be abolished (Wall Street) and personal investing should be permissable. P isn't a reasonable position however, in that the vast majority of personal investing is mediated by institutions - eg pension funds, mutual funds etc. So then we have to say something likeP*: The bad institutions should be regulated/made illegal. However, that doesn't quite work either. In the case of the crash of 2008, many, many "good" institutions bought credit default swaps and the like. They just happened to be horribly wrong about the value of said swaps, and ended up losing their shirts. That leaves then P**: a bad institution is one that is able to profit off of complex and volatile financial derivatives (and the like). And we should illegalize/regulate those! But P** is pretty clearly tantamount to saying that "If someone is smarter than me and beats me in a game of skill for money, I/we are justified in banning them from the playing field." To draw a common analogy, it's as if all the fish in the poker world woke up one morning and said: "Hey guys, poker is pretty friggin' complicated. These poker pros have access to forums and databases and tracking software and HUDS and quantitative software and devote tons of time to the game and are just generally smarter than us fish. That means we can't win! So we should ban pros from playing poker." There are two problems with this view or any view of this kind, 1) It's unjust and 2) It leads to a regress, as if the winners in a game are banned, then as winners are banned some set of losers will become winners who will in turn be the target of the same winner-banning policy and so on ...
However, I did draw the distinction at the top of the previous paragraph (that between solo and institutional investors) in order to show a possible non-contradictory way in which both 2 and 3 can be true. This is Q Institutional investing should be banned (or regulated) in all cases and non institutional investing (this can obviously be definied in various ways: eg exactly one person, set of persons < N, set of capital < N, etc) should remain legal/regulated as is. But I don't think Q is what most people are thinking of when they set out to Occupy Wall Street. I think they want their mutual funds/pension plans/various investments to deliver consistent and positive returns outperforming treasuries/interest rates and they also want it to be impossible for smart people to make a fortune in the markets. They can't fairly have both.
I'll trot out one more pretty speculative account of what might be the motivation for the inconsistent "common sense" view argued against above. It seems to me that people have a mistaken view of what investing is, and that this mistaken view leads to bad intuitions about policy. I think that when people hear "investing" they think of a practice which is guaranteed to have positive returns in the long run, subject to some short term fluctuations up and down. (a funny consequence of this view might be that people holding it have the intuition that shorting something is somehow morally reprehensible.) A possible reason they might think this is that over the past 60 years, which coincides with just about everyone currently investing's lifetimes, the American stock market has had extremely positive returns fairly consistently. However, there is absolutely no reason why this trend has to necessarily continue- past trends do not determine the future: this is the problem of induction. I think people think that Wall Street has somehow "rigged the game" and deprived their investments of the positive returns which are their just due. But an investment (in a stock, for example, not going to talk about derivatives) is just that, owning a very small part of a company. If the company does well, the investment likely produces positive returns, if the company does poorly (for whatever reason) the investment is likely to produce negative returns. Poker players know how to define that situation with a better term than "investment", we prefer to call it a bet.
Btw, this is all stream of consciousness, so not going to edit for content or grammar, there are likely to be errors. Let me know if you like this style of blog!
Guess I haven't updated since April 29th. Whoops. I'm not very good at the internet. I just obsessively respond to forum posts and try to call my mother once a week, everything else is gravy. I will start by saying that I conveniently go to school at the University of Toronto (which is in Canada!) so after Black Friday hit I just said I was in Canada and sent the sites the corresponding documents and I've been good to go. Unfortunately, they would not accept a picture of me making a thumbs up sign from my patio with the CN Tower in the background.
I spent a fair amount of May obsessively trying to get money off of FTP, but around mid May I decided I don't care anymore since I already have way more money than I ever thought I would have and it won't be the first time I've lost a million dollars so I'm just going to see what happens. I'm well aware that this attitude may seem almost pathologically laid back and immature, but I don't see any particularly rosy options for myself since .50cents on the dollar seems too low to trade FTP for given my read of the situation. I'm very frustrated that FTP died when it did since I had just learned to play big bet draw and was thoroughly enjoying myself degening it up with Yan and Durrr et all at high stakes in a new game where no one knows anything. I also finished finals for school and have time off until July 4th when I start my summer courses, time which I have been spending seeing family, going to Vegas, and drinking in the park/laying in the sun.
In Vegas this year I did my customary ritual of getting really excited to play big live and then degening it up in the poker room until all my money was gone. To prepare myself for highstakes cash I put in a weekend of 16hr 5/10 full ring NLHE grinding sessions to get my feet wet and turn all of my excitement into boredom. I also managed to put in one serious social outing and had dinner with Aaron, Chewy and about 12 other poker players and poker girlfriends, in the middle of which I got serious food poisoning and had to excuse myself to the bathroom to puke and shit my brains out and totter out looking more pale and disheveled than normal. I continued doing that for the remainder of the night/morning until I dragged myself to the 25k hu where I lost in the first round to newlywed Edawg who came in from the golf course to completely stomp me, although I did outplay him pretty badly I think.
From there I took myself over to Bobby's Room and played in the 200/400/100 ante 2-7 NLSD game which was running on Early Bird time with Billy Baxter, Yan Chen, Doyle, and Shawn Sheikhan as well as some others. I have to say, Billy Baxter is one seriously smooth gambler, and he's sharp as hell for being, what, 60+ certainly. He's also an unbelievably solid deuce player, waaay less splashy than Yan (who is also very good) and just plays balanced with the right level of aggression. I managed to donk off around 150 in the game over the course of my stay in Vegas, most of which is probably attributable to running bad, but for reasons either deluded or prescient I'm ultra-paranoid about being a tellbox live and so quit the game after 3 sessions. I felt that people made an incredible number of good river decisions against me, which I didn't like at all. I also played a bit of 50/1 plo at the Rio and played the 5k NLHE event, both of which were boring and uneventful. I can't really think of any hands from the trip which were incredibly interesting, although there were a lot that were pretty interesting. It was definitely fun to play in the old men's deuce game in Bobby's Room and talk shit, those guys have a line for everything- I guess that's a luxury you have when you're playing 40 hands/hour. The art of the well timed needle is important live, where as they say people eat like a bird and shit like an elephant. One guy did his best to make me play the elephant, but instead I just quit the game.
The best part of the Vegas trip was seeing some old friends. I got to crash at one friend's place, eat some good food, hustle some pool, go golfing for the first time (where I bet 100$/hole with an 8 handicap per hole vs my friend's par) and go on a couple hikes at Red Rock and in the Mt. Charleston area. As I was bushwhacking through the desert around Mt. Charleston I found a 4leaf clover pendant buried under the scrub which I kept, but like a donk I didn't go play anymore live poker after that although I'm sure I would have run amazing. After 9 days or so in Vegas I was ready to get back to Toronto though, since I tend to live a degenerate existence in Vegas which isn't much fun when I'm not winning.
Since I've been back I've had to re-learn plo and get good enough to crush since that's all that runs it seems like. The 25/50 plo game on stars is very, very, good and runs 4+ tables daily that I've checked. I had what amounts to maybe my first poker epiphany about a week and a half ago when it dawned on me how absurd a near optimal level of aggression is in plo. It's a psychotic game, there really isn't any other way to describe it. When I play Isildur my standard deviation is 460 bets! Who knows what my true winrate is, but it better be damn high to justify playing in a game like that. I say that, but I'm too much of a competition junky not to play other strong players hu. For me, that's the point of poker beyond paying my bills. I couldn't feel good about myself bumhunting, and I couldn't feel good about myself not striving to get better. And the best way to get better is to get beaten and figure out why. That mentality I do respect in the top live pros- sure, when Doyle/Billy/Yan sit down in Bobby's Room they hope a tellbox like me is in the game, but if I go hiking instead, they're going to find something to play anyways and who knows who's winning sometimes. Maybe that's a little bit sick, but so far it's worked for me. I just try not to get hustled for too long or too much and then I get em right back.
Euphemism: "Liquidity Problems". I hate business-speak, it's sterile, elliptical and imprecise not to mention just plain ugly. Trolling the internet after black friday I even found myself using this awful phrase in order to get people to respond to my emails and try to make myself sound professional or something. "Liquidity" means having cash. "Liquidity problems" means having no cash but implies that the business having said problems likely has other assets it is trying to convert to cash in the near future to solve its liquidity problem. The poker sites don't have assets worth shit- a couple servers tucked up on an indian reserve in Canada, some advertising and operating dollars and a few support staff scattered across the globe and a moderately valueable piece of software. So when my beloved sites have "liquidity problems" really what they are is busto.
Nerdy philosopher joke: To which I have to thank W. V. Quine, an academic of the old school who writes (to borrow a great phrase from David Foster Wallace) with almost Himalyan condescension in attacking the ontology of one of his colleagues which admits possible and impossible things: "This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor." Burn!
