feed from failsafe blog 2008-10-02T10:13:26+01:00 text/html 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 failsafe http://failsafe.liquidpoker.net a high school girlfriend's dad was a computer programmer and when she was young he gave her a problem to solve. she never solved it, but she'd asked me my freshman year of college and i couldn't solve it... then yesterday it popped back into my head because i had an intuition about what the problem represented, yet even with some more math training i still haven't been able to make the connection and solve the problem! so anyway the problem is simple: there are two bugs... the first bug is crawling a long the x-axis and the second bug is crawling along the y-axis. the first bug starts at the origin and heads toward 1 on the x-axis. the second bug starts a 1 on the y-axis and heads toward the origin. the two bugs have a line between them and are moving at the same speed. what is the equation that describes the curve outlined by the series of lines drawn by the bugs. so pretty much you've got f(x,y) = (x, 1-x) for your intercepts and the lines connecting the intercepts are tangent to a curve. the question is what is the equation of the curve? presumably if i had any idea how to describe the sequence of lines i'd just integrate and know my answer but i'm instantly defeated. this is probably a ridiculously easy question because a guy at the local high school solved it instantly but i didn't know the guy and the girl who asked him on my behalf was a friend of a friend and the answer was never relayed to me text/html 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 failsafe http://failsafe.liquidpoker.net STOP LOSING, YOU RETARDED FISH. R O F L text/html 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 failsafe http://failsafe.liquidpoker.net Poker has not been going well! I've been playing poker seriously for about a month. I used to play a bit on and off and had the advantage of some free knowledge from Myth when he was still a NL100/200 player. Beyond that I also had/have the advantages of some good starcraft friends on this site who play poker. I don't ask for a lot of advice these days because I've been able to improve my understanding and my play quite a bit by just examining my thought processes and my previous hands. I've been playing NL25 and put in a good number of hands - maybe 100k between some sessions 4 tabling and others mass multitabling. My first week was unsuccessful - I hit a heater when I started, and then expected it to continue so I tilted away the winnings. I hovered around my initial $400 deposit for the 2nd week as I was on a bit of a bad run and still had quite a few leaks. On my third week I'd rid myself of many tiltish tendencies and ran fairly well on the final Sunday, bringing my BR up to $1k. I was rolled for NL50, but decided not to move up. My computer was having some trouble with FTP so I decided to wait until I built a new computer to move up to NL50. I didn't like the idea of autochecking/mucking NL50 hands on account of my software freezing. So while I was waiting for new parts, I continued to play NL25, feeling that I had a significant edge. My plan was to continue to build a roll so that when I finished building a new computer, I could start NL50 with a healthy buffer in case I couldn't beat the game or ran badly. I've done just the opposite. Over a fairly health sample, about 25k hands, I've lost ~14 BI from my peak winnings and I'm quite shaken that I've consistently lost over such a large sample. I'm not entirely confident in my play yet and I do alternate between a nitter style and a looser style, depending on my number of tables and level of concentration, but I'm not sure that alternating pf preferences is any explanation for this depressing last week and a half. In any case, a lot of players say (and I agree) that you can beat NL25 playing as nittily as 12/10 or more loosely such as 25/20. When I examine my game, I feel like I've adapted to the full tilt NL25 game from my original practice at the stars NL25 game and that I'm better than I was when I started. When I reflect on my own ideas of my abilities and comments by Myth, Baal and others in edge vs expectation arguments I am really concerned that my losses over these last 25k hands mean that I am totally missing something Ugh, I feel like I should be capable of posting a moderate, consistent winrate such as 2-3PTBB/100 at NL25 because I don't tend to tilt too often and as far as I can tell my abc poker is acceptable... But with my recent results totally contradicting my confidence I'm quite confused. Anyway I'm determined to improve my poker game and thanks to my efforts on FTP, I'm able to purchase the cardrunners subscription, so hopefully this will help me improve. Speaking of which, I have no idea how I'll receive the subscription from FTP since their email confirmation suggested I'd receive a package by mail, but that would a really awkward way to ship an onilne subscription, and it would take forever. Prob gonna get back to playing a bit more today. I've taken a couple day break, logging less than a thousand hands yesterday and none the two days before. Both yesterday and today I've managed to lose a little more than a BI and log off. Here's hoping tonight will go a bit better.