Jeff

I have no idea what represents victory for other lp.nettians, but my first serious poker goal has been realized today. It almost goes without saying that I'm still quite bad, but it is probably STILL worth saying just to save time in the long run. Like with most things, the more I learn, the more I feel ignorant. I've nothing else to do, and so I'm typing up a time line of my poker learning experience. I'm curious how others learn, and of course I'd love if anyone interested in teaching/coaching were to take an interest in helping me. I also enjoy talking about poker and would really like to make some acquaintances both above and below my level. If anyone's interested PM me and here's a summary of my own poker =]

Time line
- [HIGH SCHOOL (~5+ years ago)] Some weekends of playing for fun


- [EARLY UNIVERSITY (3 years ago)] Two years wanting to play poker, putting some money on a site and getting frustrated within a couple weeks after a couple days of bad luck. This period leaves a LOT to be regretted. I had pretty much FREE unlimited access to Myth, Midian, ApocPLZ, and MezPLZ via AIM but never prioritized poker so while Myth left NL100, Midian left NL50, ApocPLZ left life for WoW, and Mez went from a 25k roll to winning like half a million in a month... I pretty much played 0 serious poker and never progressed at all. Obviously any practical person who's interested in poker would say that this is a sick waste of ultra valuable resources, and of course they'd be right. In an economic sense, I've forfeited like $200+/hr coaching, and probably even better as there's probably more understanding to gain from studying alongside other people who are learning than from being coached by someone who already knows. But on a completely subjective level I really regret not having an opportunity to get to know those four guys a lot better, especially Mez and Myth who seem like awesome people but whom I didn't get to know well at all.


- [THIS SUMMER] This 4th of July in China I had a weird experience where my friends and I decided to party quite hard. I inadvertently took a combination of E and Meth that left me awake for an extra twenty-four hours. After realizing, scared as hell, that I was losing most of my ties with reality (I took quite a bit too much because of a misunderstanding; language barrier, etc.), I ended up returning home and freezing myself out for a few hours to calm down. For whatever reason I decided to log on to lp.net little over a day rabidly studied pretty much every major/interesting hand discussion on lp. This is not a recommended way to understand poker, but for me it worked wonders. Before this experience I was absolutely horrible at poker. I was pretty much a robotic level zero or level one thinker who suffered from robotic play intermingled with a bunch of misconceptions. And worst of all I didn't understand the logic underlying poker, so I had no means of extricating myself aside from trying to piece together other people's strategies and plays into a misleading playbook.
Anyway, as I was reading, I began to understand poker in an entirely different sense. About nine months ago, Myth described poker to me as a game where the only thing required to win was a particular logic. This sounds completely cliche, but as I read some post by Rekrul in midstakes (probably the single informative post he made all year) and some mathematical analysis of a CTS blog that Myth had worked up, I began to see exactly what Myth meant by the logic comment (at the time he said it, the comment was bewildering and frustrating, so I remembered it). Consequently I began to see what was required in order to develop a logic for understanding poker and then the plays necessary to execute it.


- [MID-AUGUST] I got back in the states, and it was a heart-breaking experience. I've lived in semi-rural Alabama my whole life (worst place ever in my estimation), and my experience in Kunming was my first semi-long term living experience anywhere else. Needless to say China is QUITE different from what I was used to - Kunming is a VERY awesome place =] - and it was a soul-rape to come back. It was quite crushing how EMPTY everything here is. It's spatially empty because there's just SO MUCH SPACE and so many fewer people. But more so this place is absolutely void of the sense of bewilderment, interest, and purpose that I felt everywhere in China. Coming home was my most bittersweet experience, because I was resigning myself to one final year at a mediocre university where almost all other students and I have nothing in common; a town I've lived in my entire life that holds no interest for me; and an environment that I once felt so comfortable in and yet on returning, I felt so completely apart from. At the same time I was seeing my family and friends again, and it's easy to feel like there shouldn't be much more to life than that.


- [LATE AUGUST] I finally began playing poker. I ran hotter than the sun for a while, then about neutral and finally had another solar flare before plunging into a 20k hand doomswitch the likes of which I'd never imagined during my previous dabbling with the game. The doomswitch-period was exacerbated by some pain killers for a carpal tunnel surgery and an unhealthy urge to just build a BR by 18-tabling NL25 for rakeback and a marginal winrate. To end the doomswitch and the soulrape that was 18-tabling, I finally took about a week off and resolved to come back and 4-table NL50. Since then I've been playing 4-6 tables of NL50 on FTP thanks to Myth for helping me shift some money.


- [LATE-SEPTEMEBER] So 4-6 tables of NL50 is what I've done for the last few weeks, and it's been much better for my soul, not to mention my poker play. AND! I've achieved my first sincere poker goal =]


5+PTBB/100 over 10k hands




Graph




Of course I've had some help from new/previous poker contacts, and I feel like I should shout out to them for absolutely no reason at all. So thanks soyukkusenman, crownroyal, myth, k2o4, vegable and mayzerg, who i've just recently met

Anyone else who's interested in poker and wants to talk or review hands, my AIM is JeffH578 and my MSN is jeff.haynes@hotmail.com or PM me =]

Edit: Also a shoutout to XEMcontemplate (hope that's his LP.net name) who I've met via lp.net and would feel really bad to have neglected =]

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LOL!!! "don't judge a blog by its title"

+ Show Spoiler +

I posted a long response to k2o4's blog, and I'd mentioned putting up a sort of conservative-equivalent of brett's blog a while back. Unfortunately, politics make me sad, and I'm neither particularly conservative nor liberal sooooo this won't really fit the bill of an anti-liberal blog. Instead, I'll probably just make this one post (pardon the title) to try and elicit a little LP.net discussion with a slightly conservative slant to the initial rant

From k2o4's blog:


i think that the republican point of view warrants some explaining. one of my friends is a staunch conservative who is very involved with the mccain campaign in the southeast. yesterday he was talking about the mccain campaign's decision to try to trash obama's image

the point conservatives are most adamant about, recently anyway, is that they aren't responsible for the current state of the economy, and secondly that they were not in favor of the bail out bill.

- on the bailout bill: according to the conservative strategists, the only way that mccain could have even the slimmest chance of winning the election in november was for the republican side of congress to pass the bail out bill. the irony of the situation is that conservatives thought that the bill was bad for the US but that obama being elected would be even worse for both the nation and of course the republican party.

so, the republicans openly supported the bill (though maybe without the enthusiasm of democrats) out of necessity.

- on the economy (my own opinion): it's entirely disingenuous for the democrats (who hold a significant majority in congress) to blame the bush administration for the recent stock market / banking meltdown.
Wiki: The Fed has a lot of the explanation: basically Bush's administration appoints much of the oversight, but all of the appointees have been confirmed by the Senate and are subject to a degree of Senatorial oversight, meaning that a democratic congress (read senate: obama/biden) is equally culpable for the financial situation. And beyond all this, much of the central banking system is privately handled, so at least some responsibility falls outside the government structure.

I think it's got to be equally clear regarding the war in iraq that while democrats may disagree with it on moral grounds, the current economic description of the war is entirely misleading. The correlation between US gov. debt and market / financial institution erosion is entirely misleading. Government spending, in most macro economical models typically improves the nation's GDP and unemployment (because the government is generally employing its citizens in some capacity with its spending). And unemployment is a leading economic indicator(s). SO, the oblique references made by democrats to government spending for the war on terror as a major cause for economic complaint is not well-grounded.

i guess other big problems with the democrats and the economy are that socialism is not a sound economic system because it does not, generally speaking, maximize the utility (value, basically) of either the private or public sector. it reduces real income in pretty much every model and yet, the recent bail out bill basically has a bunch of "riders" that are rapidly working to socialize the united states' financial institutions. largely these riders are the product of a democratic congress who was largely in favor of the bill. to say that the country's financial institutions require more oversight is a far cry from a 4 page bail out bill being frantically rewritten into a 100+ page document that no one has time to read or evaluate (especially not US congressmen)

another problem with barack's economic policies is socialized health care. yes it has achieved some good in other nations, and yes some of the complaints against it are wildly speculative, but the serious flaws inherent in socialism (and any system that defies market-clearing prices) are present. what's worse, is that socializing health care, as the industry currently stands, ignores that there is currently a serious problem with health care pricing, and that the problem is growing rapidly. the problem currently is a lack of market-clearing price levels (for which the government is largely responsible). the enormity of the central government in the united states has lent itself to a lot of "rent-seeking" by medical company representatives seeking special privileges (which are often granted). so pretty much, my argument is that the government really must move to effect a market-solution to discover the "actual value" of health care as it is currently supplied and demanded before moving to create a socialized system (if a socialized system is a good idea), and that obama's plan appears like it will compound the problems of sky-rocketing health care prices while shifting the burden from the consumer to an already indebted government.

ugh okay i've cleared interjected a lot more of my own analysis than i wanted, but anyway i think i'll end by quickly saying that the republicans have enacted the strategy that they have because they feel so strongly that obama and a democratic congress represent a lot of injury to the united states in the near future. it's more of a desperation tactic where the ends are thought to justify the means (which as someone else alluded, is a conservative hallmark).

i personally think that if more people were better educated as to the issues of this 2008 election, the campaigning would have to take a very different form on both sides. to my eyes, both sides are very sensationalist and it's sad to see that it works so well on our biased electorate.

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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

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Comments (19)

STOP LOSING, YOU RETARDED FISH. R O F L

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Comments (4)

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.

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I have experienced the infamous doomswitch and trembled under its awesome power. I acknowledge my helplessness. Please relent.

Thanks,
Sincerely,
Depressedly,
Jeff

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I'm at Quizno's. I've just received my sandwich, and I'm walking outside to grab a table. I hadn't noticed when I came in, but as I step out the door I see that the tables outside don't have chairs - not to mention that it's ridiculously humid. So I walk back inside with my sandwich in my left hand and pull out the chair with my right. As I sit down in the chair it instantly gives way and attempts to throw me unceremoniously to the floor. I instantly throw my right hand down in order to save myself from being sandwiched lol!!! by my sandwich. My acrobatic display rescues both myself and the sandwich, and I'm looking down staring at the chair when suddenly my hand erupts into the strangest pain ever.

As I'm rotating my hand to look at it, I'm replaying the memory of catching myself. I remember feeling the cool ceramic tile on the tips of my fingers, but the sensation in my palm is something different. That's when I remember that I just had carpal tunnel surgery, and there's a massive slit it my hand (masturbation joke or something), but no really there's a two inch long incision down my palm, and I'm turning my hand over just waiting to see it torn open and blood gushing. Anyway when I finish turning my hand toward my face, I see that it is not in fact torn open or gushing blood, but the stitches have torqued the skin in a pretty sick way.

The manager is asking me "are you ok?" and I'm replying with "yeah, but I just had surgery on my hand." All the while the pain in my hand is getting worse and worse. After a couple seconds I start to wonder when it's going to chill out, but it continues to get worse. So I'm sitting staring at my sandwich staring at my two friends who are at a total loss of words as they realize what happened. The Quizno's manager is giving me this vacant stare that says he's not processing how hand surgery and catching my entire upper body weight on the incision could possibly be problematic.

I'm of course not at all hungry, and am just staring at my sandwich, which - I notice - is oozing with way too much mayonnaise [wtf weird word (WWW, anyone find that suspicious?)] and it's been sloppily constructed. Meanwhile I'm staring at the palm of my hand. It hasn't suffered any obvious damage, so I'm just expectantly staring, waiting for the numbing pain to subside. So, anyway, the bad beat.

I'm sitting here staring at my hand when the door opens and a cute blond girl steps in, smiling at me. I guess she's mistaken my charming "FML" grimace for a charming grin, but anyway our eyes meet and then she orders her sandwich, still staring at me. I don't know what it is with girls and perfectly timed "smiles" but once that moment occurs they're determined to meet you, even if after that moment you're acting like a lobotomy patient staring at your hand and wondering when the ridiculously exaggerated pain is going to subside.

I take a bite of my sandwich, holding it in my clumsy left hand. Lettuce and tomatoes fall out, and I curse Quizno's for their poor craftsmanship. Somehow the sandwich manages to taste disgusting, so I give it up as a bad venture and walk over to the cashier. For insurance, I decide to file a complaint with the manager in case their broken chair perma-fucked my nerve. At least if my hand is going to be permanently numb, then masturbation will be more fun, and now I'll be able to take advantage of the United States' bad beat jackpot: the trial lawyer. I smile at the fanciful idea of making a few million off a broken chair and a numb hand, and remind myself to make the best of the situation. I assure the manager that whatever I decide to do, the blame will fall on Quizno's ownership and not him. I don't really have any intention of taking advantage of this, but the girl is finding the exchange amusing or something, and keeps trying to assert herself. So I ignore her.

Eventually I talk to her, and after a short converation she gives me her number. I had my Beijing opera penguin t-shirt on, so it was pretty much a lock from the start, but I guess her being a freshman was probably an assist. Unfortunately, when I think of her, my only association is with the mind-numbing pain shooting through my palm during the conversation and when I first saw her come in.

Actually the negative association with this girl isn't the worst beat. As I'm leaving the parking lot, I'm tilting verging on insane. The exchange with the girl hasn't really cheered me up. I suck at parallel parking situations, and I've been in China for two months. Asians are bad influences in this regard. So I pull halfway out of the parking spot after a quick glance at the mirror. Of course I have no space. So I tilt more, and reverse. I have enough space to exit the space now, so I do. As I'm half way out, my friend in the backseat says "stop." I stop. I hear tires squealing. I wish I'd just kept going. After what seems like an eternally long tire squeal, I see a truck do a 180. I'm vaguely surprised that he can still fishtail so hard after his brakes have been screeching for eternity. Anyway the back of his truck slams into the front quarter panel of my car. -$800.

My hand is still fucked up. There's no way I'll ever call the girl. And, I have to replace my car's quarter panel. Thank god Raszi posted that adorable hamster eating that piece of broccoli otherwise I'd probably be loading the gun now.

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Skip this paragraph if you care to skip to the point of this blog and don't care about the random musings of a microstakes player:

After spending a good deal of time at NL25, I'm pretty much machine grinding up a roll while replaying curious hands in my head during the session. I guess the downside to this approach is that I'm forced to act pretty quickly in some uncomfortable spots and usually fuck them up. On the other hand, 4tabling is too horrendously boring, and one appeal of massive 12 tabling is that I get to see more questionable spots more rapidly - which in its own way is really improving my game. So I guess I'm paying a price for 12 table entertainment and education in my PTBB/100, but whatever. The cacophony of "your turn" beeps that gradually crescendos into "hurry up, asshole" beeps and finally into other players spamming "zzzzz zzzzz" like rabid bumblebees - it's all music to my ears.



Anyway the whole point of this blog is to find out how you LP.nettians like to insult your opponents in the notes section while idling between hands. Currently I don't have many, but some of my favorites are:

-(DIE) liquid poker clown (for fellow LP.nettians). I forget the reference for this one.
- retard trappily. -Some comment by Rekrul
- DONATION STATION. -Myth in microstakes; gotta write this one in caps since that's how I like to imagine myth saying it.

I also like to turn players names into "RETARD" by replacing letters. I'm willing to replace up to 6, but I feel more clever if I can do it with less

Contributions appreciated

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I've been playing a bit of NL25 on Stars, attempting to relearn poker. I was idly looking through my stats, trying to plug leaks and revise my play in certain spots when I noticed that my rake was $924.16 for 38547 (according to HEM). I quickly crunched the numbers and according to this figure I've been raked for like 4.5PTBB/100 by Stars. Is there someway that I might be misinterpretting this statistic. If I'm not mistaken, how do microstakes players and former microstakes players suggest improving vs Rake play?

I suppose I'm relatively close to just moving up to NL50, so perhaps as I get away from the microstakes, the rake ratio improves? Is it worth moving to a site like FTP that offers substantial rakeback? Pretty much how to I fight the tyranny and oppression?

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Some of your probably know me as Failsafe from starcraft. I'm semi-new to lp.net and to poker. I’ve stalked around the forums a bit out of curiosity but I haven’t felt that I was a strong enough poker player to really contribute useful advice. Now that I’m damned to be back in the USA for at least 9 months without any real prospect of leaving, I’ve got nothing to entertain me. So, I’ve decided to adopt poker as serious hobby.

All that said, this seems like a great poker community, and of course it’s very interesting to watch ex-starcraft players continue with their lives. I’m throwing up the blog here to attract some attention and hopefully to entertain a bit. I know that without pictures this will go totally unnoticed, so here's a picture of me imitating the asian smile, as well as some pictures of China where I've been studying a bit of Mandarin.

Me, imitating the asian smile and drinking a remarkably sexy (albeit it girly) beverage.





Kunming, China, the city where I studied, and capital of Yunnan Province. As some of you know there was a bus bombing here a month ago. The actual bombing took place on my route to school, and even at the exact time that I would have been travelling. By a huge stroke of running good I happened to have rescheduled my class for an hour later so all I saw was the fallout. 2 were killed and 19 others were injured, however





Really great Chinese advertising with special english translation.





So I'm back from China, and America is horrible. Auburn, America is boring; the people are boring; the nightlife is boring; my school is boring; food is boring. Where's my fucking MSG? If China taught me anything, it was that real food numbs your mouth at the first bite.



Anyway, so far so good as poker goes. I started playing about a week ago, and aside from a massive tilt episode where I spewed off all my winnings, I feel that I've become a significantly better microstakes grinder. Back in China, I was contemplating poker as an analogy for life while I was high on ecstamethasy and reading high stakes forum threads when I had some (surprisingly) empirically fruitful insights.


My poker level is somewhere around better than NL25 but without sufficient nit-resistance or nit-bashing to really beat NL50 with a satisfying winrate.

Also, hello to crownroyal, vegable, k2o4 and other starcraft friends who might be reading this <3

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