Hey I'll be coming to LA later this month. Not sure yet for how long. Long story short, my gf made travel plans with her mother through some travel agency, but basically they reneged on their services/packages.
WHAT A FUCKING JOKE. Anyway
Basically we'll be going to LA with no plan. Was hoping you guys could recommend some things to do nearby LA.
Her parents are pretty conservative, so i think they will enjoy pretty damn touristy things.
Gold got absolutely smashed a few weeks back. Too many theories about why so I won't even go there. I find some of the conspiracy nuts equally ridiculous as the guys who believes that gold just decided to suddenly drop like 10% over a few days for no reason after being a somewhat stable store of value for 5k+ years. I think it's probably just a little bit of wall street 2 going on, everything is leveraged to hell which makes really strange things happen. I think that a bunch of big western banks or other entities plays gold both long and short in an attempt to just smash causal traders and abuse sell-/buy-stops a fair bit too. So far it seems that the only thing that happened was that the demand for physical gold went trough the roof and unless the demand let's off again as prices goes back to "normal" this drop might've been a very good thing for gold. I'm fairly sure it will though, at least for a while, and the gold chart and such looks fairly bad so I think it'll take a while before we have a decent rally. Worst case scenario we'll see another leg down before anything good happens.
Anyway, since I've been living with my girlfriend for about two years I've learned never to waste a good discounts so I put some more money into metal streaming companies (this is not investing advice, blablabla) and bought some silver and gold coins. The delivery on the gold is fairly late, go figure. It's about two weeks now which is somewhat impressive considering the silver was sent in a day or two. Apparently a lot of things are sold out and it's a shortage of certain kinds of coins and investment bars in various places around the world.
The good news is that a silver dollar seems to be the right size, shape and weight to serve as a chip protector. Also, it makes a very distinct "clink" when you flip it in the air which is cool.
As far as poker goes my PLO winrate is ridiculous. I'm not playing enough to I'm crushing hard the few hands I do play. Running way above ev for the most part and not playing that many tables is nice. Running good at 10/20 PLO HU also helps, heh.
Trying to get Longple to tag along to Unibet Open in Portugal in a month or so with the plan of swapping like 10%, bust early day one and still get 10% of the first prize money. That'd be nice.
Tournaments has been going well. I min cashed in a bunch of high buy in tournaments this weekend and I've had a bunch of medium sized scores the last few weeks. Still down in tournaments lifetime (at least I think so, not really keeping tabs) but the last few months I've won a few K each month playing most of the big Sundays. Been watching a lot of runitonce content for MTT and PLO and it has helped out with both games. Thinking of playing a bunch of Scoop events, probably anything I know how to play that runs on Sundays and the big PLO/5cPLO/croucewhatever-stuff.
If anyone wants to buy action I'll probably be selling a bit at the following events assuming I play them:
High: $2,100 Pot Limit Omaha Heads-Up
High: $1,050 Pot Limit 5-Card Omaha Six-Max Rebuy - (not sure how to sell action in a rebuy, might skip selling for this one to get rid of the headache)
High: $1,050 Pot Limit Omaha Six-Max, Turbo, Rebuy - (not sure how to sell action in a rebuy, might skip selling for this one to get rid of the headache)
High: $1,050 Mixed No Limit Hold’em/Pot Limit Omaha - (stupid crap is running when I want to go to BJJ-class, so not sure if I'll play it)
High: $1,050 Pot Limit Courchevel 1 Rebuy, 1 Add-on Turbo - I love that game, I played a ton of it 5/10 HU while people still played it
High: $2,100 Pot Limit Omaha Turbo, Zoom - This one looks like something I'd be good at.
High: $5,200 Pot Limit Omaha Six-Max - Looks like great fun, probably fairly crappy value but it's scoop and very few people in the poker population knows how to play PLO well so if the field is big enough it might be worth it.
I'll possibly sell action in whatever high NL they run on Sundays too, but unless the fields in the "high" ones are really soft I'll just skip those I think. Saving like 10k in buyins would reduce variance a fair bit, heh.
Full disclosure:
1. Only time I ever sold action in online tournaments before I missed an event and thereby almost scammed Nolan out of 50 USD or something like that. It was a mistake (I forgot one of the tournaments) and I felt bad about it forever. Fairly sure most people consider me a good guy anyway.
2. I'm not in any way, shape or form sure that I'm a favourite in these. I'm fairly sure I'd be in the Courchevel and I would guess I am in most of the other's. Unsure about the 5.2k PLO-even, it depends a lot on how many randoms satellites in. However, I'm sure enough of myself that I'll play at least a couple of them regardless if anyone wants any piece of me.
3. Not gonna sell action to random. Only to people I know or who is respected on this site/vouched for by someone I know and trust.
4. Will send screenshot of my HEM2-database to anyone who passes point 3. and is interested. The PLO-cash stats are impressive, the MTT stats are not.
5. Unless demand is ridiculous I'll just sell 1:1 or swap % straight up I think. When I have a big db of me beating both MTT's and cash games I'll start selling at a premium, heh.
Also, I may or may not be online much the next few days so I might take a while to get back to anyone who tries to contact me. Facebook is probably the easiest way to get hold of me about anything that can't wait 3-4 days unless you have my phone number or e-mail.
I've been playing alright in my humble opinion so far even though I could have tilted less I suppose, I didn't put in as many hands as I initially planned to but still satisfied with the results. I played some zoom 1/2 and 2/5 this month when I didn't have any action HU... usually 2 tabling.. but it's pretty much impossible to sustain the same winrate as HU, and I like a pretty winrate xD. HU is still anything from 0.5/1 to 3/6
that's about 300 buy ins... so combined with live cash/tourneys I'm prob up about 85k on the year, well ahead of pace on my goal
I'm probably done for the month since I'm leaving on tuesday for montreal to play WPT, so going to spend some quality time with children and fiance tomorrow
Heres first few pages of a very rough draft of a book ive been meaning to write
Codex of Life
Introduction –
Hello, this book was written for the population. This content serves the purpose of moving your being closer to GTO/God/Equilibrium/Infinity/Truth, which benefits me. This book was written for myself, to enhance my existence through the process of “energetic gravity.”
[described later]
Its very important to understand before reading that this book does not refute any beliefs, ideologies, patterns, perceptions of the reader. At the same time anyone reading this with a mind that isn’t empty will not be able to grasp whatever is contained within, as they are separate realities.
What is Reality?
We all live in same universe, there is only one truth. When asked to define that we run into infinite subjective interpretations, each being subjective realities. Meaning that while we are all living in the same external universe, we are all actually living in separate internal realities and separate universes.
This paradox occurs because our internal self, the self-image, is constantly in the process of making and refining itself. This process begins with emptieness, continues into growth, solidifies into the self, and continues into death.
Death is the consequence for a solidified internal reality; meaning that as we fill ourselves internally, eventually we become full our internal energy solidifies, the external reality continues flowing, time passes and eventually the internal reality becomes distant enough from the external truth. This becomes the point of dying. Illustrated in the spiral image below.
Going to montreal this weekend for my first live tourneys. Going to be buying in to the small events myself. Not sure im staying for the main but you never know I could hook up with a poker buddy and share a room or heat up. SO If I do stay any interest in buying last minute shares of the 3000+300 main at no markup? Sharkscopes being lame right now so Ill post graphs later im up almost 40k in tournaments this year on pokerstars and been near the top of the leaderboard all year
hi, some of you may know me i´ve been playing poker on and off, and in the past months i didnt dedicate anytime to it, im 22 no college degree living in parents house and i do 0 for a living, my days are in front of the pc playing LoL and sc2 waiting for the day to go visit my (ex)-gf who lives 200km apart. and there i do the same... since i spend almost no money and had some from poker i didnt have any worrys, heres the thing, she broke up with me for that and many other reasons... i know i wont get my first love back thats not the point here, the point is what should i do now? im depressed and i just dont see myself getting a degree and working the office 9/5 thingy... in september i want to try and join aircraft maintenance but there is still a long time to go, i feel like this is my shot to get shit together, should i try poker again?? (never got past nl100)
PokerStars Hand #97561417529: Tournament #717064390, €13.50+€1.50 EUR Omaha Pot Limit - Level XXXVII (17500/35000) - 2013/04/23 3:28:50 CET [2013/04/22 21:28:50 ET]
Table 717064390 9 6-max Seat #3 is the button
Seat 1: elsalamander (1475424 in chips)
Seat 3: Hero (2454576 in chips)
Hero: posts small blind 17500
elsalamander: posts big blind 35000
Holecards(Odds) Dealt to Hero
Hero: raises 70000 to 105000
elsalamander: raises 210000 to 315000
Hero: raises 630000 to 945000
elsalamander: raises 530424 to 1475424 and is all-in
Hero: calls 530424
Showdown elsalamander: shows (a pair of Jacks)
Hero: shows (three of a kind, Kings)
elsalamander said, "jo gg"
Hero collected 2950848 from pot
elsalamander finished the tournament in 2nd place and received €1303.46.
Hero wins the tournament and receives €1215.23 - congratulations!
Summary Total pot 2950848 | Rake 0
Board
Seat 1: elsalamander (big blind) showed and lost with a pair of Jacks
Seat 3: Hero (button) (small blind) showed and won (2950848) with three of a kind, Kings
Lets hope I'll run well in another PLO-series event this week
Today’s poker is not your grandfather’s game. Games have become unimaginably aggressive, and the level of play by both amateurs and pros has risen dramatically. Today, aggressive betting and bluffing have become the norm, and plays that were once considered state of the art are common knowledge. It's argued that the cause of this remarkable transition in both approach and skill level has been the influx of thousands of online pros competing in tough games over the internet. Increasingly though, the online/live distinction doesn't hold up— today, pros are grouped more usefully by their poker methodology than by their preferred field of play. The old guard are exploitative players, always trying to gather enough information on their opponents to stay one step ahead. Increasingly, the highest limits of online play have been dominated by game theory optimal (GTO, or optimal, for short) players who don’t much care what their opponent does and seek to play a strategy designed in the long run to beat any other strategy in the long run.
I started my serious poker career in the spring of 2008 firmly on the exploitative side of the fence. Since then, I’ve traversed to the other side and become a champion of GTO play both as player and teacher, all while competing in the highest-stakes games. In 2012 I was lucky enough to be the biggest winner in online poker cash games, taking home about $4 million. (I try not to delude myself: being a winner is primarily skill, being the biggest winner requires a lot of luck.) While I was a winning pro before 2012, I attribute much of my extraordinary success in the past year to my work on optimal poker.
For our purposes, an optimal player seeks to find the optimal strategy, which is the strategy such that any deviation from it breaks even or loses against our opponent’s best counterstrategy. For any game, there exists at least one optimal strategy. As a GTO poker pro, my time and effort go to getting as close to the optimal strategy as possible. Each step along this journeyis called a near-optimal strategy.
As a poker player I have to prioritize the practical over the theoretical at all times. In other words, no matter how interesting this game theory stuff may be, I have to ask, “How is this going to make me money?” A frequent criticism of GTO play in the poker community is that it isn’t particularly profitable, more specifically that GTO play may be useful in minimizing losses against excellent players,and it fails to win significantly against weaker players. A version of this argument is made by David Sklansky in his classic Theory of Poker:
Game theory cannot replace sound judgment. It should only be used when you think your opponent's judgment is as good as or better than yours or when you simply don’t know your opponent. Furthermore, game theory can be used accurately to bluff or call a possible bluff only in a situation where the bettor obviously either has the best hand or is bluffing. (189)
The argument will become clearer through example—using a simple game we’re all familiar with: Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS). A simple thought experiment should allow you to find the optimal strategy for RPS in just a few minutes. Imagine that before each throw, you had to write down on a slip of paper the frequency with which you would throw out rock, paper, or scissors—and then hand this slip of paper to your opponent. For example, rock half the time, paper half the time, and scissors never. Since your opponent now knows your strategy is to never play scissors, he’ll never play rock, and of his remaining choices paper is superior since it always breaks even or wins, while rock breaks even or loses. More generally, anytime our opponent knows that our frequencies are out of balance, we make it easy for him to pick a specific throw that will beat us in the long run.
Consequently, the optimal strategy for RPS must make all of our frequencies equal in order to defend against an opponent who knows our strategy—therefore, playing rock, paper and scissors one third each is the optimal strategy. A funny feature of RPS’s optimal strategy is that any strategy played against it will have an expected value (EV) of 0. Even the most exploitable strategies— for example, always rock—break even against the optimal strategy. If the optimal strategy in poker is like the optimal strategy in RPS and breaks even against all, or many, of our opponent’s counterstrategies, then, it can be argued, game theory should never replace our judgment. We play poker to win, and any sound poker strategy should aim to give us an expectation in excess of the rake.
Let’s think about one more simple game: tic-tac-toe (TTT). TTT is a game of complete information, which means we can see all of our opponent’s past moves. Any competent TTT player knows that games between two good players will always end in a draw. But let’s say we open with an X in the center and our opponent responds mistakenly with an O in the middle:
We’ve already won the game, and our opponent can only avoid a loss if we make a mistake. In the language of optimal strategies, our opponent has played an exploitable strategy, and if we respond with:
X O
X
X O
then we’re playing the optimal strategy. Had both TTT players played the optimal strategy, the game would end in a draw, which is similar to how we saw the optimal strategy always break even in the long run in RPS. But unlike RPS, when one player deviates from the optimal strategy in TTT, his opponent will be able to secure a win. The technical term for a suboptimal strategy that always breaks even or loses against the optimal strategy is a dominated strategy. My main project as an optimal poker pro is to eliminate from my game as many dominated strategies as possible.
Chess is an example of a much more complicated game of complete information. Chess is complicated enough that it has still not been perfectly solved but simple enough that top computers almost always win against the best humans, and against average human players, the computer always wins. For the computer, chess is a lot like tic-tac-toe when played against a novice who doesn’t see that his strategy is dominated. In a game as complicated as chess, the optimal strategy will always secure a victory against even advanced suboptimal strategies.
In my experience poker is a lot like chess, and not very much at all like RPS. Optimal (or near-optimal) poker will absolutely crush even relatively strong strategies played by intelligent humans, because even professional players (myself included) employ many dominated strategies.
It turns out that some forms of poker are becoming much like chess. The simplest form of poker, from a programming perspective, is heads-up limit hold ’em, and today’s best bots routinely beat world-class human players by a significant margin. More specifically, world-class heads-up limit hold ’em pros typically win 1to 5 big blinds per hundred hands (bb/100) against somewhat weaker players, and the best bots now beat the pros by about the same amount as the pros beat the games for. It’s even possible to calculate how much a bot would lose to an opponent’s best counterstrategy (although it’s impossible to calculate the optimal strategy itself), and the best bots lose to that strategy by about twice as much as they beat the pros!*
But even if we play poker with the intention of exploiting our opponents, it’s often extremely helpful to know near-optimal play in order to pick an approptiate exploitative strategy, especially if our opponent is also a strong player . For example, say we’re playing someone who calls 40 percent of the time after opening on the button and being 3bet by the big blind. If we have an idea of what the optimal 3-bet calling percentage is, then this information can be used to encourage us to 3-bet more aggressively for value (if she’s calling too much) or bluff more aggressively (if she’s folding too much). In other words, we can use our best guess of what optimal play is to make adjustments to exploit our opponents.
In addition,a near-optimal strategy in poker wins against just about any strategy an opponent is likely to play. This means we can ignore our opponent’s strategy most of the time and still expect to have a healthy winrate. If you’re an online player who multi-tables, ignoring your opponent’s strategy frees up a massive amount of attention.
... is how you survive, I ain't tryin' to survive I'm tryin' to live...
This quote by Jay-Z was true when I was a poker player. Unfortunatly nowadays is all about survival, so this blog will be about regular 9 to 5 jobs.
My professional situation changed dramatically since last month. I was kinda worried that I would lose my job because my contract was ending at the end of april and I wasn't sure if I will get another one. I send some CVs applying for other jobs just in case and was invited on interviews in McKinsey and Credit Suisse.
Then suddenly in the middle of the recruitment process in those companies I was given a promotion and a raise in my current company and signed a new contract. Then after a week of silence I was contacted both by McKinsey and Credit Suisse for my final round of interviews. To get things short I got an offer from McKinsey yesterday and I am waiting for a response from Credit Suisse who are suposed to make a decision by the middle of next week.
Now to the point. I am kinda hesitant on accepting the offer from McKinsey. My current job is just super laid back. My boss is the most calm and smart person I have known, he does the majority of work to the point that I never felt ANY pressure when working on something and never did a single hour of overtime. To make things even more awesome I have a dinner break that can last 1 hour in the middle of the day, and I don't have to work more because of it. So essentially I am working 7 gours a day, great boss, no presure, 1 hour dinner break, coffe breaks as often as I wan't, very small workload. The pay is pretty good and I have a senior position after my pomotion.
On the other hand McKinsey is very tempting. I think the company has a great brand and will open many doors if I work there (anybody dissagree?). The pay is good + there are many additional benefits. But after doing some research I read that the workload is very heavy and You can avarage 60 hours a week. This is something I am scared of because as a former poker player I am not used to work at all and am struggling to endure 8 hours at my regular job.
Does anybody work or knows someone working as an analyst in McKinsey? I'm just trying to find out is it worth the long hours spend at work. How is Your experience working overtime?
Has anyone here watched this? I am downloading it at the moment. I am looking forward to watching this. I guess I am interested as I have finally finished watching the 5th season of the Wire, and I noticed David Simons speaks in this movie. So I am curious. Does anyone know how "credible" this is or is it one of them stupid conspiracy type ones?
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(a pair of Jacks)
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