Poker hasn't been a huge priority lately. Partly due to the fact that I'm one of those normal downswings (I finished 3 buy-ins below AIEV today in just 1200 hands... only lost a total of 6.5bb for the day, though, so no biggie), but mostly due to actual life concerns.
Alrighty. I admit, I haven't been completely honest with all of you. I've been engaged for ten months already. Now I'm getting married in two!
I originally started this blog to be solely about poker, but life intruded. Things are more interesting this way, anyhow.
Back to the future Mrs. Thorn, she just moved last weekend to what will be our marital apartment. We're old school, dyed-in-the-blue Catholic folk, so we're not going to be living together until after we tie the knot. Which means I'm paying double rent for a couple months (no biggie, really; I'm a frugal guy and have more than enough saved up). The downside was that we ended up moving on a weekend when most of our friends were busy/also out of town/moving themselves since we all basically moved into our places at the same time (graduating from college will do that).
So we had to move by ourselves. Turns out I can handle that big ol' sleeper couch all by myself. Not bad for a 5'6" guy. Still, we've got so much stuff to move on over. Wedding gifts have been arriving, gifts from the bridal shower, furniture my fiancee inherited this last year, etc. It's crazy. I had a "Fight Club" moment where I wanted to go all Tyler Durden and burn it all to the ground.
It's a nice place we're moving to. Top floor of the apartment building, beautiful view, down the block from her workplace, 30-minute commute from mine.
Stil... you can blow anything up with enough soap...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Switching gears yet again
With my new-found gadget PokerTracker, it's become obvious that my win rate completely plummets at NL 10 Rush. I've got over 35,000 hands on both, and the numbers don't lie. For Nl 10 Rush, my winrate drops to about 1/4 of my of my winrate at NL 5 Rush. In other words, it's not even close to worth it for me. Heck, without rakeback, I might even be a losing player there long term (gotta love statistics).
I've decided that to get better, I'm going to grind up my bankroll with NL 5 Rush (say 1000 hands a day, put in 1-table sessions on the regular tables, and climb the micro ladder that way.
This way, I get the best of both worlds, both grinding up and improving my game, all in one! Bonus: On one table, I can actually play and work on real poker. You know, the kind where you actually make reads on people and adjust. :)
Moved my $260 over from Stars, FullTilt all the way!
Current Bankroll: $579.80
I've decided that to get better, I'm going to grind up my bankroll with NL 5 Rush (say 1000 hands a day, put in 1-table sessions on the regular tables, and climb the micro ladder that way.
This way, I get the best of both worlds, both grinding up and improving my game, all in one! Bonus: On one table, I can actually play and work on real poker. You know, the kind where you actually make reads on people and adjust. :)
Moved my $260 over from Stars, FullTilt all the way!
Current Bankroll: $579.80
Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Humbler: PokerTracker 3
I finally caved and bought PokerTracker so that I could keep track of my results. It's really interesting, actually; I'm still a very marginal winner. The only reason I've won up to this point, actually, is because of rakeback and bonuses, but it's still been good enough to roll my $110 deposit up to $366.15.
PokerTracker reveals that in cash games, I'm down $21.87. My losses are mostly due to getting destroyed at NL 25 Rush, losing $161.55 over 3,290 hands. Meh. I'm going to be bringing my PokerStars roll ($260) over to Full Tilt because of Rush, and the fact that PokerStars cash games have a slightly higher rake, after rakeback. The bankroll will be $526.15, rolled enough for NL25 again at 20 buy-ins, but this time I'm going to wait for 30 buy-ins and make sure I'm beating NL 10 at a good clip. I've also definitely overestimated my win rate; my total win rate for all stakes only stands at 2.32 bb/100, a pretty marginal rate, really. I've gotten much better since my hand history began, though, so I'm going to optimistically peg myself at 3bb/100 for right now.
I'm planning on switching entirely to cash games, specifically Rush Poker; I was very slightly up at tournaments until a month or so ago when I decided to try and mass multitable KO tourneys, and that's what knocked me negative there. So no more tournaments.
I'll try and do a weekly/monthly/yearly update so I can keep better track of my progress. Here's the first one:
Lifetime Summary:
Deposited: $110
Cash Game Winnings: -$21.87
Tournament Winnings: -$65.07
Bonuses won: $115
Rakeback: $228.09
Total Winnings: $255.15
PokerTracker reveals that in cash games, I'm down $21.87. My losses are mostly due to getting destroyed at NL 25 Rush, losing $161.55 over 3,290 hands. Meh. I'm going to be bringing my PokerStars roll ($260) over to Full Tilt because of Rush, and the fact that PokerStars cash games have a slightly higher rake, after rakeback. The bankroll will be $526.15, rolled enough for NL25 again at 20 buy-ins, but this time I'm going to wait for 30 buy-ins and make sure I'm beating NL 10 at a good clip. I've also definitely overestimated my win rate; my total win rate for all stakes only stands at 2.32 bb/100, a pretty marginal rate, really. I've gotten much better since my hand history began, though, so I'm going to optimistically peg myself at 3bb/100 for right now.
I'm planning on switching entirely to cash games, specifically Rush Poker; I was very slightly up at tournaments until a month or so ago when I decided to try and mass multitable KO tourneys, and that's what knocked me negative there. So no more tournaments.
I'll try and do a weekly/monthly/yearly update so I can keep better track of my progress. Here's the first one:
Lifetime Summary:
Deposited: $110
Cash Game Winnings: -$21.87
Tournament Winnings: -$65.07
Bonuses won: $115
Rakeback: $228.09
Total Winnings: $255.15
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Park51 Mosque Is a Win for Muslim Extremists
Rambling, non-poker posting time. Caution: This is a political issue.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, I'm sure you've come across the news that there are construction plans for a mosque in NYC, a couple blocks away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately for us all, this is very, very bad news. Before you left-wingers start saying I'm trampling the Constitution and the right wingers start saying "I told you so," let me explain why it isn't bad news for the reasons most people have been talking about lately.
I studied International Relations not too long ago, and we covered things like National Security and that little ol' problem of Muslim extremists. Pretty extensively. And I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Park51 mosque debate will increase the number of violent, Islamic extremists in the United States. That's right, I said the "debate" would. Let me walk you through how this happens, giving you a bit of history that the FBI and CIA have found out since 9/11.
Basic Recruitment in Armed Groups
So how do those guys recruit people to blow themselves up and kill innocent people in cruel acts of terrorism? By rallying the marginalized, downtrodden section of a society and giving it a "higher path" where a culture of murder and terrorism is embraced.
Society's marginalized people suffer. They begin to resent the majority because it spurns them. For the extremist looking for followers, this presents an opportunity. They show the downtrodden that the society those people live in is out to destroy their ideals, their culture, and their livelihood. They snatch them from their suffering and their aimless lives, shoving them how the cruelty of the world isn't really their fault, it's society's. They give them a renewed sense of purpose in life with the "higher path," and the recruits' newfound sense of pride, self-respect, and self-righteous anger will lead them to do whatever you want them to, up to and including butchering innocent people. It's a universal recipe, used throughout the world by warlords and armed groups everywhere.
Application to Radical Islam
The "higher path" in the Islamic extremists' case is a twisted version of Islam. It's simple for them to corrupt the message because the Quran is in such a high, pure, and perfect form of Arabic that literally NOBODY can perfectly translate it anymore. It is not too difficult for extremist imams to turn "Jihad for the defense of Islam" into "Jihad for murdering anyone for the promotion of OUR Islam" when they teach it to gullible people who can't read Allah's divine work for themselves.
The societal marginalization of Muslims came after 9/11.
As humans, people tend to be bigots when dangerous things happen. We fall into an "Us vs. Them" mindset because our brains like to make confrontation simple. It's the product of thousands of years of evolution and survival in a world where quick stereotypes helped mankind to survive. If something is big and has large teeth like what ate your friend last week, but isn't exactly the same as that other beast, it's better to assume that it's deadly and kill it or run away than it is to ponder the various possibilities in search of the truth while being eaten. So we all naturally stereotype to simplify our decision making processes.
The 9/11 attacks were an act of strategic genius by Osama bin Laden that used this human tendency against us. The resulting backlash against the Arab Muslim community after 9/11 was enormous because our attackers were Arabs and "did it in the name of Allah." Ding, the stereotype switch goes off in peoples' heads, and suddenly every Arab is subconsciously feared to be a Muslim terrorist.
You had old, conservative fogies trying to run down Muslim women to "save America," kids nicknaming or outright calling their Arab classmates "terrorists." It was not a good time to be an Arab in the Western world, particularly if you were Muslim. As a group, they became marginalized by society's predictable and misdirected hatred.
As became clear in the years since, Islamic, al-Qaeda-inspired militants made full use of this. Arab Muslims became a marginalized part of the Western world. As a result, militant recruitment into terrorist cells increased. Not in Arab, Muslim countries, but in developed, first world nations like the United States and the UK. What’s worse, these recruits have full access to any number of targets in their countries of residence. The terrorist plots in NYC and the terrorist cells popping up in London were the new breed of extremist; these terrorists were not foreign nationals formally tied to a vast organization plotting the downfall of the US. They were dangerous in a new way, being local residents who could come and go as they pleased, almost completely isolated and self-sufficient, separate from al-Qaeda. All of these cells were created within the span of a few years, something that was literally unprecedented in the history of Islamic extremism; all because of 9/11. Thankfully, the post-9/11 NYC and London plotters and the shoe and Christmas day bombers were incredibly inept and got caught thanks to the vigilance of ordinary citizens and the efforts of law enforcement, but it only takes one to slip through security, one lucky group flying under the radar to do incredible damage.
The 2004 bombings in Madrid, Spain show that in spectacular and tragic fashion. It was an attack planned, coordinated, and executed by Muslim extremists who were Spanish locals "inspired" by al-Qaeda through the internet. It's impossible to catch them all when they pop up on your home ground. What's even worse is that the cycle is a self-propagating, positive feedback loop. You carry out a terrorist attack, society recoils from Muslims, you get more converts to the cause. Repeat.
The Park51 Mosque debate is a cog in the wheel of that process.
Whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf realizes that or not is a matter of some debate (personally I think he's just misguided and self-righteously naive), but his decision to build the mosque and community center in an emotionally significant area has put the wheel in motion.
People react strongly to the news of the Muslim mosque. It's a polarizing piece of news that it's being built near Ground Zero. Either you're against it because you feel it's too soon, too close, insensitive and inflammatory, or you are for it, citing freedom of religion, its several-block distance from Ground Zero, and the need to uphold Constitutional protections for all. And of course, because it's a polarizing piece of work, the issue has gotten vast amounts of media coverage and has become an important debate in the public arena, spreading that polarizing, confrontational idea around the nation.
This is creating the same bigotry and backlash against Muslims that we saw post-9/11. We have conservative right wingers, the most strongly evolved stereotypers, going completely off the walls and protesting not just the "Ground Zero Mosque" but also other mosque projects around the country. There is national blowback against the Muslim community, and it's all over the news. Again.
No, we won't tolerate that community center and mosque here because it's insensitive, because Islam in general is clearly bad. Congratulations to us and our highly evolved, stereotype reasoning.
Recruitment season is on its way. It is now more likely than ever that there will be yet another "home grown" terrorist plot in the US. Maybe we will catch them. Maybe not.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, I'm sure you've come across the news that there are construction plans for a mosque in NYC, a couple blocks away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately for us all, this is very, very bad news. Before you left-wingers start saying I'm trampling the Constitution and the right wingers start saying "I told you so," let me explain why it isn't bad news for the reasons most people have been talking about lately.
I studied International Relations not too long ago, and we covered things like National Security and that little ol' problem of Muslim extremists. Pretty extensively. And I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Park51 mosque debate will increase the number of violent, Islamic extremists in the United States. That's right, I said the "debate" would. Let me walk you through how this happens, giving you a bit of history that the FBI and CIA have found out since 9/11.
Basic Recruitment in Armed Groups
So how do those guys recruit people to blow themselves up and kill innocent people in cruel acts of terrorism? By rallying the marginalized, downtrodden section of a society and giving it a "higher path" where a culture of murder and terrorism is embraced.
Society's marginalized people suffer. They begin to resent the majority because it spurns them. For the extremist looking for followers, this presents an opportunity. They show the downtrodden that the society those people live in is out to destroy their ideals, their culture, and their livelihood. They snatch them from their suffering and their aimless lives, shoving them how the cruelty of the world isn't really their fault, it's society's. They give them a renewed sense of purpose in life with the "higher path," and the recruits' newfound sense of pride, self-respect, and self-righteous anger will lead them to do whatever you want them to, up to and including butchering innocent people. It's a universal recipe, used throughout the world by warlords and armed groups everywhere.
Application to Radical Islam
The "higher path" in the Islamic extremists' case is a twisted version of Islam. It's simple for them to corrupt the message because the Quran is in such a high, pure, and perfect form of Arabic that literally NOBODY can perfectly translate it anymore. It is not too difficult for extremist imams to turn "Jihad for the defense of Islam" into "Jihad for murdering anyone for the promotion of OUR Islam" when they teach it to gullible people who can't read Allah's divine work for themselves.
The societal marginalization of Muslims came after 9/11.
As humans, people tend to be bigots when dangerous things happen. We fall into an "Us vs. Them" mindset because our brains like to make confrontation simple. It's the product of thousands of years of evolution and survival in a world where quick stereotypes helped mankind to survive. If something is big and has large teeth like what ate your friend last week, but isn't exactly the same as that other beast, it's better to assume that it's deadly and kill it or run away than it is to ponder the various possibilities in search of the truth while being eaten. So we all naturally stereotype to simplify our decision making processes.
The 9/11 attacks were an act of strategic genius by Osama bin Laden that used this human tendency against us. The resulting backlash against the Arab Muslim community after 9/11 was enormous because our attackers were Arabs and "did it in the name of Allah." Ding, the stereotype switch goes off in peoples' heads, and suddenly every Arab is subconsciously feared to be a Muslim terrorist.
You had old, conservative fogies trying to run down Muslim women to "save America," kids nicknaming or outright calling their Arab classmates "terrorists." It was not a good time to be an Arab in the Western world, particularly if you were Muslim. As a group, they became marginalized by society's predictable and misdirected hatred.
As became clear in the years since, Islamic, al-Qaeda-inspired militants made full use of this. Arab Muslims became a marginalized part of the Western world. As a result, militant recruitment into terrorist cells increased. Not in Arab, Muslim countries, but in developed, first world nations like the United States and the UK. What’s worse, these recruits have full access to any number of targets in their countries of residence. The terrorist plots in NYC and the terrorist cells popping up in London were the new breed of extremist; these terrorists were not foreign nationals formally tied to a vast organization plotting the downfall of the US. They were dangerous in a new way, being local residents who could come and go as they pleased, almost completely isolated and self-sufficient, separate from al-Qaeda. All of these cells were created within the span of a few years, something that was literally unprecedented in the history of Islamic extremism; all because of 9/11. Thankfully, the post-9/11 NYC and London plotters and the shoe and Christmas day bombers were incredibly inept and got caught thanks to the vigilance of ordinary citizens and the efforts of law enforcement, but it only takes one to slip through security, one lucky group flying under the radar to do incredible damage.
The 2004 bombings in Madrid, Spain show that in spectacular and tragic fashion. It was an attack planned, coordinated, and executed by Muslim extremists who were Spanish locals "inspired" by al-Qaeda through the internet. It's impossible to catch them all when they pop up on your home ground. What's even worse is that the cycle is a self-propagating, positive feedback loop. You carry out a terrorist attack, society recoils from Muslims, you get more converts to the cause. Repeat.
The Park51 Mosque debate is a cog in the wheel of that process.
Whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf realizes that or not is a matter of some debate (personally I think he's just misguided and self-righteously naive), but his decision to build the mosque and community center in an emotionally significant area has put the wheel in motion.
People react strongly to the news of the Muslim mosque. It's a polarizing piece of news that it's being built near Ground Zero. Either you're against it because you feel it's too soon, too close, insensitive and inflammatory, or you are for it, citing freedom of religion, its several-block distance from Ground Zero, and the need to uphold Constitutional protections for all. And of course, because it's a polarizing piece of work, the issue has gotten vast amounts of media coverage and has become an important debate in the public arena, spreading that polarizing, confrontational idea around the nation.
This is creating the same bigotry and backlash against Muslims that we saw post-9/11. We have conservative right wingers, the most strongly evolved stereotypers, going completely off the walls and protesting not just the "Ground Zero Mosque" but also other mosque projects around the country. There is national blowback against the Muslim community, and it's all over the news. Again.
No, we won't tolerate that community center and mosque here because it's insensitive, because Islam in general is clearly bad. Congratulations to us and our highly evolved, stereotype reasoning.
Recruitment season is on its way. It is now more likely than ever that there will be yet another "home grown" terrorist plot in the US. Maybe we will catch them. Maybe not.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Lost with a Straight Flush... Yay?
Darn you NL 25. This hand knocked me below my BR requirements for it again.
Idiot end of a straight flush. I'm in such disbelief that I lost with a straight flush, I'm almost... happy. Like I've seen something special, that only the guys who put in a ton of volume get to experience...
Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 837736
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter
BB: $28.05
Hero (UTG): $25.00
MP: $12.04
CO: $24.62
BTN: $100.27
SB: $35.01
Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is UTG with 6
7
Hero raises to $0.75, 3 folds, SB calls $0.65, 1 fold
Flop: ($1.75) A
9 T (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $1.15, SB raises to $4, Hero calls $2.85
Turn: ($9.75) J (2 players)
SB bets $6, Hero calls $6
River: ($21.75) 8 (2 players)
SB bets $24.26 all in, Hero calls $14.25 all in
Idiot end of a straight flush. I'm in such disbelief that I lost with a straight flush, I'm almost... happy. Like I've seen something special, that only the guys who put in a ton of volume get to experience...
Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 837736
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter
BB: $28.05
Hero (UTG): $25.00
MP: $12.04
CO: $24.62
BTN: $100.27
SB: $35.01
Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is UTG with 6
7Hero raises to $0.75, 3 folds, SB calls $0.65, 1 fold
Flop: ($1.75) A
9 T (2 players)SB checks, Hero bets $1.15, SB raises to $4, Hero calls $2.85
Turn: ($9.75) J
(2 players)SB bets $6, Hero calls $6
River: ($21.75) 8
(2 players)SB bets $24.26 all in, Hero calls $14.25 all in
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Poker Update: Up and down... and knockin' fools out!
The good news is I did it! I ground my bankroll up to $750 and moved up to NL 25 in short order.
The bad news is I hit a downswing and promptly lost 6 BIs in ~4,000 hands to knock me back to a measly $596 (hah, alright, so I'm still happy I've come so far). My confidence was pretty shaken. Although a good amount of it was unavoidable (I lost 2 buy-ins with 99 on a J92 rainbow flop... he had JJ), I was wondering if there were too few fish for my style. I rely on the stations paying me off with their whole stack to make a profit, and there just weren't enough of them willing to give me that. May be variance, may be not.
Either way, it's a habit that I've picked up on my path to continual poker improvement; I won't chalk it up to variance unless I actually start winning with the same game next time I try.
I took a bit of a break, went back to the very comfortable NL5 to grind up to $600 (I actually made it to $601!). Then I decided to move half my roll back over to PokerStars to try some tournaments. I've been eying the knockout tournaments lately and decided to try mass multitabling tournaments this Sunday, trying out both Stars and Full Tilt. I'm glad I did; I made another $23 on 20 games of assorted $1.75, $3.30, and $6.50 90 man knockouts spread out over both Stars and Full Tilt. Stars treated me much better, really. I only broke even on Full Tilt; all my profit came from Stars. The Stars structure is slower, and therefore has less variance, but it takes a good deal longer to finish a tournament... I'm on the fence as for which structure I like more.
On a related note, Rush Poker prepares you really, really well for some important aspects of mass multi-tabling tournaments. Solid fundamentals and quick decisions are all you really need to win at these low level stakes. The fish are plenty, and the bounties really bring out the crazy in people...
Also on a somewhat less related note, the inspirational true story of Boku87 gives me hope! This crazy robot (because really, what human can play that much?) took a $100 bankroll and turned it into $10000... all in 15 days, over about 7,000 sit n gos. How he fit in that much volume (50-tabling 500-600 games a day) boggles my mind...
The bad news is I hit a downswing and promptly lost 6 BIs in ~4,000 hands to knock me back to a measly $596 (hah, alright, so I'm still happy I've come so far). My confidence was pretty shaken. Although a good amount of it was unavoidable (I lost 2 buy-ins with 99 on a J92 rainbow flop... he had JJ), I was wondering if there were too few fish for my style. I rely on the stations paying me off with their whole stack to make a profit, and there just weren't enough of them willing to give me that. May be variance, may be not.
Either way, it's a habit that I've picked up on my path to continual poker improvement; I won't chalk it up to variance unless I actually start winning with the same game next time I try.
I took a bit of a break, went back to the very comfortable NL5 to grind up to $600 (I actually made it to $601!). Then I decided to move half my roll back over to PokerStars to try some tournaments. I've been eying the knockout tournaments lately and decided to try mass multitabling tournaments this Sunday, trying out both Stars and Full Tilt. I'm glad I did; I made another $23 on 20 games of assorted $1.75, $3.30, and $6.50 90 man knockouts spread out over both Stars and Full Tilt. Stars treated me much better, really. I only broke even on Full Tilt; all my profit came from Stars. The Stars structure is slower, and therefore has less variance, but it takes a good deal longer to finish a tournament... I'm on the fence as for which structure I like more.
On a related note, Rush Poker prepares you really, really well for some important aspects of mass multi-tabling tournaments. Solid fundamentals and quick decisions are all you really need to win at these low level stakes. The fish are plenty, and the bounties really bring out the crazy in people...
Also on a somewhat less related note, the inspirational true story of Boku87 gives me hope! This crazy robot (because really, what human can play that much?) took a $100 bankroll and turned it into $10000... all in 15 days, over about 7,000 sit n gos. How he fit in that much volume (50-tabling 500-600 games a day) boggles my mind...
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