Rolled On The River

We’ve filled our time with so many projects,

There’s none to spare for blogging.

Making our reader base feel like rejects,

We surely deserve a flogging.

Up to our ears in work at the moment, and you’ll probably be glad to hear, a new blog site is at the top of the list and should be live and completely functional within the next couple of days. We’ve saved our trip reports to kick off the new site and hopefully you guys will all head on over there and enjoy our exploits. The blog is going to combine about 6 or 7 existing blogs of Life Fish’s (our study group) members and posts from members who don’t have a blog. It’s going to a great way to combine all our services and experience in one sexy, sleek place (I obviously had the biggest hand in the design direction). We’re really hoping to take poker blogging to the next level and give readers something they aren’t used to, I’m hoping once I get a tiny bit of free time I’ll get a chance to make (or get assistance in making) a webcomic which will be linked to the Life Fish Blog.

The book has hit a hurdle, apparently it’s too hard to read for our target demographic. This has lead to the powers that be advising us to split it into two separate versions, a cover-to-cover readable book, and a manual. Frustrating as this is, it’s probably the smartest way to go about it if we want to hit people with a great (but readable) book.

Don’t go anywhere, the best is yet to come, we gonna blow yer mo’fkn mind, yo.

Ps: Apparently my contributions (Or lack of other people’s) is noticed:

Top 5 names for new blog:
5. Aussie Poker
4. Lacie’s Ladyboys
3. Grinder’s Paradise
2. 70% Dutchin’s Blog
1. Wizards Of Oz (or Aus, but having WOO as initials seems better)

<3 DoubleFly.

http://doubleflypoker.blogspot.com

I’ve recently had the questionable ethics of poker thrust into my face by a few different people, and my answer has always been one of ‘well, welcome to the world that we live in’. While I do understand that we take money off people who need it, and that poker is lumped in with all the other skilless gambling games, the question from me is always ’so what?’.

The world we live in today is dog eat dog, money and sense are assets which can be traded freely. You need to be thrifty to keep your wallet full, since every taste, pleasure and need can be sated.. for a price. Casual players (fish) come into poker with multiple mindsets, they can think they are better than they actually are, or they can think that it’s all about luck. They could do this with craps, roulette, blackjack, sportsbetting or any of the house games just the same, yet we field the majority of the blame, because instead of the money being dispersed amongst partner owners of an RSL club, they are split between you, the poker site, and your rakeback affiliate. I don’t know of anyone who looks down upon a club manager for the millions they make for nanna burning her pension through his slot machines.

Everyone in this world save for children and the mentally handicapped are trusted to look after their own finances, it’s assumed that they are intelligent enough to realise that whenever they pay for a product or service, someone else is making money. If you put money into an online poker site and don’t know what rake is, you’re throwing it away.

Ok, so who do I think is on the same level as professional poker players?

Owners of pubs and clubs: They put cover charges in place that only apply to males, they won’t let you in if you’re in a big group of guys, they charge upwards of $12 for drinks that would cost them less than 50c to make, they prey on the young and stupid.

Government run lotto agencies: They never announce your odds or show you how many people have entered each lotto, they are allowed to advertise at any time of the day, encouraging the general citizen that their dreams are but a lotto ticket away.

Advertisers: I’ve spent a bit of time in my life creating flash banners for websites (though nothing with ‘you’re a winner!!!! click here’ emblazoned on it) and I think they do much more damage than poker sites, convincing people to part with their savings to buy stuff they don’t need is scummy to say the least. The way tv advertisements prey on their target audience between shows, advertisments for toys in childrens programs, hardware during the DIY shows, useless crap during the daytime soaps. Advertisers have always, and will always be the sum of the earth, another group of money-grubbers I’m proud to call myself a part of.

The tax office: They use underhanded tactics to force people to pay an unfair amount, and make estimations that can screw families out of their homes, with no proof whatsoever. The way they can go ‘Ok, we assume you made this much this year, prove you didn’t or we’ll tax you accordingly’ and ‘Ok poker player, you won 400,000 and lost 300,000, we’ll tax you 25% of your 400,000′. Unfair legislation, once again proving why people try so hard to screw them back.

Insurance companies: More scum of the earth. They get to have their cake and eat it too, they get a constant income from the premiums, which they never question, you can go in, sign a contract with a huge flaw in it, and you’ll be none the wiser for 20 years until you try to make a claim. They will NEVER let you know you’re unable to make a claim until you already have. Once you make a claim, they’ll fight tooth and nail not to pay it, lawyers included.

Coke and Mcdonalds: While I love their products, and their availability at any time of the day, the likes of them are killing the first world slowly. Mcdonalds and other fast food chains destroy competition with their heavily streamlined food preparation systems which makes their prices impossible to beat. The food and drink is available everywhere for a cheap price, and alternatives are pushed out of the market. Someone who buys two or three fast food meals a week will be doing a lot more damage to their arteries and hip pockets than any poker player could ever hope to do.

Politicians: They’re politicians.

Banks: Banks give credit and finance to those who are unable to reasonably pay it back. They offer credit cards to people on minimum wage without even meeting them in person. This goes for furniture and electronics stores who give those ‘buy now pay later’ deals which involve an interest free period which ends after 12 months or so and the interest is jacked up to over 20%. They give out token invoices to the consumer saying ‘Your bill this month: $0.00′. Scum.

Of all the self-serving scum in the world (and I only counted the legal ones), I don’t feel too bad at being part of a group that takes people’s money in exchange for their enjoyment. Nobody is forcing fish to play poker, if they are going to gamble the money, they can do it against a casino or against us. We aren’t forcing them to take credit, we aren’t locking them into any deal, and we aren’t taking any more than they put on the table.

It’s unethical, yes. But on whose scale?

We hit up Star City casino in Sydney last night, I played the 1/2 games for about 5 hours, had a pretty decent time while still getting my live experience up for the Vegas games. I ended up down about $75.00, which wasn’t too bad considering a 62o hand cracked my AA for about $600.00. I’m not in the least results oriented, but I kinda forgot that most people are. Half the people on the table were pissed off at the fish for shoving such a horrible hand, all the while patting me on the back and giving me their condolences for my fallen stack. I guess people look at it differently when they only see 30 hands an hour. I just stacked back up to 100BB and moved onto the next hand.

It’s a good feeling knowing that I have a solid edge, but it’s weird at the same time, spending so much time on the one table. I haven’t done much study into live play and tells but the biggest thing I picked up on was so many players to my left had their hands either on their cards or stack preflop, giving away a huge tell as to what they were going to do. I thought they might have been leveling me, but they more often than not followed through with the action they were representing. A lot of the play was incredibly loose, which made value-betting the premium strategy. You couldn’t really bet for fold equity, there just wasn’t any, plain and simple. Skelm ended up winning a bit, so we walked out with a profit on the night since we were splitting action.

Been cramming the book work lately since we’re behind schedule, something I didn’t want to happen, but with a project that has more than two hands in it, that’s often the case. I’ve been polishing off the articles that I was assigned, and we had a guest author drop out (to be fair we only added him at the last minute, and he’s still helping us with the article), so I’ve taken on that article as well, since we still want to include it.

I’ve handed the last of my Apprenticeship modules in to work as well, which I’ll be a tradesman within the next 3 or 4 weeks. Though poker is quickly becoming a sustainable part of my income, it’s good to know I’ll always be able to get a job for the rest of my life. Overhead Lineworking companies are extremely undermanned in Australia and around the world, there’s a critical skills shortage in the industry and I’ll be able to get a job anywhere on the planet for the rest of my life. I’m glad I stuck it out through the first Lineworking job I had for as long as I did, it made me appreciate the company I’m with now all the more. I guess there’s a lot to be said about long term financial security, it can make a 24 year old do something crazy like go out on a limb, invest his time and money into writing a book and take a leap as large as quitting his job to gamble for a living. Oh well, I’m still young, there’s plenty of time to rebuild losses if I can’t ride the wave long enough.

Well, it’s my birthday today, and it’s been a pretty sweet day. Played a decent session at 50NL FR last night after work and finished up, plus I’ve been working a few kinks of my game out.

It’s always best to be your own harshest critic in this industry, and I know that I’m mine. But I think I’m playing a winning game, I can more often than not put myself at the advantage and find profitable situations. I’m still not as aggressive as I’d like to be, but I’m beginning to widen my opening ranges as I get tougher to play against postflop. Skelm has offered to up my stake, and begin coaching me at 100nl, but I still think there’s a lot to learn here that’s going to be the same, but for half the price.

The biggest leak most players that I’ve come up against at 50nl full-ring seem to have is reading flop textures, the person you’re up against and the flop texture should take precedence over the cards you hold. Fortunately for me, the opponents at this stake don’t often bet the flop. There’s just so much money to be made from continuation betting it’s crazy, whether the opponents are playing fit/fold, or they just get scared when they see a 2/3 pot bet, they are bleeding money. Of course though, you want to factor in position, player type and board texture before you just start burning cash, but generally the best way is to throw a bet out there and charge them for the turn. If you’re playing position well your cbet will often be behind a check, whether they call, fold or raise will tell you so much about their hand, and though you had to pay, you have a lot more information than if you checked behind, regardless of your hole cards.

It’s really just basic aggression with a little bit of depth to help you narrow their range, when their range is narrow, you know where you stand, and you have solid reasoning behind making each play.

Nothing helps you snap back to the reality of full-ring quicker than having your opponents turn trips against your overpairs, river straights against your sets, and flop quads over your flopped boat. Just poker’s way of saying ‘welcome back to 9-handed play, retard’. It was good to put in some volume and be reminded that I still know what I’m doing, Skelm helped get the thought processes back in line for the games.

We’ve been having some problems with out net connection late during the nights, which is good, because the games get horribad around the time the net dies, so I spent some time running a couple of people through the intricacies of TableScan Turbo. Was a pretty fun experience to see the alternative ways you can look at a program based on the games the player is sitting at. I have everything for myself customized down to a tee, table scanning takes into account the custom scoring system I’ve set up, which ranks tables by assigning + or – values to the number of: People in the waitlist, TAGs, regs, fish, multitablers and such. But the other guys I was helping set the program up play at 1/2, which has far less tables, and far tougher regs, so it was a challenge to help them set something up that was customized for their stake, since they perceive ’good tables’ not as the ones with the most fish, but more the ones with less soul-crushing regs.

I’ll also probably be making the official tutorial video for the program which I’m looking forward to, since we’re trying to make names for ourselves as the guys who are on the forefront of the poker software development, it would help our cause if I had some accessible media with a blog/rakeback plug on it.

I’ve been neglecting my poker play recently to accommodate work and the book, which has been pretty slack on my part, but there’s just not that many hours in the day. I’m slowly moving back into full ring play and getting back on track, while balancing my writing and work. Since Skelm has been taken under Dusty’s wing, I thought it would be a waste not asking about, discussing, and applying as many strategies as possible. So I’ve set myself a couple of hours minimum each day to play, and another couple for study, hopefully I’ll be making a regular profit and doing a stake-jump soon enough.

While we’re still plugging away at book content, it’s getting closer to the date we’ve set for everything to be turned over to the publisher. We’ve been reviewing the guest articles, and it’s no surprise that we’ve learned a few things along the way. The content is top notch, we couldn’t ask for more, and really reflects the reason we contacted these specific writers for their input in the first place. We’ll be relinquishing control of everything in a few weeks, freeing up time for a second project we’re coordinating with James *Splitsuit* Sweeney, and I’m already salivating with anticipation.

Sweeney’s one of those cool guys who just seems to have a really relaxed and laid back approach to life. He knows his shit, has solid fundamentals and a grasp on where everything’s at, but he also has a good history, integrity, and character. He taught Skelm and I beer pong when we were in the states last year, and we met a few of his friends who were also pretty awesome, looking forward to catching up with him this year when we head over. Check out his site http://www.splitsuit.com/

So Skelm convinced me to have a shot at the Dream Job (Australia) tournament on Stars, I’m not really a tourney guy, and I didn’t really feel like dedicating my whole night to it but it was pretty good for a freebie. I was planning on writing that that evening, which I skipped since being fairly new to tournaments I wanted to learn as much as I could. The field was, 2986 players, with the last 9 making it into the finals. I got out 11th. Pissed off..

It was interesting, but annoying all the same, with no cash prizes or consolation for the hours lost staring at the screen and winning flips, but that’s poker. We went over some of the spots I could have played better, which was enlightening, but I don’t think I’ll switch to being an MTT pro any time soon. Some interesting things the last few weeks in town, 5,200 people stripped naked for photographer Spencer Tunick in front of the Sydney Opera House. How they organise something like that, and what type of people attend those sorts of things puzzles me, but each to their own, it’s a pretty impressive feat and brings the city a little publicity. Secondly, we had the Queen Mary 2, a huge luxury cruise liner pull into Sydney. I was in town at the time so I saw this thing and it’s pretty fucking sweet, incredible how something so huge can stay buoyant.

Anyway, back to it.

I’ve been blogging here about the book recently, which has taken up most of my time as of late, but I wanted to steer away from that and just ramble on about a subject that has been floating around in my head.

I tried to steer as far away from social networking sites as humanly possible for a long time, I have the attention span of an ADD puppy and it takes a fair bit of effort to get me to sit down at the tables or to research and write for the book. It’s hardly that I’m not passionate about those things, it’s just that it takes discipline and a conscious effort for me to not let my mind wander onto something else. Enter Facebook, this wonder of the internet and similar programs/sites are annihilating the productivity of the world, our most base curiosities can be sated instantly as we’re electronically tethered to almost everyone in our life through it. We want to know who’s the same and who has changed. Whether we’re there for the gossip, pictures of loved ones, meaningless quizzes, stupid games we are all giving in to our desires and ignoring what we should be doing.

Most of the people I have on my Facebook are people I knew from high school, co-workers, or poker players. Just reading through some of the posts and comments makes me want to hold my head in my hands and cry, you see the same people saying the same stupid shit and going through the same cycles over and over again. Girls complaining about how guys treat them one day, then heading out to a club to get hammered the next. Guys beating their chest and acting tough one day, wondering why they got into a fight and ended up in overnight lockup the next. I’m not better than these people, maybe I’ve learned from others’ mistakes to avoid making them myself, but that’s all. I’ve seen the womanizing jocks from high school end up having kids they didn’t plan on, then trying to convince everyone else that because they can father a child they’re more mature and further along on the road of life than everyone else. It’s just sad that so many people who had hopes and dreams back in school just end up coasting through life, their biggest aspiration is a new car or a pay rise.

This could steer into a philosophical post but I’ll leave it before it get’s to that. I’m still working, I have a long way to go, one of the best things about the poker industry is you’re working with people who are independent and goal-oriented. Sure, you may get your toes stepped on by someone climbing their way to fame and fortune, but the majority of people are full of life and chose poker because they wanted to break out of the norm. I guess what I’m trying to say is plan ahead, pick some goals and stick to them, don’t get caught up in everyone else’s shit, and don’t let other people drag you down with their mediocrity. If you want money, it’s out there to be made, if you want good friends, they’re out there too. It’s been proven time and time again that success is mostly due to planning and determination.

Or you can add me on Facebook and cry on your wall about failing another university subject. I’m sure if you go out drinking or shopping to relieve the pain your marks will magically improve, it’s not like you need to work for anything in life, I’m sure things will change for the better.

No regrets, right?

We’re at a pretty strange place right now, Skelm has been on Skype constantly the last week or so co-ordinating guest authors, reviewing content and writing. The poor guy has been clocking 19 hour days, working in between grinding sessions. I came into the office after a week of being interstate to find McDonald’s rubbish strewn across the office desk and an unshaven, red-eyed fool sitting there.. ‘Oh I got into contact with some of our guest authors, should be getting the Legalities chapter in soon, and the Rakeback content is coming along swimmingly’. He hadn’t slept for over 30 hours and was prepared to soldier on, my recommendation was for him to go to bed but what would I know?

‘Oh and Zandry said he’s been waiting ages for you to send him the TableScan Turbo article for final approval’. The funny thing was, I had sent Michael the article to review and then forward to Zandry. Five days ago. My confusion was met with a blank stare. ‘Oh, THAT’S what that was’. I thought it would be in our editor’s mailbox by now. Time for sleep dude, do it when you wake up.

We’ve only got one chapter that hasn’t been started in one way, shape or form. This is really good news, everything else has been written, is being written, reviewed, researched, allocated, or collaborated on. It’s all moving ahead, and within a month, the workload will be shifted from us to Scott, our editor. I’m really looking forward to/dreading the day when the flow of content is out of my hands. It’s still our baby, a foetal imprint of our collaborative input, eugenics of information flow, without the Nazi overtones. Soon it won’t be ours to shape, the delivery will be handed over to the powers that be, and its acceptance or rejection will be on the shoulders of the community and public.

Infanticide is commonplace in Sparta.

Will it be appreciated for what it is? What will it be remembered for? What will the average reader get from it? Will Scott be pissed that I used a metaphor to describe him as a midwife?

I guess time will tell.