The season is 162 games long.  That means, on average, each team is going to win 54 games and lose 54 games.  It’s what each team does with the other 54 games that separates the winners from the losers.

I’m paraphrasing, but the point is there – there’s the stuff you have to do and the stuff you never do, but what you do with the other stuff is what defines you.  I was thinking about it today, and I realized that the same sentiment can be applied to poker.

Every instructional book I’ve read on playing poker begins almost exactly the same way – a study of acceptable starting hands, paired against the hands that always get thrown away.  Aces are good from any position, but 2-7 off never plays.  Pocket 8s and 9s are good from the middle provided the action is slow and there are alot of players, but AJ offsuit might not be your best bet from early position.  Yesterday, it occurred to me:  the strong hands – the high pocket pairs and suited connectors, the unraised big blinds – those are the hands that correspond to the “games you’re going to win”.  Don’t get me wrong – you may not win the hand, but these hands represent the opportunities you’re always going to take because the odds say it’s the right thing to do.  Conversely, there are the low three-offs, the double-raised big blind with A-4 off – these are the “games you’re going to lose”.  Statistically, these are the hands you have to throw away, regardless of the circumstances.  Maybe the flop comes and it turns out you would have hit, but still – you lose more than you win with these weak hands, so into the muck they go.

The difference here is while sports pundits can very easily carve a 162 game season into 54-game portions, that can’t be easily done in poker.  I’ve been in sessions where I’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of hands and the fact of the matter is the statistically-obvious situations described above are going to come up alot less often than 2/3 of the time.  More often than not, you’re going to need to make some serious judgment calls, use information about the players and the game that you’ve gathered through observation, and consider personal details like your own stack size and level of fatigue when determining what to do with the other less-obvious hands that come your way.  Just like the coach puts in a different pitcher or switches up the batting order against certain teams where the outcome might be less obvious, you need to assess and re-evaluate your situation constantly while you’re sitting at the table.  If you spend your whole poker career waiting for pocket aces in late position at a full table, you’re giving away a host of opportunities.

Many of you know I spend alot of time playing poker online.  Lately, I’ve been discouraged from playing a great deal because players will lose their minds when they take a bad beat.  They say things I’m sure they’d never say in person to the player who cracked their aces with 5-6 suited from late position.  Long after the hand is over, these players hang around in chat, continuing their “virtual railbird” tirade and generally being a nuisance to the players who are left.  In a cardroom, I can call the floor over and have the harassing influence removed – but I can’t do that online, and it forces me to do things like turn off the chat option or mute certain players, which takes away from the social part of the game for me.  It kills me that, as mainstream as poker has become, there are still players who think that certain hands guarantee victory and feel a personal affront when these supposed guarantees come up short.  These players almost always fail to really look at the situation they were in – maybe their opponent was short stacked and needed to make a move.  Maybe he or she called a slow-play early and was getting the right odds to stay in the pot.  Yes, suck-outs do happen – but sometimes the situation at hand (literally and figuratively) is what led to a player taking a bad beat.

As an aspiring semi-professional, I know what I should do statistically.  It’s developing the finesse to deal with situations that are less cut-and-dry that will make me better than the pack.  If you want to improve your game, I suggest you do the same thing.

Current Mood:  contemplative

Still on the job hunt – considering several possible avenues for expanding the available possibilities, but things are still pretty quiet.

We ended up with about 2 feet of snow here in Fieldsboro.  After hearing from my friends in the near south about the accumulations that they had by about 8:00PM on Friday, I would frequently look out my window before turning in at about 1:00AM to see when things had started – there still wasn’t much on the ground.  I thought maybe this one would miss us – but by the next morning, we had a good 18 inches and snow continued to fall for the rest of the day. Mac and Mina, of course, loved every minute of it.

Who do you like in today’s game?  I’m thinking good thoughts for the Saints.

Still on the beach, but there is an idea in the works that may end up coming to fruition soon. . .stay tuned.

Was very good to see everyone for the wife’s birthday last week. . .I miss you all and hope to see you again soon.

Current Mood:  groggy

First of all, full disclosure:  I’m blogging from my MacBook.  My position on technology is this:  give me something I need to do what I need done, and do it well.  I need no more and no less.  The MacBook is the best portable computer on the market, so I own one.  Same goes for my iPhone – give me a device that lets me carry one thing as opposed to several, and do it better than other devices.  To me, the iPhone fit that bill, so I own one.  I also have a PC laptop for the things my MacBook can’t do but are less critical and day-to-day.  I have no allegiance, blind or otherwise, to any one manufacturer, platform, or technical ideology.  Just do the things I need really well.  Hear that, Cupertino Catholics?

Now, on to the iPad.  My argument against is simply this:  It’s a big iPod touch.  That’s it.  That’s all it is.  And you need look no further than Apple’s website for confirmation.  The “Features” page lists the most prominent (if not all) features this device will ship with:  Safari, Mail, Photos, Video, YouTube, iPod, iTunes, App Store, iBooks, Maps, Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Home Screen, Spotlight Search.  Yep – I carry all of that around in my pocket today, on my iPhone, including the browser that can’t display Flash-based content.  There are no improvements here (“looks different”/”larger” is not an improvement), so I’m not sold.

The notable exception is iBooks.  I’ve been investigating an eBook reader for quite some time now, and figured I’d wait until this device was introduced before I started seriously shopping.  Even with the availability of Apple’s iBooks application, I’m not convinced the iPad is a “Kindle/Nook Killer”.  See, eBook readers are equipped with a technology that makes the screen appear more like a printed page, with adjustments to contrast and whatnot, so the reading experience is easier on the eyes.  From what I can surmise, the iBooks app is just a document display app (the Apple site touts its “high resolution LCD screen” and nothing else when talking about the quality of the display of an eBook) – if I had to read an entire book in the way I read web pages, I’d go blind in a day.  So again – this doesn’t appear to do eBooks better than a Kindle or a Nook, so I’m not sold.

So how about some real meaty applications?  So far all I see is iWork, and they buried it on the App Store page when discussing functionality.  I don’t know a single human being who actually does anything with iWork, unless they’re forced to due to an “any port in a storm”-type restriction.  The MacBook I’m typing on has Office for Mac installed, which is what I use for productivity.  iWork doesn’t do what I need, so it’s not a selling point.  Again – something I already have does it better.

I think the non Apple-flavored-Kool-Aid drinkers who just want a functional device that doesn’t duplicate what they’ve already got will be waiting for the “3G” edition of the iPad before plunking down $500-$900 for something that does what a myriad of other devices do at 1/5 the size.  Mr. Jobs?  If you’re reading this, and you really, really, REALLY want my money, here’s what you’ve gotta include in iPad 2.0:

1.  A proper eBook application, incorporating Digital Ink technology.  Steal a couple Kindle or Nook developers and get them to write one.
2.  Let me make phone calls.  I could argue for replacing (or, more reasonably, supplementing) my iPhone with an iPad if I could make phone calls from the iPad – and don’t talk to me about Google Voice or Skype.  If I’m going to pay AT&T anyway, I want one throat to choke when my service is bad.
3.  Apps.  Real ones.  Safari and iWork means you’ve got enough of an OS kernel on there that you can make other stuff work.
4.  A keyboard dock that doesn’t look like it’s going to be recalled for causing these things to crash to ground.  And how about a wall mount, in case I want to use it in my kitchen or bedroom as a secondary TV or information source?  Maybe with some sexy little speakers on the side?

Let’s start there.  Until then, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.