the weekly whinge

Did this slip out without much fanfare, or did I just miss it completely?

Tags: exchange, mailservers, microsoft, protocols.

So I’ve criticised the last couple[1][2] of Full-Tilt howtos that have dropped into my inbox; I thought I should redress the balance and say that Aaron Bartley’s discussion on early-aggression in MTTs is a good read. The content may seem obvious and I’m sure it doesn’t say anything that’s not in a thousand poker books but I think it’s always good to crystalise things like this.

Tags: full-tilt.

Today’s state-the-bleeding-obvious award goes to Jordan Morgan in the featured tip in this week’s Full Tilt newsletter.

One of the keys to making money at the poker table, however, is being able to interpret when the three-bet means what it’s supposed to mean, and when a player is only representing a big hand and making a move.

The next tip in the series is “only bet when you think you have the best hand or your opponent might fold”.

Tags: full-tilt.

Say you want to step through a bunch of records in order using a MySQL cursor. That’s normally not a problem: you create a stored procedure so:
CREATE PROCEDURE doit()
BEGIN
DECLARE whichi INT(11) DEFAULT 0;
DECLARE mycur CURSOR FOR SELECT IF(i=1, f1, f2) AS whichi ORDER BY whichi;
DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR SQLSTATE '02000' SET cursorExpired=true;
open mycur;
curnext: loop
FETCH mycur INTO whichi;
IF cursorExpired THEN
LEAVE curnext;
END IF;
select whichi;
END LOOP curnext;
close mycur;
END;


Obviously that’s an incredibly inefficient way to list records, but you get the idea.

The point of the query is that the SELECT must be ordered by the result of IF(i=1, f1, f2); however calling doit() will not output what you expect (unless, of course, you’ve come across this problem before, in which case you’ll be expecting it :))

What you get is no ordering of the data at all – the ORDER BY part of the statement is effectively ignored. Why? Because we’ve called the field in the SELECT query the same as the variable we declared above. So you end up with (essentially)

SELECT IF(i=1, f1, f2) AS whichi ORDER BY 0;

I guess you can imagine how long it took me to figure that one out.

Tags: mysql.

Howard Lederer’s post on full-tilt yesterday talks about S&G bubble play.

You’re second in chips with 3,000, the blinds are 100/200, and you’re dealt Ad-7d in the big blind. The chip leader is on the button and raises to 600; the small blind folds and you call the extra 400. The flop comes Q-8-3 with two diamonds, which is a pretty attractive flop for your hand. You check, and your opponent does exactly what you didn’t want him to do: put you all in for about double the size of the pot. You’re getting slightly better than 3-to-2 pot odds on a call for your tournament life.

Is it just me or is the correct thing to do with the nut draw there never ever ever ever to check??? Move all-in yourself and put the decision on your opponent.

Admittedly we don’t have a lot of information about the relative chip-stacks; if your 3000 is a decent proportion of the chips on the table and the fourth-place guy is short then clearly you can pick a better spot, but if everyone has 2000 or more then I don’t see the value in folding there.

The only way your opponent can call is if he has AQ, AA, KK or QQ, which is possible given the preflop raise but four-handed a button-raise could have a much wider range of hands than that; otherwise I don’t see how he can possibly call and – even if he does – you’re about 45% (?) to the nuts and pairing your ace may still be good.

Of course the real mistake Howard hasn’t talked about is much earlier on in the hand: if you’re planning on checking that flop you should have folded to the 400 bet in the first place – what on earth were you hoping for – AA7? Did you really expect the chip leader not to lead out and bet at any flop on which you’d checked?

Thoughts?

Tags: full-tilt.

I like this. It’s my idea of heaven in a theme – uncluttered, plain and simple.

Tags: meta.

I’m not a great fan of making use of non-ANSI SQL: not only does it make it harder for new coders to pick up but it means any chance of changing databases becomes completely financially unviable.

The MySQL USING() clause is the worst type of example: not only is its requirements for brackets confusing and unnatural, it provides no advantage except to the incredibly lazy – being purely syntactic sugar.

For those who don’t know, it replaces

FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.fieldname=b.fieldname

with

FROM a INNER JOIN b USING(fieldname)

Up until today I’ve been mildly irritated by it, until I came across a bizarre piece of behaviour. Given two tables, “pubs” and “beers”, with a joining field “brewery” and both with named fields “name”, running

SELECT strength FROM beers INNER JOIN pubs USING(brewery) WHERE name="the white horse"

utterly fails to warn me that “name” is ambiguous and returns no results (unless there’s a beer called “the white horse”, of course). On the other hand,

SELECT strength FROM beers INNER JOIN pubs ON beers.brewery=pubs.brewery WHERE name="the white horse"

immediately produces the “Column ‘name’ in where clause is ambiguous” error you expect.

Do I need to go into detail why this makes USING() harmful?

This is admittedly fixed in more recent versions (bugs.mysql.com) since October last year but how many installations out there (like mine) will still exhibit the bug? I’d guess at a fair few.

Tags: bug, join, mysql, using.

I need a new tyre (I think mine has a slow puncture) and I found these guys – tyre fit direct – who seemed to be offering the best deal for an on-site fitting (actually the best price at all – even cheaper than the remarkable black circles) for the Conti I wanted.

So I go through the order process, which seems all well and good: I get an email back telling me that most orders will, if placed before 10:30 (mine was around 9:33), be fulfilled the same working day.

I sit back and wait but, when lunchtime arrives and I’ve heard nothing I figure I should check to make sure that the order hasn’t just disappeared into the internet ether. One phone call to tyrefitdirect and “they’re trying to find a fitter nearby as their normal fitter’s van is broken”. Hmm.

At 13:57 I get a short phone message telling me that they’re cancelling the order; they’re not sure what’s wrong with the van and they don’t know when it will be fixed. I get the distinct impression that the van doesn’t actually exist.

There are two things wrong with this. First, their tagline is “Mobile Tyres Fitted Nationally”, not “Mobile Tyres Fitted Nationally (as long as you’re in one of our three delivery areas)”. Second, can it really take four and a half hours to figure out they won’t be able to fulfill the order?

For future reference, Mr TyreFitDirect, if you’re serious about “fitted nationally” the right thing to do is to send a non-local van to fit my tyre. It may cost you a bit more but it will pay in the long run because you won’t get bad publicity like, erm, this blog post.

Failing that, tell the customer up-front and don’t wait for him to call you.

You see, the problem is that the impression I now have is that tyrefitdirect.co.uk are just a bunch of cowboys who probably have a couple of fitters signed up and (if you’re lucky enough to live in the right area) will turn up with the wrong tyre and expect you to accept it because you’ve waited all day and you need the tyre to get home. So next time I shan’t even bother and I recommend that others don’t either.

So I’ve gone with the excellent e-tyres instead, who are a little more expensive (actually 10% more) but who have delivered on their promises and done an excellent job the last three times I’ve used them. I suppose “you get what you pay for” applies here as anywhere else.

Edit on 7th October: I spoke too soon – etyres have just called to say their systems were down overnight so now I have to wait another day. They are at least apologetic enough to send me a £10 voucher though, which is more than our friends at “Mobile Tyres Fitted Nationally” ever did, and at least they’re coming tomorrow (touch wood…).

Tags: online ordering, tyres.

This (7dayshop.com) initially looks neat but when you think about it, given that the idea of a USB drive is that it’s as small and unubtrusive as possible it really has no value except as a gift for a geek who likes poker.

Ah. Won’t need to buy flash drives just before Christmas then…

Tags: 7dayshop, online ordering.

So those of you who read regularly (or indeed have the presence of mind to be able to read down a couple of entries) will know that today’s Pokerstars EPT London satellite weekly final was graced by yours truly.

Things started slowly: I couldn’t pick up a hand and when I picked up marginal holdings (A8, A6, 55) someone behind me would reraise wildly. I made a marginal call on the river in a pot from the cutoff with second pair against a straight (oops) but managed to maintain enough of a reputation (I think they thought I was a bit of a donkey) to get a few small pots, I got lucky a couple of times to stay in (second pair calling short-stack’s all-in improved to aces-up on the river, two pair against a made straight improved to a full house on the river) but I wasn’t making any great inroads, just staying still.  I chased a couple of big draws and missed and ended up at about 9BB, then hung on until I found a hand worth playing. It turned out to be AA(!) against a player who – with 3x the stack of anyone at the table – had been raising most things. I limped with the AA expecting him to raise and he joyously raised 2/3 my stack, meaning he had to call my all-in. The AA held up (for once!) and I went into the break comfortable at 21xBB.

Nothing happened for a while and I played 44 in the BB against a 4xBB all-in – I felt pretty sure it was a coinflip and it was, but his AJ hit two pair and I couldn’t magic the third 4. That left me back at 11BB and not really enough to speculate with any more.

Then came 88 and facing a bet and a raise all-in I figured the chances of winning looked slim but with the blinds increasing rapidly I crossed my fingers and called. One of the better possible scenarios looked back at me: an AJ and AK; the K came on the turn but I was saved by a river 8 and suddenly I had a playable stack – about 13th in a field of 200 or so.

The next few hands played out: I used my relative stack to win a couple of pots uncontested, then made a questionable call on the flop with Q7 – I’d hit third pair and something felt wrong about the bet – and thought better of it on the turn.

I still wasn’t sure about the fold though and when, 5 or so hands later, I picked up KK and faced a reraise to my standard raise from the same player I pushed and proceeded to cry like a baby when he virtually flipped the AA.

Aces held and (apart from a glimmer of hope with my remaining 1.7BB with A8 which went nowhere) that was that.

Oh well, there’s always next week 🙂

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