also GL in the return!

Walking through zombie homeless types that frequent the Main Street bus station is just part of the costs of getting that ice cream fix.

Sorry for the lack of poasts lately. Nevada 'rona cases per person have jumped up to around double the national average since the casinos reopened, and in response I've been trying--unsuccessfully--to hit a big score online. If I don't hit anything today or tomorrow, I'll probably be back to playing live on Wednesday.

Here's a tough spot BvB from just a few minutes ago.

Yatahay Network - 600/1200 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

MP+2: 49,867
CO: 103,207
BTN: 79,577
SB: 60,881
Hero (BB): 61,398
UTG: 56,734
UTG+1: 33,573
MP: 50,000
MP+1: 96,416

9 players post ante of 150, SB posts SB 600, Hero posts BB 1,200

Pre Flop: (pot: 3,150) Hero has 5 A

fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, SB raises to 4,013, Hero calls 2,813

Flop: (9,376, 2 players) J 7 9
SB bets 2,344, Hero raises to 9,376, SB raises to 56,718 and is all-in



Never been to Lappert's, actually. I'll have to try it.

I've walked around downtown in the wee hours quite a bit, as I lived in the Main Street/Stewart/Eastern/Fremont St quadrangle from 1998-2006, several of those years without a car. Outside of the casino area and bus station it's more empty late at night than dangerous. Maybe I've been lucky on that front.

As far as blind play goes, we're in the blinds 40-50% of the time when we're 4-5 handed, so it matters how you play. That said, I still haven't looked into it as much as I should.

Yes, I will overlimp a modest amount. My VPIP/PFR percentage in full ring tournies online is around 17/13, with about 40% of that 4% gap representing overlimping, and with the rest of it being flatcalling.

Thanks fidstar! Everybody limps at $1/$2, but it can still be profitable to bump it up and take it down pre or on the flop. You have to find the right number, aka the threshold of pain, to get enough people to fold. That number differs from table to table and from hour to hour. It can be as low as $6 + $2 per limper, or a raise to $40 could still get you 3 callers. You have to read the table.

Metro police have been harassing the homeless at the bus station quite a bit lately. They don't hang out there much any more.

Yeah I thought city of Las Vegas criminalized being homeless. I mean yeah like most people I don’t like dealing with homeless people but being homeless isn’t a crime.

Being homeless isn't a crime, but at certain places, it's illegal to wander/roam/prowl/loiter (whatever the most appropriate verb).

Hey SJ how you been? Been reading a good amount over the Summer. Almost exclusively Larry McMurty books. His genre may not be for everyone but one has to recognize his writing talent and his appreciation of novels.

I’m rereading your story from Oh No, Not Again, for the third time. In between library hold books for the day. Do you know what happened to Maynard?

Any recommendations? I’m considering The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or similar but am obviously clueless.

Man if you ever end writing a book as well written as that story I’ll snap buy it!

No update in weeks

RIP suited

That's a ****ing weird book; I read it in college.

Sorry for the lack of updates! Nevada's been getting worse and worse with the COVID and I've been sort of mentally following pace by growing more and more insular and agoraphobic.

I seem to be snapping out of it lately, just in time for tomorrow, when Red Rock is going to reopen their poker room with refurbished 7-max, plastic-partitioned tables. Here's a pic, though it's a bit hard to see the partitions.



I think the 7-max format is a good compromise: there's still some room for everyone to distance, and we won't be stuck in the blinds half the time, although Gambelina pointed out that the cup holders don't line up.

That shouldn't be a problem, as I'm not going to be drinking much while I'm there, alcoholic or non; I'm going to keep the mask on as much as possible, going with the current scientific findings that the disease is spread primarily through air droplets and hardly at all through surface contact.

The latter bit of information has freed me from what was an increasingly obsessive-compulsive decontamination routine upon arriving home from somewhere. Recently I was able to take a few steps out of that long and complicated process, and that makes it easier to contemplate venturing out on a more regular basis. As long as I keep the mask on, I should be all right.


I enjoyed Electric Kool Aid Acid Test back in the day. Tom Wolfe has plenty of other good stuff. Bonfire of the Vanities comes to mind; I liked that quite a bit. The movie was reportedly so bad that it ruined the reputation of the book for some people, but not for me.


Speaking of the Acid Tests, I just finished Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, though I don't know if I would recommend it. It's a good book, but it's very much a piece from the late 50's/early 60's and it hasn't aged well.

Kesey was a very good writer and he has better books out--and you know what, I've never read his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; I've only seen the rather excellent movie. My college buddy and I killed a fifth of Smirnoff while watching it one afternoon many years ago. We were both Psychology students at the time and were so mesmerized by the movie that we tossed the vodka down like popcorn, and the booze didn't slam down on us until after the credits rolled.

I might pick that book for my next half-read review.

Currently I'm reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72--just for a little nostalgia for when we had normal elections.

The idea that the 72 election was normal is crazy.

Also read Bonfire of the Vanities and really liked it.

I really don’t blame you for the lack of updates and hiding out, I’m doing the same.

Would be cool though to hear about the games at RR if you go.

Glad you’re doing alright.

Still waiting for "Back in the saddle, part X, Y, Z".

Time to get back to work.

...or not

Several things are still keeping me away from the live tables. First, foremost and as always: I exist within a foreground of procrastinating, living lazy and drifting along with inertia.

Putting that aside, tomorrow I'm heading back East to work at my old employers' business for two weeks so that they can take some vacation time.

My elderly parents live close by to the business, and I'll be visiting them fairly often. My dad is in his early 80's and he has been smoking cigarettes since he was 13. I especially do not want to give them a case of the 'rona.

Given that, I made the decision to pre-quarantine before my trip. It's bad enough that l'll soon be sitting for several hours in an enclosed tube filled with the dropletty exhalations of hundreds of fellow passengers; I also didn't want to bump up my chances of catching the virus beforehand by putting in dozens of hours at a casino.

That said: I have been watching a lot of poker videos lately. I watch, read and review poker material for at least an hour a day. And today I decided to start practicing what I've been learning through playing some 10nl blitz (an equivalent of zoom) on ACR.

I like the idea of zoom games. With just single tabling, I can put in more than 200 hands per hour, which equates to around 8 hours of live play for every table/hour of zoom play. This ought to be very effective for practicing concepts quickly.

But until now I've stayed away from zoom games, largely from having trouble getting reads on players who are constantly being zoomed on and off the table. But today I realized that PokerTracker 4 works on ACR blitz games, and with the HUD up and running, I can easily get a bead on the other players.

So that's going to be my deal for a few weeks. I'll work 8 hours a day, then I'll still be able to study and put in 500 hands a day online. When I return to Las Vegas in early September, I'll be prepared to return to the tables. That doesn't mean that I will return to live play, but I'll be ready in any case.

My hero and role model.
God bless you God bless you

Thanks Nepeeme2008! Look, laziness and inaction are generally considered to be bad traits, but my question about these assumptions is: are you happy?

Let's assume that you're not currently in dire financial straits, and that you can get away with--say--playing Destiny 2 all day long for 3 days in a row. Did it make you happy, those 3 days? Or did it make you feel like you should've been doing something else? If the answer is the latter, ask yourself why did you feel antsy when you should've been enjoying yourself? Was it because you actually wanted to do something else, or was the irksome feeling in response to societal conventions that put an onerous sort of guilt on you to get up and do something more "productive."

If the answer is the latter, then I say: **** it. Ignore that niggling nonsense. We're not ants or bees or any other sort of collective hive builders. The people who want you out there being productive are the ones who stand to make money from your labor.

And how lazy is it, playing a video game all day, if that particular game makes players grind out loot and achievements, as so many of them do? It's merely a different kind of activity, and one that you might enjoy.

I'll add the disclaimer to the above screed that almost none of it applies to parents of non-adult progeny. Once you've made or adopted a near-helpless dependent, you've entered a completely different reality, and almost nothing is about you any more. Mind you, I've never had a kid, but I was a stepdadish boyfriend for a year, so I get the general gist of it--or at least the initial revelation part of it.

Speaking of PvP video games: Today I played 340 hands in one hour of double-tabling six-max 10nlz on ACR. The game differs from low stakes live poker in 3 basic ways.

(1) There is very little limping: In the 500 or so hands I've played so far, I've seen maybe 4 open limps. Obviously, I've missed a few limps when I've folded early and zoomed over to the next hand, but even if I've missed say an additional 20 limps that way, the rate would still be very low compared to live.

(2) Villains in zoom seem to play more fit or fold on the flop: I believe that's a function of the zoom mechanics. Missed the flop? Zoom on to the next hand, no waiting. Whereas when you fold the flop live, you have to wait for the dealer to push your chips over to the villain, and then you sit and wait for the next hand, and during that long-seeming interval you can sometimes feel the weight of the other players checking you out, maybe passing judgement how weak-tight of a nit you might be.

So we're c-betting more playing zoom, but we have to know that that's getting us to the turn with a weaker range and getting villains to the turn with a stronger range, and we'll have to make the appropriate adjustments. So what are those? I'm not quite sure yet, and I'm open to suggestions. One obvious adjustment is to start dialing down our turn c-bets, but other regs with HUDs might spot the gap between our flop c-bet and turn c-bet percentages and float the hell out of us. The only mitigating factor in this is that it takes a lot of hands for the HUD stats for turn c-bets to become relevant. And, of course, if hand reviews suggest that a reg is floating us more, we can start double-barreling them more.

(3) Lots more 3-betting. Most $1/$2 live regs 3-bet around 3%-5% of the time, almost always with premium value hands. With zoom regs--I'm not sure yet--but the average 3-bet rate could be as high as 10%. The counter strategy is to call more often, especially in position, and to add in a 4 bet bluffing range, as below.

Yatahay Network - $0.10 NL FAST (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BTN): $19.80
SB: $18.78
BB: $39.83
UTG: $12.61
MP: $14.94
CO: $10.25

SB posts SB $0.05, BB posts BB $0.10

Pre Flop: (pot: $0.15) Hero has 2 K

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $0.25, SB raises to $0.90, fold, Hero raises to $2.50, fold

Hero wins $1.90

Yatahay Network - $0.10 NL FAST (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BTN): $19.44
SB: $12.34
BB: $15.44
UTG: $12.80
MP: $11.63
CO: $10.22

SB posts SB $0.05, BB posts BB $0.10

Pre Flop: (pot: $0.15) Hero has A 9

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $0.25, SB raises to $1.00, fold, Hero raises to $2.50, fold

Hero wins $2.10

In both of these case, the villains made a lot of 3 bets early on. I didn't have a lot of hands on them, so they could've just been running good, but as I play more 10nlz, I'll pick up more hands and I'll be able to tag and target some of the regs who get out of line.

^^ Eek, both of those should be snap folded to the 3bets, with 4betting them being the nut worst option, especially for that large of an IP 4bet size. ~22bb is better (these should still be 100% folds, though).

Try using this sites free solved ranges instead: http://www.zenithpoker.com/

Average reg 3bet% is 8'ish in 10NL Blitz.

^^ It's not necessary snap folds if they're out of line with their 3b. Let's not forget that:
It's 6-max.
It was a BTN open from hero.
Which means a wider 3b than normal from the blinds.
Which means a wider defense (call/4b) from hero.

The conditions were in place from your second post. Villain 1 had 3-bet in 5 out of 10 spots and V2 in 7 out of 17. We're playing 6 max and they're in the blinds facing a button steal. These are exploitative spots rather than solver GTO spots.

8% 3-bet sounds right. If it's linear, that's 88-AA, ATs+, AJo+, KTs+, KQo, QJs, but a lot of times it's going to be polar, so you're going to see some Axs, Kxs and some small pairs and suited connectors taking the place of some of the broadways and AJo, which become flat calls.

And the crappier stuff is going to fold to 4 bets.

Sj, no one can convince me people that get up each morning to go work at a construction site or an assembly line or a coal mine are doing it because they like it.
Like you said, usually most people make other people the money through their labor. And I know for a fact, because I work for my brother in law and sisters painting contracting company, in the office, that the people sitting in the office all day and running things from their computer and phone, are going to tell you that they work hard. The label lazy is a scam.
But on the other hand, people who are lazy of the mind are sort of pitiful.
Keep doing your thing. All that matters in this life is enjoying it and being happy.

Agree with the notion that happiness > more money, once you're able to satisfy your minimum lifestyle.

Thoreau (I think) had it right: simplify, simplify.