Good job SJ!
Keep going!

Any time period on this challenge?

Thanks uberkuber! I think I'll play more if I have something to play for, and if I have to account for myself every week.

Let's say...the start of the 2022 WSOP, whenever that is. Seems reasonable.

At work currently, and the classic rock station is playing Ozzy, bless his large and probably coke-scarred heart.

I'd like to tell you about how I made a heroic pitch for changing the station while out with the owners, steering the subject of discussion away from the health of one of the owner's Canadian friends over to Justin Bieber, and how--even though I was once interested in giving his material a fair shake, after much exposure to it, I found myself regretting that he's a no-talent assclown--shamelessly ripping that phrase from Office Space--and how the usual work radio station plays his dreck at least 12 times within an 8 hour workday, and getting agreement, then making my pitch for changing things up a bit...

I'd like to tell you that, but that never happened. Instead, my occasional half-assed passive-aggressive sniping finally wore them down.

It's a W, and I'll take it.

Win!

W

Good update.

What do you mean by "wore them down"?
What's the end result?
Actual state of affairs?

I'd originally filed these details under 'too boring to post,' as well as 'clearly embarrassing,' but I'll indulge with two of the more energetic instances:

(1) Last week Accounts made an idle comment about hearing an Adele song several times during the day, and I jumped on that with, "I KNOW. I KNOW. THEY ONLY HAVE LIKE TEN SONGS AND THEY PLAY THEM OVER AND OVER AGAIN."

(2) Earlier this week we had severe thunderstorms in the area, and the radio station went out, and I jumped up and danced around shouting, "It's dead! It's dead! It's dead! They struck the tower with lightning and it's dead! Yesss!"



Not sure who 'they' aka the lightning strikers were in my second outburst, but the station soon came back, and I made disappointed noises.

Regarding the actual state of affairs: The problem with passive aggression, other than it being annoying and generally dysfunctional, is that it gets amorphous results. This is because the passive aggressor, by nature, does not clearly set the terms for what they want to achieve.

Currently, I'm alone in the office for today and Tuesday. When everyone comes back on Wednesday, the correct thing to do would be for me to buck up and hammer out some terms right then and there, but instead I will likely wait until someone tries to change the station back, which is almost assuredly a worse time to negotiate.

Thanks for the details!

How about putting the radio in a locked cage with only you knowing how to unlock it? You'd then have negotiating power!

Villain here is one of those fairly common fish who like to limp/call or flatcall pre, then donk minimum bets on the flop and turn with anything from air to a good hand. If you call him/her down, they'll usually bet around 5-10bb on the river, again with a very wide range.

We both have big stacks for this stage of the tourney, and it's a progressive knockout. I've picked up a couple of bounties, so my current bounty stands at a little more than half a buyin. Villain covers me, and tanks a long time before acting on the river.

Yatahay Network - 400/800 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

UTG: 26.92 BB
MP: 39.17 BB
Hero (CO): 133.22 BB
BTN: 81.56 BB
SB: 137.82 BB
BB: 137.39 BB

6 players post ante of 0.15 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.4 BB) Hero has 8 T

fold, fold, Hero raises to 2.5 BB, BTN calls 2.5 BB, SB calls 2 BB, fold

Flop: (9.4 BB, 3 players) 4 T 9
SB checks, Hero bets 5.7 BB, fold, SB calls 5.7 BB

Turn: (20.8 BB, 2 players) T
SB checks, Hero bets 15.6 BB, SB calls 15.6 BB

River: (52 BB, 2 players) 3
SB bets 113.87 BB and is all-in

Value Fish

This is a tough spot, and I won't blame anyone for not taking a crack at it.

Villain leads with a 2x pot overshove on a blank river. I'm going to leave Equilab alone here and leave off comparing ranges for this one hand.

I made a population read and I folded. I've noticed a new class of fish at the micro tourneys lately--and maybe they're not new at all, maybe they've been around all this time and survived, Darwin-style, while the other fish have died away all around them.

These particular fish play like around 66/10 or 49/33 preflop (i.e. they're always in a hand, and you or your HUD will pick them out quickly), but they make huge value bets, and they make them every chance they get, and their massive value bets get called much lighter than usual, because they're fish.

While it's true that value fish are still in a lot of hands and therefore have a lot of junk and therefore lose a lot of small pots, when they do have something, the big value bets they make generate big EV when they're called. And it's enough, I believe, to push them into breakeven or slightly +EV territory.

A large site like WPN holds enough low-limit tourney players that between themselves, players don't play a massive number of hands together, so it's hard for a decent micro or low limit player to spot a value fish, or to even recognize that such a type of player exists. A decent player could just say to herself, "Well, Villain is allowed to make a good hand sometimes; he probably does this in this spot as a bluff as well." I'm not so sure about that, my good straw-woman.

Yes there are still fish who will shove that river as a bluff, but they're much easier to recognize than value fish. If a fish shoves as a bluff and shoves for value, then they're shoving early and often. A value fish, on the other hand, doesn't have a value hand that often, so chances are good that you will see them make some folds, and make some much smaller bluffs and/or some flat calls in that spot before you see them shove.

ACR $0.19 to $10000 Challenge: Week 4*

Previous ACR bankroll: $155.03

Cash nl10z: $0
Tournament: +$40.68

Current ACR bankroll: $195.71


*This was the 2nd week of keeping track of challenge, and the 4th week of doing it.

Back in The Old Days™, these players used to destroy live small stakes nlhe games. They seemed to disappear after the post-Moneymaker nlhe revival. I theorize that this was because of the introduction of buy-in caps--it no longer was profitable to spend hours or even days setting up a table just to stumble on a big hand and win $200. Bet sizing, bet sizing, bet sizing.

I've been settled in at my new place for two weeks now, and I'm still grateful to be no longer living the life of a superannuated juvenile at my elderly parents' condo.

Of course, I could have been out on the streets like a lot of other people whose luck ran out, so my complaints about being taken care of are really a little much, but that realization did little to stop me from complaining.

We adjust our assessment of our general situation on a sliding scale, and people who enjoy or at least take comfort in being unhappy will always find something to be unhappy about, regardless of their situation.

The emperor Nero, upon completion of his infamously decadent Golden House, sprawling over 640 acres of prime central Rome real estate (Amazon fulfillment warehouses fill up around 15 acres by comparison), was known to say, "Finally, now I can live like a human being."

I originally UPSed my boxes of books and whatnot to my workplace, and I've been slowly taking a box or two at a time back to my apartment. If I'd taken all 16 or so boxes at once, they would have intimidated me with their sheer cubic footage, and they would all still be sitting there to this day, unopened, crowding up the center of my living room.

As it is, one or two boxes at a time are never intimidating, and are easily put away. I bought two new bookcases last week, and it's satisfying to watch them be slowly filled up as the days go by. I gave away too many books, though, in order to save on moving costs. But there's a Barnes & Noble nearby, so I'm sure that I'll have that matter rectified in no time.

Today I opened my collectibles box and realized that it had been a while since I last checked on my two 1999 factory sealed Pokemon Starter Gift boxes that I bought for $1 each on clearance from my old bookstore.

I'd been reading some reports that Pokemon is hot again, and that collectors have been clamoring for merch.



So, sell now while the market is sky high, or hodl?

https://youtu.be/mypHpsSoF8o

Exactly. With 300bb stacks, I could see this being profitable, if high variance.

At the shallower stacks you see in most stages of tournaments, I don't think they'll do much better than breakeven, but in the early stages, if they can get their 120bb turn shoves into 20bb pots called consistently, then they're at least countering a lot of their bad play

Agreed. I don't want to be sitting on what could be the equivalent of a rare beanie baby circa 1993, hoping that it'll keep going up. After some more research, it looks like I around $670 on eBay would make the me cheapest seller out there by about $5. I could deal with that.

I have a new idea for a story; the poker-related one I had a while back never really caught fire in my imagination. This new one might have some legs. I'll post some basic details later.

I didn't play much online this week. I have to get back into some nl10z, but I feel like my online zoom cash skills are rusty and in need of a brush up. Some study is in order.


ACR $0.19 to $10000 Challenge: Week 5

Previous ACR bankroll: $195.71

Cash nl10z: $0
Tournament: (-$21.15)

Current ACR bankroll: $174.56

I have no idea what this means. Looks like something I’d write.

Not my best work, for sure.

Are you familiar with the Beanie Baby Bubble of the early 90's? Little plush dolls became hot commodities, and some of the rarer models were going for $750+, until people came to their senses. Nearly 30 years later they're all virtually worthless. Similar thing happened with Hummel porcelain figurines in the 70's.

I think the same thing could easily happen with Pokemon cards, so I'm selling...now.

Ha yes I remember the beanie baby craze. Where you saying you have a Pokémon card that if you put it up on eBay for $670 it would be the cheapest one listed? Yeah I’d sell now before the bubble.

I remember the baseball card boom of the late 80s. Those cards are now worthless. Now I do remember Beckett the pricing magazine saying a 1952 Mickey Mantle was worth like $40K. I thought that was crazy however one just sold at auction for $5.2M.

Here's my story idea. It's just bare bones at this point. I was thinking about how a fully privatized prison system wouldn't work out well in this country, simply because the big prison companies would spend all of their lobbying money creating more product, through increasing the number and scale of criminal offences, through increasing law enforcement, through encouraging more frequent sentencing, longer sentences, and a higher recidivism rate due to them providing fewer options for rehabilitation within the walls, then ​making probation conditions tougher to satisfy outside the walls.

So what if private prison companies are paid instead by the level of rehabilitation achieved by their prisoners, both while the convicts are in jail and after they're released? It sounds like a reasonable solution, but it also could be something that could be terribly abused in the hands of, say, an algorithm similar to the ones that manage Lift and Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers. Especially given that prisoners have far fewer rights then even the most put-upon free workers.

So it's the near future and you're living in a pretty standard religio-authoritarian dystopia, but crime rates are historically low, and that's credited to your probation officer: an inscrutable algorithm that is constantly pushing you to achieve, like much more than most of the other ex-cons who you know.

And you don't want to fail probation and go back to jail, because people die when they go back. Not every time, but often enough; the companies lose money on recidivists and low achievers, so it's thought that a certain percentage of returning prisoners are killed off in "prison fights," or "attacking a guard" or "attempting escape" when they get back behind bars, and that percentage--while shockingly high--is just low enough to keep an extremely incurious law-and-order government from investigating.

This one?

This important question also applies to your new story (and every other story or script you'll ever write).

Right. We need more information about the hot chicks and the car chases.