Politics and Booze

One of the things the YouGov site allows you to do is assign a political position to alcoholic beverages. It may allow you to do other things as well, but - frankly - who cares? Its political spectrum runs from 6 left to 6 right; for each point I've found a celebrity whose YouGov rating matches it (well, the rating is for people who like that celebrity, but that's close enough for me). So we can now match types of booze to celebrities and political attitudes. Some may say this is a completely spurious exercise with no genuine relationship to reality, but I say it's scientifically rigorous and opens up a whole new way of thinking about politics.

The initial results of my research are below.

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

Leon Trotsky

Russell Brand

Owen Jones

Harriet Harmen

Pussy Riot

Richard Dawkins

Boring Person

Hugh Dennis

Brian Cox

Adele

Nigel Farage

Jeremy Clarkson

Katie Hopkins

Beer

Carlesberg Export



Newcastle Brown Ale



Heineken



Carling



Carlesberg



Guinness



Stella Artois



Becks



Budweiser



Kronenbourg



San Miguel



Wine

Hardys



Campo Viejo



Wolf Blass



Lanson



Bollinger



E&J Gallo



Moet & Chandon



Blue Nun



Whisky

Whyte and Mackay



Grant's



Glenfiddich



The Macallan



Glenmorangie



Teacher's



Bell's



Famous Grouse



Whiskey

Jim Beam



Wild Turkey



Jameson



Jack Daniel's



Bushmills



Maker's Mark



Gin

Hendrick's



Bombay Sapphire



Gordon's



Vodka

Smirnoff



Absolut



Russian Standard



Rum

Sailor Jerry



Bacardi



Captain Morgan



Brandy

Courvoisier



Three Barrels



Martel



Hennessy



Misc

Southern Comfort



Sambuca



Jagermeister



Bailey's



Grand Marnier



Jose Cuervo



Tia Maria



Cointreau



The $2/$4 Spreadsheet

Six months ago my struggle with micro poker was interrupted by the sudden, shocking arrival of paid employment. Although it's hardly a well-paid job (agency rates, folks) it certainly sucked the point out of scrabbling around at the 10c/20c tables for a few bucks here and there. So my poker account lay dormant, apart from one night when I got a bit drunk, took my $20 to a no limit table, lost it all, bought in for another $15 and lost that too.

However, the job's been ticking along reasonably well, I've managed to save a bit of money, and it occurred to me that I might throw some of it at the poker tables. The aim of my micro-poker adventure had always been to earn enough to play $2/$4 limit holdem - hardly high stakes, but that's the point at which a winning game can deliver a useful income supplement (say, $100 a week, if you double-table). Maybe I could use some of my savings to jump straight to the main event without having to grind my way up from virtually nothing....

Now, a bankroll for $2/$4 is about $600-$800 (£400-£600) and although I didn't have that kind of cash at my disposal there was no reason why I couldn't buy in for £100 and see how it went. If I lost the hundred I could either give up or wait until I had another £100 and take another shot. If my total losses reached £400 it would probably be time to admit that the game was too tough for me and take up bus-spotting instead.

So with this rough-and-ready plan in mind, I spent a couple of weeks watching the $2/$4 tables at PokerStars and making notes on the various players (Stars has an excellent feature that allows you to do this; if you make a note it's there to be read whenever that player's at your table). I also set up an Excel spreadsheet to track my progress. You can't play poker and not have a spreadsheet. In fact, creating a spreadsheet is one of the main reasons to play poker in the first place. It's all about the spreadsheet, poker. Spreadsheet.

Sorry, I got side-tracked. Anyway, after work on Monday night last week, I clutched my debit card nervously in my hand and forked out the hundred quid. That gave me just over $160 which, serendipitously, was a standard amount for two sessions of $2/$4. So at one minute past midnight on 1 May I started to play. Since then I've clocked up about 32 hours at the tables (that's "table-time", rather than "real time" - one hour playing at two tables counts as two hours; in real time I've probably played about 20 hours) and so far things have gone pretty well. There's certainly been some ugly sessions along the way, but the overall trend is     gratifyingly upward.

An extract from the spreadsheet is below. I can't get the formatting quite right, but the basic info's there. If you want to see it properly, it is here (I find it views better if you're logged into Hotmail). I'll keep you posted, probably about once a week.

An Unusual Hand

Here's something that doesn't happen very often, even at micro-limits.

Playing this morning, there was a maniac at the table. Now maniacs fall into two groups: those with a semi-method to their madness and those who are just plain mad. This guy fell into the second category. Unfortunately, he was directly to my left so I didn't have the chance to make any isolation plays or anything like that (not that I was getting the cards for it anyway - in fact, I was stuck in the game). After a while I looked down at a pair of kings in early position and thought "if I limp, he'll raise and then I can come back over the top. But if I do that all the others will disregard his raise and cold-call and I'll be left out of position facing a large field with a lone pair and everyone chasing like mad. Not a comfortable situation. But if I raise there's a good chance he'll re-raise. Cold-calling three bets with the original raiser still to act is not something even these guys are likely to relish, so there's a good chance it'll limit the field."

So I raised. The maniac re-raised. It was folded round to me. Perfect. My plan from here was simply to bet at every opportunity, no matter what the maniac did or how scary the board became. The likelihood that I was crushing him was simply too high.

So I capped the betting and he called. The flop was rags. I bet, he raised, I re-raised, he capped it, I called. The turn was a harmless 10. I bet, he raised, I re-raised, he capped it, I called. The river was another 10 which might've killed me but much more likely helped me, because if he'd flopped a streaky 2 pair I now had a better 2 pair. I bet, he raised, I re-raised, he capped it, I called. He turned over Q7 for a pair of tens with a queen kicker. I scooped the pot.

Now, apart from my initial decision to bet rather than get cute with a limp, there was no skill at all involved in my play. I only mention it because it's not very often you get to win a hand that's been raised to the maximum on every single round of betting - especially not when your opponent has nothing better than queen high, rubbish kicker until the river brings him a pointless pair on the board. Even for a maniac, that was a formidably bone-headed piece of poker.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

When the hell was it? Wednesday or some such. I'd run my way up to $10, which was my target for moving from 2c/4c to 5c/10c. Feeling pretty pleased with myself too. Posted a win on my first 5c/10c session - was almost up to $12. Feeling even more pleased with myself. And then I found a whole new way of screwing things up. I thought I'd seen them all, but NO - there was yet another one out there just waiting for me to discover it. I am nothing if not a poker innovator when it comes to screw-ups.

It happened like this: I'd been using the Poker Stars limit filter to block out all the games I wasn't interested in. At first I'd restricted things to 2c/4c only, but then as my bankroll approached the $10 threshold I started watching the 5c/10c games as well. And when I moved up to 5c/10c I filtered out the 2c/4c games and added in the 10c/20c games (file under "hubris"). Like I said, I posted a healthy little win from my first 5c/10c session during Wednesday (?) afternoon and sat down to my second session in the evening with high hopes. Life was good.

First hand folded round to the small blind who raised my BB. I forget exactly what I had but it was enough to warrant a three-bet to show him I wasn't about to be pushed around. Biff, pow, he hit (probably), I didn't and when he bet on the end I figured I'd made my point and it was time to retire gracefully from the hand. Except that at this point - and only at this point - I realised he'd just bet 20c. How the hell could he bet 20c in a 5c/10c game? The answer, of course, was that I'd managed to sit down at a 10c/20c game without realising it. I mean, what sort of idiot sits down at a game and doesn't know the stakes he's playing for? Turns out the answer is: me.

FFS. Now I was 60c in the hole so I had a decision to make. I could take my entirely self-inflicted injury on the chin and move down to the level I'd meant to play at, or I could stick around and hope to win it back by picking up a winning hand. Guess which choice would've been the sensible one to make. And then guess which one I made. Yup, I stuck around. My cards went dead. I got blinded down another 60c, missed with a big ace and before you know it my 60c loss was a $2 loss. So I opened up a second table to help speed things along (file under "mental health problems"). Actually, this moronic tactic very nearly worked: I won a hand or two on the second table and was within one pot of breaking even at which point I would've been out of there in a flash.

And then I got aces on table one. And they were cracked by kings in the hole when the flop came Kxx. And then everything went to hell. I had aces cracked twice more, a flopped flush beaten by a better flush and a set beaten by a guy who drew to an inside straight on the river and hit it. As runs of bad luck go that's pretty standard, but of course it had to happen when I was playing out of my league from a bankroll point of view so every damn suckout cost me double. What was meant to be profitable little 5c/10c session turned into a hit-and-run 10c/20c session which turned into a four hour, two table 10c/20c session at the end of which my stats looked as follows:

Bankroll: $5.10
FPPs: 1820

Yeah, I'd managed to lose over half my fucking bankroll. A whole week's worth of grinding wiped out by a stupid oversight compounded by an even stupider attempt to dig myself out of the hole. Next day I was too depressed to look at Poker Stars and too ashamed to write up my idiocy in this blog. I took a few days off, which was probably the most sensible thing I'd done in a while.

Well, now I've digested and reflected. It's cost me a week, but that's not the end of the world. One week here or there isn't going to kill me. But the more important reflection is probably this: I ought to be careful about the evening games. One reason why I lost so much was that the game was very lively. Generally speaking, the evening games are looser than the ones in the afternoon. Potentially that means greater profits but it also means a higher variation: on a good day you win a heap, but on a bad day you lose quite a chunk. And when you're playing off a small bankroll (like me) it's better to stick to low-risk/low-reward games. So from now on I might restrict my evening play to freeroll tourneys and save my limit game for the afternoons - at least until my bankroll isn't so paltry.

That's my tale of woe. I've taking my licking and gotten over it. Back to the grind.

Move On Up

Bankroll: $10.27
FPPs: 1913

I spent a lot of yesterday playing badly in free-roll tourneys. The main reason was that I played a short 2c/4c session in the morning, won 60c in next to no time, and realised that I'd made it over the $10 threshold I'd set for moving up to 5c/10c holdem. So I shut down my limit game for the day.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to savour the moment (though I did) as that I'm always slightly nervous about moving up to a higher level - even when that "higher level" is as laughably small as 5c/10c. For some reason it feels like jumping into a shark-infested pool - or, better, like the first day at a new school. I know for a fact that the 5c/10c tables are full of the same sorts of players as 2c/4c (actually, many of them are the same players) but still the prospect makes me slightly uneasy.

I suppose the higher level does represent a risk to my bankroll. $10 is 100 big bets, which is at the short end of the estimated requirement. Some say 100 big bets, some say 200, and I've even heard 300 quoted as the amount needed to ride out the vagaries of fortune. Terrible streaks can and do happen, and I'm mindful of the fact that I've had ten winning days in row. It worries me (as it always does) that I might be raising the stakes just when I'm due a run of bad luck.

To be honest, though, I don't think that's the main reason for my unease. It's more that I've grown used to 2c/4c - I feel comfortable there, king of a tiny world. And now I've got to leave it behind and prove myself all over again. Well, that's the task I've set myself, so I'd better just stop whining and get on with it.

Sunday Night Poker

Bankroll: $9.61
FPPs: 1923

As the November 9 were kicking off their final table in Vegas (first prize: $8,711,956) I was scratching about on the 2c/4c tables and various free-roll tourneys. Getting depressed about the humiliatingly small stakes I'm playing for is one of the key dangers I face. It's odd: on the one hand you mustn't care about the money - ie, you mustn't play scared or else the rest of the table will just run over you. But on the other hand, you have to treat your chips with respect. If you start thinking "it's only four cents, I might as well call" you'll be broke in no time. It's a tightrope you've got to walk. Time to quote legendary poker champion T.S. Eliot:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

Anyway, progress has been decent. Tonight I discovered the joys of Poker Stars' Sunday Night $2,000 free-roll. It costs 50 FPPs to enter, but the top 20% get paid and it's not a turbo (15 mins per level instead of 5) so you get a bit of time to make a few plays. A lot of the other competitors didn't seem to appreciate that, however: they were knocking themselves out at a hell of a click. I guess they were trying to build up a big enough stack for a shot at the final table. That's a standard strategy, of course, but it's also high-variance. I'm working on a very tight budget here and so, for me, it's all about getting paid. And I'm happy to report that on this occasion sneaking my way into the money was relatively easy. Another $1.80 in the bank.

With a bit of luck I'll be able to hit $10 and move up to the 5c/10c game some time tomorrow or Tuesday. Hope I don't get a nosebleed.

Meet Your Inner Idiot

One week on and how do things stand? The stats don't lie:

Bankroll: $5.83
FPP: 2,147

That's nearly a 20,000% increase on my starting position. If the trend continues then by this time next week I should have around $1,200. I guess sometimes the stats do lie.

They certainly don't tell the whole story. Yesterday, for example, saw me doing all sorts of stupid things as if I was intent on wrecking my solid (though unspectacular) progress up to that point. For a start, I got stuck on one of my 2c/4c tables - nothing out of the ordinary, just a couple of beats and some draws that went bad - but I got annoyed about the crimp it would put in my figures (as if I had a target to hit or something) and started playing Catchup Poker. Inevitably all I managed to do was dig myself deeper into a hole. Fortunately things were running smoothly on my other table and I finished a few cents ahead, but it would've been a lot more if I hadn't acted like a complete dick on table 2. Question: how the hell can you go on tilt on one table while remaining calm and sensible on another? I don't know, but I did it.

And then I got drunk. Even scraping together the money for the booze was an act of lunacy; I won't bore you with the details, but by about 6pm I found myself sat a turbo tourney already several large whiskies to the good. I can't remember what happened, but I didn't win anything, that's for sure. Now "drunk in charge of a freeroll tourney" is not a capital offence. At worst I was pissing away a few FPPs, and if that'd been the end of it then no big deal. But of course it doesn't end there, does it? No. It. Does. Not.

I watched Raging Bull (self-loathing idiot makes damn sure his talent doesn't get in the way of failure), got absolutely smashed, and thought it was the perfect time to hit the limit tables. After losing a bit at 2c/4c holdem I had what probably counts as The Poker Donkey's Number One Stupid Loser Idea: "I know, I'll win it back quickly by moving up to a bigger game". Bravo, genius! So off I went to a 5c/10c table. Well, it could've been worse: at least I didn't take my bankroll to a no-limit table (and, believe me, I've done that before). And then something completely unfair happened: I started playing great. And by "great" I don't mean "solid" or even "tight-aggressive", I mean I was playing like a complete animal. I was raising with all kinds of weird shit and then either dancing away from trouble if I didn't like the flop or beating the crap out of it if I connected. My judgement was unerringly good - I don't think I lost more than a couple of showdowns all night, and the ones I won usually left my opponent scratching his head and wondering what the hell just happened. By the end of the session the rest of the table was very wary of getting involved. And the strange thing was how calm and happy I felt. It was like I was watching somebody else play: somebody better than me. I remember laughing a lot.

Anyway, long story short: I won a couple of bucks and ended up a dollar to the good for the day. Whoop-de-do. But I really shouldn't make a habit of it. Poker's one of those games where, unless you're completely blind, you get to learn something about yourself. And I've learnt (many many times) that my game has certain self-destructive psychological flaws. Every now and then my Inner Idiot emerges and shrieks "Why be content with small gains when you can post a whopping loss?"

That's not uncommon, I think. I remember once playing $4/$8 holdem at Binion's. I was in a hand with a ragged old fella who, despite knowing I was solid and rarely bluffed, called my raise and doggedly called me down all the way with an ace on the flop. When I turned over AK he mucked and said to me, "Why did I do that? Why? I knew you had it. Never doubted it for a moment. Why did I do it?" It was like his whole life had been summed up in one hand of poker. He had tears in his eyes.

Maybe that's who I'm turning into.