Workshop: Intercontinental
I’m not sure about this. Overall, I thought boots tried a bit too hard. He is trying to force a lot of ideas into a rather narrow vessel. Saying less but saying it more strongly may have been better. It’s an interesting contrast with Father Luke’s piece, in which typically the Father has a focus on one theme and makes a deep but not broad statement.
I didn’t much like the in-jokes either. Rather forced.
But boots is not a bad writer and this is not a horrible effort. I think perhaps he struggles a little bit for fluency: in his newsgroup posts and his bloggetry, it’s often clear that he has something in mind but struggles to express it just so. I think that boots would benefit from a more directed approach to his writing: one, work out what you’re going to say; two, work out the method of saying it. I have a vague recollection of being taught to write school essays by making a list of points. This is not a bad way of writing fiction, as it happens, if you struggle to corral your thoughts. You can do an AtoBtoC of how your story will go and what it will say at each point. If the AtoBtoC doesn’t work, the story won’t either.
In commenting, try not to quibble with minor points of issue. Try to add something, rather than to see my review as an Aunt Sally to knock down. Bear this in mind: you might not use serial commas, or think that glint and squint jingle too much, but I am not saying that this is what you should do in every instance at every time; merely suggesting how I think it could be improved. And anyway, I daresay I understand American English better than you do. About half my time is spent editing it. That’s not to say you should not point out when I’m wrong; just try not to make that your focus: obviously, I get things wrong, but there is not a contest to prove it.
Intercontinental
Death has been healthy and prosperous lately.
This is a terrible introduction. What does it even mean? Reading on, I realise that you could have done better with “Death has been doing good business lately.” It’s the idea you were aiming at, I think.
My mother passed away 5
years ago, at about the time the war ended and Mr. Booth put down the
President.
This is okay. The reader is wondering why you’re blithering on about death but it’s okay. We realise you’re setting the scene and you have found a relatively neat way to identify the period. Don’t write “at about”. Just “about” is fine. “Mr. Booth” is too cutesy. He’d be just about universally known as “Mr. Wilkes Booth”. “put down” is awkward here, because it would mean “floored” of a person. Yes, Lincoln was floored, but Wilkes Booth actually killed him. We do say “put down” of a dog, but it has connotations of sympathy that are lacking in an assassination.
My father is old and sick, little time can remain to him.
This is neatly put.
No sooner did I return home from being educated than I received word
that Grandmother was gone.
I suppose “from being educated” is okay. It implies that you spent your entire education away from home and puts you in a certain class. However, it more strongly suggests that you are in a vacation from boarding school than that you have graduated from university, which I suspect is your meaning. Just say “from university” or “from college” or whatever.
Yes, Death has been a busy fellow.
On the trip east it had seemed appropriate to dress in a fine suit.
When one as wealthy as Grandmother leaves the Earth, many others of
equivalent station gather around to distract themselves from the fact
of their own mortality by expressing sorrow at the corpse's passing
while they wonder what they will inherit.
Nice. Quite Dickensian.
Grandmother made fools of
them all, I was the only one to inherit, the only one with no care for
the wealth but great sorrow at the departure of such a good woman.
Okay. You’ve created your character fairly neatly, but you have to do something with him. I don’t think you did in this story.
Leaving the East for what I hoped would be the last time
Why though? It’s frustrating that you give no reason here or later for this.
I discarded
the fine suit as a thing of no value beyond that of any other hair
shirt, and carried with me only one small leather bag.
I didn’t like this. A fine suit is nothing like a hair shirt and you are not wearing it for anything like the reason one would wear a hair shirt. You are trying to be too clever. Rein yourself in and you have the beginnings of a good story.
In any case, your character has no reason to be penitent, nor does he ever acquire one. He ought to. Don’t drop the notion in and then pass it by.
The lawyers
would count the money that Grandmother left to me, and they would
parcel it out when I needed it, if I needed it; for the moment my only
need was peace, a thing always hard gained and never parcelled out by
lawyers.
No, don’t like it. You’ve squandered the early feel with this. Wills have “executors”, who count money. While they may well be lawyers, this reads oddly because it implies that the executors needed to pass the estate on to lawyers to count money. Why? It all seems too convoluted, too involved.
And you’ve really already drawn your character and need to do something with him. Overdefining a character is a mistake. The reader starts to feel stifled.
At Kansas City it was necessary to change trains for the final leg of
my journey.
Okay, but I’d write “I had to change trains at KC for the final leg…”
It was good to be off the train for at least a few
moments, it gave my buttocks a break from the constant pounding as the
train's wheels moved across thousands of uneven joints in the track.
Changing trains is rarely done in a few moments. The comma needs to be a semicolon or a full point, because you have run on.
I recalled watching them build the railroad when I was a boy, peering
over hilltops to watch the coolies lay track under close supervision.
When it was hot sometimes one of the coolies would die from some
combination of dehydration, heat prostration, and sheer overwork. His
fellows would be allowed to bury him as long as they were quick about
it, but they had to make up the time lost, and all had to work harder
to make up for the fallen one so that the rails could continue toward
completion on schedule.
Okay. I like the contrast of Eastern affluence with Western striving. Do “coolies” bury their dead though? I have the feeling they might burn them. And "peering over hilltops" is weird. Say "peering from hilltops" maybe.
There were fewer cars on the train west
All your trains are “west”, no? Reading on, I understand that you are contrasting the journey west with the one east, but if you are changing trains, you have more than one train each way!
and by the time I entered,
only one seat remained. I sat across from two men of indeterminate
age, both wearing black suits, one wearing a derby and the other
wearing a tophat.
I think you missed the opportunity to define them by saying they wore “cheap black suits” or mentioning a material. The hats don’t really say anything, although a topper is a bit weird, even for the 1870s.
I sat
Sat down. “Sat” means the same as “was sitting”, which is not what you mean here.
they glanced over, then resumed their
animated conversation.
“an animated conversation” is better because it is the first time we have encountered it.
I spent my time looking out the window as the
world passed by, but in such a confined space their words floated
through my thoughts.
Make the comma a semicolon. Just do it.
As the track joints below us noisily battered our behinds
No. You’ve done that. It doesn’t improve for the repetition.
through the
hard seats, and the country outside slowly became more familiar, a
picture of the two men and their lives effortlessly assembled itself
in my mind. We three were all dressed for our destinations, they for
the city, and myself for the land beyond the end of the tracks.
Hmmm. Not sure about that. You didn’t say what you were wearing, as it happens. And people on the frontier, at least in the films I’ve watched, often wear suits, black and otherwise.
Our
clothing categorized us;
Colon.
their suits made them competitors for the
favors of city life, and my rougher clothing made me an outsider,
unworthy of their attention, yet free to observe them because of our
proximity.
Yes, okay. But you should have earlier described your clothing a little. Perhaps if you had said that you switched your black suit for a pair of denims and a check shirt or some other thing like that…
It seemed that Derby was a gambler, one of a familiar breed who sought
easy wealth on a path of risk;
Period.
Tophat was a magician of sorts, able to
walk a coin across his knuckles and make it disappear. I wondered at
both, what was piecing itself together of their lives seemed strange
to me indeed.
That sentence adds nothing. I don’t really understand it.
From here, your story, not too badly constructed, doesn’t go anywhere. I felt a bit cheated. I wanted there to be some interaction. You’ve created your character but you don’t allow anything to happen to him! Except to be an observer. And what you observe is not sufficient to be worth the ride.
They spoke of many things. They spoke of politics, and of women, and
of wealth and how to gain it. They spoke of lesser men, and men of
lesser breeding, as they would speak of servants or cattle. They
seemed to have dreams that were remarkably similar, and included an
expansive home in which they would pursue their leisure to the
admiration of all.
Yes, okay. But what is he saying? What is he noticing? You’re not to the point here. You have already shown us a character who looks down his nose at wealth. You just seem to be trowelling it on. But nothing happens to your character. No reward, no loss. The story begs for one or other. He should play cards with the gambler and the magician and they should cheat him. Something like that. Do you see? There is no payoff. It’s all background, all fuzzy. Get to the point of it. And I have to note that the contrast between Eastern wealth and Western striving is destroyed by having Westerners who want the easy dollar!
On the train east I had been fortunate enough to
share a car with a very interesting man named Nikola, a man of thought
and some understanding who had been seeking a place to carry out
experiments with lightning.
No. The timeframe is wrong for Tesla, who would have been too young at this time. Be careful when you do this kind of thing that you have placed your characters correctly in time. I didn’t check that your dates work for building the railway west from Kansas City, but they seem right. Make sure they are because some readers will know.
Compared to him, Derby and Tophat seemed
common graspers of trinkets.
Compared “with” him. Distinguish between “compared to” and “compared with”. You compare like with like. If I compare this year’s figures with last year’s, they are two things of the same kind that I compare. If I compare you to a toad, I am holding you up to a toad to say something about you. Compare unlike to unlike. I hope that’s not too confusing because if you taste-tested apples and pears, you would say “I compared the apples with the pears”, but if you thought the apple tasted like a pear you would say “I compare this apple to a pear”. Do you see? In the former, I compare qualities of things that are in some way alike; in the latter, I compare the things one to the other.
A good way to decide which to use is to consider whether you are saying something is like something else or whether you are saying something is different from something else. When you compare figures, you are saying they are different and you are comparing them to see the difference; when you compare me to a toad, you are saying I am like a toad. Note that Shakespeare, when he said "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" was not suggesting that he should take you and a summer's day and see how you compare, but was asking whether you are like a summer's day at all.
A sudden jolt from an unusually uneven joint in the tracks woke me
from my thoughts to the present. Soon I would be home with my own,
where I had a place in a very different world. I sighed, looking out
at the clustered thunderheads above, thinking that I have
Had. You are in the past tense here.
much to
learn, just as Derby and Tophat and Nikola have much to learn. One
day Death will find each of us, busy fellow that he is. Until then
the Great Spirit will continue to teach us all.
And so it ended with a whimper, not a bang. My advice, I hope you’ll take it, is to go back and rebuild the story. Think about where it could go once you’ve set the scene. Make something happen. It would have been quite cool had you made Tesla your main character, and contrasted his striving with that of the gambler/magician.
On the plus side, you more or less stuck to the assignment. Thanks for trying it. I think it was a decent effort. I reproduce it in full below so that others can read it without being interrupted by me.
The copyright in this story belongs to its author, whose right to be identified as the author I respect by affixing his name, and the story is posted here with the author’s permission, their rights reserved.
Intercontinental
Death has been healthy and prosperous lately. My mother passed away 5
years ago, at about the time the war ended and Mr. Booth put down the
President. My father is old and sick, little time can remain to him.
No sooner did I return home from being educated than I received word
that Grandmother was gone. Yes, Death has been a busy fellow.
On the trip east it had seemed appropriate to dress in a fine suit.
When one as wealthy as Grandmother leaves the Earth, many others of
equivalent station gather around to distract themselves from the fact
of their own mortality by expressing sorrow at the corpse's passing
while they wonder what they will inherit. Grandmother made fools of
them all, I was the only one to inherit, the only one with no care for
the wealth but great sorrow at the departure of such a good woman.
Leaving the East for what I hoped would be the last time, I discarded
the fine suit as a thing of no value beyond that of any other hair
shirt, and carried with me only one small leather bag. The lawyers
would count the money that Grandmother left to me, and they would
parcel it out when I needed it, if I needed it; for the moment my only
need was peace, a thing always hard gained and never parcelled out by
lawyers.
At Kansas City it was necessary to change trains for the final leg of
my journey. It was good to be off the train for at least a few
moments, it gave my buttocks a break from the constant pounding as the
train's wheels moved across thousands of uneven joints in the track.
I recalled watching them build the railroad when I was a boy, peering
over hilltops to watch the coolies lay track under close supervision.
When it was hot sometimes one of the coolies would die from some
combination of dehydration, heat prostration, and sheer overwork. His
fellows would be allowed to bury him as long as they were quick about
it, but they had to make up the time lost, and all had to work harder
to make up for the fallen one so that the rails could continue toward
completion on schedule.
There were fewer cars on the train west, and by the time I entered,
only one seat remained. I sat across from two men of indeterminate
age, both wearing black suits, one wearing a derby and the other
wearing a tophat. As I sat, they glanced over, then resumed their
animated conversation. I spent my time looking out the window as the
world passed by, but in such a confined space their words floated
through my thoughts.
As the track joints below us noisily battered our behinds through the
hard seats, and the country outside slowly became more familiar, a
picture of the two men and their lives effortlessly assembled itself
in my mind. We three were all dressed for our destinations, they for
the city, and myself for the land beyond the end of the tracks. Our
clothing categorized us; their suits made them competitors for the
favors of city life, and my rougher clothing made me an outsider,
unworthy of their attention, yet free to observe them because of our
proximity.
It seemed that Derby was a gambler, one of a familiar breed who sought
easy wealth on a path of risk; Tophat was a magician of sorts, able to
walk a coin across his knuckles and make it disappear. I wondered at
both, what was piecing itself together of their lives seemed strange
to me indeed.
They spoke of many things. They spoke of politics, and of women, and
of wealth and how to gain it. They spoke of lesser men, and men of
lesser breeding, as they would speak of servants or cattle. They
seemed to have dreams that were remarkably similar, and included an
expansive home in which they would pursue their leisure to the
admiration of all. On the train east I had been fortunate enough to
share a car with a very interesting man named Nikola, a man of thought
and some understanding who had been seeking a place to carry out
experiments with lightning. Compared to him, Derby and Tophat seemed
common graspers of trinkets.
A sudden jolt from an unusually uneven joint in the tracks woke me
from my thoughts to the present. Soon I would be home with my own,
where I had a place in a very different world. I sighed, looking out
at the clustered thunderheads above, thinking that I have much to
learn, just as Derby and Tophat and Nikola have much to learn. One
day Death will find each of us, busy fellow that he is. Until then
the Great Spirit will continue to teach us all.
boots 2007
Wide asleep at the final table
At the final table of a five-dollar tourney, you have 125,000 chips. The big stack has 250,000 and the small stack 8,000 after paying his 8,000 blind. He has about only one more orbit to go. You pick up AQ and make it 20,000 to go. The big stack comes over the top for 120,000. The big stack has had a few lucky hands, pushed his luck a bit, and has seen me pushed off a few hands.
What do you do?
Well, I wasn't really paying attention. I thought the small stack had called. If I had realised he'd folded, I had an easy fold. Although I'm beating the big stack's range, it doesn't make sense to risk my stack when the other guy is on the respirator. On the other hand, if I won the hand, I am in a commanding position, reversing it with the big stack. Were it HU, it would be an easy call.
Anyway, I called, the big stack shows JJ, which makes it a coinflip, and the coin comes down hooks, with the flop JJQ. So the call cost me a hundred dollars but I can't complain.
Incidentally, the big stack's bet was terrible. If I had realised that the small stack had not called, I would have folded and the big stack would have missed a great chance to bust me or take more money. In his shoes, I would have flatcalled and seen a flop. He wins anyway if the flop doesn't show paint, and if it does, he can still call if he thinks I'm weak, and he's no worse off than if we had gone all in before the flop. With the flop as it was, I was going to go bust or close to it anyway. This was his style though. He had pushed a lot of guys off hands, which is a good way to go for the big stack: you use the chips to push the other guys around, make every decision very difficult. But here it was the wrong thing to do. He just isn't going to get enough big hands to make it worthwhile to steal with them. The move would have been better with a pair of 7s or rags.
Workshop: Soon enough
I approach criticising Father Luke’s story with some trepidation. I’m one of the Father’s biggest fans. He writes very much like Bukowski, but with a depth Bukowski never had, and a subtlety that I think Bukowski aimed for but rarely achieved. When Father Luke is successful, which he is sometimes but not always, he finds a huge theme in a tiny moment. Like Bukowski’s, his stories are often autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical. They are hardbitten but not entirely cynical. The impression is of an insightful man whom life has toughened but whose flame has not gone out.
Having said that, at first I wasn’t entirely convinced by Soon enough. I felt some discomfort in tone. I know this is new ground for Father Luke, but some of the confidence is gone from his writing. I think the central metaphor is quite obvious – I would have been surprised if no one had made the connection between train trip and life’s journey. That’s not to say Father Luke hasn’t used it neatly; he has (and I’m hoping that I can find a place or two where I can show that the Father’s eye for the telling detail really puts colour into the metaphor). But I felt maybe he could have gone on with it. However, thinking about it, I reckon that the denouement rescues it.
Soon Enough
Presently the train pulled into the station.
The first sentence, we all know, although it doesn’t “make or break” the story, sets the tone, sometimes irrevocably. I didn’t like “Presently”. It has such specialised usage (commonly in “I’ll be there presently”, where it means “very soon” and “he is presently head of equities”, where it is used for “now”, not that “now” is needed, given that the present tense in this context says “now”) that I struggled to make meaning with it. I wonder whether it is saying “Just then, the train...” or “Soon afterwards, the train...”
I would like either here. They make the sentence much more interesting than simply plainly stating that the train pulled into the station (although I’m enough of an admirer of plain writing to feel that is a perfectly decent start). The first says that something has been going on and it’s quite abruptly interrupted. It makes the character – whom we are yet to meet, so it could be characters – pre-exist. The second gives an even stronger idea of something’s having happened. And on top of this, we generally use it to say “this is the next significant thing that happened”. It conveys weight both to what has gone and what is to come.
I liked that it’s the train. This makes the train a focus of interest, because it’s not just any train. We are tipped off that the train is significant to the character(s). If the train was just the insignificant mode of transport in a story, it’d be “a” train.
Do I really think short phrases or single words really convey such a huge freight of meaning. Yes, I do. Sometimes, there’s a happy chance to do a lot of work with a few words. Not always: some of the time there just is more to say, but on occasion there is le mot juste.
There were three cars
including the train's engine.
I think this is too simple and would have read better as a more active sentence without the existential there is. Because I would choose “the engine pulled two cars”, I’d need to change my first-sentence “pulled” into, maybe, “drew”.
The conductor wore a black cap, wire
glasses and black sleeve protectors.
As a very minor matter, Father Luke is an American, so there should be a comma before the “and”.
I liked “black cap”. I immediately thought “hanging judge”.
He held the brim of his hat and
jumped onto the gravel of the tracks near the outside platform.
I like that he held onto his hat. Because it is what you say when someone does something daring, isn’t it? Father Luke isn’t too familiar with trains. If he was, he’d probably have said “trackway” rather than “tracks” (which to me at least are just the rails) and “up platform” or “down platform” for “outside platform” (the latter is okay but if the platforms weren’t numbered, this is how you’d probably refer to them).
He
walked into an empty train station.
Glare made it impossible to see inside the windows of the train.
“through the windows of the train” or “inside the train”. You can’t write both together because the sentence says you are literally trying to see inside the window pane.
Inside the middle car, Pastor Mc Corkhill sat watching a coin spin on
a table with his forearms resting on his thighs, flattening the crease
in his black pants.
Whether intentionally or not, here is something Father Luke always does well: neat observation. The pastor does not just have his forearms resting on his thighs, but is resting on them firmly enough to flatten the crease in his pants. I know that that doesn’t have to be too firm but the point is, you know the author has seen someone slumped onto their knees and has thought, man, they’re so slumped that they’ve flattened out their trousers.
Life moves us, he thought, watching the coin. Moves us, and moves
through us with little or no matter as to our preferences. All in all
there is no real fairness to it at all. A ride with no choices and but
one final destination.
Because the coin metaphor is often used in poker, I think of coins as the symbol of chance. I see a contradiction here that I think works very well. When I read “pastor” (and note that it’s the black-hat type), I start thinking of the more protestant Protestants, if you know what I mean). I think of John Calvin, and of course the notion that our lives are predestined and God’s will, not your free will, is done. The contradiction is that the pastor is thinking that life is controlled not by God’s will but by chance.
The silver coin slowed and dropped to one side. Pastor Mc Corkhill
reached his left arm up, tugged at his cuff so that white sleeve
showed from under his black coat. He picked the coin up with his right
hand and spun it. He glanced to the window, squinting against the
glint of the setting sun as it reflected off the tin roof of the
station.
Squint and glint jingle a bit, and setting suns don’t really “glint”. Father Luke must have a similar late afternoon to ours, because at five o’clock it becomes almost impossible to drive west, because the low sun is blinding. I’d maybe just go for “light” or just “squinting against the setting sun...” As a minor matter, I might have preferred "glanced through the window". If he was looking at the window rather than through it, I would write "glanced at the window". Partridge is good for writers who struggle with the correct prepositions to use with verbs.
The conductor walked to the train. He grabbed hold and pulled himself
up and into the train.
Presently the train began moving.
Presently works here for the reasons it didn’t work previously. Here it means “Soon afterwards” with a hint of “as expected”.
It would arrive at it's destination
soon enough.
“its”.
Now this sentence rocked. “Soon enough” nearly always has the implication “so don’t be in a hurry” or at least of “unhurriedness”, sometimes even unwantedness, as in “If I never see him again, that’ll be soon enough for me”. It’s also a rather insouciant phrase. It’s a weary phrase, a sighing phrase; it says “I can’t be fucked”. The train will make its destination soon enough but yeah, so what? Who cares, next…
Suddenly, I realise Father Luke has set us up. The portentousness of the black cap and the dark-clad priest and conductor, and so on, has led us to feel that this is all very serious. But the Father leaves us with a shrug. In a sentence, he has dismissed life’s journey and you realise that he is not saying life is like a journey, blah blah, but that life is something you simply ride in, no more significant than a train trip from here to there. He says yeah, you know, it’s all very exciting but you just sit back in your seat and, because trains just do go where they’re going, you’ll get where you’re going soon enough.
That’s my opinion. I’d be glad to hear others. Obviously there are the comments but if I get an email about the story, I’ll post it. I am posting the story in full below so that it can be read. As with all these stories, just so it’s clear, the copyright in all these stories belongs to its author, whose right to be identified as the author I of course respect by affixing their name (a far more important right than copyright, in my view), and the story is posted here with the author’s permission, their rights reserved.
***
Soon Enough
Presently the train pulled into the station. There were three cars
including the train's engine. The conductor wore a black cap, wire
glasses and black sleeve protectors. He held the brim of his hat and
jumped onto the gravel of the tracks near the outside platform. He
walked into an empty train station.
Glare made it impossible to see inside the windows of the train.
Inside the middle car, Pastor Mc Corkhill sat watching a coin spin on
a table with his forearms resting on his thighs, flattening the crease
in his black pants.
Life moves us, he thought, watching the coin. Moves us, and moves
through us with little or no matter as to our preferences. All in all
there is no real fairness to it at all. A ride with no choices and but
one final destination.
The silver coin slowed and dropped to one side. Pastor Mc Corkhill
reached his left arm up, tugged at his cuff so that white sleeve
showed from under his black coat. He picked the coin up with his right
hand and spun it. He glanced to the window, squinting against the
glint of the setting sun as it reflected off the tin roof of the
station.
The conductor walked to the train. He grabbed hold and pulled himself
up and into the train.
Presently the train began moving. It would arrive at it's destination
soon enough.
Father Luke 2007
Aces
Although S has now won three Friday tourneys, I don’t think he knows poker. I think he has won because he has the aggro style that works well in small tourneys and has run a bit hot. We are not particularly strong players so that is probably enough. But he is not a good player, I am sure of that. Why?
We are talking about Jupiters and whether it’s worth playing there. I’ve heard there’s a dollar-a-hand seat charge, which for 5/10 poker is excessive. So I ask the guys who’ve played there, how many go to the flop? All of them, S says. It’s rubbish. They always suck out. You just want to play multiway hands.
He is wrong and that is why I know he doesn’t have an understanding of poker. I tell him that is my dream game and I would play it every night if I could. So play it, he says, because he likes to be rude, because he doesn’t like that I’m a learner and like to talk about the game.
If I had three thousand dollars, I would play it. I’d be unhappy about the toke, but I think it might even be beatable. I know I will at least become a better player than S – much better – because I do understand that.
What is poker? It is laying and taking bets. If you are tenhanded and pay a bet to see the flop, you have, without any other information, accepted a bet at nine to one that you will win the hand. When would this be a good bet to take?
What S does not even consider is that this is a good bet to take any time you are better than a nine to one chance to win! This is absolutely elementary and you simply cannot ever become a decent player if you don’t get it.
Say you have a pair of aces. It is definitely not what S means by a “multiway hand” (he means suited connectors, ace suited and small pairs that can flop a set). You are about a 30% chance to win against nine players with random hands (and if all nine see a flop, they can be considered to have random hands; I won’t go into why but in the long run it’s a reasonable approximation). That means that seven out of 10 times you get rockets, you will be beaten if all nine call you down. Say you betted preflop, flop, turn, river. And they all just call you down, no raises or whatever. Seven out of 10 times you would lose 3.5bb; so you’d lose 24.5bb. But when you win, you win 10 of each: 35bb. Times it by three, 105bb. Take the losings from the winnings and hello! You win a bucketful of cash. Now, it doesn’t work like that, of course. You get raised sometimes. You drop it before the river sometimes. Not all the fish call you. But the key to it is that when you call a bet preflop, you are three times more likely to win than anyone else! Yes, you lose most. But you are going to play enough hands in your career for that not to matter.
Just to be clear, think of this, there is only 100% chance to win to share out. There is a unity that each person has a slice of. (Even if you split a pot, it’s not as though the casino If I have 30% chance, there is only 70% to go round the other players. If we all just flatcalled preflop, they are averaging about 8% each and paying 10% each. They are, at least theoretically, losing money. To me.
Okay, that’s aces. But everything else loses, right? Well no. I raise with hands that are about 15% against nine hands. I have the edge, and play enough hands, I will win. If you do not see why, imagine this: you are offered a thousand coin flips at a dollar a flip; but the coin isn’t quite true and heads will come up 55%. Now, it should be clear enough that you are going to lose a lot of flips but you’ll take the bet, won’t you? You don’t care about the 450 flips you are likely to lose because you’re figuring to win 550 and make 50 bucks profit. That’s how poker works. If you can take bets that favour you, you should take them, and if nine guys come to the flop with me every time I pick up a hand I want to play, I am going to win, regardless that they suck out on me more often than not.
Always the bridesmaid
So I am ahead, head's up, and I'm thinking this time I am going to win the Friday night game. I've played well enough. S, my opponent, is one of the better players but has played poorly, getting lucky several times to get this far. He has been all in six times, three with me, five times with the worst of it, and each time bar the last he has escaped. On the last, I pushed all in with AA and he called with JT. That put me ahead.
Earlier in the night, J, new to our game, had pushed and I looked down at 99. I passed but I kicked myself when he showed A6s. Who would have guessed though that with no pressure a guy would push with such a weak hand? Crediting my opponents with more ability than they have is a weakness of mine. (What makes it worse is that he and the other guy in the hand rabbithunted and a 9 came on the flop.) But he got busted with that kind of play later, although not by me.
So S pushes and I look down at JT and call. This is tilt. I know not to call all ins with JT but S has been whining about being tired and that is why he has been pushing so hard with crap. But I have 30x the BB and don't need to call. I just think, right, get it over with. Stupid. He has just made the exact same call and I know he was dumb to do it, so what do I do?
By a quirk of fate, which I'm sure will tickle boots, he shows AA, and of course I lose the hand. I bust on the next hand.
So I'm disappointed. I threw away a good position. I knew the guy would not let me play poker and would push at every chance, but I could and should have picked my spot. I am not kicking myself too hard though. I have cashed again and my game is getting better. Ironically, what puts me in the money so often is an unwillingness to make loose calls. W, the host, talking to me after the game says, well, sometimes you'll throw out a quite big bet and then you'll always fold to the raise. I say, I don't always fold to the raise (because I don't, of course) but this is what it is, one time the other guy had made a smallish bet at the flop. He'd been doing it all night and stealing quite a lot of flops. About 70% of the time I'd say, he was stealing with nothing much. The rest of the time, the small bet was a suck bet, looking for action. So on this hand, with about 1600 already in the pot, he'd put in 500. The flop is showing JJ8r. I have ace high. This looks like a probe bet, so I come over the top for 1500. I'm betting 1500 to win 2100. You don't need to be a maths genius to work out that I'm figuring the odds at 2100/1500 on a 7/3 shot. If he has nothing, he'll fold. If he has something, he'll push all in. I reckon he's unlikely to bluff all in because I raised PF and can all too easily have something like AJ or a decent pocket pair. I haven't been caught out of line, although I have raised light during the evening. He pushes all in. This is an easy fold. W may well have called but it's not a good play to throw good money after bad. I could easily afford the bet (otherwise, I would not have made it) and I was happy with that play. It's pretty standard. That W doesn't understand that explains why he is losing money on Friday nights.
Concepts such as revenge, or any personal feeling, don't have any place in poker, but it is still sweet to turn the tables. On another hand, I'm in the BB with 52. R, who had called me down with fuck all the other week, and rivered a huge suckout, had the big stack, having hit some very good flops. The flop came A4x, giving me a gutshot draw. R made a bet that I interpreted as saying he had a pair, maybe not the ace (I can't remember what the other card was, a queen maybe, something high enough to feel like a big pair though, and he could reasonably take it no one had an ace because there had been no PF raise). I called. In limit, this would be a loose call, because the pot was only paying maybe 3 to 1. But sometimes in NL, it's worth calling a small bet to try to hit a gutshot. If you don't make it and you are bet at again, you can just fold. The turn was a 3, making my straight. I checked, he bet, I called. The river was a 9 or J or something similar, lower than his pair, but the kind of card that I might have paired. I went all in. He called with his pair. That's a terrible call. A pair is not a great hand in NL. I don't think he'd even seen the straight.
It's easy to think I was just lucky. But everyone gets lucky at least on one hand in a night. Two things matter. First, you have to make the most of your luck and second, you have to make sure you don't piss your luck away on hands in which you're not so lucky. T, another new player, wasted nearly all his chips with AK, flopping it ace high and running scared when his opponent called a big flop bet and then led out at the turn. He did two things wrong. First, he did not ensure seeing all five cards with AK, which is a mistake if you're going to play it. Second, his fold was terrible. What more can you want with AK than to flop an A or K? It's a top pair hand and you have top pair. I'm pushing right there. If someone wants to call with their shitty ace, let them. If you're beat, you're beat.
I woke up with AK on two hands. The first, some guy raised, I pushed all in. He called. He had a pair of fives. Terrible call but he happened to be ahead. This is a coinflip though: if you have AK vs a pair that doesn't have an A or K, the pair is 54/46 ahead (my AK was suited, which makes it 52/48). I flopped a K and he didn't suck out on me, so I doubled up. I don't mind that play. In a single-table tourney, you have to take a risk or two. Pushing with AK is a risk because you trail pairs (although a solid player won't likely raise a pair of fives with eight other players in the hand; I certainly wouldn't), but you are beating the range that will have raised. Most players will raise a decent (or not so decent) ace, and you see that often, or KQ/KJ, even KT, all of which you're dominating. (M senior, a reasonably tight player, has this failing, which is the downfall of his game (or one of them): he will raise with pairs and make big pots with them, and then feel wedded to the hand when it goes pearshaped. Now I think of it, this is not as bad as going too far with weak hands, which he also does.)
The other AK, the same guy raised (he had a bigger stack than me both times). I pushed. He called. He showed AJ. I don't like his call. I was playing fairly tight, certainly not getting out of line with raises, so a thinking player would put me on a decent hand. But this guy is of a type. He was very aggressive, stealing a lot of pots (this is the same guy I mentioned earlier), bluffing a lot (it's funny, you know when guys are bluffing a lot, even if they don't show their hands -- how? Because they are in a lot of hands and win most of them. No one runs that hot.) and using aggression to win more than his share. That's good but guys like him just don't get that it's only one element of a complex game. Much more important is to work your opponents out and play them. If I am playing Dr Zen, and he pushes all in with a nearly full table and no pressure on him from a short stack, I'm putting him on something that beats AJ easily and I fold.
Chinese whisper
So, anyway, I forgot to lie on my application form for a visa for China and had to write a statement that I was only going there for tourism and not to work. Because it's the last thing China needs, rogue textbook editors running around fixing up copy.
Actually, I could do with the work. If anyone were to ask me to fix up a textbook while I was strolling the streets of Shanghai or Qingdao, I would take them up on it. I sit down at night with columns of figures: on one side, the work I can count on coming in and my current resources, on the other, the outgoings I must meet. It seems a million miles from my carefree, often broke youth. I suppose this is what "growing up" comes down to.
It has taken the shine off my trip a little, knowing that if I didn't go, I would be financially secure for the rest of the year. But uncertainty is, I suppose, part of being a freelance, and so too is being flooded or being parched. I daresay I will score a couple of projects later in the year and you will find me, come November, moaning that I just can't keep up.
Seasoned competitors
Reading were my second team when I was a child. Why I had two teams, I don't know, but I did. I followed their results and was happy when they won, sad when they lost. Not as happy or sad as I was about Leeds, but faintly so. Reading were one of those teams who yo-yo'd between the bottom two divisions, whose highest aspiration was to make it to the Second. So it's with some joy that I see that Reading won their first match in the Premiership, which was unthinkable when I used to stand in the terraces and watch Davey Crown kick lumps out of opposition strikers.
My second team has since childhood always been the local side, wherever I have lived. Briefly that was Reading, coincidentally, but it has also been Brighton, QPR, Gloucester City and Queensland Roar, who I will go to watch on Saturday. I suppose it would have been Palace when I lived in Clapham but I didn't go to football then. I have been to other grounds, of course, mainly to watch Leeds.
Nothing beats live football. You could compare it with watching a band live against listening to their records (or more accurately watching them perform live on TV). It is the fellow feeling: the suffering together, the joy of scoring, winning, and something more. The more is that you can understand football so much more if you are watching it live. The agonies of the players are realler; the intricacies clearer; the skills more impressive. The beautiful game is just more beautiful in the flesh.
I do not have particularly high hopes of the new season. For Leeds, it is looking like an uphill struggle. They sold the best of their strikers and the new signings do not look to me like those of an ambitious, upwardly mobile team; rather, they seem the water-treading shufflings of the permanent second-level outfit. For the Roar, the exciting talents of Brosque and Williams are gone, and in their place are players who do not inspire much hope of improvement. Worst of all, Bleiberg was not sacked, although he thoroughly deserved it, and there is no sign at all that he has learned anything from last season. In the preseason, the Roar have been as muddled and hopeless as they were in the worst of last season. Still, football is one of the few areas of life in which it feels about as good to suffer as it does to succeed, so I am sure I will enjoy the season nonetheless, if only because I'll have plenty to moan about.
I doubt it
What use is it to doubt? We are adrift at sea and we are lucky if we have a boat. Why would we want to dive in and risk drowning in seas that are over our heads?
I look at Hizbullah's boys with envy. They are stupid but they are not doubtful of the course their lives should take. They are rooted in a place and they are fuelled by hatred of the Other and love of their god.
We imagine they are angry but we are wrong to, I think. They are happy. Happiness is contented striving, I once read. I can go with that. If I had a cause I could sacrifice myself to, I think I would be happy.
***
In any case, the Cartesian project is based on a lie, that being that it is good to doubt. It has led us all to pretending to doubt the wrong things. In a sense, relativism was a certain outcome of Descartes' sitting in front of his fire, because if you will not allow a thing to be right in and of itself (even though Descartes himself did not go that far; he had to accommodate a faith in God that the likes of me do not), then you allow everything to be right.
But is it a lie? That's my first thought because science has not been built on doubts (don't kid yourself that falsification implies doubt: it has been built on increasing certainty through induction). But so much of what we know points to doubt as central: quantum mechanics is the paradigm of doubting what is going on; no thinking person can either believe or disbelieve in God (by which I mean the concept rather than any particular version of it) without doubt unless they make a fundamental commitment that goes beyond rationality (I was interested to find out -- and a little disappointed -- that Brisbane's secular humanists, who claim to be ultrarationalists, are as dogmatic about the nonexistence of God as some Christians are about his existence, and on as little evidence (although, saying that, I very much enjoyed reading one screaming fundamentalist nutter's philosophical disproof of God, which I only regretted was too incomprehensible for me to analyse here, but centred on a belief that God is excluded by modern physics)); theories that are right today are wrong tomorrow. Sometimes knowledge seems impossible. Yet we know it is not. We know that even if our knowledge is built on shaky foundations, we'll still cleave to it. I do not entirely think this is wrong because swimming around in unknowing can be so painful.
These have become notes, where they were to be a reasoned and interesting piece. I was sidetracked and will have to come back to it. Never mind.
Winners... grinners
Should I learn no limit? I'm asking myself for two reasons. The first is that I don't feel I am making progress at limit. I am winning more than I'm losing and I'm fairly sure that altogether I'm a winning player, but I don't feel I'm any better now than I was a couple of months ago. I'm sure all players who are learning the game have this feeling. Bad play can really hurt you in limit. You patiently wait for the good hands and then you fuck them up. The second reason is that whereas I thought I would be temperamentally better suited to limit, I enjoy no limit more, and I think I play it better. I do not think I am any good at it but I do win money.
I've just won a sitngo. It is just a five-dollar game but winning is winning. You have to be better than the other nine players. Before that, I came fourth. I made a bad play as a bluff. It was tilt. I suffer from tilt and need to think about how I can fix that. (For those who enjoy reading about horrible play, it went like this. Blinds of 100-200. Villain bet 600. I called with A8s in the big blind. That's an okay call. I'm putting villain on A-rag or a small pair at best; maybe just stealing with something smaller even than that. The flop comes Q-rag-rag, rainbow. Not a great flop for me, but I can be reasonably confident it's not great for him either. I check, he bets about 300. Looks like a weak continuation bet. I push all in. I'm thinking that he's missed and has A high. He might be beating me but he's not going to call and I can take this decent pot. What the fuck came over me? I knew I should not do it and I did it. Tilt. The guy had AQ and I was finished.)
So I got back on the horse after that and played a tiltfree game. I took some horrendous beats and could have been tilted by some halfwitted slowplaying. One guy in particular insisted on slowplaying everything. I comforted myself with laughing at his poor play though. Slowplaying has its place, but it's better to bet for value and not let your opponents have the free cards to beat you. On one hand, he had a pair of Ks. He limped and I limped with QT. The flop came Q high. He checked. I bet out. He called. He checked and I bet out again on the turn, which was a brick, and he called. But I had kept my bet small because I was suspicious. The river was another brick. He made a small bet and I paid him off. A few hands later, he had K7 and the flop came 776. There were four to the flop. All checked. The turn was a brick. All checked. The river paired one of my cards. I bet out. He raised and I called, suspecting the bluff. So I paid him, what, 500 chips with the blinds at I think it was 50/100. Big deal. He didn't take a cent from the other two players. Later on, he met his end with a hint of poetic justice. He had hit the flop and yet again slowplayed, this time with top pair. The turn was a brick. The other guy bet, he pushed all in. The other guy called. He had slowplayed a bigger pair! I L'dMAO.
Once in the money, I outplayed the other guys. I had plenty of space to manoeuvre because the blinds were still quite small. So I watched and waited and then started putting some moves on them. The big stack, A, was a particular kind of player. This type will bet when they have an ace, say, or a pair, but rarely with a king or worse. After the flop, they will bet when they hit and will fold to a bet if they haven't. They'll sometimes check and call with a small pair, and sometimes will slowplay when they have called a PF raise and think that they have the raiser beat. I don't know how you'd characterise that type of player but I know them when I see them. They're awesomely predictable. What they don't realise is that
they are exactly the kind of player who gets sucked in by a slowplay. A tricky player, knowing where he is against a player like A, can wait for just that hand where A hits and he hits too.
The other guy was just rubbish. The worst thing you can do in poker is call bets when you neither figure to be ahead nor are drawing to be ahead (or even if you are drawing to be ahead, you figure to pay more than you'll ever earn when you hit, over the course of all the bets you take). Sometimes, you'll be calling with a small pair and will get lucky, but generally, you want to be betting or folding, not calling, unless you are drawing. You can take that too far, or forget the folding part, and play too loosely and aggressively, but it's far better to be a bit aggro and win some, lose some than to be too willing to pay when you are losing.
I guess he can consider himself a bit unlucky because he got all in with me with AK. I had QQ. It's the classic coin flip. I love it! I love it either way. You are a slight favourite with the ladies but I don't mind having Slick. It gets the heart going. My ladies held up and that was him done. I did the poker equivalent of slapping A around. He had run pretty hot early in the tourney, and had amassed a lot of chips, but by this stage, I was the big stack, and I used it to push him around.
Of course, I remind myself, when I make the final table of the stud freeroll, I think I should be a stud player; when I win a packet at limit, I should stick to limit... that's how it goes. Your best game is always the one you just won at!
Assignment
Here are the rules for the writing assignment I'm setting anyone who's interested in doing a writing assignment.
1/ You must obey the classical unities. These are:
unity of action (you must only have one plot, no subplots and, importantly, the action must be whole);
unity of place (the story must be set in one place and cannot be shifted geographically);
unity of time (in a play, unity of time demands that the action does not cover a longer amount of time than the play does (originally, it was no longer than one day); you figure out for yourself what that means for a short story). If you're not clear on the classical unities, there's a typically intellectually underpowered
Wikipedia article that you can read but if you want discussion of how the unities are employed in drama, and how they can shape a piece of fiction, you'll have to cast your net further
1.
2/ You must set your piece on a train.
3/ You can write fiction, faction, semifiction, nonfiction. I don't care which.
4/ You may not feature more than three characters but any character you do feature must be properly drawn. You will have to figure out what that means for yourself.
I'm willing to criticise and discuss anything submitted to me at drzen1 AT gmail DOT com or any other email addy you have for me. I intend to post pieces and critiques here, so if you don't want that, don't send me anything, or at least let me know so that I can keep your critique private. I'm hoping that we can have a discussion in the comments, and also that others might add their thoughts by email. I'll also post anything that is sent to me unless otherwise noted.
But besides that, I'm going to be looking for something either good or bad, but notably so either way, to write a post about. I intend for this to be a technical post, so for instance, I might talk about how a choice of tense was incorrect or how a writer had skilfully drawn his or her character. I'll also do the assignment myself but anyone with the temerity to criticise me knows what they're likely to get.
There's no deadline.
1 Why make you stick to the unities? Simple. A problem many writers have is that they are not disciplined and are unable to constrain their ideas to a suitable vehicle. They either try to force too much action into a story that conceptually will not bear it or do not sufficiently focus their ideas. So by using an artifical limit, you are setting the constraints that will help you focus.
Return
No fold'em
So on Friday night I forgot one of the basic lessons of poker, which is don't try to bluff calling stations. Our Friday night game was down to four players, all of whom I'm far superior to, so I was confident.
Oh dear. I know a problem in my game is a propensity to tilt, but tilt works both ways. It's not just playing wrongly because you are losing. It's also playing wrongly because you are winning or expect to win.
The players I was against were bad enough that all I needed to do was play solidly, wait for good hands and bet them. Even fourhanded, when you need to play looser, there's no need to go crazy with the blinds low.
But here's an example of how badly I went (and how rubbish my opponents were).
Blinds are 50/100.
I raise 400 preflop with Ax (I forget what the x was but it doesn't matter). Only the big blind, R, calls. We both have stacks of about 5000 chips.
The flop comes KQJ rainbow. I am a bit concerned that he might have hit the flop but he checks so I figure that he will fold to a bet if he has not and probably raise if he has. He does not understand how to extract value when he is ahead. I put in 1000 chips. He calls.
I interpret the call as most likely having paired the J. Okay, I'm probably behind but I know that he probably does not have a K. He would have bet out if he had. The turn is another K. He checks. I put in 1500 chips.
He calls again. This is unreal. Maybe he has a K and is slowplaying? It's not like him but it has to be a possibility. I have strongly represented a K. I raised preflop and although I've c-betted a flop before and he knows that, my flop bet was bigger than pot size and I fired again, big, on the turn.
The river is an 8. He makes a small bet and I make a crying call. He shows 85 of diamonds.
There wasn't even a diamond on the flop.
The guy has called bets on the flop and turn assuming that I was bluffing (which I was, but it's a poor assumption on his part) or had a pair and was chancing it, and he was hoping to hit a six-outer (because if I'm bluffing I must have an ace or a pair). That is terrible poker. I just couldn't believe it.
Sometimes it is right to call a bet to pick off a bluff. But he called off two-thirds of his stack without a hand that could even beat a bluff, unless he thought I had raised preflop with 7 high! Oh, he said, I called the raise because I was suited.
You what? I said. Being suited is not a big advantage fourhanded (and nothing like so much of an advantage in NL anyway as it is in limit), and calling with any two suited is terrible because you will pay off so many raises trying to get lucky and you have too few opponents to get paid (a good player will not pay you anyway because he will fold if he thinks you have a flush). If he had flopped a flush and bet it, I would have straight away folded. If he had slowplayed, I would have suspected he had it, and played cautiously. If he had flopped a twoflush, he would have had to pay bets to try to fill his flush with no guarantee that I would pay off if he hit (because it is generally rather obvious that you are drawing to a flush and doubly obvious when you hit it). All in all, it's a sucker play.
Still, I was unlucky. His calls were terrible and three times out of four I would have beaten him even though I didn't pair. In the metagame of trying to win the tourney, it was a bad play to try to muscle him out of it but in the long term, I'm going to make a lot of money from his being in the game. He has no idea how bad his play was: that he could say "I was suited so I called the raise" with 8 high shows that he just does not get it (he should have folded without hesitation preflop, failing that on the flop, failing that on the turn: he had nothing! I at least had an overcard and a draw if I was behind: an ace or ten would have beaten him if he had paired his jack, as I had thought).
Now, the question is, would I be congratulating myself on bold, good play had he not paired on the river? I'm just not sure. If I had not suspected I was behind, then maybe I would be right to. But the reason I am kicking myself is that I actually thought I was muscling him off a pair of jacks, and let's face it, a player bad enough to call down four paint cards with 8 high because he thinks you've whiffed with an ace or small pair is never folding a pair of Js if he thinks you have that.
It's difficult to analyse poker hands with hindsight. If I put him on nothing, I made a good play. And knowing what he had, I made the correct play. He made terrible mistakes PF, flop and turn. If I could have seen his cards, and he mine, I would bet and he would fold.
Still, I would have been okay if the other useless guy didn't do practically the same thing a few hands later (he paired small on something like a KQ3 flop and called bets to the river -- mark me down as someone who just doesn't learn from their mistakes).
For people who do not play, or rather do not understand, poker, it might seem strange that I can be considering the other players poor and myself good. After all, I crashed out and they survived! Well yes, that's true, but next time we play, and the time after, and the time after that, they'll be making the same terrible calls and won't suck out. I had a bad night and can kick myself for it, but they are having bad lifetimes at poker.
On flair versus technique
Occasionally, a person who has inferior writing skills to mine will tell me that they don't have anything to learn from me because I am rules-bound and they are creative. The notion is that creativity is somehow damaged by learning how to write well technically. This is transparently rubbish. Most great writers are technically excellent and have read and studied writing hard. The difference between them and the unschooled is visible in their writing. I consider that the main ramification of my better understanding of technical side is that not only do I write better than the "creative" ones but I can tell them why too.
Just now, a friend of mine told me that they don't want to take part in my online workshop because they have nothing to learn from me. They implied that, because I am an editor, I am just a rules-bound mole, delving away in language to throw up molehills of boring, crusty old bollocks, whereas they, free from the constraints of learning how to write, could take flight. Naturally, this would have made more impact on me had it been true that the person in question really could write brilliantly, but as so often is the case with the "creative" types who think they cannot learn, it is not true.
Just so I'm not misunderstood, I'm not suggesting that a person must understand what they are doing to be able to do it. I'm rather pointing out that a technical review is a help when you are not able to do what you are trying to. Most of the "rules" of English are internalised in competent writers (many are of course the same as those of spoken English, and one rarely thinks of speakers as incompetent).
This is what I wrote to them:
You would understand writing better -- and be a much better writer for it -- if you understood that there is no opposition between "creativity" and "rules", because the "rules" are not constraints on creativity but part of the means for building it! They aren't either analogous to laws, or even road rules. They are more like the road than the rules for driving on it. And if I am helping people learn to write, I don't discuss their writing solely in terms of "rules" (although I focus on that when I am blogging about writing because I do not generally blog reviews or critiques, and I am interested in technical aspects of writing for obvious reasons). When I've reviewed your writing, I didn't discuss it with you in terms of the rules, rather, I focused on much broader ideas of how you communicate what you want to say (or don't), how you use register (or don't). Learning how to write is not a question of learning grammar but of learning how to mould your communication effectively. It's a rather small part of learning to write to learn good grammar, but a big part to learn why bad grammar is fucking up your message. If you compare writing with making music, grammar is like music theory. You may not know the "rules" of music theory, but if you disobey them, your music will, I'm sorry to say, not work.I am not hurt or dismayed when someone claims that I can't possibly have an imagination, be creative or be an artist because I have a good technical understanding of English and use it to make a living. I simply consider that person to be ignorant of what makes good writing good and no surprise: you rarely hear that from someone who actually can write well. Good writers may have natural talent but they are aware that they had to nurture it, increase it and mature it.
Free to not get it
"Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world,"
says John Reid.No, I get it. To have my freedoms protected, I need to give up my freedoms. It's one of the problems with freedoms that people
just will abuse them. So what do you do?
Reid's answer is to take away the freedoms. Anyone who thinks that's a bad thing, including judges who seek to protect us from his depradations, "doesn't get it".
I get it. It's a bad old world. It always has been. There always has been and probably always will be people trying to kill one another. C'est la fucking vie innit.
And there will probably always be demagogues who insist that there is a shadowy Other that we must be protected from by being oppressed. The strange thing is that most of us, I reckon, are more worried about our own governments' harming us than the small chance that we'll be on the next train bombed.
What are the odds?
What are the odds?
It’s often the first thing I ask myself when I’m deciding what to do in a poker hand. Often, the odds dictate what to do. Because I play limit holdem mostly, decisions are usually simple. I either have the best of it if I call or I don’t.
Play for a while and you have the most common odds memorised. Drawing to a flush, a bit more than four to one; drawing to an openended straight, 4.75 to one; drawing to an inside straight, about 10 to one; drawing to a set, eight to one on the flop, 22 to one on a single card. For the uninitiated, drawing simply means trying to get the card that will make your hand a more powerful one. If I have JT and the board shows 984, I have an openended straight draw. Any Q or 7 will make me a straight, which is usually a strong hand.
A couple of things confuse most players who are trying to play well. First, you haven’t actually won when you draw with the correct odds and miss. You have lost the bet you made. The reason you take bets when you have the best of it is that you will tend to win over the long term. But the long term can be very long! It is because of the law of large numbers that it is worth taking bets that favour you. The other thing is that the long term starts with your next hand; in other words, it is reset. Just as if you were to flip a coin and get ten heads, you will not be any more likely to hit a tail on the next flip. It is just that the ten flips will turn out to be a blip in the bigger picture. This is hard to remember when you have missed four flushes in a row! You expect to win the next. But you are no more likely to win the next than you were the last. Over time, your results will converge on the odds, ever closer with ever more hands, but the past is not a guarantee of the future in the short term.
Which can be frustrating, of course. When you are running cold, not picking up hands with the distribution you would expect, it can be very painful to miss flushes over and over again.
(What do I mean, the distribution you would expect? I mean that when you receive cards at random you can expect high cards x% of the time, pairs y% of the time, suited cards z% of the time, just because those cards make up those percentages of the combinations possible from 52 cards.)
So why trust the odds? Why not gamble more often on my draws coming in? That’s what some of my opponents do. They try to draw to outrageous longshots, which sometimes come in. But they pay for that sometimes, over and over, with a bet here, a bet there. Mostly, they only count the ones they win, and do not think about all the dollars they threw away chasing when they had the worst of it. The reason I don’t do it is because I intend to play for a long time and I don’t want to go busto doing it. I can be confident that over time, the times my flushes come in will converge on their odds (they will, even in the shorter term, tend to come in as often as expected: anecdotally, I can report that I do seem to hit a flush about one time in five; sometimes, I’ll get two in a row, then another five later, then miss seven, but it seems to be about the right amount).
There are a couple of further problems that players often ignore with draws, but I am aware of and consider carefully. The first is that when we calculate odds, we do it with all unseen cards. If at the turn, I hold two suited cards, and two more are on the board, I have 46 cards I haven’t seen. Nine make my flush, so I say I have odds of 37/9 to hit my flush (just more than four to one, as I noted above). However, it’s perfectly possible that there are not nine cards that make my flush, because one of the other guys might be holding one (indeed, he’s likely to). Of course, this is offset by the other guys’ also holding cards that are not flush cards. In the long run, it evens out (because the proportions of flush cards held by others to nonflushcards held by others will converge on the proportions that they “should” be holding). In the shorter run, if I feel someone else is drawing to the same flush as I am, my calculations are slightly complicated. I will tend not to chase the marginal draws in these circumstances. (You can take the idea too far though, because you cannot know what others hold.) The other issue is that you can make a draw but not get paid enough to have made it worthwhile (in poker terms, your implied odds were not sufficient). Generally, when I chase the flush draw, it is the pot that is offering me the odds I need. If it contains six big bets and it is a big bet to me, I will be paid sufficiently (and I will be paid for the other four draws I missed in the same circumstances). But when, for instance, you play a small pair before the flop, you are hoping to make up eight bets or more (because it is eight to one that you will flop another of the type of card you have in your pair). Some players will raise smallish pairs to try to knock players out but this is a bad play because, on being called in a couple of places, they do not have enough opponents to pay them off if they hit and have too many to hope their smallish pair will hold up. (The corollary of this thinking preflop is that it is a mistake to call with low suited cards, which are about 16 to one to make a flush: you simply will not often enough win 16 bets to make up for the ones you lose, not to mention that low flushes are more often beaten by bigger ones than flushes with a big card. Luckily, many of my opponents do not understand this and play any two suited. I can’t remember how often one is dealt suited cards but it’s quite often, something like one in four or five hands.)
No limit is a bit different. The odds of drawing are the same but other variables come into play. If you have a small pair and can see a flop relatively cheaply, you are delighted. Whereas in limit holdem your implied odds are restricted by not being able to bet more than a bet or a double bet at a time, in no limit the potential take with a set is a whole stack. Players forget though that for you to get that stack your opponent must hit some kind of hand. This doesn’t happen often enough that you’ll want to call too many bigger bets before the flop. An example will show what I mean. With blinds at 50/100, a player in EP bets 200. Another guy raises to 500. I call with AJ suited (a pretty good hand). Both call. The guy in EP has paid five times the big blind to see a flop. He happens to have 55. The flop comes with a 5 and two other cards. Neither help me. He checks and the other guy checks. I check. The turn is a blank. The first guy bets out. The other guy (foolishly, he has nothing) calls. I fold. On the river, the guy with the set of fives bet again, not too heavily, and the other guy folded. My memory fails me as to how the action went precisely but it was something like that. The point is that I didn’t pay off and I saw that the middle guy had QJ.
So the guy with 55 did well, right? Well no. He called a big bet preflop and got lucky. He was paid something like, let’s say, 2000 chips. But he will only hit that bet one in nine times. He paid 500 to drag 2000. That’s only four to one! He ended up taking the worst of it. That’s bad poker. The guy in question is one of the better players among those I play on Friday night but that kind of play makes it clear to me that he is not all that good: he has run hot a couple of nights rather than actually played particularly well (because any sucker can play a pair of fives like that and get lucky). If you bet 500 chips every time you have a small pair, you’re going to have to get paid 4500 when you hit. Because he doesn’t understand that (he thought he had the pot odds for a call: 300 more with 900 in the pot), I know he is not too sharp.
Pimp needed?
I've edited everything in my time. I've worked on a legal newspaper, the local paper, a medical magazine (fun pictures), financial reports, vanity publications, legit books, management and finance textbooks, shipping ads, newsletters, maps, curricula, posters. These days I specialise in finance. Not by choice but because anyone who knows I do it will insist I edit finance rather than anything else. I don't care. Words are words. Finance has its own jargon but it's mostly written in English, like anything else.
If I had a choice, I'd work as a manuscript doctor. I'd be good at it. But I don't know where I'd acquire clients from. Maybe I could advertise on my own account. I know what you're thinking. Most clients would feel that the poison was better than the cure if I doctored them, but I can work with registers. Most publishing works on a courtly but entirely fake courtesy, which I have long mastered. You could call it a professional tone if you liked, or the grease on the wheels maybe. I can do greasy.
But I am not choosy. So long as it involves hard cash, I'll edit anything. I have no scruples at all in deploying my skills. I might hesitate to edit for the Israeli Defence Force or the Conservative Party, but actually I'm a bit light at the moment, so, erm, so long as no one knows...
But the money has to be there. The other day an acquaintance asked me to edit a quarterly for him. He was a bit sketchy about the pay and he wanted to make it quarterly too. I said look, how much are you proposing to pay. He wanted me to telephone him and talk it over. But I don't do telephoning if I can help it, so I said look, how much are you paying and would you pay a retainer? Because, it was clear, he wanted only to pay when he had been paid and wanted to speak to me so that he could sell that. I'm not a good target for telesales at the best of times because if I wanted to buy, I would be out looking for what I wanted. I don't do impulse buying of anything bigger than a chocolate bar. Anyway, I don't like talking about money. I've never liked making loans, because I hate to ask for the money back, yet if I don't, I fret over it (not because of the lost money but because of the error of judgement and the necessity of rethinking my view of the delinquent borrower).
What is curious is that the skills you have are never sufficient for the job. What I mean is, when you are trying to get hired, the skill you most need is making a good first impression. When you are a freelance, the skill you need is to sell yourself, I suppose. There must be many people out there who would love to pay me to do what I do but how can they know I can do it? It's a mystery to me how I can reach them. (I'm not saying it's a mystery how they can be reached. I expect others could reach them easily. But how could I do it? I cannot do "spec". I cannot ring people I don't know and ask them for things. I can no more do that than fly.) I need an agent! But editors do not have agents; they just have their own wits. Sigh. Maybe I should put an ad in the paper for a pimp...
Zen and the art of Zen
I am a terrible fraud. So at least say the boring blowhards who infest the Uselessnet. You know the type: tedious literalists who believe that Uselessnet interaction is about being in the right or, a man could become helpless with laughter at the pompousness of it, honour and decency; the bellends who think that a debate is settled by “logic” (they do not mean logic, of course, because, as I sometimes delight in taunting them, fully aware that they do not get it, logic can as easily prove the false as the correct, and is no guide to truth or falsity; but they are not closely enough acquainted with logic, or with rhetoric, to come up with a better name for the concept they are trying to discuss). What they cannot grasp, poor souls, is that being right in a Uselessnet stoush is as pointless as having the cleanest jersey in a game of football.
They are not wrong though. I am not a real doctor. Nor am I a practising Buddhist. Anyone would think that I really was trying to deceive, given the fury my screen name rouses in the honest Johns. It does surprise me how often someone asks what I am a doctor of: I say I am a proctologist, since I so often encounter arseholes.
The blowhards are confused on two scores so far as “Zen” goes. First, I did not choose it because I am an adept of oriental philosophy (although I take an interest and believe it to be a fount of wisdom but what isn’t, approached in the right way?) but for the much less impressive reason that it begins with a Z. I know, I know, it spoils the mystique and yes, there’s more to it than that. Zen has a wonderful taste of meaninglessness, which is appropriate for a nihilist (which if I had to be any “ist” bar an Occamist, I would probably admit to being).
Second, the misconception the blowhards suffer with is that Zen is nicey nice. I fear this is an American misconception, common among people whose idea of Buddhists has been formed by Californian quasihippies who tinkle bells, chant and urge peace and harmony for all.
But Zen is not about peace, man. If you think it is, you are confusing it with Mahayana, which is a caring, sharing religion a million miles from Buddha’s message. Zen is austere, empty, cold. It is not huggy. It is a slap in the face. It is about control, about creating a dichotomy in which you merge with the world while becoming entirely interior. Zen is about confrontation, sudden enlightenment, not gradually approaching a goal, as in other forms of Buddhism. Its teaching method is a smack with a rod, an impossible riddle, lessons without content.
Not that I am trying to teach anyone anything as I piss about in newsfroups, although I do think you can learn from knowing me (for once, this is not an expression of my monstrous vanity; I think you can learn from knowing anyone, albeit some more than others). I am not doing anything in particular, just acting as a deep pool of nothing much. Generally, you see yourself reflected in a deep pool. If you grimace, it grimaces back. If you smile, it smiles. Sometimes, if you dip a toe in, you get it bitten off. But if you dive in, it’s warmer than you thought it would be. Some people splash around, insisting that I am a puddle or whining because I won’t keep them afloat and they can’t swim.
To me, it is nothing. I am serene, unruffled, a few ripples and then the flat, calm surface of the millpond. Or the shell of a tiny watersnail. I do not mind which I am perceived to be or which I really am. Either way, the shrilling of blowhards bounces from me and I remain a mystery to them.
Shaving the world
One of the more often misunderstood concepts in science and philosophy is Occam's Razor. The ignoranti take it to mean that the simplest theory is correct. But the Razor is not a tool for deciding correctness, but is better used to decide which model to prefer. Simply stated, it says that one should prefer the simplest explanation for all the facts at hand.
The key word is "all". Maxwell's demon is a simpler explanation for electrons than superstrings but the demon does not explain all the properties of electrons. Naturally, it can be seen that at greater levels of complexity and abstraction, different explanations will be preferable.
I am, I suppose, an Occamist. I tend to accept as my model whatever most simply explains what I know about things. If I find out more, I broaden my model, but I am always attempting to pare away the frills. The Razor is for doing just that, slicing away unnecessary frills to leave the bare bones of explanation.
Religion does not fare well at the touch of the Razor. Mostly this is because it is stuffed with frills and, more importantly, because it does not explain facts so much as it explains things that are ideal rather than real. In other words, it explains what we have inside us far better than it does what is out there. It explains ways to deal with fears, insecurities and emptinesses. (That is not to say it is the best explanation of those things, only that that is what it is for.)
Is it not though simple to say "goddidit"? Well yes, but the Razor does not urge us to accept the simplest theory possible, rather that which is simplest at the level of complexity we are considering. Goddidit is unsatisfying because it is a very broad, meta-explanation, which does not concern itself with trivial things such as the facts: we say God created the universe, but we do not say how, specifically, or why he created it with this bit rather than that. Not that religionists have not sought to explain what there is, but once they do, the simplicity of goddidit quickly becomes incredibly complex. The concept of a god who just does becomes complicated to one that does this but not that, until the unity of an ineffable god has become a Byzantine being, inscrutable because of the complexity of motive and ability he is made from rather than because of an innate unknowability.
Unknowability is the anti-Razor, something the Occamist in me dislikes a great deal. Unknowability is a closed door for the mind. The Razor says prefer the simplest explanation; by extension, it can be taken to say abhor the lack of explanation (I am not sure what William himself said about that but for me it is clear that saying that a thing cannot be explained is a bad thing). In the case of God, the chief difficulty with unknowability should be clear (actually, it's a good illustration of why unknowability is a bad thing for Occamists). The simplest explanation for God's being unknowable is nonexistence. Any other explanation will be much more complicated, not least because it will have to posit a being with motives for being unknowable: it should go without saying that a being with those motives is an entity more than no being at all. The Razor demands that we ask why our supernatural being should have those motives. What do they explain? The only thing, it seems to me, that is explained by your being's having some motive or other for being unknowable, is its unknowableness. Which is more simply explained by its nonexistence.
Voila! Occam's Razor slices away an unknowable god. It's easy to do so because most mystical stuff adds nothing to our understanding of the physical world (which is why we call it the "supernatural"; I am using the word "physical" in an extremely broad sense, to mean "what there is", which obviously includes things that are not physical in a narrower sense). What the ignoranti do not grasp though is that this is not in any way a disproof of God. The secular humanists of Brisbane, whom I consider religionists equally as distasteful as any fundamentalist haters, do not understand that the Razor does not decide correctness but only preferability. A rational mind should prefer explanations that do not include gods but those explanations may well be incorrect. There could be a god because neither he (or she) nor anything in the universe can be compelled not to exist just because it is a frill! The universe is not required to be austere (it would be a simpler place, would it not, were there not dozens of particles that interacted in bizarre, counterintuitive ways). The key, again, is to understand that Occam demands that we ought not to complicate explanations unnecessarily, not that we should simplify them for the sake of it.
I find this approach to life (and the philosophy of it, particularly of science understood as a way of looking at the world) satisfying but not, I struggle for the right word, warming. It is not a concept that gives you a hug. The Razor tells me that when I die, I will dissolve into sludge, oblivious, my time as short as three score years and ten or a little more. It tells me that this is a world of atoms and the forces between them, unchangeable by any but brute means, and not of mystical forces that interplay in weird and wonderful ways, susceptible to intervention by wishing them different. It tells me, painful as it is to hear, that I am nothing, not a soul riding in a body, not a consciousness, a mind sitting in a brain, nothing at all but echoes of whirling, singing strings, pointless, arbitrary, meaningless (because "meaning" is an unnecessary entity in explaining me).
But I have never quite been able to accept things as part of my understanding of life just because they make it more comfortable. (Would I if I could? I don't know because it is so alien to me, but perhaps I would take many little Pascal wagers to make life more bearable.) Perhaps life would be richer for it. I would be smaller but the world would grow by comparison. The two will always conflict in me: satisfaction at the opening of doors accepting the Razor allows and discomfort at the chill of bigness that walking through the doors entails.
The day after
Human beings can, we all know, be cruelly stupid. At least, you have to believe that is our problem if you do not want to have to believe that we are hopelessly venal.
A couple of days ago, I was out in Platypus Bay watching a subadult humpback backflipping on a fresh winter's day. A better expression of the splendour of life you couldn't wish for. And it's the climax of a wonderful story. The group of whales that travel up and down Australia's east coast had fallen in number to 200 or so. This is the very verge of unsustainability. I'm not clear on exactly why (another gap that I must fill at some point) but for all species there is a point surprisingly far from zero, past which a population cannot recover. The moratorium on whaling came just in time though and now there are 7000 whales in this group. They have survived their predators -- orcas and big sharks mostly -- by using precisely the skill the subadult was demonstrating: making a frightening splash and using their agility to become a target that is too energy sapping to bother with.
But backflipping will not save the subadult from a harpoon. He will one day approach a boat, curious because these intelligent animals like to know what is in the world around them, and some guy will press the button that will end his life.
I feel mournful as their song when I think about a nation of killers who have to give whalemeat away free to schools to try to encourage kids who prefer beef to eat it. I feel it is a small but terrible tragedy that my grandchildren, should they take the boat from Urangan harbour into Hervey Bay, which is a safe haven for the whales, too shallow for their predators and sheltered from ocean swells by Frasier Island, will watch nothing more than dolphins. I know that life changes and evolves, that species come and go, but we are watching one more beautiful part of our legacy be destroyed by people who cannot, will not look past tomorrow to the day after.
