Monday 2.38pm

I'm listening to the leadoff track of Amon Tobin's The Foley room. The album has had mixed reviews but it's as good as anything he's released. If you like Tobin, you'll like it a lot. If you don't, you probably won't.

So I'm thinking about my guts. They have been bad for months, years even. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know. It strikes me as a perverse wager. I could go to the doctor and find out that it's something like a persistent giardia infection, easily cleared up. Or I could find out I have irritable bowel syndrome or worse. The "or worse" is why I'm avoiding the doctor. I am scared to find out. I no longer feel too young to die. I've entered that stage of life where you feel you actually might be mortal. In the past couple of weeks though, I've been suffering from pain and bloating. I thought it might be food poisoning but it recurred. So I'll be doing a stool test.

You know your life is empty when the most interesting thing you have to write about is stomach pain.

I am also thinking about A, whose son is signing up to die in Preznit Bush's folly in Iraq. I feel desperately sorry for her. I know that most Americans believe that being in the military is something praiseworthy but Europeans are mostly sick of wars, and distrust people who are willing to fight them. I would be horrified if one of my children signed up. Auden has never been so apt. One line in particular I find chilling:

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just

The voices on Fox News have faces, sure enough, but they certainly lack the compassion that Auden wrote about:

him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept

The individualism that capitalism promotes creates of all of us mindless haters, desperate to acquire and defend our acquisitions. I have faith that we are not doomed to be like that, that we can rise above it, but sometimes the world seems so mired in the shit that that faith can be difficult to maintain. I do not have anyone to pray to, but if I did, I would be praying that A's son gets drunk and either does something that will get him a short jail sentence and a discharge or fails a medical or is disallowed from entering the army for some other reason.

I am also thinking about something spiteful that I wrote. It was unkind. But it was true. But I wrote it because I thought it would be hurtful. The truth often hurts. Sometimes you feel it is necessary to say the hurtful thing because of a benefit you perceive in it or simply because you do not care about the people you are hurting, and you are using the truthfulness of what you are saying to assuage your conscience. But that isn't the case here. I was operating out of spite.

But in thinking about it, I realise that I cannot articulate why I felt the need. I know that I felt it, and I know that it was justified in some way. But I cannot find the words for the justification. It just felt right.

I wonder whether more harm hasn't been done in this world by people's doing what feels right than any other thing.

Anyway, this sort of thing happens. Because I don't tend to be as demanding of them as my correspondents are of me, they sometimes feel they don't owe me decent treatment. Taking the opportunity to remind them that they do is as good a motivator for spite as any, if it can ever be said to be well motivated.

I am trying not to think about poker. I was playing an online final this morning with the prize of a seat in the WSOP potlimit holdem tourney. I wasn't going particularly well but I was still alive with 19 of 90 runners still playing, and within one double-up of the top five. So when someone minraised and I woke up with KK, I was delighted. I raised pot and they called. This guy had maybe double my stack but I think that this was arguably a poor call, given his holding. He was best case a coinflip and could simply have folded for his raise. If Lady Luck had been favouring me, the flop would have shown some paint, inducing a fold from villain, fearing overcards, but it was all rags. He checked and I pushed without hesitation, of course. He called with TT. Because this is a bad beat story, you know the rest. Now, I know that the pros will tell you that all you can do is get your money in ahead, blah blah, but it still hurts when that one in ten shot happens on this occasion and not one of the other nine.

Someone asked me, does making progress like that mean you're getting better? Well, I don't know. Yes, I am, but how much is a difficult question to answer. In the short term, luck plays such a huge role in poker that you cannot know whether you are doing better or being luckier. I feel I am understanding some things better and still just not getting some others. You could see progress if you wanted to: I began by learning to play tight, which takes you this far, and have been learning the right spots for aggression, which takes you a bit further. Experience helps you with hand reading -- or at least helps you determine when you're facing a real hand or someone who's full of shit. But I have the perennial problem of not being able to chip up in tourneys, so that I often get to the bubble, and sometimes limp into the cash, but rarely have enough chips to go very deep. Do I lack gamble? I dunno. I'm trying to find spots to push a bit harder, and it's working for me, so maybe that's what I needed. At the same time, I mostly play low-limit sitngoes, where patience, discipline and shifting gears appropriately are the most important skills, so far as I can tell. But even there I'm a bit at sea. I am beating the game -- I'm confident that I am although my sample size is too small to merit confidence -- but I know that I do not take enough opportunities on the bubble. I could be beating it a lot more. The chief problem is that the strategy I use, which would be instantly familiar to anyone who reads 2+2, is much stronger in a wild game than it is in a tight one, and I'm not sure how to adjust to the latter. (It doesn't help that PokerRoom plays 8-minute blinds, which tends to make the play a bit faster than is good for me.) If there are five of us left at t100 blinds, I'm confident of making the money. If there are seven, not so much. What tends to happen in a tight game is that the players will not gamble early but are much too willing to gamble closer to the bubble. (In a loose game, players will be far too loose in the first few levels and then far too tight when shorthanded, which suits my strategy perfectly.) This means that they won't fold anywhere near optimally on the bubble, so it can be hard to play if you are running cold. If I have an M of less than 5 and there are seven left, I know I will need a slice of luck or some decent cards. I hate to have to rely on luck! The problem is, of course, that I have not been taking detailed notes, and in any case too few players are regulars, so I don't know which kind of game I'm in straight away. If I'm not paying enough attention, I do not necessarily get a good handle on my opponents. Well, there's one route to improvement right there!

I am now listening to Phantom limb by the Shins.

I am thinking ahead to Thursday, when my parents come to visit. I haven't seen them for at least a year, and I was pleasantly surprised when they told me they were coming. I have unreservedly good feelings about my parents. It is one of the blessings of age that I have been able to lay aside bitterness at their failings and allow myself to love them without conditions. When I think about Mrs Zen, and how it could be feasible to rebuild our relationship, I remind myself that my relationship with my father was poisoned, but now is good. I can happily sit and talk with him. I'm older and wiser, and can avoid areas of discord. He is not on the whole a bad person. He just fucked up. But you cannot punish someone for fucking up forever. Eventually, you have to be able to forgive them. Erring is human; forgiving too. I believe this because I believe I fuck up too, and I want to be forgiven. If I am not doing it on purpose, I do anyway. Or even if I am, if my reasons for it were not unforgivable but simply misguided, then I hope that others will forgive, and the price I pay is to be willing to forgive on my part.

Not that I find it difficult. My mother used to say when I was a child that I was notable for not holding a grudge. I still don't. Which is why I know that if I am taking "revenge" on someone who has slighted me, I'm almost certainly acting out of spite, rather than because I have residual bad feeling. (I'm wondering whether that makes sense. I know exactly what I mean. I pay you back because I'm vicious and think in some abstract way that you probably deserve it, not because I am punishing you for any particular crime you've committed.)

This SNG I'm playing now is a good example of what I was talking about. It's t150 and still eight players in the game! I have the big stack, so I'm under no pressure, but if I play pots, I'm going to have to be willing to put chips in. Just picked up TT and made it 4xBB to go. Bugger! Called by the guy to my left. Can you believe it? He had QJ and flopped a queen. This is how it's been going for me. Awful calls rewarded left right and centre. Luckily the pot was semiprotected by an allin guy, so I checked and folded. I am going to have to call an allin somewhere in here though, because I can't just fold into the money.

Wow! I wake up with AQ and call a tighty who might be pushing it a bit. He has 66. The flop comes Q6x. Oh noes! Turn Q, which means I'm still way way behind. LOLZ abound at the river A. Ah well; it's about time I handed one out.

Now it's tough. T200 and the other players have no idea how to play an SNG, so they are walking each other's blinds, limping into hands and basically playing horribly. This doesn't suit me. I want them to be battling it out with each other, of course.


So I bust one out. I limp into his big blind and he minraises. So I call of course with T9. The flop comes T high and I check, he pushes, I call. He shows A4 for bottom pair and doesn't improve. If he had pushed preflop, he probably would still be in the game. I would have pushed myself -- the strategy demands it -- but I think he would have called very wide there, having a quarter of his stack in as the blind.

In theory, I should be able to push nearly every hand. Here's where I struggle though. I just can't make myself push, because I know these guys are going to call wide and I'm not sure whether it's going to be +EV.

So get this. We're on the bubble and a guy gets a few chips, so that now he has a stack about the same size as mine. But instead of attacking the shorties, he keeps trying to steal my blind. I resteal a couple of times but I'm worried that he's only playing values and will eventually be stupid enough to call one. So I let him steal a couple. He has no idea how to play poker, obviously. So I pick up AQ and he raises. I push. He calls and shows 99. I flop a Q and MHIG. He had me covered by quite a bit, thanks to one of the shorties walking his blind or worse, calling it and then giving up on the flop. The guy starts to whine. You were lucky, he says. Dude, I say, you are totally retarded. Two shortstacks and you try to steal my blind instead of theirs! I wasn't trying to steal, I was trying to bust you, he whines. Oh. My. Gawd. Well, lord send me players like that, I suppose, because that's breathtakingly clueless. But worse was to come. The shortstack -- patently without a clue -- allowed himself to be blinded down so that he only had a big blind left. To my astonishment, both the other players folded! Here is the guy telling me I'm a donk and he doesn't know to limp and help me bust the shorty. Obviously, with more than two-thirds of the chips in play, I go on to win. The whiner ran his AQ into my AK, and then, to my absolute delight, I called a push HU with T4 suited in spades and laughed like a drain as I flushed. You lucky fuck, whined the whiner. Lollerchoppers! Yeah, but I was only in the position to get that lucky because he donated his stack to me.

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:38 pm