05-28-07 - 2

Dan and I are going camping in Sequoia for a few days. I'm turning 30 but those kind of artificial milestones don't really mean anything to me. I've never cared much for birthdays, they just remind me that I have no friends. I have had some really wonderful birthdays though when girlfriends did sweet things for me and treated me so well, thank you. Also I really hate receiving presents because they're usually not something I really need and I feel like the person is wasting their money. I also just hate having stuff that I don't really love so it's really like you're just giving me something that I now have to take the trouble to take down to Goodwill or whatever.

05-28-07 - 1

I'm debating again whether to sell my poker HUD. I've fixed it up a lot for myself and it's just so rad now I feel like I have to sell it, for its own good, you know, my baby needs to be free, like a muscle car needs to be raced, my app needs to be used. The problem is I really don't want to do all the tech support. I've been trying to find someone to sell it for me and maintain it, but it's hard to find someone who wants to do that kind of work that's competent. I'm sure there are lots of people in India or wherever who could do it and would love to but I have no way of finding someone that I trust enough to establish a long term working relationship with.

05-25-07 - 1

I just love it when I go to write a function and it's already there cuz I did before. Hmm.. I need to print the final pot size, I guess I'll query the total put in pot for each player.. oh, lol, GetFinalPotSize(), sweet!

05-17-07 - 1

Fucking Firefox is so full of bugs. It just decided to reset all my config; home page reset, my custom search, all my settings to make it format faster; I don't even remember what all the settings were. How can it be so fucking hard to make a fucking formatted text+image viewer!? This is like fucking junior high programming, WTF WTF. (ps. I know it's not actually that easy because the fucking HTML standard is entirely fucked to all hell with bugs and crazy ass special cases and versions and all kinds of nonsense that makes it a ton of work to actually support right).

05-16-07 - 3

The bad thing about ever limping is it defines your hand. It defines your range as stuff like small pairs, suited connectors, not AK, not big pairs. Defining your range isn't bad against morons but it's very bad against good players. If you're going to always raise with {AK,JJ+} preflop then you need to always raise with *everything*. Alternatively you could sometimes limp the big hands, but that's such a negative thing that it's better to just always raise or reraise. Part of the issue is that the big hands are so critical in hold'em. {AK,JJ+} are about 4% of holes but are about 90% of your EV. Everyone loves the small pairs and suited connectors and so on, but the truth is they are only barely profitable and their main benefit is in Shania for your big hands. In some ways you can think of NLHE as a game of waiting for AA, pretending you have AA, trying to crack your opponents AA, etc.

05-16-07 - 2

Any time your range of hands doesn't match the range your opponent puts you on, you have a profit opportunity. You may not be able to realize that profit, however, unless you know what kind of error he is making. For example, if he puts you on a very good hand and you range is wider than that, you should not be value betting the top of your range - you should be value betting the top of the range *he puts you on* which is tighter than what you actually hold. On the other hand in that same spot you should be bluffing with a large amount of your range. Conversely if he puts you on a loose range but you actually are on a tight strong range, you might value bet 100% of your range. Compare this to the game theory situation where you opponent knows your range - when he knows your range you should be mixing up your play in the different regions of your range - value bet the very best hands, check the middle, bluff the worst hands.

Now, most people in SSNL don't really actively exploit this principle. We just assume that our opponents are sort of morons and are going to mess up our range. We just play a sort of standard solid game, and we automatically get profit opportunities because our opponent makes mistakes and puts us on a range that's different from what we're actually playing. The most common case is that they assume we're a lot looser than we actually are, so we can value bet lots of hands and get called incorrectly.

At the higher levels if you try to play a basic solid style, you will run into people who can read your range very well. The reason is partly that they came up playing the exact same style so they know very well what hands you play in what situations. Now that doesn't necessarilly mean they can "own" you as many mistakenly think. If you are correctly varying your play and doing different things with different parts of your range (eg. playing game theory style), then they cannot exploit your play at all. However, they can play 0 EV against you so you cannot make any money from them. Of course in the real world, the standard "solid" style is very exploitable because we do not mix up our range correctly. There are lots of sitations where an SSNL player will never show up with a wide enough range and won't bluff.

To fix this problem you have a few different options. One is just to mix up your range more correctly so that you are theoretically unexploitable. This is a very powerful way to go and aba20/sbrugby sort of plays this style. Most players don't have the mathematics and discipline to do this, so they instead "change gears" which is more of a feel response. By changing gears you can keep your range hard to read, any time you are in a different gear than your opponent thinks you are, you have an edge, or at least you avoid being too readable.

05-16-07 - 1

How can the fucking TiVo software be so fucking ass broken? "Thank God your Here" was just on and I missed it and wanted to at it to the list. Well I can see it in the past in the program schedule but fucking broken ass TiVo won't let me a select a program in the past so that I could ask it to record the rerun. So, I search for it by name in the program list. It's not there. WTF WTF WTF. It makes me almost as mad as the fucking poker site software which is such sitty software and they're just rolling in money. Not to mention pokertracker which is written in like VB or something and literally takes 24 hours to import a bunch of hands that my software does in about 10 minutes. (and my stuff is not at all optimized and really lazy heavy C++ stuff). FRIGGLE FRACKLE.

05-15-07 - 1

I made a big mistake in my poker bot code way way back in 2005 when I started it. I used "float" for the money amounts (the stacks, the pot size, etc.). They're decimal numbers right, use a float? I didn't really think about it and just went to work. Then float precision errors started popping up and I realized my mistake. Of course it's really an integer number of cents, so I should've used ints and worked in cents. Instead I just switched some floats to doubles where I was having trouble. But that doesn't really fix anything (doubles have plenty of precision but I still have failures because I store to disk in floats for size and backward compatibility). Now I've got the floats all over and it would be a huge mess to fix all because I didn't really think about it at the beginning.

05-12-07 - 1

Ugh, I'm so sick that this "Neil DeGrasse Tyson" guy has become a scientific spokesman. The guy is a giant retard whose scientific knowledge is on par with a typical 3rd grade elementary school teacher. So sick.

05-11-07 - 1

Fucking retarded Windoze uses a mix of NULL (aka 0) and INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE (aka -1) for HANDLE return values on error. Thanks a lot MS.

05-08-07 - 2

Any C editor should have an option to find-replace that's case insensitive but *preserves* caps. eg. if you put in "stars" -> "tilt" it should autochange "Stars" to "Tilt" and "STARS" to "TILT".

05-08-07 - 1

Wow, a lot of the 2+2 internet poker pros are flaming out now. Partly it's because the games are drying up, but also it's because a lot of them weren't actually that great, they just ran hot, and then they were sloppy with their money, lent it to friends, lived the "balla" lifestyle, took shots at the higher games and lost; lots of them do coke and play poker, the cost of the coke isn't really significant but the cost of feeling strung out and overconfident and taking your roll to the top games can be very steep when you stop running hot. Of all the kids who made $100k+ last year, very few of them actually have the humility and discipline and control and money management to be long term winners.

05-06-07 - 1

There's this whole funny phenomenon where movies/books/etc. which are trying to show the evils of a lifestyle wind up becoming the icons of the very people they are attacking. "Scarface" is a classic example - it's trying to show the hopelessness and depravity of Pacino's character but he winds up being celebrated by those who idolize that lifestyle. "Wall Street" is another - it's clearly trying to show the evil of the stockbroker character, but winds up being touted as a hero by real brokers.

05-05-07 - 1

WTF Spiderman is so fucking retarded, how can all you people like it? 1. Kirsten Dunst is not pretty, has no charisma, and is generally loathesome and a terrible actress. 2. Tobey MacGuire is again a terrible actor, and a tiny little dweeby pansy, and don't tell me Peter Parker is supposed to be a pansy, he's supposed to be a nerd, but he has a certain sharp wit and energy which Tobey totally lacks. 3. The action sequences SUCK SUCK SUCK. They're all computer, totally fake looking, with all those super-plasticky stretchy computery moves and the camera whipping all over the place to try to create energy that isn't really there. Ugh.