Closer

I have a feeling that I recently mentioned two good poker books, but went on to write about only one of them. Well, the other is called ‘The Science of Poker’, by Dr Mahmood. I flicked through it once or twice in the bookshop some time back and didn’t fancy it, but last Friday I finished work early and had the chance to sit in the café at Borders and give it a proper read. And, it is excellent.

Any book with pot limit Omaha in it at all is a bonus for us devotees of that game, and Mahmood writes some decent stuff about it. The book gave me some food for thought about certain types of starting hand and the way to play big ‘wrap’ draws. The heavy statistical bent of the material doesn’t particularly do it for me, but Mahmood has a neat turn of phrase too. I liked this:

‘Loose-aggressive players are both dangerous and beautiful. They are like the necessary evils that make our lives interesting and even enjoyable’.

A good book if you are interested in pot limit play, particularly Omaha, and as it happens I have played against the author many times online.

My girlfriend and I watched ‘Closer’ the other night. What a load of crap. It looked exactly like a play turned into a film, something which rarely works. The dialogue in a movie needs to be more naturalistic to be convincing, and I’m sure that could have been achieved without losing all the best lines (and you could almost see the playwright – a keen poker player by the way - sitting back with a smug smile when some of the line were delivered).

Julia Roberts was the only one of the four stars (Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen) who managed to seem more low-key and believable, rather than telegraphing every line and gesture to a theatre audience. Perhaps she has more experience of betrayal and tangled love - ?

Incidentally, what gives with Jude Law? It’s the first time I have seen him in anything, so I had no idea he had such an awful voice and was so physically average. Who knows what the hell attracts women?

If it is snooker skill then I am getting more handsome; I played my best ever session last night, making numerous breaks (without beating my personal best). I played poker when I got home slightly drunk, and recorded only a tiny win as follows:

I came only 10th in a two table sit ‘n’ go while losing some chips in a PLO cash game which broke up before I could recover. Then I sat in another cash game and played very well, while taking second place in a small one table sit ‘n’ go. I more or less threw the SNG heads-up. After my heads-up opponent had been rescued by a pot-splitting river card when all-in, the play ebbed and flowed for a bit, to the point when I was desperate to go to bed and gambled with Q8 when I was pretty sure I was beat.

The cash game was entertaining, mainly because a chap started talking to me after I lost a (very small) pot, and his opening gambit was ‘Are you a beginner?’ He proceeded to criticise/patronise me over a period of time, and it amused me no end - not least because I had outright stolen two reasonable pots from him already at that point (he was a transparently weak player). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I am that great of a player, but this dude’s weakness was like a beacon on top of his head. The very fact that he was sitting with about a tenth of the maximum buy-in was a clear indicator – not because he had lost chips (we all do) but because no intelligent player would sit in a pot limit game with a miniscule stack when he could top up.

Finally: I am moving over the weekend, and my phone line gets connected on Thursday. I have a contingency plan for the intervening days, of course…