I want cards banned

I am closing on a year since I began this blog. There will of course be balloons and cake if you check back on the 23rd.

I have tried a couple of things to arrest my bad run, even though I believe it has mainly been a dry run of cards. I played three hours of totally focussed PLO8 on Monday, no surfing, no chatting. It went quite well, though not spectacular.

I also tried my own sit ‘n’ go experiment, though on a far smaller scale than poker nerd. I tried just sets of three at once. My laptop monitor doesn’t allow me to multi-table without significant overlap, regardless of resolution, so I find more than three tables at once rather tricky. I did three goes.

It went okayish, but I only made two seconds and a third. I felt, surprise surprise, that I didn’t enjoy much luck. I never once outdrew anybody in an all-in pot, and was a coin-flip from turning the third into a second and one of the seconds into a first. Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a lot, so that was nice. As it stands, though, I am a net loser in Party $10+1 sit and goes, after about 20 of them in total. That can’t be good!

I guess we all struggle to truly mentally assimiliate the poker fact of swings, variance, call it what you will. Bob put it nicely, saying that on a bad streak he thinks ‘I suck’, and on a good streak ‘I have my doubts about whether I’ll ever lose again’.

Meanwhile, the Blair government - elected by something like 22% of eligible British voters - outlines its plans. One of the major pieces of crap is the compulsory ID cards plan. This particular policy is so abhorrent to me on every level that I might finally get off my arse and do some campaigning. This site does a reasonable job of explaining why a compulsory ID card (never mind having to personally pay for one!) is so wrong in context of the state- individual relationship.