Hair's breadth

Oops, that might have been the longest break in this blog's history.

Following on from last time, the PSP continues to amuse, and 'Football Manager' - which I picked up on my break back in England - is extremely good.

I had a good snooker world championships in betting terms, which is a good job because poker has followed my eternally frustrating pattern of long winning streak followed by insanely long losing streak. I've been experimenting with short-handed limit hold 'em lately, just a couple of 2-4 tables at a time. It's a fascinating/fast/stressful/funny/ludicrous game. The line between brilliant play and abysmal play seems to be a hair's breadth. I'm down about $800 after xx hours (can't remember, ask me again tomorrow).

The biggest reason I've been trying the short handed limit stuff is because it racks up rakeback much better than PLO8, where the button crawls round the table at about 4 orbits an hour half the time. It's pretty obvious that if I could be even a small winner at a decent limit, the rakeback would make it all nicely profitable.

Anyway, World Cup time and the tournament has started brightly. Still plenty of time for the sudden-death rounds to be cagey and negative and full of penalty shoot-outs though. I'm feeling good this afternoon, having backed the Czechs for the tournament at 40-1 and just seen them dismantle the USA 3-0.

I'm well-disposed to the Americans these days for personal reasons, and I reckon 3-0 was a bit harsh, but certain things were exposed. I think it might be time that the States got an experienced manager in from the more established football world... Today the tactical inflexibility once they went behind was very disappointing, and Bruce Arena's soporific demeanour on the touchline was very uninspiring. The States may have reached a plateau, and a grizzled old World Cup veteran like a Leo Beenhakker or Henri Michel might be able to get them to another level.

incidentally, again no personal axe to grind because it's really not that important, but today's game did expose the sham that is the FIFA rankings. USA are 4th or 5th in the world at present, supposedly, when at a very conservative estimate there are 13 or 14 teams in this World Cup alone that you would expect to beat them more often than not.