Playing Well, Send More Money

Failed to post my NFL bets last week. For reference, I was on the 49ers for 10 pts, Browns for 5 pts, Patriots/Broncos UNDER for 5 pts and Houston on the money line for 3 pts. These went 2-2 and continued my trend this season whereby if I took out my biggest bet each weekend I would be reasonably well in the black. It would be enough to make me switch to level-stakes betting, if I didn't think that was completely ridiculous.

Ridiculous? Sure. If you were betting against a random Hold 'Em hand, wouldn't you bet more if you had KK than if you had 6-8 suited? You'd be a fool not to, and I see sports betting the same way. If I'm convinced that a particular game or line is of more value than another, then I should bet more upon it. The crux of the game (the betting game, not the sport itself!) lays in how good one's judgement of that value is. Thus far this season, mine isn't good enough.

Poker-wise, I couldn't be playing too much better than I am, yet I've had a downswing of only two cashes in the last thirteen SNGs (remember, these are 18- and 27-seaters) and am at only 39% ROI for the month, which is very much the lowest end of my expectation as far as I'm concerned. The pattern just recently is as follows:

1. I cruise towards the final table without showing down a hand. This is both good and bad; good because I'm obviously picking my spots well, bad because it means I've never managed a double-up or a decent-sized showdown win.

and then

2. I play my first all-in hand and lose as a 65 or 70% favourite, either crippling me or actually knocking me out. Today's were AK versus A2-suited, and 66 versus K5. Both 70% favourites, to save you looking. Yeah, like you were going to, I know.

The alternative wrinkle has been to get in a big showdown on a flop early in the tournament as huge favourite, say 85%, lose and be crippled rather than have the kind of enormous early stack that I almost always can wield effectively into the money.

Such is life, I'm not concerned. I'm playing higher than last month and finding very little difference in quality. There might be a couple of better players per tournament than before, but the number of absolute, total, complete, utter eggs is still fantastic. And I'd have taken 40% ROI at this new level if offered it two weeks ago - it's just that I've now seen that I should expect to do somewhat better than that.

Finally, I'm reading Victoria Coren's 'For Richer, For Poorer'. It's excellent. She is funny and a very good writer, and she'd have to be in order for me to admit it, because I have an inbuilt "NEPOTISM!!" reaction to any child of a media person who then pops up in the media him/herself. But an unexpected delight has been coming across so many people in the book who I know on some tiny level. Not 'know', but have seen, met, played poker with, if only briefly during a period when I played in London a little bit in the early years of this century. Barny Boatman, Joe Beevers, Jac Arama, these are somewhat poker 'names', but then there's Pedro... I butchered AK against him in a charity tournament in which I had no clue what I was doing.

Okay, that's enough. Back to the grind and getting that ROI back up to 50% and higher...