A friendly exchange takes the inevitable turn...

WOE!! My genial exchange with my fine Greek protege has, I am sorry to report, taken a turn towards the seedy. I just received this:

Thank you a lot my friend for your advices. Charm in you now I will think better my each movement in the poker. However exajtj'as the world economic crisis I do not have enough money in order to buy chips from somebody. You I ask one last charm and it believed with apogoi'teftw if him you do not satisfy after you gave enough time for me. It could me you give few from your money in order to I can make a good beginning?

The ingrate! That cretinous cur!

Ah Babel Fish......

Hello. My name is Andrew Fitzgerald, and I play too much Facebook (well, Zynga) Poker¹. At the time of writing this I have around $2.5 billion in chips. There are many curious things one could write about the Facebook poker economy. The fact that people actually sell these chips potentially, it has been pointed out to me, has implications for 'real' inflation, for instance. One thing I really like, however, is the mirror it holds up to society's sexual politics. See that hot girl who just sat down at the table²? In a few moments she will be inundated with drinks, flowers, 'poker-buddy' requests and possibly (if she's lucky) a few gracious offers of a good boning. Conversely ... you see that ugly-as-fuck but terribly (virtually) rich guy that just sat at the table? Yeah, in a few moments he'll be getting much the same treatment from a bevy of virtual gold-diggers. Sadly, however, much of this stops at the truly big tables where such vixens cannot even afford to sit. All I get nowadays are hackers trying to phish for my account password, and constant friend requests from people begging for chips. WOE! It makes, then, for quite a refreshing change when one receives correspondence from someone truly interested in the game, as I did today:

I am worshipper of game poker and I would want you to ask that you accomplished to gather as a lot of money in this game. For example who at your opinion is the secret of your success. Your advices with will be precious, for this reason you will request with answers.
Have one splendid day!!

Thank-you, random babel fish user. This friend request I think I shall accept.

¹Hi Andrew.....

²Well, O.K. .... the person whose profile picture is a hot girl. Christ knows if it's even a she, let alone whether or not the picture corresponds in any way with the person in question.

For Ben

Most of this post will not, in fact, be for Ben exclusively (although perhaps I'm crediting myself with a little too much forward planning, here), but it's as good a title as any¹  and I open with a poker video which will probably be appreciated by no-one else:

This is, apparently, the largest pot in (professional) high stakes poker history, and it's the kind of hand you just live in dread of. You can't fault either player, the poker gods merely arranged the cards such that, barring any excessive stupidity on the part of either player Gus was always just going to double up against Daniel. Paradoxically, if Daniel had played a little more stupidly pre-flop he might have won ... although, of course, if Gus had played more stupidly he might have won less. This is precisely like the draw from Casino Royale, where Bond's poker brilliance consisted of being extraordinarily lucky and not playing like a dufus-brain.

This brings us to the topic of A Quantum of Solace. Why? It just does. That shittily named² sequel (and, a first for Bond, this really is a sequel) to Casino Royale. We were told, by no lesser personage than Andrew Bolt that they had killed the Bond franchise with this movie. This, of course, prompts one to question whether or not Bolt actually contends there have been no bad Bond movies before now. One must also point out that if On Her Majesty's Secret Service failed to do this, all indications are that the Bond franchise will be the only edifice of human civilisation likely to survive a nuclear holocaust, and that Bolt should go fuck himself with the nearest available high-friction object. Apart from that, the movie isn't actually bad at all. It's obviously influenced by the Bourne movies, and he grunts and exerts himself a whole lot more than he used to. Sure, we could do with a little more of the stylish, quiet lethality of previous Bonds but the tone is much the same as Casino Royale and I think that a good thing. His only gadget is a really cool phone.

You should also see In Bruges. A movie about hit-men in which you actually like all three killers involved (in a 'I'd have a beer with that guy' kind of way, no less) without actually glossing over the fact that they all do rather evil things. It's full of nice, slightly surreal happenings. Probably the one thing I liked the most about it, though, was the fact that they did this kind of obvious (if you look out for this kind of thing ... which I do) foreshadowing of future events near the beginning.... but when they get to these future events (probably the best scenes in the movie), they end up not actually occurring as foreshadowed. Things such as this , well, they just make my life worthwhile. Rather like ducks, long walks on the beach and ponies.

While on such a topic, I'd like us all to take a quiet moment of appreciation for the first 10 minutes of The Departed. Firstly because it's just as great example of exposition and drawing you into the movie as you're ever going to see (think how much un-rushed information you digest). But also, because I just realised how much more poignant and cool Jack Nicholson's speech becomes in light of the recent US presidential election. Srsly. 

P.S. I will be in Brisbane from Dec 11 - Jan 1.

¹Assuming, of course, said title does not include such words as 'midget' and 'sodomy'.

²Though not nearly so shittily named as Body of Lies - a passable movie whose title and brief plot synopsis gives the impression that it's the anti-Iraq/Terror war propaganda movie that it just isn't.

Poker

Suppose you are a sporting club or some other kind of similar organisation and you're looking to host a fishing competition. There is an entry fee and a cash prize for the winner which is drawn exclusively from the sum raised by such entry fees. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine that this would be a perfectly legal thing to do in the state of Queensland (and if it isn't, why the fuck not?). In fact, if you were to substitute 'bridge' for 'fishing', well, that'd be ducky too, yeah? Bridge is a nice, respectable game, after all. You play it wearing dorky bow-ties and vests. It's like the golf you play when you want to play golf instead with a deck of cards, a partner and a table.

So, given the post title, I'm sure everyone reading this sees where I'm going with this (this is probably trivially true.......), but I'm going to spell it out anyway. What, pray tell, would happen if you were to now substitute the word 'bridge' for 'poker'? Well. Now it becomes gambling, therefore bad and therefore illegal unless you've payed for some ridiculously expensive license that lets you do so (when the real benefit of such an event is not in takings from the game, but in the crowd you draw). Apparently, it's perfectly alright for a sports club or pub to own row upon row of pokies into which hypnotised cretins can pour money to see the pretty shiny lights. It's alright for the Treasury casino to skim of the top of people's winnings in a stupid structured-betting version of texas hold-em (rules that make consistent big winnings much more difficult). That shit's just ducky, Charlotte - but heaven forbid we allow people to start playing the kind of game with each other, from which a casino cannot really profit that much and which, with practice, you can actually learn to consistently win. What the fuck is the deal here? Here endeth the first part of my polemic rant.

Now for the second. I was at the season QPE final in Ballina on sunday. There are 300 qualifiers from, I think, 20 clubs (no-one has paid to enter). First place gets $5000, 2nd place $2000 and downward from there. I came in somewhere in the 40s. So why am I pissed? It's not entirely sour grapes at being more or less forced by blind sizes to go all-in on pocket jacks, because to be fair I would have been in real trouble anyways seeing as the flop showed a 10, a 9 and an 8 (giving me an open-ended straight draw on top of a pair higher than anything on the board) .......and I was facing off against a half-drunk bogan with pocket aces (and obviously I didn't subsequently get a queen, a jack or a 7). After coming back from the final break they were rising the blinds by a lot every 15 minutes (there were about 70 people left in and they kind of want to force an out-come). Having broken the second table I was sent to just prior to the break (I mean this literally... I knocked 5 people, half the table, out of the tournament - I left with 21,700 having started the tournament with 2,400). I was forced to move. This is bad at the best of times - you have to learn a new table and you want to establish some fear there. Worse, I look down the table: person 1: half-drunk bogan, person 2: half-drunk bogan, person 3: half-dr....... I mean, if I'd wanted to play against a table of heavy drinking bogans who treat the game like 'bingo', only with more cards and beer involved I'd be playing in the Australian Poker League. The up-side is that if I hit something really good, I can be pretty much guaranteed to sucker these people into insane calls when they feel their manhood is at stake and they don't want to look scared off. The down-side is that I can't afford to bluff too early or try to steal pots because I'll get called for pretty much the same reason. I get a run of un-playable cards in unplayable positions. Table gets broken up, and I'm shortly at another bogan-heavy table in about half an hour, where blinds are now 3000-6000 and I have 18,000 left. The blinds started at 25-50 and I made almost all of my 21,700 (the highest I saw) with blinds at no more than 300-600. The point being, I had to work a lot harder to gain those chips than those who took them by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. I really see no reason for the blinds to rise at such a meteoric rate..... especially when you're going to be pushing people around from table to table like that. It doesn't need to be this way QPE!!! Not fucking happy Jan.