Baby Blue

The story behind my baby blue constitutes perhaps the most prolonged and bitter trial of my young life. I now begin to realize that I'm only receiving my just reward for jewing a dying man of his prized posession.

It all began in the fall of my Junior year. A buxom young lass of thirty-seven parked on the side of the road caught my eye one night as Breaux and I drove into Santa Paula. The soft glow of a nearby street lamp illuminated her shiny skin, offering a brief hint of silky white leather interior as we passed by. My eyes followed her longingly until a bend in the road took parted us from view. I was smitten. And hopeful, as a black and red "For Sale" sign had been seen adorning the back window.

From there, our courtship was brief and tempestuous. Her owner was loathe to part, but failing health and a need to pay the medical bills sealed the deal at a rather healthy cut to the asking price. A week later I was the proud new owner of a '65 Mustang. And the story should here have ended happily ever after. But woe to man and his vanity. Nothing would do but that I strip this poor innocent of her innards, and build her anew after my own liking.

So Darren and I made a trip to LA to scour the junkyards for a promising new engine. We found and pulled a 302 small block out of a late seventies Ford cruiser, which was quite an experience. We also had to pull out a 451 for Grumbine. Fashioning engine hoists from seat-belts, and disassembling the blocks from the cars took the better part of a day. We later pulled into Hamburger Hamlet on the 5 for dinner, soaked in sweat, our clothes, faces and hands caked in engine grease and dust, and two full engine blocks jutting over the sides of the truck's flatbed. Our waiter got a nice tip, one I'm sure he wasn't expecting.

Finding all the necessary parts for the rebuild was a nightmare. Trips to various junkyards and shops around L.A. became my specialty. By the time summer rolled around, we had managed to rebuild the engine, but hadn't yet placed out the old one. Darren had plans to house-sit the Reyes' ranch outside Sacramento, so we decided to try and finish it there. Now that experience really deserves it's own story. I had planned on spending a week there, and ended up staying for over half the summer. Every conceivable thing that could go wrong did, from escaped cows to prolapsed sheep uteri, the wrong size pushrods and an oversize exhaust manifold, drunken gun-toting mexican neighbors, earwhigs, spray painting a 50k ton earth mover, a messload of cute kittens(!), Mr. and Mrs. Reyes, Mr. Darren's Uncle and leaky fluids on his driveway and toothbrushes, three different starters, a host of igition problems, immodestly ripped clothing, getting lost with Pat Carter in the slums of Sacremento in Darren's broken down rabbit, getting lost in San Fransico in Darren's broken down rabbit on an empty tank of gas. I finally admited defeat and had the Mustang towed back to school (thanks Aaron) while Darren headed home to Washington.

I then spent another two weeks hiding out on campus, trying to finish the car by myself while avoiding Mr. Collins and his questionable insistance that I PAY for such a priveledge. I won't bore with technical details, but I finally got it running on a beautiful Saturday morning. I took Ben Susanka into town to celebrate. That would be a short lived victory. Upon returning to campus, I decided it'd be fun to drop the clutch and do a burnout. Apparently this isn't a good idea when you have an engine putting out over 400 ft./lbs. of torque on a driveline meant for around 150. So after that shot out from under the car and sprayed the Blessed Serra parking lot in gas, I rented a car and drove home to Nebraska.

It took me the first month of Senior year to get it up and running again, and this time it ran for an entire week. I made occasional attempts at fixing it after that, but a new problem always crept up. Bad fuel pump, ignition and idling problems, you name it. Something finally broke that I couldn't figure out, and I had given up on it until tonight. All it took was a $35 distributor gear the size of a walnut. It's replaced now, and I pray that my baby's previous owner will now relent his curse from beyond the grave.

Drunken Spanish Minstrel

Last night at Heavy J's party, the heavenly muse of OG Light moved me to record this sweet little number on Christo's 8-track. I think the hushed giggling and background partying add a certain character and ambiance sadly lacking in many of today's professional recordings.

And so I now have to have an 8-track recorder. I'm tempted to post the remaining tracks of Chris and I's fresh new demo CD, tentatively entitled "Classical Ass Volume 1: pwning n00bs", but maybe the world isn't ready for our work just yet. This will have to do for now.

In related news, I'm taking lessons from Carlos again. And that's kinda sexy.

You can be my wingman anyday

Top Gun on the bigscreen, hotness.

Let the Thunder Roll

To those in the Midwest, a loud bang and a flash in the night is a comforting and welcomed event. At 4 A.M. in the Ojai Valley, to someone in the first stages of sleep, it comes as a sure sign of the Apocolypse.

I figured it was occasion enough for a day off at the golf course. My tee time is in an hour, so I'm off.

Must Be a Full Moon

Some of us like to write poetry on our blogs, bitterly lament the social ills of our times, perhaps wax philosophical. I like to think of my blog as a catchall for excess mental diarrhea. If you're interested in the geekery of my current job, keep on. Otherwise, go learn how to be a playah.

So I recently moved up limits again, which you might think of as being analagous to a pay raise, except that your new coworkers are far more smelly, nasty and vicious than before, so you're not really sure if you're happy about the whole thing. I really have no idea where these guys come from, but they're all thoroughly insane. And by insane I mean blindly aggressive with regards to the way they play poker. They'll cap any draw on every street, and check-raise bluff the river any chance they get. When they aren't hitting cards, this means you get to make an assload of money. When they do, you sortof vomit a little inside your mouth, and think about buying a nice sturdy roap to hang above the nearest chair.

I mentioned before that a decent poker bankroll should be around 300 times the size of the big bet for that limit. So for $10/$20 limit, you should have a playing bankroll of at least $6k. But your bankroll requirements are also determined by the amount of luck involved in the game you're playing in. Poker players use a statistical tool known as standard deviation to "measure" luck. Standard deviation is simply stated the average range within which your wins and losses will fall for every one hundred hands played. The more aggressive the players are, the more wildly your standard deviation will vary, since your wins and losses will be much higher.

Time for a little math!

Statisticians have come up with formulas for determining the size of a gamblers bankroll for any given game, based on his risk of ruin (chance he'll have bad luck and lose for an extended period of time). With a 5% risk of a ruin, one formula states:

Bankroll = (1.64sigma)^2/4u

where u is the player's hourly winrate.

To determine your hourly winrate though, you need to have played many, many, many hands at your current limit. The formula for this involves the player's standard devation, and determines the players winrate within a certain confidence interval (another fancy statistical term, simply saying that given x, y, and z factors, we can say with 95% confidence that your winrate falls within this particular range, and is not the same thing as saying you have a 95% chance of having that particular winrate).

95% CI = u +/- 1.96*s/sqrt(r)

where u again is your winrate (though not hourly, but in terms of BB/100), s is your standard deviation, and r is the number of hands you've played at a given limit. Most poker players don't understand these concepts, are completely unaware of the amount of luck involved in online hold'em, and thus are dismayed when they hit their first big downswing and lose their entire (and underfunded as we see) bankroll. Granted, many of these players are long term losers, but a winning player who is underbankrolled can go broke just as easily.

So. I have about 7k hands at my current limit over the last week, a standard deviation of 20BB/100, and a current winrate of 5BB/100. Calculating my true winrate within a 95% confidence interval, falls within the range of 0.31 - 9.69BB/100. Which is basically to say that I could be anywhere from a break-even player, to a massive 8BB/100 winner. If I calculate the same standard deviation and winrate over 100000 hands, it lies within 3.76 - 6.24 BB/100. Therefore the higher the standard deviation you have, and the fewer hands you've played, the larger the possible range
your true winrate can fall inside a 95% CI.

This is all a fancy way of saying, poker is gambling, until you've played a very large number of hands. It takes me five months to play 100k hands, and even then, I can only have a very general idea of how much money I can expect to make on an hourly basis. In the meantime, it is necessary to have the bankroll to cover the crazy fluctuations, and the emotional discipline to keep playing well while such things happen.

As an unlucky anonymous gambler recently said, "These swings have chopped off my balls and left me with a camel toe the size of Michigan." In the last two days, I've had the largest run of good luck and bad luck since I've been playing (over 500k hands), mostly due to the increased aggression of higher limit players. For some reason, these things always happen to me on back to back days. Earlier in the summer I lost 130BB and gained it back in two days. This time it was over 150BB.



By now this should make enough sense to you that it resembles a native African villager stricken with Elephantitis.

Thank God for Commerce tonight.

Generic Witty Post Title

Life has been very weird the last few weeks/month. Long periods of isolation and boredom interspersed with brief moments of diversion. I suppose I'm a fairly introverted person, and enjoy being alone, but only to a point. I have no TV, no phone, no car, no neighbors or friends nearby. I'm one of maybe a few thousand people on earth making a decent living playing a silly game on a computer. Definately not the place I would have imagined myself being five years ago.

Darren and I have taken to watching Very Weird Movies lately. A few pseudo westerns to start out, the first was Dead Man with Johnny Depp. He plays a city bred accountant or some like that moves to the west to work for a mining company. A weird introduction to the town has him fleeing for his life into the wild, where he meets a crazy outcast Indian who helps him turn from a bookish city slicker into a badass gunslinger. The story makes little sense, and without the hotness of Johnny Depp would have nothing to offer. But the evolution of his character is fun to watch. Then I picked up a movie called West of Heaven, South of Hell with Dwight "The Ugliest Motherfucker Ever" Yoakam, who you may know from such country hits as Streets of Bakersfield and Readin', Writin' and Route 23. Ok, so country music is as ugly as he is. But I enjoyed his acting in Sling Blade and Panic Room, so I thought this might be good. He plays a retired Army hero turned Federal Marshall, and the story centers around a conflict between him and his criminal foster family. Again, the story makes little sense, and the acting and dialogue are very poor, though watching Dwight Yoakam play a sensitive but rugged cowboy was worth it. I'm still confused though, since I found the movie under the Westerns section, not the comedy section.

A few nights ago it was Hiyao Miyazaki's Howl's Floating Castle. Same guy that made Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and the weirdest movie I've ever seen, My Neighbour Totoro. Lot of the same imagery and characterizations, and enjoyable, but still very asiatic and weird. Then we saw Bob Dylan's Masked and Anoymous. This is one of those movies that demands an immediate and visceral reaction. At face value, it seems like a monumental depiction of self-masturbation by Dylan. Every character has something memorable and loving to say about the music of Jack Fate (Dylan's pseduo-character). And we're talking big name actors. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman (thought this was going to be the Big L 2 for a minute), Luke Wilson, Penelope Cruz, Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater, Chris Penn, Giovanni Ribisi, Cheech Marin, Jessica Lange, Val Kilmer, a few others who I forget at the moment. Admist this blatant hero worship, the movie is rife with dime store philosphies and platitudes. There's also an overarcing political and religious theme centered around the nature of place and the life of the common man. The movie is set in no particular place and time, though we're led to believe the period is slightly in the future, admist a war torn and economically collapsed third world America. Very few white people are seen in the movie save for the main actors, and the locations at times remind you of Mexican border towns, small African villages, asian markets, etc.

It's an easy movie to make fun of, but since it's so blatant, I feel like credit should be shown to the writers, and maybe there's more to the movie than you first notice. There are so many cliche and overused themes that run through the movie, such as the role of alchohol and tobacco, prostitution, and other vices, political oppression, the insignificance of the powerless worker, and the corruption of the powerful, and every character has his moment to wax philosophical over them. But there are also several aspects to the story that receive less obvious attention, and seem to be the real point of the movie. The vagueness of time and place, the implicit connections between the characters and their interactions that are never really explained. So I tend to think it's either an amazingly clever and well made movie, or it's one of the most meaningless piles of drivel ever created. It was certainly painful to watch at points though. And Dylan's music is good, but uh, not as good as he thinks maybe (?)

Someone suggest a good and interesting movie to me. One that makes sense.

Party Pooper

Playing Poker for a living is already a crappy enough venture. Where else can you work a forty hour week for a loss. I can handle that. But Party Poker today effectively gave us all a pay cut to the tune of ~20% by raising their maximum rake. I won't go into exact numbers, but that's a lot. This also has a huge effect on the entire player base. Anyone playing at or a little below a break-even winrate will now turn into a significant long-term loser, and the crappier players will go broke that much quicker. I suppose Party Poker never learned the old phrase, "You can skin a sheep only once, but sheer him many times." So the immediate effect is bad, the long-term effect will be even worse.

Apparently there was a horrible hurricane? My mother was appalled that I hadn't heard. I get less news now than I ever did on campus. Which wasn't much. I guess this means I'll need to start taking a daily paper of some sort, and ruminate over it with a hot cup of coffee in the morning. But then I'll need a sexy bathrobe and slippers to sport in front of the neighbors.

...

I see where this is going. Staying informed is obviously the first step of a slippery slope towards adult responsibility. Sneaky bastards.