guttervomit

8 Sep 2006

Gin Blossoms @ Amazon.com I’ve always been fairly ambivalent of the we’re-nice-guys-and-we’re-doing-this-for-the-chicks pop rock institution that is the Gin Blossoms. Like any teenager during the early 90’s, I found it impossible to go a single week without hearing "Hey Jealousy" or "Found Out About You" or "Till I Hear It From You" at least once on the radio, so very firm associations have been created in my mind between these songs and high school.

The band got back together a couple of years back and have recently recorded a brand new full-length called Major Lodge Victory, their first album in 10 years (!). Yup, their last album ("Congratulations … I’m Sorry") was released all the way back in 1996, right around the time I was taking the UPCAT entrance exam.

So what do the Blossoms sound like, a decade later? Suprisingly familiar, believe it or not. All the same hooks and Zippo-waving riffs are still there, and Robin Wilson’s laidback vocals channel the Beach Boys and The Byrds more than ever (check out the track "California Sun," for some very distinct allusions to Brian Wilson and his progeny).

This is the kind of album that would probably gain a minor following amongst the younger crowd (i.e., if they haven’t yet discovered Death Cab For Cutie or The Fray or Copeland), but I have a feeling that maybe the Blossoms have already hit a kind of creative ceiling. In a way, they remind me a lot of The Ataris, who had developed their sound to the point that they couldn’t come up with anything new anymore. That’s fine for listeners who are looking for something familiar and instantly recognizable, but it for people who are a little more discerning, it tends to get fairly repetitive fairly quickly.

Poker Update, August 2006

3 Sep 2006

I just did a Tournament History request over at PokerStars, and got some interesting results. Of the past 46 games I’ve played, I’ve finished in the money 13 times, including 5 first-place finishes, 4 in second place and 4 in third. Since I’ve played nothng but cheapie $3 buy-in games, we can do the math quite simply as …

profit = (46 games * $3 per game) - ( (5 * $15 for 1st place) + (4 * $9 for 2nd place) + (4 * $6 for 3rd place) )

… which, believe it or not, comes out to exactly $3 whole dollars. This is depressing and eye-opening at the same time, because even with a win-rate of approximately 1 in 3.5 games, I have just barely broken even.

Last night, I played an (offline) live game with friends and actually found myself a bit put off by the fact that there were now real faces in front of me, instead of the usual graphical avatars at PokerStars. I think the big advantage of online play is that there are fewer distractions: instead of pretending you have the ability to read your opponents’ facial ticks, you can focus purely on the game itself, i.e., the odds, the strategy, and interpreting your opponents’ moves.

I placed third at that game, which was decent considering that one of the newer players was riding the river like you wouldn’t believe. (Of course, unlike online play, we only reward 1st and 2nd place at our home games, so finishing third has no real bearing one way or the other.)

One of the things I’ve been really learning is to stop playing marginal hands. Of course the definition of "marginal" wasn’t really obvious to me until very recently. Basically you want to only be playing pocket pairs greater than 4/4, and suited cards A/10 or higher. Everything else just go straight into the muck unless a) I have the biggest or second biggest stack, or b) there are only 4 or fewer players remaining. So far this has worked really well for me, as it allows me to stick around a lot longer than most people. The drawback is that I inevitably spend alot of time watching from the sidelines as I wait for decent cards, so it can get fairly boring.

The other thing I’ve been learning is how to make decisions based on your position. You could state this idea very succinctly as: the later your position is, the better. So the guy on the button has a very big advantage over his opponents because he gets to see what they’re up to before he has to act. The implication is that players in late position can get away with playing a bit more loosely because there’s less risk that someone will raise behind them. On the other side of that equation, early position players have to be a lot more careful when betting speculative hands because there are as many as 7 other players queued up behind you, and any one of them could have a hand that trounces yours.

So, as an example: I would not play Q/J offsuit from an early position unless I had a really solid read on the entire table. I would probably call with it in a middle position, and I would probably raise with it in late position (assuming everyone ahead of me folded; otherwise I’d just call).

There are tons of other things that I still have yet to learn — how to compute pot odds quickly and how to deduce your opponents’ hand possibilities and bet accordingly, for example — but so far, understanding those two things above have been enough to keep my ass in the running throughout most of my online games.

quick links to the good stuff

@helloluis on Twitter

elsewhere online

Gin Blossoms: Major Lodge Victory

Poker Update, August 2006

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