Random Musings

Here are some random musings that I have had over the last few days:

1. I watched this week's House last night and the patient was this creepy 28 year old blogger lady. Basically she just put her entire life on the internet and had thousands of followers reading her every comma and ellipsis on bated breath. Her boyfriend expressed concerns that originally she was doing it to be connected to people, but she had since slipped past that and was now simply performing for an audience. I'm not sure which I'm doing, but I'd like to think it's at least a little bit of both.

2. DeucesCracked is a very cool service. Babar's peanut collector series is insightful, even if he and his guest hosts do spend a little more time bullshitting about random off topic things than I'm used to in online lecture formats (read: MIT Open Courseware).

3. Online play really drives home the type of variance we're dealing with in this game. In the last two days I've logged something like 700 hands online (without really trying) and dropped about 80 bets (this stretch was preceded by 2000 hands of me just crushing it). The whole endeavor took like maybe 3 hours (I don't even think that long) of me sitting in my room in front of my laptop. In my live 20/40 game this would be 3 full days of play and a 6.5 rack loss, including close to 200 miles and 4 hours in my car. I see why people like it.

4. Nobody at Commerce ever folds their blind. Like seriously ever. It's unreal. I'm starting to question my opening ranges quite a bit. Like should I really be trying to steal the blinds from the CO with K7s if they're both gonna call 90+% of the time? I mean at a certain level the answer is still yes, since K7s is better than an average hand and if they are calling 100% of the time then they just have an average hand and I'm in position and in theory they are bad players and I should show a tidy profit on the whole situation. But what about J9s? Pocket 3s? I need to think about this some but I think I might need to tighten up substantially with non-showdowny hands.

5. Google AdWords has a stated policy of not endorsing any form of online gambling. I had been wondering for some time now why the ads that show up over there ( <----------- ) were of such low quality. Google AdWords is famous for having revolutionized the world of advertising, allowing customers to bid on available space and target exactly the eyeballs they're looking for. Why then are some of my ads stupid? Shouldn't they all just be for Full Tilt, Party Poker, and Poker Stars? Like every single one, right? Because those sites should be out-bidding everybody else except for the occasional chip set seller and what not. The answer is that those businesses are banned from advertising, in much the same way that tobacco companies can't release commercials. I think this pisses me off, and am going to have to consider looking for another advertising service. While I recognize that AdWords is the industry standard, unilaterally blocking the lion's share of bids on my space seems like a pretty big draw back.