Everything Has A Limit

2009

pbirks@btinternet.com — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:48:08 GMT

I'll get some form of graphs and tables up, although it will be a mess.

Party in 2009:

Stars in 2009

Pacific in 2009

50c-$1 NL/PL 2009

$1-$2 NL/PL 2009

A major cause of the downswing in November was due to me suddenly running bad at $1-$2. People think of running bad as being a sequence of bad beats, but it isn't like that. The thing is, at NL, you will often be in against short-to-medium stacks on the turn when you will be 30% to 40%. You haven't done anything wrong to get to that position (most of the time you have taken the hand down either PF, on the flop or with your bet on the turn) but you are in the situation of "I'd rather not be here, but now that I am here, folding is worse than calling". If you lose eight or nine of these on the spin, plus you never hit a suck-out, plus you get one or two big suck-outs against you, then, bang, you've lost seven or eight buy ins compared to EV.

In my case, this was how the downswing started, and then it got to running bad as well (where you get to a bad position and folding is better than calling). Your EV line starts to flow down in sympathy with your actual results line. Experienced players will know the situation all too well.

$2-$4 NL 2009

All Birks

Year on Year comparison

The $3k or thereabouts downswing, which kind of started on October 10th and which really kicked in in November, was not a pleasant experience. I adopted my normal strategy. Keep playing, try to rock up and do nothing speculative, and move down in stakes. And, as predicted, the recovery took the path of

(a) slow the decline (rocking up, moving down in stakes, bad luck continues)
(b) begin a slow recovery (rocking up, lower stakes, bad luck has ended)
(c) gradually accelerate reciovery as confidence rebuilds (slightly less rocky, a little bit of higher stakes play)
(d) resume previous win rate (full recovery of confidence, back to standard playing style, more play at normal stakes).

Despite a net $2k loss in November, wins of $3k in the first 10 days of October and $4.5k in December (mainly down to heavy volume rather than a higher win rate) pushed me to $5.5k for Q4, with which I was delighted. That made the four quarters roughly $9k, $1.5k, $9k and $5.5k. I haven't included the gratis hotel in Monte Carlo or the €10k entrance to the EPT in my winnings, mainly through laziness (and the fact that I lost the €10k back fairly promptly).

I'm still not absolutely certain that I can beat $1-$2 (particularly on Stars) once the regs suss out my playing style. Paradoxically, I'm more confident at $2-$4 on Party and (when I get the nerve to attack it) $5-$10 on Party, where I feel "in tune" with the regulars and where you get the occasional single-tabling fish who likes to gamble. As for Pacific, well, I really think I could beat just about any full ring game that starts up there, but the software is so horrible (and the speed of play so slow) that it has to be ruled out as the main source of income.

The dream, at the moment, is to crack $2-$4 NL on Stars as well as Party. But at the moment I'm trying to re-establish myself as a $1-$ NL player. Hard to remember that one weekend in early October I played exclusively $2-$4 one weekend when I was on Party (sticking to $1-$2 on Stars). You have to be able to shrug your shoulders at $2k swings in a day if you are four-tabling $2-$4 and 6-tabling $1-$2, and I realized that I wasn't yet in a shoulder-shrugging frame of mind. It will come, but I probably need a six-figure bankroll (i.e., sitting in the various sites and on Neteller) to be able to do it.

Summary

Position	Hands	$	bb/100	VPIP%	PFR%	3Bet%	WTSD%	W$SD%	Agg	Agg%	Std Dev bb
1) small blind	32815	($12,809.83)	-25.79	18.8	7.7	3.8	20.8	52.6	5.93	38.9	54.33
2) big blind	32812	($23,173.85)	-44.25	9.6	4.4	4.4	18.4	49.3	5.21	29.1	62.22
3) early	84796	$12,873.52	9.69	9.2	8.8	2.4	24.9	57.3	6.3	51.8	45.76
4) middle	67691	$15,413.08	15.49	11.4	10.6	2.7	24	57.9	5.04	45.1	53.58
5) cutoff	35499	$8,942.92	17.43	13	11.2	3.4	21.5	52.4	4.92	40.2	56.28
6) button	33058	$15,555.69	28.77	20.4	12	4	21.2	53.6	3.77	40.1	65.31
TOTAL	286671	$16,801.53	3.98	12.7	9.3	3.6	21.2	53.4	5.12	38.8	56.25



		STAKE
SITE	Data	BONUS	$50	$100	$200	RAKEBACK	$400	$10	Tournament	$600	Grand Total
PTY	Sum of Win	$2,939	-$196	$4,355	$2,132	$1,066	$2,171			$56	$12,523
	Sum of Hands	0	991	66,007	64,036	0	8,301			77	139,412
Pacific	Sum of Win	$225	-$38	$1,654	$2,061	$760	-$114			$117	$4,665
	Sum of Hands	0	1,184	41,190	10,516	0	1,037			12	53,939
Littlewoods	Sum of Win	$142		$2,269	$261	$20	-$6				$2,686
	Sum of Hands	0		15,832	1,398	0	5				17,235
Stars	Sum of Win	$890		-$165	$2,344	$857	-$143		$1,339		$5,122
	Sum of Hands	0		27,919	40,611	0	307		1,860		70,697
UB	Sum of Win	$25						-$17			$8
	Sum of Hands	0						432			432
FTP	Sum of Win	$760		$161							$921
	Sum of Hands	0		5,972							5,972
Noble	Sum of Win	$41						-$2	-$4		$35
	Sum of Hands	0						243	50		293
Total Sum of Win		$5,022	-$234	$8,274	$6,798	$2,703	$1,908	-$19	$1,335	$173	$25,960
Total Sum of Hands		0	2,175	156,920	116,561	0	9,650	675	1,910	89	287,980

+++++++++++

(Later);

Every so often Warren Buffett just cuts through the crap and nails a company's directors so firmly to the wall that it's a wonder any of them ever move again.

This time it's Kraft, in which Berkshire Hathaway owns a 9% stake, that is at the receiving end of an attack so blisteringly logical that if I were a Kraft director I would kill myself now.

Kraft, in a move that didn't look all that controversial, asked for permission to issue up to 370m shares to finance a paper bid for Cadbury. Berkshire said that it would be voting against this. But what was interesting was the superb justification it used:

What we know with certainty, however, is that Kraft stock, at its current price of $27, is a very expensive "currency" to be used in an acquisition. In 2007, in fact, Kraft spent $3.6 billion to repurchase shares at about $33 per share, presumably because the directors and management thought the shares to be worth more.

Does the board now believe those purchases were a mistake and that Kraft's true value is only the current price of $27 per share -- and that it is therefore fine to structure a major acquisition based upon that price? Would the directors use stock as merger currency if the price were, say, $20 per share? Surely the true business value of what is given is as important as the true business value of what is received when an acquisition is being evaluated. We hope all shareholders will use this yardstick in deciding how to vote.

As Eric Morecambe might have said, "Get out of that". Using paper to finance deals is very popular amongst senior executives -- it makes their company bigger (equals higher salaries) and doesn't involve onerous things like interest payments. But Berkshire has highlighted a fantastic contradiction, one that I suspect will be used many more times over the next few years. "Why are you valuing your stock at '$x' for this takeover when you valued it at '$x times 1.5' only a year ago when you were repurchasing shares?"

This goes to the heart of the stockmarket. Just because your stock was trading at $33 last year and is trading at $27 today, that does not change the underlying value of the company. And any share repurchase (reducing the amount of stock in issue) or paper-based takeover (increasing the amount of stock in issue) implies that you believe the stock to be in fundamental terms to be worth more than you are paying when you are repurchasing, or worth less than you are issuing when you are buying another company.

In reality, companies repurchase shares when they have nothing else to do with their spare money, and make paper-based takeovers when the market is depressed, because the acquired company looks "cheap". The flaw in this argument is that a company is only "cheap" if you are paying cash. If your own shares are also depressed, the "cheapness" is a complete illusion.

It would be more logical to use your paper to make what look like pricy purchases (because your own paper is overvalued, while the takeover target is presumably less overvalued) when the market is high, and to repurchase your stock when the market is low. Indeed, if capital rules allowed it, in times of recession it would make sense to borrow money from banks to buy back shares.

________________

Monday

pbirks@btinternet.com — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:26:29 GMT

I keep meaning to post my numbers for 2009; the graphics are saved. It's just the damned tables that take so long to put together.

For those interested in other people's results, Andy has put up a comment at http://www.secretsoftheamateurs.blogspot.com/
as has Clarkatroid at
http://www.clarkatroid.com/

One covers tournaments, the other, cash.

Compared with both these players' figures, my own returns will look decidedly modest; but compared with many other players' figures, they will look extremely good. Ignoring all of the losers (i.e., about 90% of the player base) it would be interesting to see how the "winning 10%" spread out in terms of actual winnings and in rate per hour. Andy and Clarkatroid would, it's my guess, be in the top 1%, but I might be way out. Perhaps there are huge numbers of $250k winners out there.

Maybe the best way is to look at the player base. Pokerstars probably has a big six-figure player base. Would there be about 5m online cash poker players worldwide? That would give 500k "winners". The difficult thing now is to work out how in the curve the winnings are distributed. Something like 450k winners of up to $1,000, or 450k winners of up to $10,000? I just don't know.

+++++++++++++++

They just don't like winners

pbirks@btinternet.com — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:15:03 GMT

I have no absolute evidence that this letter from Victor Chandler to one of its players is genuine, but it was posted on PokerSiteScout in the reviews section for the IPoker network, and it smells genuine:

This network is a joke, dont play here, they will ban you if you win money.

This is the email I got:
If you are not already aware iPoker will be implementing a new policy in the New Year which will categorise players depending upon certain criteria. The new policy will also impose penalties upon card rooms that in essence, have a high proportion of winning players in relation to losing players.

Regrettably therefore, we are being forced to restrict a number of accounts in order to comply with the new policy and to avoid penalisation by iPoker and it grieves me to inform you that we have no option for the time being other than to restrict the cash game stakes at which you can play on Victor Chandler Poker.

We sincerely regret having to take this action and hope that the policy will change in the future so that you may once again enjoy playing cash games at Victor Chandler Poker. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this action will cause but know that you can still play in our tournaments and on any other of the Victor Chandler suite of products.

Yours sincerely,

Victor Chandler International

As I've explained before, there is a different business model for skins compared with standalone networks. It was a flaw ruthlessly exploited by NoIQ Poker, making IPoker look a bit stupid and Titan Poker seriously annoyed.

But this letter from VC Poker is a new one. We are entering the land of "you are welcome to play with us ... provided you aren't a winner".

LAGging indicators

pbirks@btinternet.com — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:01:15 GMT

I decided to play a Laggy style on Stars this morning. No particular reason. I'd read a rather good post on the matter on 2+2 (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78/micro-stakes-full-ring/improving-your-redline-pooh-baah-637589/); I'd kind of reached all of my targets for the year; I suspect that all of the sites will eventually move to contributory rake, and I just fancied a bit of interest.

Obviously, I did my bollocks. Well, not really, the actual loss for $100BI 250 hands was not that much ($87), although the volatility was obviously much higher. Given the cards I got, I would probably have lost about $30 playing my "normal" style.

My standard 12.5%/10% style moved to 22.5%/17%. Button raises went up from 20/15 to 43/30. Of 30 hands, 3 went to showdown and I lost the lot. But I still finished up ahead from button play. My losses were in my normally "strong" areas of early position and middle position.

Mentally I'm not suited to this style even though, paradoxically, I find it more exciting. The paradox is resolved in the sense that I am not seeking excitement or "fun" when I play my "professional" poker. The big question is the bottom line.

Now, given that I am rather new to this kind of play, and that it is necessarily more volatile, I would probably have to stick with it for quite a while to establish whether I would be able to generate a higher win rate per hour. I think I could definitely generate a higher win rate per 100 hands, but six-tabling in this style is far harder than six-tabling at 12/10. I spotted at least one situation where I had put in a dodgy raise and then failed to make a continuation bet because I had a difficult river decision on another table. But, well, practise, practise.

Here's some hands, with comments:

PokerStars Game
Table 'Buda' 9-max Seat #5 is the button
Seat 2: eYeLovErAgS ($170.65 in chips)
Seat 3: cp112 ($46.20 in chips)
Seat 5: thebigfisch ($32.90 in chips)
Seat 6: Hero ($96.85 in chips)
Seat 7: LeoFara ($20 in chips)
Seat 8: DivisnByZero ($108.75 in chips)
Seat 9: FutureBet88 ($121.55 in chips)
Hero: posts small blind $0.50
LeoFara: posts big blind $1
ijhevlidl: sits out
winnypuuks: sits out
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [4♣; 7♣;]
DivisnByZero: folds
FutureBet88: calls $1
eYeLovErAgS: folds
cp112: raises $3 to $4
thebigfisch: folds
Hero: calls $3.50

This would be a standard fold by me in normal play. But the essence of the 2+2 post was "fight for every pot", and I think that you have to be willing to make mistakes to find out how far you can push this principle.

LeoFara: folds
FutureBet88: folds
*** FLOP *** [A♣; T♠ 4♠]
Hero: checks
cp112: checks

This is a really weak check by opponent. I would always CB an Axx ds flop

*** TURN *** [A♣; T♠ 4♠] [5♣;]
Hero: bets $8

Following the principle of "fight for every pot"

cp112: calls $8

*** RIVER *** [A♣; T♠ 4♠ 5♣;] [7♠]
Hero: checks

This check is mainly to do with stack sizes. But I was still very close to betting, and I think that I should have, despite the spade falling on the river. Certainly if I had just had a pair of fours I would have bet.

cp112: checks
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Hero: shows [4♣; 7♣;] (two pair, Sevens and Fours)
cp112: mucks hand
Hero collected $24.75 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $26 | Rake $1.25
Board [A♣; T♠ 4♠ 5♣; 7♠]
Seat 2: eYeLovErAgS folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: cp112 mucked [Q♡; Q♠]

Villain did not play this hand well, imo. But I don't think that I played it that well either. I should definitely bet river, because opponent could well call with a worse hand,

Seat 5: thebigfisch (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 6: Hero (small blind) showed [4♣; 7♣;] and won ($24.75) with two pair, Sevens and Fours
Seat 7: LeoFara (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 8: DivisnByZero folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: FutureBet88 folded before Flop

PokerStars Game
Table 'Bernardina' 9-max Seat #8 is the button
Seat 3: Hero ($119.20 in chips)
Seat 4: maisi1984 ($20.65 in chips)
Seat 6: nico42152 ($166.50 in chips)
Seat 7: Murzik100 ($15.65 in chips)
Seat 8: hatsaflatse ($51.85 in chips)
Seat 9: TwoTone102 ($102.20 in chips)
TwoTone102: posts small blind $0.50
MrKGBoreoman: is sitting out
MrKGBoreoman leaves the table
manwe69: is sitting out
manwe69 leaves the table

Hero: posts big blind $1

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [8◊; J♠]
maisi1984: calls $1
nico42152: calls $1
Murzik100: folds
hatsaflatse: folds
TwoTone102: calls $0.50
Hero: checks

*** FLOP *** [6♣; 8♠ T♠]
TwoTone102: checks
Hero: bets $3
maisi1984: folds
nico42152: calls $3
TwoTone102: calls $3
*** TURN *** [6♣; 8♠ T♠] [T♡;]
sandermeijer joins the table at seat #1
TwoTone102: checks
BertonE314 joins the table at seat #2
Hero: bets $7
nico42152: folds
TwoTone102: folds
Uncalled bet ($7) returned to Hero
Hero collected $12.40 from pot
Hero: doesn't show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $13 | Rake $0.60
Board [6♣; 8♠ T♠ T♡;]
Seat 3: Hero (big blind) collected ($12.40)
Seat 4: maisi1984 folded on the Flop
Seat 6: nico42152 folded on the Turn
Seat 7: Murzik100 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 8: hatsaflatse (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: TwoTone102 (small blind) folded on the Turn

A fairly standard hand. The ten on the turn is very nice for me, since my play is completely consistent with having top pair on the flop.

PokerStars Game
Table 'Sicilia' 9-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: VKLIN ($103.90 in chips)
Seat 2: CallMeLucid ($100 in chips)
Seat 4: mettex-7 ($147.55 in chips)
Seat 5: Hero ($100 in chips)
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs ($100 in chips)
Seat 7: WojtasPolak ($100 in chips)
Seat 8: moe86 ($51 in chips)
mettex-7: posts small blind $0.50
Hero: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [T♡; T◊;]
DooM_DaYs: raises $2 to $3
WojtasPolak: folds
moe86: folds
VKLIN: folds
tuchko0381 is disconnected
CallMeLucid: calls $3
mettex-7: calls $2.50
Hero: calls $2
*** FLOP *** [8♡; 2♠ 2◊;]
mettex-7: checks
Hero: checks
DooM_DaYs: checks
CallMeLucid: bets $10
mettex-7: folds
VKLIN leaves the table
eYeLovErAgS joins the table at seat #1
Hero: calls $10
DooM_DaYs: calls $10
*** TURN *** [8♡; 2♠ 2◊;] [7◊;]
Hero: checks
DooM_DaYs: checks
CallMeLucid: checks
*** RIVER *** [8♡; 2♠ 2◊; 7◊;] [Q♡;]
Hero: checks
DooM_DaYs: checks
CallMeLucid: bets $33
Hero: folds
DooM_DaYs: calls $33
*** SHOW DOWN ***
CallMeLucid: shows [3◊; 3♣;] (two pair, Threes and Deuces)
DooM_DaYs: shows [9♡; 9♠] (two pair, Nines and Deuces)
DooM_DaYs collected $105 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $108 | Rake $3
Board [8♡; 2♠ 2◊; 7◊; Q♡;]
Seat 1: VKLIN folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: CallMeLucid (button) showed [3◊; 3♣;] and lost with two pair, Threes and Deuces
Seat 4: mettex-7 (small blind) folded on the Flop
Seat 5: Hero (big blind) folded on the River
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs showed [9♡; 9♠] and won ($105) with two pair, Nines and Deuces
Seat 7: WojtasPolak folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 8: moe86 folded before Flop (didn't bet)

An annoying hand. But it's hard to make an overcall here. Had I been in DoomDays position I would probably have made the call with nines as well. But I failed to fight hard enough for this pot. Multiwayers are hard when you are trying to be laggy. Calling here would have put me in the black for the session!

PokerStars Game
Table 'Lameia V' 9-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: Upay4college ($51.35 in chips)
Seat 2: maisi1984 ($22 in chips)
Seat 3: Hero ($100 in chips)
Seat 4: snowboard85 ($38.65 in chips)
Seat 5: slc2005 ($201.70 in chips)
Seat 6: WojtasPolak ($100 in chips)
Seat 7: Murzik100 ($20.50 in chips)
Seat 9: kgb2109 ($85.70 in chips)
slc2005: posts small blind $0.50
WojtasPolak: posts big blind $1
Qassen: sits out
Hero: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [J♡; T♡;]
Murzik100: folds
kgb2109: folds
Upay4college: folds
maisi1984: folds
Hero: raises $2 to $3
snowboard85: folds
slc2005: folds
WojtasPolak: raises $8 to $11
Hero: calls $8
*** FLOP *** [A♠ 2◊; 3◊;]
WojtasPolak: bets $16
Hero: calls $16
*** TURN *** [A♠ 2◊; 3◊;] [4♡;]
WojtasPolak: bets $36
Hero: folds
Uncalled bet ($36) returned to WojtasPolak
WojtasPolak collected $51.85 from pot
WojtasPolak: doesn't show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $54.50 | Rake $2.65
Board [A♠ 2◊; 3◊; 4♡;]
Seat 1: Upay4college folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: maisi1984 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: Hero folded on the Turn
Seat 4: snowboard85 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 5: slc2005 (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 6: WojtasPolak (big blind) collected ($51.85)
Seat 7: Murzik100 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: kgb2109 folded before Flop (didn't bet)

My main stupidity here was messing around with a 17/13 Supernova Elite player who knows what he is doing. My flop call is just a simple float, implying a hand such as AQ. If opponent checks turn I bet the pot. But opponent is could enough to bet out turn as a bluff, for value or with the nuts. Since I don't have a read here, I should probably give up on the flop, despite my "fight for every pot" rule. So, one pot that I didn't fight for that I should have, and another that I didn't fight for that I should have!

PokerStars
Table 'Sicilia' 9-max Seat #5 is the button
Seat 1: eYeLovErAgS ($102.35 in chips)
Seat 2: CallMeLucid ($113.75 in chips)
Seat 3: TwoTone102 ($50 in chips)
Seat 4: mettex-7 ($105.90 in chips)
Seat 5: Hero ($96.50 in chips)
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs ($157.25 in chips)
Seat 8: moe86 ($50.65 in chips)
Seat 9: ChippyBrady ($81.60 in chips)
DooM_DaYs: posts small blind $0.50
WojtasPolak: is sitting out
WojtasPolak leaves the table
moe86: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [A♠ 6♣;]
ChippyBrady: folds
ChippyBrady is sitting out
eYeLovErAgS: raises $2 to $3
CallMeLucid: folds
TwoTone102: folds
mettex-7: calls $3
Hero: calls $3

deliberate looseness on button from me. This is the kind of hand that people hate, because it's so rare that you know where you are. However, as I have written before, I think that "knowing where you are" is overrated. All you have to have is sufficient faith that you will be winning often enough.

DooM_DaYs: folds
moe86: folds
*** FLOP *** [7◊; A♡; J♡;]
eYeLovErAgS: checks
mettex-7: bets $3
Hero: raises $5 to $8

I like this raise. Opponent's bet is too small for a vulnerable Ace such as AT or A9. AJ would be scared of a flush draw so would be more. I think that this hand is a draw of some kind.

eYeLovErAgS: folds
mettex-7: calls $5
*** TURN *** [7◊; A♡; J♡;] [6♠]
mettex-7: checks
Hero: bets $20
mettex-7: calls $20

A lucky turn for me, but I'm betting the same amount even if I miss.

*** RIVER *** [7◊; A♡; J♡; 6♠] [T♣;]
kalmuka joins the table at seat #7
mettex-7: checks
Hero: bets $40

If opponent has AT or KQ, well, so be it.

mettex-7: folds
Uncalled bet ($40) returned to Hero
Hero collected $63.50 from pot
Hero: doesn't show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $66.50 | Rake $3
Board [7◊; A♡; J♡; 6♠ T♣;]
Seat 1: eYeLovErAgS folded on the Flop
Seat 2: CallMeLucid folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: TwoTone102 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 4: mettex-7 folded on the River
Seat 5: Hero (button) collected ($63.50)
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 8: moe86 (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 9: ChippyBrady folded before Flop (didn't bet)

PokerStars
Table 'Sicilia' 9-max Seat #5 is the button
Seat 1: eYeLovErAgS ($100 in chips)
Seat 2: CallMeLucid ($111.55 in chips)
Seat 3: TwoTone102 ($48.50 in chips)
Seat 4: mettex-7 ($116.30 in chips)
Seat 5: Hero ($114.35 in chips)
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs ($175.75 in chips)
Seat 7: WojtasPolak ($116.05 in chips)
Seat 8: moe86 ($49.50 in chips)
Seat 9: ChippyBrady ($88.10 in chips)
DooM_DaYs: posts small blind $0.50
WojtasPolak: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [A♠ T◊;]
moe86: folds
ChippyBrady: folds
eYeLovErAgS: folds
CallMeLucid: folds
TwoTone102: folds
mettex-7: calls $1
Hero: raises $3 to $4
DooM_DaYs: calls $3.50
WojtasPolak: raises $10 to $14

Here's the SNE guy again. This bet is very wide-ranging. I think I should simply reshove here, but that's the nuclear option and if you get called you have basically ruined it as a future option unless you have AK, AA or KK. The reshove here really wannts a fold, and I have a horrible feeling that this guy has seen the dodgy reshove often enough not to immediately fold anything bar AA and KK. He's probably calling with AQs, AK, QQ KK and AA. What percentage is that of his range? I'm not sure, yet. In hindsight, my instincts remain that a reshove is minus EV, but it might be more marginal than I thought.

mettex-7: folds
Hero: calls $10

"fighting for every pot". See earlier. Folding to reraises is for wusses. I'm calling flop and turn if I hit either top pair or some kind of decent draw.

DooM_DaYs: calls $10
*** FLOP *** [8♠ Q♡; 7♠]
DooM_DaYs: checks
WojtasPolak: bets $28
Hero: folds

Floating ceases to be an option. Either I fold or raise all-in. Once again, I don't think I have enough fold equity against this guy. I really shouldn't be at a table with him one, two or three seats to my left.

DooM_DaYs: folds
Uncalled bet ($28) returned to WojtasPolak
WojtasPolak collected $40.85 from pot
WojtasPolak: doesn't show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $43 | Rake $2.15
Board [8♠ Q♡; 7♠]
Seat 1: eYeLovErAgS folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: CallMeLucid folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: TwoTone102 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 4: mettex-7 folded before Flop
Seat 5: Hero (button) folded on the Flop
Seat 6: DooM_DaYs (small blind) folded on the Flop
Seat 7: WojtasPolak (big blind) collected ($40.85)
Seat 8: moe86 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: ChippyBrady folded before Flop (didn't bet)

(Poker Stars) $100.00 USD NL Texas Hold'em
Table Buda (Real Money)
Seat 1 is the button
Seat 1: Daergy ( $17.00 USD )
Seat 2: eYeLovErAgS ( $114.00 USD )
Seat 3: Burritosss ( $21.70 USD )
Seat 5: dymarko ( $19.90 USD )
Seat 6: Hero ( $100.00 USD )
Seat 7: ftw72 ( $38.55 USD )
Seat 8: DivisnByZero ( $101.50 USD )
Seat 9: FutureBet88 ( $119.80 USD )
eYeLovErAgS posts small blind [$0.50 USD].
Burritosss posts big blind [$1.00 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ T♠ T♣; ]
dymarko folds
Hero raises [$3.00 USD]
ftw72 raises [$6.00 USD]
DivisnByZero folds
FutureBet88 folds
Daergy folds
eYeLovErAgS folds
Burritosss folds
Hero calls [$3.00 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ 8◊;, 3♡;, Q◊; ]
Hero checks
ftw72 bets [$10.00 USD]
Hero raises [$35.00 USD]

I like this line. Opponent actually called time on this one and I think that he was v v close to folding, which would have been a superb result, given the size of his stack. If only he had had about $10-$15 more in his stack, I think that he would have given up.

ftw72 calls [$22.55 USD]
Hero wins $2.45 USD
** Dealing Turn ** [ 2◊; ]
** Dealing River ** [ 4◊; ]
Hero shows [T♠, T♣; ]
ftw72 shows [J◊;, J♡; ]
ftw72 wins $75.60 USD from main pot

++++++++

Net result over all was at least a positive red line (profit on hands which did not go to showdown). Given the number of hands where I eventually gave up for a fair amount of money, this was a good achievement. However, you need to keep the "showdown" winnings in the black as well!

Other downsides to this style It's more tiring. That means that, even if you are earning twice as much per 100 hands, you can't play as many tables and you can't play for as long a time. Annd, as mentioned, volatility is much higher, so your cost of capital is greater. These three factors mitigate against this style if you are looking to play 300,000 or more hands a year while holding down a job. However, for single- or double-tabling at higher stakes, it has much to recommend it -- with the exception of the volatility.

______________________

Warning, sexual stereotyping

pbirks@btinternet.com — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:16:57 GMT

A friend of mine has a two and a something bit old son. When he (the son, not the dad, who saves such experiments for after seven or eight pints) decides to be naughty along the lines of "I wonder if that chip pan full of smoking fat is hot" or experiments with how long he can scream in his dad's ear before dad gets annoyed, dad's instinct is to shout at him.

Mother does not approve of this. Instead, son has "the naughty step", which is, I suppose, the modern equivalent of "go and stand in the corner with the dunce's cap on", except that you don't have to do it in front of your peers.

However, there is one problem with "the naughty step" -- that being, son now simply says "shall I go and stand on the naughty step?" In other words, son now thinks "well, what's the big deal?" It's a bit like being poked with soft cushions and being made to sit in the comfy chair.

But, what's the theory? The theory is one of "social exclusion" and "you are different". Now, if you are a female, the hardwiring of social exclusion and being "different" is a considerable threat. You only have to look at simple anthropology to realize that the moment that one female is complimented on how she looks, she will not strut like a (male) peacock. She will instead be self-deprecating and say "oh, but you look good too!"

There are good prehistoric reasons for behaving like this -- co-operation is the name of the game for those raising the children.

Unfortunately, it doesn't apply to blokes or to young (male) kids, where the threat of "you are different" holds no such hard-wired horrors. Look how many young male adults (ghastly phrase, but accurate in this context) wear their electronic tags as badges of pride. The "naughty step" is the two-year-old's electronic tag. It's a kind of "well, so what?"

Now, dad's shouting ("roar"), well, that has an impact. That is, quite simply, scary. Which is I suspect, one reason that mum doesn't like it, because it scares her too. It's not the side of dad that mum particularly wants to see him now that he is a father rather than a suitor. It has echoes of bachelordom that do not fit in with mother's idea of "family".

I don't mention specific names here because I think this is a general point. I'm the best fan of kids learning by experience, providing that the damage from getting it wrong is not permanent. But if you do have to stop your two-year-old from even thinking about doing something, then the old Harry Enfield cry of "OI!!!! (Insert Name here) NO!!!!!" has a lot to recommend it.

_______________

Christmas musings

pbirks@btinternet.com — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:58:36 GMT

I had got myself well-prepared for the emotional strain that I knew I would be under this Christmas. I wouldn't be cruel enough to impinge a sad old dwarf on anyone else's festive jollities (although if I had been given the chance to ruin Ant & Dec's laughathon, I might have jumped at it). I would just watch movies, read a bit of a book, play a small amount of online poker, and eat an ordinary meal.

What I had not allowed for was the boiler going completely tits-up at 9.15 last night and refusing to ignite again until 5pm this evening. The flat's temperature had dropped to 13 degrees by that time, and I was mightily weary of life. I'd boiled about 16 lots of kettle to create the shallowest, most lukewarm bath in history. I'd gone back to bed with a hot water bottle. I'd sat with the electric fan heater (wisely bought last week) keeping me warm but driving me mad with the noise. And I was pissed off with having to keep the office door closed. It was as close to a prison as you could call a room appointed with a piano, a TV, 600 books, 500 CDs, 200 DVDs and four computers.

By 4.30pm I was almost in tears of sadness, so I went for a walk. When I got back, the ignition sequence initiated and the burner lit up, 15 hours after it had been asked to come back on. In that time I'd discovered more online about how boilers work (the Wikipedia entry is particularly fascinating, actually) than I really wanted to know. And I had in particular discovered that Baxi Potterton's have a reputation for poorly constructed Primary Circuit Boards (a flaw that they deny in the face of all complaints). What this means is that (if it is the PCB that's causing the problem) you need a person who is a dab hand with a soldering iron to fix it, because all a plumber can do is order a new PCB, and the new PCB is as likely to develop the same "dry joints" (hairline cracks preventing efficient operation, or, indeed, any operation) as your old PCB. And you can't get the PCBs from anywhere else.

Indeed, one guy said that he could make a tidy living just taking a soldering iron round Bryant homes manufactured/built in the 1990s , which had Potterton boilers, because some 25% of the homes on one new estate reported this fault.

And the boiler firing up was not the end of the tale. It cut out again within five minutes. But this time I was ahead of it. There are "pump overrun" and "anti-cycling" bits of electronics on the boiler. This meant that if I got the hot water running fairly quickly, the boiler should fire up via a separate circuit on the PCB (one that bypassed the ordinary ignition circuit, which would only be needed when the pump overrun cycle completed after three minutes). BAM, I hit the bathroom running, and the boiler duly reignited. I ran the hot water for three minutes, turned it off and waited to see if the burner carried on heating the radiators (the domestic hot water (DHW) flow takes priority over the central heating (CH) flow). It did, and it's still working at the moment.

Of course, this is no life to be living, and I have no idea what to do about it to get my life back into a bearable state. Apart from get another new boiler (this one is 3.5 years old).

Having carefully studied the diagrams for the combi boiler, what amazes me is that they don't break down more often. The potential for "fall-over" lurks at every turn. And it's not like a car, where, if the electrics or the mechanics go, you can hire a new car. You can't really hire a new boiler. Separating the two operations (DHW and CH) strikes me as one sensible option (but that is not one open to me because of space constraints). Getting a wood-burner back-up is another sensible option, and this is not impossible. I could get one installed in either the front room or the office. Getting the wood might be a problem, and I have no real storage space for it. I could create some in the front garden though.

Anyway, the one thing this has taught me is that being warm in your flat, after you have been cold and alone in your flat, is mightily mood-enhancing.

++++++++++

Not that it stopped me spunking off $500 on Party -- a nice welcome return to $200 buy-ins. This was just after I'd won $750 yesterday, also mainly thanks to a $200 buy in on Pacific, where I simply crushed some poor donkey with a penchant for overbetting. My limp-reraise with KK promptly elicited a "scary" pre-flop 4-bet shove from him that I snap-called. My KK beat his JJ.

That put us both on $400 and I was awaiting my chance, but he fell down to about $250 before I found QT of spades in the big blind. I called his Cut-Off mini-raise and the board came Qxx all diamonds. This is worth a lead-out, which he called. Turn brought another Queen, and I decided to check-raise all-in. Unfortunately he checked behind. A Ten of Diamonds on the river gave me the House, so I led out with what looked like a blocking bet. He duly raised me all-in. I called and he turned over Ax of diamonds, a flopped nut flush. Woop woop, slow play is for losers.

So, some heavy volatility at $200, which I don't really fancy at the moment. The Pacific game was an exception because my EV was just huge. Indeed, if Pacific gets 6-max games at higher levels which are that bad (which it looks to be getting at the moment), I really ought to bite the bullet and risk a $5k downswing, because there's a good chance of winning $10k or so in a week at just $3-$6 NL 6-max.

+++++++++++

True Blood ended this week on C4. A great series. I'll postpone watching the Dr Who until after the second episode is shown next week. Meanwhile, a good film noir season on BBC gives the opportunity to catch up on some rarely broadcast classics, including Gilda, which I have never seen.

__________

God bless Twitter

pbirks@btinternet.com — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:00:30 GMT

Although the technology was around at this time last year, this seems to be the year when the "mass communication" of the mobile twittering/iphone/blackberry classses has become the norm rather than the exception. And I must say that I'm finding it rather pleasant. E.G., communications such as "Am on train to Manchester, but train had to turn back to Euston because someone left their child on the platform". That's a true one, btw. As one observer commented: "Well, Christmas is a stressful time. You can't be expected to keep on top of absolutely everyting".

I suppose it's been made more useful/entertaining by the rush of pre-Christmas bad weather, which means that there are more disasters for people to report.

However, just as everyone else is becoming "more in touch" on a peer-to-peer basis, the automation and automatization of "big" travel business has moved in the opposite direction, with dire results.

That means that a person who has been fucked over by Eurostar can be texting Radio Five Live, er, Live, (or, indeed, can be interviewed on his mobile while sitting in a waiting room in Calais), but the person from Eurostar "on the spot" (i.e., in the waiting room in Calais), both knows nothing and says nothing.

The same happened this morning with Easyjet. While people at the airports were reporting live on the radio what was happening, the staff at the airports had no idea what was going on. While communication for the masses has been liberated, the "top-down" communication systems of big business remain in the (relative) dark ages.

It's no surprise, therefore, that the major gripe of nearly all passengers who have been stitched up has not been that the trains broke down or that the planes didn't fly, but that no-one at the companies concerned seemed to have the faintest idea what the fuck was going on, and that any communications that were given were frequently either wrong or were contradicted by someone else within minutes.

It's long been a moan of mine that automated communication systems are a major stress causer. The "expected arrival time" on a train platform that goes back by a minute, every minute, is one of these. That "progress bar" that some donk programmer thought was a good idea whenever a program is doing some work, well, that's a bete noire of mine. The McAfee update bar, for example, always stays on zero for about a minute, then moves to about 10% for three minutes, before zooming to 100% in a nano-second. It is, in other words, useless.

But with the arrival of the mobile, facebook updates by iphone or blackberry or whatever, people's tolerance of poor information has dropped to zero. And rightly so. There is just no excuse, except that of incompetence.

And on Friday night, Eurostar showed incompetence in spades. It was a case of reputational risk gone mad. Whatever procedures they had in progress for such a PR disaster unfolding in real time (my suspicion is that they didn't have any) they were not implemented. So we had people in Calais talking to the Radio, while no-one from Eurostar could tell you what was going on. The CEO (Richard Brown) didn't appear on the radio until 11am on Saturday. Where was he while the shit was unfolding? Because no-one these days (not a CEO, anyway) is "uncontactable". If someone who is freezing their bollocks off in a Calais Waiting Room because a Eurostar train has just been towed back to the French side of the Channel can talk to Radio Five at 11pm on a Friday night, then, one has to ask, why can't the CEO?

No longer do companies have the luxury of 12 hours to get a battle-plan for crisis management together. If it's fucked up now, then the CEO has to be on the radio, now. On the Friday night Eurostar couldn't even summon up a lowly PR guy.

In this sense, Richard Brown has still got it wrong, because he's talking about the snow, the technicalities, and how well the people were looked after who were stranded. In fact these are sideshows. The real fault of Eurostar was that it was never on top of the situation and it was never in a position to communicate to travellers or to the public what was going on. As such, we got all our news, live, from disgruntled travellers.

I hope that PR departments in all companies, not just travel companies, have taken note of this, because when the shit hits the fan somewhere else on a Friday night, say, in a year's time, the public's access to mass media as producwers will have increased even further. Live coverage on Facebook from the people there. PR man and CEO in bed, or in a meeting trying to work out how to put a decent spin on the disaster? By the following morning, it will be too late. The agenda will have been set by the public.

It's all rather liberating.

_____________________

Smokes and Mirrors

pbirks@btinternet.com — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:26:53 GMT

It was about two years ago that I read a rather technical article on how triple A-rated derivatives were created, as it were, out of nothing. I had to read it twice. Eventually I understood it. But I could never work out how to explain it to other people in layman's language.

This was a bit annoying, because putting complex issues in simple terms is, in a sense, my job. Keefe Bruyette & Woods and Guy Carpenter can churn out stuff from technicians that are very good, but not very simple. I always try to write my work pieces so that the "non-expert" in the company can understand can understand them, even if the "expert" might occasionally mutter "well, why is he explaining that? It's fucking obvious".

The disintegration of nearly all forums and small-circle areas of work into initialisms, local slang and the like is probably well-documented. The 2+2 forums must be virtually incomprehensible to a person who spends more than 50% of his time in the non-poker world. Even when writing in these areas, I try not to fall into this trap. I remember well bad teachers who were incapable of seeing beyond their own area of comprehension -- so that anything which was "obvious" to them was glossed over, leaving poor pupil (me) to eventually conclude that the guy was a fucking idiot. He wasn't (or, rather, they weren't). They were just incapable of projection from the state of "knowing" to the state of "what would it be like not to know?"

So, back to the smoke and mirrors of creating safe derivatives from non-safe derivatives. Here's how it was done.

Take 10,000 US mortgages. Of these, we'll call 1,000 very safe ("AAA"), 4,000 fairly safe ("AA"), 4,000 not fairly safe, but not dodgy ("A") and 1,000 risky (triple B-rated and below).

Now, let's create our first level of derivatives.

1) 500 x AAA, 500 x AA (we'll call this Man Utd)
2) 3,000 AA (Arsenal)
3) 500 x AA, 500 X A (Liverpool)
4) 3,000 x A (Man City)
5) 500 x A, 1000 x B and below. (Everton)

That gives us five products. Now, derivatives are not like chains as steel. They are not as strong as the weakest link. They can actually be stronger than the weakest link. All that matters is the risk of failure.

Let's suppose that triple A's have a 1% chance of failure, double A's a 2% chance of failure, single A's a 3% chance of failure and B and below a 5% chance of failure. (In bold, because I shall return to these percentages later).

Now (and this is where it gets a bt complicated). Let's mix up our first level of derivatives.

I'll just create the two extremes of five new second-level derivatives.

Super League Derivative (1) consists of 50% Man Utd, 25% Arsenal, 10% Liverpool, 10% Man City and 5% Everton.

Premier League Derivative (5) consists of 5% Man Utd, 10% Arsenal, 10% Liverpool, 25% Man City and 50% Everton.

Now, just to add one further level of smoke and mirrors, as an investor, I can buy "tranches" of these second-level derivatives. Assuming that I'm a trusty bank, I would only want to buy the "safest" 10% of any of these derivatives. We'll call these tranches the "super safe" and the "less safe".

Now, let's crunch the numbers here for the "super-safe" part of our "least-safe" derivative.

It actually consists of (taking Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Man City and Everton in turn):

25 AAA loans
25 AA loans
__

300 AA loans
___

50 AA loans
50 A loans
___

750 A loans
___

250 A loans
500 B and below loans
_____

That gives us 25 AAA loans, 375 AA loans, 1,050 A loans, 500 B and below loans.

Loaded up, that gives us something like a 3.1% chance of failure overall in the Premier League Derivative.

However, we are taking the "super safe" tranche of the Premier League Derivative. The best 10%. Let's suppose that there's a gradual decrease in the level of default. Within the 3.1% chance of default, default is 5 times more likely on the unsafe side than on the super safe side (remember, the super safe side is the last 10% of the tranche to which default would be applied).

That in turn means that the supersafe part of this tranche only takes a fifth of the 3.1% risk, or 0.6%. Well, a 0.6% risk of failure is less than the 1% threshold for triple A, so this "supersafe" investment is a triple A product, even though it has only 25 AAA loans in the entire product of 1,950 loans.

And, this, remember, is the least-safe second-level derivative. It's far easier to create triple-A-rated products from the "middle-three" second-level derivatives.

So, where's the logical hole? What went wrong?

I think you can understand why the innocents in the fund management business went so horribly awry here, because it all looks so transparent, and the hole is hard to spot because it assumes something that isn't even mentioned in the description of the products.

This is where the flaw lies: Let's suppose that there's a gradual decrease in the level of default. Within the 3.1% chance of default, default is 5 times more likely on the unsafe side than on the super safe side (remember, the super safe side is the last 10% of the tranche to which default would be applied).

In fact, that apparently conservative assumption proved to be wildly optimistic. Although at the ground level (the actual mortgages) you could assume a gradual increase in the likelihood of default, depending on the credit-worthiness of the borrower, as you move up through the levels of derivatives, that line stops being a straight line and starts to become a curve. and that curve becomes curvier and curvier each time you create a new derivative from a collection of other derivatives.

What does that mean? Effectively, it means that, once you get to third- and fourth-level derivatives, if one brick (tranche of risk) falls, all of the bricks fall. The "super safe" and "less safe" tranches at the higher-level derivatives were actually about as safe as each other.

Why does the likelihood line become curvier? Because of correlation. Suppose you have a recession. 10% of people are put out of work, and 10% of people default on their mortgage. That's fine if you a boring old mortgage bank, because 90% of people are still paying.

But what the derivatives did was slice and dice the borrowers so that you had all of the 10% groupings (from lots of different towns) in a single derivative. No longer did you have a straight line. If a small recession hit and 5% of people were put out of work, then the super-safe part of the least safe derivative was safe, but if 10% of people lost their jobs and defaulted, then the derivative, all of it, went tits up.

Much of the analysis of the past disaster has focused on the moral hazard of being able to lend and then being able to securitize those loans straight out of the back door. And certainly too many loans were made to people who should not have been allowed to borrow. But this point about the "curvy" correlation line in derivatives is perhaps the more important point, because it doesn't require bad lending to make it a bad product. The flaw is in the derivatives themselves. Far from spreading risk, the derivatives actually concentrate the risk.

There's a simple answer, of course -- the rating agencies just have to change their modelling techniques. And, to their credit, they are (although they are being a bit quiet about it). Once you get to third-level derivative and above, I'd claim that all of the tranches should have the same rating, because it's almost inevitable that if one tranche goes, the lot go.

__________________

A reincarnation?

pbirks@btinternet.com — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:10:20 GMT

Are they by any chance related?

I think we should be told.

January 5 predictions

pbirks@btinternet.com — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:57:15 GMT

I made some predictions at the beginning of the year, stating where I would be going with things.

The problem with revisiting this kind of stuff is that so many people (intelligent people, at that) say "how can he have thought that?" without realizing that their knowledge of subsequent events colours their view of things. Hell, I even do it to myself. It's absolutely impossible to return to your frame of mind and frames of reference even a few months ago, let alone at the beginning of the year.

That caveat aside, here it is:

And so it is that my positions in the market appear somewhat to contradict my opinions about the most likely outcomes for 2009.

Inflation: My position. Not retiring debt, would be willing to take on more long-term debt at reasonable price. My prediction for 2009. Low numbers throughout year, going negative in the middle for months. (1)

Interest Rates: Down to 0.5% by June, back up to 1.5% by December. (2)

Sterling: Down to a bottom of about 92p against the euro. Remaining sub-parity by December (98p-ish).
Dollar: Strong until May or June, then weakening against euro to $1.60 or so by December. Strengthening against sterling ($1.27?) but weakening in second half to $1.55 or thereabouts. (3)(4)(5)

Unemployment: Dreadful. See ouput
Output: Ghastly. Minus 2% to minus 2.5%. (6)

FTSE: Despite a return of fears about inflation, no immediate boost to the market. However, bottom is reinforced by retail investors who now have nowhere else to put their savings. Low of 3,400 to 3,500 in April. Rebound to 4,500 by December. (7)

Gold: Excellent. $1,100 an ounce by December. (8)

Oil: Remaining in the toilet. $30 to $40 by December without much volatility this year. (9)

Comments:

1) As it happened, I did retire some debt. £10k, in fact. I just couldn't find anything else sensible to do with it, and the clincher was the fact that I can pay off £80k of debt before I even have to think about tax problems on my rental income. Well, I wish I could pay off £80k of debt, but you know what I mean.

2) Interest rates. Got the "down to 0.5%" roughly right. Wrong about timing of rerise in rates (another reason for the decision to retire some debt).

3) Sterling: Way wrong on pessimism about Sterling. It held at 1.06 against the euro and has since recovered to 1.12, although I got the shape of the "curve" right.
4) Dollar/Euro. Too pessimistic about dollar.
5) Dollar/Pound ("cable") Too pessimistic about Sterling's bottom, but got curve fairly right and was almost alone in being Sterling bullish (v dollar) in March when it became apparent that the bottom was going to be in the 1.30s rather than 1.20s.

6) Unemployment and output. Slightly worse than even my pessimistic figures.

7) FTSE: Not right, but got the curve correct. Current performannce of FTSE continues to baffle me, but the clear explanation is the effect of quantitative easing, which seems to have gone right through to the bottom line with the investors' lament "What do I do with my money? Hell, why not the FTSE? "The trend is your friend"".

8) Gold: Very good, A or A+ for Birks here.

9) Oil: Not good. The China fiscal strategy (see a recent post of mine on this) was probably the main cause of that fuck-up, although there may also have been some supply issues.

Conclusions: It's a lot easier to get the general curve right than it is to guess exactly where that curve will be on the graph. Overall mark: B- or C+, I'd say.

The litmus test. How did I do?

Well, equities went okay. Of the four stocks that I picked (Whitbread, Ladbrokes, William Hill and Havelock Europa), I've done well out of Whitbread (close to 80%) and okay on Ladbrokes and William Hill. Europa has halved, but I still think it a sound company. My small company investments have done reasonably well over the years (for a start, their numbers are usually far less opaque than they are for the FTSE 100 companies!) and I like Havelock's relative lack of gearing -- the one thing which has caused me problems when investing in smaller companies in the past.

IG Index was a net loss of a grand on the year I think. Suffered by shorting Barclays and the FTSE when the former was at 160 and the latter was at 4700. Also made small loss on going long on Feed Wheat. There has to be a way to back soft commodities, but I'm now beginning to realize that this niche sector is actually quite volatile within itself. And the subtleties of deciding whether feed or milled wheat is the better bet (they can head in opposite directions!) is clearly one for the specialists. Any punting on softs by me would really need to be in some kind of "basket", and then you suffer from third-party fee syndrome.

US investments were stars. Index-linked was up 12% mark-to-market (plus the dividend, obv) and equity was up 10% on when I bought it and up 35% from March low. Dividend continues to come in quarterly on that one as well.

Where and why did I go wrong?

As I said, it's hard to put yourself back in your economic frame of mind as of Jan 1 2009.

I definitely misjudged the effect of QE on equities (a real one of "how could I have done that, it was obvious", and my only consolations are that I was (a) far from alone and (b) I was bullish enough on equities to have added to my holdings. It was just a case of "I could have made much more".

Too pessimistic on Sterling. This is a perennnial bugbear of mine and I was glad at last to get a bullish call right in March, even though I didn't follow it up with sufficient vigour. Market overshot on the upside, obv (when it got to $1.70), and I still feel that $1.63 is a mite high. The curiosity here is that the rate isn't much to do with follar/pound and is everything to do with dollar/euro. And THAT is to do with the euro -- specifically, Greece and the other debt basket cases who are in deep shit and are either going to need ECB support or will need to quit the euro after getting IMF backing.

In a way, several countries have "quit" the euro already, in the sense that any plans to join it are now either permanently on hold (Latvia) or have been abandoned altogether (UK). But no country that has gone in has yet come out, and the implications of such an event would be so frightening for the intrinsically risk-averse ECB that bailouts would go in before such an event was allowed to happen. A trip by Greece to the IMF would implicitly make that happen, because it would then be marching to a completely different economic drummer. I can't really see how Greece could get IMF support and stay in the Euro, but, in any case, the complexities are so great that I am sure that the ECB wouldn't allow it to happen.

The markets think the same, and the euro is weakening as a result. (Incidentally, much as I hate the short-term day-to-day commentaries about currency movements being "because" of something or other, in this case I do think that there is a fundamental macroeconomic issue at play. Weakness in the weaker Eurozone economies is a case of "when you are a billion pounds in debt, it's the bank that is in trouble", and in this case the bank is the ECB and, by implication, Germany and France. And the implication of that is a euro coming under pressure, even though Germany and France have emerged faster from the recession than the UK.)

________________

Boiling mad

pbirks@btinternet.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:44:46 GMT

My boiler is being a shit. By that I mean, it's not even being a solidly broken-down shit; it's being an intermittently not-working shit, which means that, the second that I give up trying to get it to work (after it has not heated any water or radiators for 12 hours) and phone the plumber, it decides to start working not three minutes after I stop talking to him. So, I phone him up, tell him it has started working again, only for it to once again stop working a half-hour later.

I suspect that it's an electrical problem on the primary circuit board, and I think that I have isolated one possible point of error. When the boiler switches from the central heating to heating the water for the taps, it might not remember straight away (if ever) to switch back to the central heating. And then it won't work for the hot water either, not until you get it working for the central heating. That would indicate that the "priority" switch (hot water > central heating) on the Primary Circuit Board is playing up. But why it works for a week, then stops, then starts, then stops again, well, god only knows.

So, a two-year-old boiler looks to need a new expansion valve (Birks's fault, holds hands up, put pressure up to 2 with cold water, so it blew when the water expanded when it got hot, like, duh, obviously, Birks does not understand physics) and a replacement PCB. Bleeaaagh,

Oh, and the boiler downstairs still isn't 100%, but the good news is that it might not after all be the dreaded leaking pipe "somewhere under the floorboards", and might be a fault within the boiler.

Boilers are like computers were 30 years ago. There's no Microsoft Windows operating system "standard". Engineers who quite possibly haven't seen the light of day since 1900 design insanely proprietary systems (mechanically and electrically) that have become more "efficient" (for which, read "complicated") over the years and thus, when they do go wrong, require not just a plumber, not just a specialist in boilers, but a specialist in that particular type of boiler, to fix it. Oh, and the part you require has to come from Slovakia. Not good news if your boiler breaks down on December 22nd.

Oh, and the manuals were written by someone whose first language was probably Finnish and who is an expert in describing the migratory habits of birds, but not very good on explaining Boilers For Dummies.

It's the inconvenience rather than the expense, but I wonder what it must be like if the expense would be a problem as well (I can still remember those days). This is the fear that British Gas plays on, ripping people off for £15 a month so that they don't have to worry about finding the money when the boiler goes kaput.

I distrust these systems for two obvious reasons:

1) British Gas obviously takes in far more than it would if it were charging on a case-by-case basis. In other words, it's just overpriced insurance.
2) If BG already has the money, what incentive does it have to turn up promptly or to do a good job?

+++++++

Oh well, day one of the holiday underway and, as predicted, I've got a list as long as my arm of things that I have to do, and I've done none of them. Playing at $100 BI is making the Party Palladium level by-the-end-of-the-year campaign rather hard work (but the gain on rakeback is so good that it's worth persevering).

Full Tilt, meanwhile, seems to be continuing its five-year campaign to totally fuck me over. I am just SO UNLUCKY on that site. AA runs into KK and loses. then KK runs into AA and, well, loses, obv. This goes back right to when I first started playing on FTP and I managed to find AA opposite my KK six of the first 12 times I got KK. My worst ever limit run was mainly on FTP. I don't think I've ever really made a profit on a bonus, even when it works out at 50% rakeback (which is the main reason that I keep falling for it !)

Have still only won back half last month's losses. Things are definitely tougher on Party now (as predicted some months ago). Well, they are tougher everywhere except on Stars, where they just remain as tough as they have always been.

++++++++

I enjoyed the two-part adaptation of Small Island on the BBC, as well as the radio adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Indeed, the latter nearly got me to start again on The Honourable Schoolboy (an underrated Le Carré novel, I feel) before moving onto the overrated (but still brilliant) Smiley's People.

++++++

Well, "Do Blog" was not one of the things on my list. But, now that I've done it, I suppose I could add it to the list and then give it a tick.....

_______________

My word is my bond

pbirks@btinternet.com — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:19:32 GMT

I was going to write about how everything I read these days relating to the economic crisis confirms my view that politicians don't understand it, don't know what to do about it, and are vaguely hoping that, if they spout enough nonsense for long enough, the problem will quietly go away; of, if it doesn't, will become someone else's problem. But, hell, we all know that anyway, so why harp on about it?

Well, harpering on serves some purpose because it's interesting to see the more nonsensical/opaque parts of governmental annnouncements, as well as to record the gradual step-by-step approach to the day when government debt is rated about as solid as General Motors and Ford debt was 10 years ago.

But I'll mention some other things first. One is that Spotify has thrown up two more fantastic artists who had passed me by. 65daysofstatic are a Sheffield post-rock band (the term is a bit like "post-punk" and "indie rock" in its wideness, so think Mogwai/God Speed You Black Emperor) who have ploughed a relatively lonely furrow since 2001, but have definitely produced some gems. Also The Mountain Goats, aka US guy John Darnielle, has been around even longer. He started recording in 1991, and reminds me most of Sufjan Stevens, except that Darnielle is (a) better and (b) more prolific. Superb lyrics and memorable tunes. His more recent stuff seems to me to suffer from over-productions. The earlier material — rather reminiscent of Destroyer (mainly Dan Bejar, who also works with The New Pornographers) — is better for its lack of smoothness.

++++

I've begun re-reading the Culture series from Iain M Banks. I read a few of these when I was out of work in the early 1990s, but only those ones that I could find in the public library. It seemed an idea to read the series again, in order. However, Consider Phlebas, the first in the series, doesn't appear to have held up too well. Then again, I've not been so keen on the Rebus books recently, so perhaps I'm going off Rankin.

Eckhart Tolle still does me good when I feel down. Get the men in white coats now, I guess.

+++++

Anyhoo, back to governmental incompetence. I had a local councillor ring my doorbell last week. One has to feel sorry for any local councillor willing to get Birks going on the sorry state of British politics, but I did at least have the decency to say to him (after a 20-minute rant on how the public spensing solutions of the LDs was not really a solution at all) that "I might not vote Liberal Democrat next time round, but I do appreciate you coming round and showing your face, and it puts the Liberal Democrats in a better light in my eyes". So, give the guys credit where credit is due. The only time I ever saw a Conservative representative was on the eve of the 1992 election when Gerry whats-his-name was hopelessly trying to hold on to Dulwich. I've never seen a Labour representative ever.

The Pre-Budget Report seems to have broken all records for being an absolute disaster, and Darling's team are clearly quietly leaking why it was so awful. Step forward Mr and Mrs Balls as the evil couple behind it all (in the Darling version of events). Balls (backed by Brown) demanded a real increase in spending on education because, he said, this was a defining difference between Labour and the Conservatives. The fact that Britain can't afford it didn't seem to matter. What was important was drawing a distinction between Labour and the Conservatives. This is the kind of thing that gives politics a bad name. Meanwhile, Mrs Balls, AKA Yvette Cooper, wannted to keep the funding for personal pension accounts, due to start in 2012, by cutting the starting point for the 50% tax rate to £100,000 to £150,000. This is a good example of "thin end of the wedge" taxation. Bring in a higher rate at some kind of stratospheric level that no-one you know reaches (National Insurance and income tax started that way, with only a minority coming into their remits when they were launched) and, before you know it, it's applying to everyone on the average wage.

The terrible thing about these budget speeches, be they PBRs or actual budgetary announcements, is that the devil is always in the detail and the detail is not available when the speech is made. For example, a £500m capital spending commitment (won by Mr Balls) wasn't even mentioned in the accompanying documents, let alone the speech.

Pension campaigner Ros Altman unearthed in Annex B that Darling's statement in the PBR that in the public pension sector, "by 2012, contributions by the state will be capped" masked a large increase in pension payments in 2010-11. Indeed, the "cap" is hardly a cap at all, and we are likely to see many years of "higher-than-expected" public sector pension costs compared to budgetary forecasts.

But this is like kicking a cripple. We know it's a mess; Darling knows it's a mess. The problem is, there is no way out of the mess that isn't personal poitical suicide, not when you have ministers such as Balls and Balls closer to the ear of the prime minister.

(For those masochistic enough to actually want to seek out some of "the small print", well, you have to look fairly hard to find it. A 46-page pdf at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr09_chartstables.pdf has some rather horrid numbers in it (see in particular page 40, which shows taxes and other receipts falling from £525bn to £489bn this financial year, while expenditure rises from £563bn to £606bn, and then to £646bn in 2010-11).

The index is available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/prebud_pbr09_index.htm

Note, however, that the Treasury makes this very hard for you to find! (I wonder why). Its "microsite" with all that you are meant to need to know, is http://prebudget.treasury.gov.uk/ (cleverly inverted order). To get to the "proper" pre-budget report you have to click on a less obvious link.

The best place to find out the real nitty-gritty is, perhaps unsurprisingly, good old HMRC, where this site ... http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/pbr2009/index.htm ... probably links best to stuff that might actually affect you, rather than all the glossy "at a glance" stuff put out elsewhere. But all the DirectGov sites are basically fluff, without nitty-gritty details that are so important.

Personally, I'm taking the "projections" for 2010-11 as having the same degree of optimism as did earlier projections for 2009-10.

If we move the over-optimistic figures by about the same amount, I make it that the UK will have a deficit of £181bn for 2010-11 (2009-10, £130bn; 2008-09, £52bn) rather than the £139bn that the Treasury predicts. I predicate this on a £171bn tax receipt rather than £184bn, a £166bn tax on production and imports income rather than £180bn, and £31bn interest and dividend income rather than £44bn.

Now, my maths might be a bit shaky, but I don't see a £181bn deficit as being "the road to recovery". That's just another three grand that every man, woman and child in the UK is in the hole. And no-one in government has the faintest idea what to do about it.

In a way, this is the fundamental tenet of my "inflation will come back" argument, because unless that debt is inflated away, there is no "solution". And the more people who arrange inflation-proofed pensions, the more the penalty will fall on the poor sods who don't. Until (and this is the tipping point), those people who are suffering the penalty will refuse to take the shit any more, at which point the whole edifice will come crashing down.

There's no way anyone with an inflation-proofed pension is going to agree to be "part of the sacrifice". They see it as "their" money, rather than just a promise to pay from society.

This, in a weird way, is an uncannny parallel with what caused the current crisis. Banks were happily booking at 100% loans which were never going to be repaid in full. It thought it had the money (after all, the securities were triple A rated), but when push comes to shove, the only money you have that is guaranteed is the money under the mattress, and even that can get its value wiped out fairly quickly when inflation takes hold.

Conclusion. Don't think that "you" and your living standards are safe, because you have an inflation-proofed pension, a government pension, a contributory pension, or money in the bank, or money in the mattress, or gold in the fridge, or assets in your property. It can all vanish in a very short time (if not in an instant) and there won't be a single fucking thing that you, or I, will be able to do about it, apart from genuinely diversifying our risk. And even that is easier said than done.

++++++

The start of the serious downward slide will come when our debt is no longer triple-A rated (making the deficit more expensive to finance). At that point the politicians will presumably stop blaming the banks for Britain's ills and will start blaming the rating agencies. But this is an inexorable tide caused by the fact that no government (and I include the non-democracies here) seems willing to state that standards of living for the working, the unemployed and the retired will have to fall.

Iceland, Ireland and Spain -- the current basket cases in the eyes of the rating agencies -- have now been joined by Greece. The way the UK is going, we will soon be joining them. At first sight the Greek PM George Papandreou has held up his hands and admitted that Greece faces systemic corruption in the public sector. But when it comes down to specifics on how Greece is going to deal with a debt situation that will soon reach levels of unsustainability (basically that being when your debt is rising faster due to the interest owed than you are raising every year in real income) the Papandreou is remarkably coy. Unlike Ireland, Greece is too scared to enforce serious wage cuts -- not least, I suspect, because democracy in Greece is rather more fragile than it is in Ireland. Indeed Ireland, to its credit, stands apart from its closest European counterpart Spain in actually facing up to the problem and doing something about it. The UK, Greece and Spain may seem different from each other in the scale of the problem and how the governments think that problem should be solved, but all three are guilty of talking loudly and carrying a very small stick.

The utter cluelessness of the UK government was perhaps best exemplified by a quote from "a Treasury spokesman". Not unreasonably, some journos who have a vague understanding of how the city works phoned up the Treasury: The conversations (which are based on real historical events although, for dramatic purposes, some incidents are fictional and some characters are combined or invented) might have gone like this:

Journo: "So this bonus tax on banks, that also hits stockbrokers, even though they had nothing to do with the crisis, oh, and asset managers, even though they had nothing to do with the crisis. Er, what's to stop the banks absorbing the increased tax themselves by, say, doubling the size of the bonus pool?"

Treasury (and this is a real quote): " We expect institutional investors to take a very active interest in all aspects of bank remuneration policies".

As they say in the poker world. Lolz. So, the main, nay, the sole regulator of a government announced tax is going to be a ragbag of institutional investors, many of which are life assurers and other such managers of our savings. Does the Treasury seriously think that these investors (who only actually have a "nuclear" option when it comes to restricting the salary levels, because all such votes are only recommendations that, even if passed, can be ignored by the board) will go to war over a pre-budget report from a government that won't be around after next May?

This is the delusional land that the current UK administration is inhabiting.

_______________________

Yours,

The Management

____________

Conservative interventionism

pbirks@btinternet.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:53:46 GMT

ET Claim? (7,6)

Yes, it's Climate Change time in Copenhagen, mysteriously now Copenhaagen according to at least one Radio 5 Live political commentator. I look forward to hearing about the G20 conference in Paree.

The debate on Global Warming is interesting, not least because all sides concerned seem to be doing their best to throw logical thought out of the window. One woman on Radio Four said that anyone who ignored the threat of global warming was contributing to the problem -- which seems a bit unfair on the carbon neutral eco-bloke living in a forest who has turned his back on The Guardian and all who sail in her.

A second curiosity seems to be this "either/or" dichotomy. One side says it's all the fault of industry and cutting down the Amazon rainforest, while the other says that it's just a natural global cycle (or, in some cases, they claim that it's an even shorter-term blip). None seems to accept that some of the warming might be a blip, some might be part of a long-term global cycle, and some of it might be our fault. And since no-one seems to be taking this line, no-one is trying to ascertain what percentage cause can be ascribed to variance, what to a long-term natural cycle, and what can be blamed on humanity.

However, it's the third curiosity that most amuses me. I remember the De Gaulle speech of 1968 that brought the French workers out on the streets of Paris to bring to an abrupt end the student protests of 1968. As the Gaullists marched down the Champs Elysees, proudly singing the Marsellaise, one left-wing observer commented: "If only they would listen to the words they are singing, they would realize that they are on the wrong side".

I get that feeling with Global Warming. Those who are doing everything they can to get us to reduce carbon emissions are associated with the liberal left, and yet it is these who are, in the broadest sense, the most conservative; while those in industry who are saying "hell, it's not a bother at all", should realize that the changes that will be rendered will probably put most of them out of business and create new companies based in the new cities in Greenland and on the Antarctic.

I guess that my point here is that worrying about maintaining the current ecological balance is not something that peoples six centuries ago had time to worry about. It's a product of privilege. And if one takes the extreme view and assumes that the "worst" scenario will come true, the simplest answer I can think of is, so what?

I looked up web sites that were warning of the dangers of global warming (not the "climate change deniers") to see what threats they posited. And, guess what, nearly all of these are threats to humanity's comfortable life, not to the survival of humanity itself. In addition, the threats are, in the main, threats to the developed world, rather than to the developing world. Let's face it, telling Bangladeshis that there's an increased danger of flooding as sea levels rise is hardly going to get much of an emotional response when we've been allowing the country to suffer horrific weather events for the past 50 years without really lifting a finger.

No, the worries about climate change are worries about the developed world losing its very comfortable life. Valuable land will become less valuable, while currently worthless land (Greenland, Antarctica) will acquire desirability. Little wonder that the population and government of Greenland is less than enthusiastic about "keeping things as they are".

I don't see us stopping the current long-term cycle of warming (which, for my tuppence worth, I think is slightly more significant than our own contributions) and that means the world of 2100 will indeed be very different from the world of today. But that does not mean the end of humanity. What it means is opportunities and gains for many have-nots and losses for many haves. It's the threat to a comfortable way of life, not the threat to the planet, that is the major cause of worry in the developed world.

But that's the nature of the earth; it changes. And if eventually we destroy the planet in the same way that our forebears destroyed the Sahara, then, well, that will be that; it was good while it lasted. We have no "responsibility to our children", and we do not hold this planet "in trust for the generations that come after us". If you'd tried speaking guff like this to anyone in any century in the past, they would have looked at you as if you were mad.

Personally, I think that some of the excessive consumption-mad lunacies of our current generation (gas-guzzlers, conspicuous consumption, deliberate obsolescence, GDP-growth mania, etc) is distasteful and inefficient. But that's a moral stance of mine, not an absolute right. My guess would be that, in 2100, humanity will still be around, despite the end of the Amazon rain forest and the existence of parts of the world where we have to live under special sun-protecting canopies. But humanity will be no more nor less miserable than it is today, because most of the people alive will have known no different.

Our desire to stop "climate change" is really our desire to maintain our own way of life. It's an intensely conservative way of thought and also a rather narrow way of thought, because there have been people like that throughout the centuries. In the past, they were often religious or political leaders. Change is not "good" or "bad". But it happens. Some people try to slow it down, but they can't stop it. The trick to winning is working out how to utilize things in the way that life is going to be, rather than putting all your effort (and eggs) into the basket of stopping the change happening. Because, if you do that, you are bound to lose.

++++++++++++++++

Some hands, some ancestors

pbirks@btinternet.com — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:05:35 GMT

A couple of AK hands. As you probably know, AK is the new AQ online. But these two worked out ok.

$100 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Sunday, December 06,

Seat 9 is the button
Total number of players : 9

Seat 2: A_KOLMOGOROV ( $92.36 USD )
Seat 1: Hero ( $102.80 USD )
Seat 7: ENJ0YME ( $104.88 USD )
Seat 5: Fromolon ( $100 USD )
Seat 4: OmarKhayyam9 ( $100 USD )
Seat 9: Villain ( $156.26 USD )
Seat 3: Tubarao777 ( $96.01 USD )
Seat 6: damian_banks ( $97.56 USD )
Seat 8: o_pheliac ( $98.50 USD )

Hero posts small blind [$0.50 USD].
A_KOLMOGOROV posts big blind [$1 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to Hero [ A♣; K♠ ]
Tubarao777 folds
Fromolon raises [$3 USD]
damian_banks folds
ENJ0YME folds
o_pheliac folds
Villain raises [$7 USD]
Hero raises [$32.50 USD]

((This looks rather aggressive with AKo vs a raise and a reraise, but this is Sunday morning and the initial raiser is loose in his standards, meaning that villain, already a loose raiser, might be tempted to put in a weaker-range-than-normal isolation raise. The relatively small size of the reraise reinforces my thinking here. However, if initial raiser or reraiser shoves, I can still fold a hand where my expected range is no more than 18%-20% EV))

A_KOLMOGOROV folds
Fromolon folds

Villain calls [$26 USD]

((This is beginning to look like JJ or QQ, although it might be AK or (just) KK.))

** Dealing Flop ** [ 3♣, 4♣, 2♠ ]

((An interesting flop! Now, if opponent has AKs or AKo I have good fold equity (because he can't have AKs with a flush draw). If he has QQ I have (less) fold equity (in fact I should have none, because if QQ is folding post-flop on this kind of board, why is he calling the reraise pre-flop? But, well, opponents don't always act optimally.) If he has KK I doubt that I have any fold equity.

However, my outs against QQ are good. Any 5, any A, any K or runner-runner clubs. No time to pokerstove that when I am playing, but I think it has to be more than 33.3%, which is the key number here (any fold equity makes it a positive EV bet).

Hero is all-In [$69.80 USD]

Villain: kk or aa
Villain will be using his time bank for this hand.

((Villain thought for about half his time bank on this hand. I'm fairly sure he is QQ, but, eventually, he came to the right decision.))

((My equity is 39.5%, btw.))

Villain calls [$69.80 USD]

** Dealing Turn ** [ K◊; ]

((fortunately, to no avail….))

** Dealing River ** [ T♡; ]

Hero shows [ A♣, K♠ ]a pair of Kings.
Villain shows [ Q♡, Q♣; ]a pair of Queens.
Hero wins $206.60 USD from the main pot with a pair of Kings.

HAND TWO

$100 USD NL Texas Hold'em -

Seat 9 is the button

Total number of players : 9

Seat 1: A_KOLMOGOROV ( $241.28 USD )
Seat 5: Hero ( $104.13 USD )
Seat 3: DUKU101 ( $302.94 USD )
Seat 7: ENJ0YME ( $129.14 USD )
Seat 2: Fromolon ( $100 USD )
Seat 8: OmarKhayyam9 ( $98.50 USD )
Seat 9: in_the_bobo ( $106.35 USD )
Seat 4: o_pheliac ( $100 USD )
Seat 6: simex88888 ( $100 USD )

A_KOLMOGOROV posts small blind [$0.50 USD].
Fromolon posts big blind [$1 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to Hero [ A♠ K◊; ]

DUKU101 raises [$2 USD]

((Very loose-aggressive pre-flop. 75/30. Likes this early mini-raise. I've already decided to put the guy to the test with Top-pair-decent kicker or better.))

o_pheliac folds

Hero raises [$6 USD]

ENJ0YME folds
OmarKhayyam9 folds
in_the_bobo folds
A_KOLMOGOROV folds
Fromolon folds

DUKU101 calls [$4 USD]

** Dealing Flop ** [ Q♡, 5♠, A♡; ]

DUKU101 bets [$5 USD]
Hero raises [$14 USD]

((Many many players flat-call here against agg opponents. Bollocks, I say. I'm in front and I want to make him pay. Raising this size of bet on the flop when you have TPTK is more profitable against all types of opponent at this level, although for differing reasons. For straightforward players you are raising a hand that the bet shows is middling. Against trickier players you are both raising for value AND disguising your hand, because trickier players expect top pair to flat-call.))

DUKU101 calls [$9 USD]

((There's now about $40 in the pot and I have $84 behind. I'm planning a pot bet on the turn.))

** Dealing Turn ** [ 3♣; ]

DUKU101 bets [$9 USD]

((However, this bet kind of changes things. I had thought that he was a bad Ace such as AT or AJ, but perhaps he's on some kind of draw – say a flush draw with a gutshot? That would make more sense given the size of the bet. Like I say, the guy is tricky and laggy, so you have to allow for a wider range than normal. The problem here is that I might be well-ahead-well-behind (AK vs e.g. AT or e.g. A3), or I might be ahead against a draw (flush draw and a gutshot).

In addition, my pot bet now becomes obviously commitworthy, and I'd now rather take down the pot now than go to showdown (partly because there is more money in the pot and partly because I think that the chance that he is on a draw has increased)).

Hero is all-In [$84.13 USD]

((That solves the reverse implied odds problem. If in doubt, fold or shove, I say....)

DUKU101 folds

Hero does not show cards.
Hero wins $131.66 USD

+++++++++++++++++++

As you can see I'm back at $100 buy in for the moment. I've got back a third of what I lost last month already (helped by actually running half-good on a couple of all-ins) and that's without much bonus money. This morning I dipped my toe in the water with a single table of $200 buy-in on Party, mainly because only five tables of $100 buy-in were running. I'm doing bits and pieces of hit-andrun on FTP and Stars – all helping to rebuild bankroll and confidence. Five-tabling FTP $100 buy-in with (at one point) a $560 bankroll was a great way of focusing the mind. Back up to $700 bankroll there now.

And I've been doing some reading on 2+2. Their "Concept of the Week" on the Full Ring Micro Stakes forum is useful, not because I plan to take up any new concepts, but because I want to know how the regular opponents are thinking.

Am absolutely loving True Blood on TV. Have also discovered a couple of interesting bands. 65daysofstatic are a God Speed You Black Emperor/Harmonia corss-over, from Sheffield!

Also The Church. Australian, been around a long long time. Echoes of The Bats, Early Cure. Interesting.

++++++++++++++

Further genealogy. On the Middlesbrough front, I'm sorry to inform Mr Dickson that it appears this was a temporary work assignment for my great-grandfather, hence my grandfather being born there. In fact nearly all of the Birkses on that side (and, therefore, I assume, on my maternal side on that line), seem to come from a small part of Shropshire/Staffordshire that, even now, appears to be in the middle of nowhere. Just look up Bishops Offley, Cheswardne, Moreton Say, Adbaston, Chetwynd and Longford and you appear to have the Birks generation of blacksmiths and wheelwrights going back centuries (well, great great grandfather Enoch, in any way, who was born in 1817).

On the mother's mother's father's side (Alfred James Starkey, born 1853), I appear to come from a family that worked in the leather trade in various ways shapes and forms (shoe makers, leather case makers, etc) and who lived in parts of Hackney until I get back to great great grandfather John Starkey (born 1796) who lived in Worship Street, a road that I traverse every morning when on my way to work.

The censuses appear to be rather unreliable in certain places. I'm fairly sure that great grandmother Ruth Starkey was one of many many offspring of shoemaker John Helms, of Northampton but born in London. But she doesn't appear in the 1861 censurs. Perhaps he just forgot her.

I haven't even started on my mother's father's side, partly because I suspect that might be the most complex strand (my maternal grandfather was a pianist for the silent movies, but was also rather peripatetic. Add to that a common name (Harold Palmer) and you can see the problems that might arise).

But, all very interesting stuff. And, as Tony Hancock might have been pleased to say, still English in every case. But it would be neat to find someone who was French, German or African. If an Australian ancestor turns up, kill me now ….

_________________________

Free money!

pbirks@btinternet.com — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:07:11 GMT

One of the things which has mildly puzzled me over the past nine months has been the strength of equity markets and the appearance of lots of money, despite unemployment rising and what looks like a fairly serious contraction in GDP. I didn't let it worry me unduly -- it made a couple of investment decisions (oh, ok, blind punts) on IG Index go wrong, but these things happen. I just attributed it to some kind of larger multiplier effect than I had anticipated, possibly through higher confidence levels than reality dictated.

Even this morning the FT was talking of an "overheated debt market", with the re-emergence of certain debt offerings that were symbols of the height of the 2006 debt madness. One of them, Booz Allen's payment of a $350m dividend to Carlyle that will be paid out of a corporate debt raising rather than something as irritating as profits, struck me as particularly scandalous, with Carlyle's excuse that after the debt issue BAH's gearing would still be lower than when Carlyle bought it as, well, no excuse at all.

However, the scales rather fell from my eyes when I saw this graph yesterday, courtesy of Swiss Re's chief economist in Asia.

This rather innocuous offering conceals the fact that China effectively pumped CNY3trn, or $450bn to you and me, into the Chinese economy to stop all of those newly urbanized workers from being laid off and potentially causing a few riots if the government tried to send them back to rural poverty. If you want to see a visual image of the size of a problem that might be, look at the crowds held up at China's big-city railway stations in January last year because snowfalls shut down the rail lines at the time of a traditional once-a-year return-back-home holiday for these workers, many of whom have wives and children thousands of miles away, all of whom depend on factory wages for survival at anything other than poverty level.

Anyhoo, that $450bn didn't sit still. In effect it was transferred from the US gilt market to the global economy, particularly the developed world that imports a lot of stuff from China. THAT in turn makes the QE of the Bank of England look rather anaemic by comparison (although not irrelevant). That $450bn is probably a major factor in asset price support in the developed world.

At the same time, China cut its interest rate by two points to around 3.5%. The result? Building in China hasn't slowed down; it has accelerated. And we in the UK should be looking equally closely at Chinese interest rates and this level of bank lending as we are at the UK QE level, the UK interest rate level, and what is going on in the US.

Actually, we should be paying more attention, because the actions in China will, I think, be a good lead indicator to what will be happening in the US about 12 months later. Just look at when the Chinese got moving with its monetary stimuli -- a good nine months before the equity lows in the UK and the US.

++++++++++++++++

The current fuss over plagiarism on the web and the need for "proper" newspapers to charge for content ignores one interesting point -- the FT and the WSJ, both of which charge for content, put a lot of unoriginal material on their web site. Other newspapers are even more guilty. Why should I pay Rupert Murdoch to access content that's been compiled by Associated Press, Reuters and Dow Jones? Ahh, the WSJ might say, "but it's a convenient way to get all of it in one place."

"Like Google, or any other news aggregator, you mean"?

"Ahh."

The "pay for content" guys actually want it both ways. They want to charge the reader, but they want to be aggregators on the quiet. I'll happily subscribe to publications that offer me original content or source stuff that I would otherwise miss (South China Morning Post is an excellent example), but I'm buggered if I'm going to subscribe to an online newspaper that clutters up my browser with three or four pieces of Adobe Flash shit, surrounding a story that they've got from a stringer on Reuters.

________________________

Gherkins and salad

pbirks@btinternet.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:26:39 GMT

To the Swiss Re Gherkin this morning to hear chief economist Thomas Hess continue the "inflation is nothing to worry about" story, although it was at least tempered with "in the developed economies". I'm not quite sure how he thinks inflation in the BRIC countries will remain isolated from the developed world to which they are exporting their goods, but there you go -- he gets paid about five times what I get, I should think.

The driving theme of the morning appeared to be that the insurance industry is shitting itself that it will get tarred with the same brush as the banks when it comes to new solvency and capital rules. While Swiss Re shouts to the rooftops that the industries are fundamentally different (mainly in the worlds of liquidity and (non)-contagion) you can sort of see the point of view of the other side. After all, AIG was the biggest disaster, and AIG was an insurer. That it was the Financial Products division that caused the problem is a matter of how many angels can you get on the head of a pin to the people looking into the causes of the systemic crisis.

The other problem is that the insurance industry is very much a game of two halves -- life and non-life -- and if legislators have difficulties differentiating between the business models of the banks (borrow short and lend long) and insurers (take the money up-front and hope that the shit doesn't hit the fan) then you can imagine how much greater a difficulty they have between short-term business and long-term life assurance with a very large savings component.

++++++++

Managed to end the month only losing two-thirds of what I won in October (and that being won in the first 10 days of October to boot). I carried over quite a lot of bonusto December too, so things weren't even as bad as that. Whether I can win all of that back in December is debatable, as I am restricting myself to $100 buy-ins until I re-reach my peak earnings. If I put in the hours, it should be doable. Of course, there's always the Armageddon possibility, that I am now officially not a long-term winner at the game. But we'll take that scenario as and when, shall we?

___________

Time, Gentlemen

pbirks@btinternet.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:07:07 GMT

Broadcasting House is a rather childish programme broadcast from 9am on a Sunday on Radio Four -- one which seems to think that it's considerably funnier and edgier than it really is. This week it picked up on a number of texts that it had received commenting that the programme was finishing at 10.01 and, thus "stealing" a minute from The Archers.

Cue great hilarity in the Broadcasting House studio about what they should do each week with the "extra" minute.

It all struck me as vaguely moronic (although the choice of Barry Cryer speaking for a minute was, paradoxically, rather a good one -- he saved the programme) but, more importantly, it missed the point.

The BBC can start programmes and end them whenever they wish, but why can't the programme listings be accurate? There's no law saying that programmes have to be listed as starting at times ending with a nought or a five. If The Archers ALWAYS begins at 10.02, then why not list it as such on the radio listings?

BBC Two completely fucked with people's heads when it used to list Arrested Development (a programme that, like Seinfeld it did its best to stop people watching) as starting at 11.20pm and finishing at 11.40pm -- an impressive feat when all the episodes were 22 minutes long.

The thing that baffles me here is I can't understand why the BBC did it. And they are still doing it. Why list a programme as starting (or ending) at a time different from the time that they know it is going to start (or end)?

The one Radio Station within the Empire that doesn't put up with this shit is the World Service, because they actually have to start and stop to accurate times there (because of regional variations in broadcasts).

++++++++++

I cracked and accepted the Full Tilt $500 bonus offer, and almost immediately regretted it. Full Tilt is the pure bok site for me, ever since the first 12 times I had Kings on the site (at limit) and I ran into Aces six of those times, and smegged a winner in none of them.

Am looking at the "requirements" for December and it looks as if I might be going for a record number of hands. I know in my heart of hearts that this is not wise, even if it is positive EV. But I just can't resist the offers!

Well, that isn't quite true -- I resisted the $10k 100%+ rakeback on Party, for a mere 1000 points every day throughout November. One guy who was going for it (pokeprogress) told me he was playing 8k hands a day to get there. By my estimate he won about $8k in open play (I'll check it on PTR later), got $10k as the Australian entry bonus, and $10k in rakeback bonus (although this falls back if he takes the cash rather than the rollover on future hands played). That's the kind of cash that can be generated at modest stakes if you put in the work. But, hell, 8k hands a day, every day for a month? No thanks.

So, for Peter, I need to get 4,300 points this month (December) to move up a rank on Party. That improves the rakeback for the following quarter Jan-Mar 2010 significantly.

Second, I want to get in 35,000 FPPs worth of play on Stars. Third, I want to win at least a grand on Pacific. Fourth, I need to play about 25k hands on FTP to pocket the $500 bonus there. At least only the Party one of these is an "all or nothing" condition.

Some of the reasons for this are metagame. I really have to think about next year and what I want to achieve and how I plan to achieve it (more hours? more tables? higher stakes?). For that, I need to know what I am capable of. I've already realized for example that I can now play for three hours when five-tabling without much fatigue -- whereas the "focused" six-to-eight tabling on Stars left me knackered after two hours. Looks to me as if 400-420 hands per hour (depending on how lively those tables are) is about optimum.

+++++++++

Two more weeks of work before the Christmas break for me. Swiss Re building tomorrow, Art show at the Soho Theatre on Wed night, and the Grosvenor on Thursday for the London Market Awards. Made my way to John Lewis to buy a bow tie, my old one having mysteriously disappeared. Got my hair cut (whence came invitation from Jessika to go to her Art Show on Wed night). I have grave doubts whether I will enjoy this, but it seemed churlish to refuse. But Jess is only about 26 (I've known her since she was a baby 21-year-old washed up in London from the streets of Berlin, with not much English at all) and I expect that most of the other people there will be similarly young. I feel an old-enough washed-up has-been at work amongst 30-somethings (even amongst 40-somethings), so I fear that being in the proximity of edgy 20-somethings for an hour or more will likely either give me a panic attack or make my head explode.

Have to tidy up tonight for cleaner who will almost certainly fail to appear tomorrow. So it goes.

________

pbirks@btinternet.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:20:14 GMT

Well, I was going to write something about Dubai, Mohamed Al Makhtoum (who, you might be interested to know, did not take too kindly to journalistic enquiries a few weeks ago about how solid were the finances of DubaI) and what a pile of mess it all was, but I suspect that this matter has some way to run, so I'll leave it for the moment.

Except... this is an interesting example of how the markets can sometimes work well. Unlike politicians, or newspapers, the markets have no moral compass and no hidden agenda. This might appear to be a bad thing and, in some cases, it may well be just that. But in this instance, it's a good thing. While the UK government fiddled the rules with Saudi Arabia and BAE for what were called "economic" reasons, in this case the economic forces have shown the UAE, Abu Dhabi and Dubai that you can't treat the markets like you treat visiting politicians or your subjects. Fuck around with the markets, and they will fuck you back, and they are a lot bigger than you are and they don't give a shit about Abu Dhabi's oil (they just go short or long on that as well, and make the money back that way!)

Al-Makhtoum is today getting a lesson in just that, with credit spreads on Dubai debt now wider than Iceland's. Expect a tail-between-legs pull back in the not-too-distant future.

+++++++++++++++++++

ANCESTRY

I finally got around to doing a short bit of genealogical research yesterday. A sort of Birks "Who Do You Think You Are?" and, in line with that TV programme, it threw up some interesting facts in just an hour's work.

Putting the 1911 census online was the thing that made it easy for me, because I knew the name of an uncle and an aunt on my father's side, who were born in the first decade of the last century. I found them, and thus found my grandfather and grandmother (Harry and Beatrice, it transpires) and the address in Crewe (Goddard Street, still there, although the house is long gone). By a stroke of luck, the mother in law was living there as well in 1911, which gave me a great grandmother on that side, as well as another surname (the rather tedious "Wood").

I knew that my grandfather had worked in Crewe's railway manufacturing industry, but I hadn't known that he came originally from Middlesbrough. My maternal grandmother, meanwhile, was born in Shropshire.

But more interesting facts emerged on my mother's side. Here the hunt fixed on an address that I had. Once again, by a stroke of luck, this threw out the names of not just my maternal grandmother (who died in the late 1940s) but also my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on that side.

It's that great-grandfather -- Alfred James Starkey, born 1853, who is the real bit of interest. He was born either in "London Lukes" (a parish near Old Street, where I work now) or in Bethnal Green -- the records differ, but are not necessarily contradictory. This gives me the satisfaction of putting my heritage back within London as far as the mid-19th century, although unhappily it is north of the river!

Even more of a black mark on my name is his job -- London City Missionary. Yep, my great-grandfather was an urban evangelist.

The London City Missionary movement started in Hoxton in 1835 -- you can read about it on Google.

My great-grandfather was eventually assigned to an area just south of the Elephant and Castle, where he would go from door-to-door spreading the Word Of The Lord. His wife's family had money and a property off the Camberwell New Road -- it was they who bought the two houses in Handforth Road, in one of which my great grandfather and great grandmother lived (I was brought up in a part of the other house). If I were minded, some research of earlier censuses could, indeed should, produce information on the previous generations, both in Bethnal Green and in Camberwell.

Anyhoo, Alfred James Starkey was one of the people interviewed by the Salvation Army in its survey of London at the turn of the century, and the originals of that interview are still available in the Charles Booth Archive in the London School of Economics. These interviews (the map and the sociological classification of London at the time is particularly interesting) often had descriptions of the interviewee, as well as details of what they said.

But what is interesting is the surname. While "Birks" can trace its English heritage back to Yorkshire in the 16th century and quite probably some way beyond, "Starkey" is a Jewish name, and Bethnal Green is old working-class Jewish territory. And yet Alfred James Starkey was a Christian evangelist. Odd indeed. Did his parents convert? Did HE convert? Aftwer all, the London City Mission was Hoxton-based and it was there that they started their hard evangelical work. My curiosity is piqued.

Of course, details of one's own family tree are a bit like holiday photos -- of far greater interest to oneself than to other people. But I did find all of this stuff fascinating, and it was incredible how much information I managed to garner, from the few facts that I knew, in such a short time. Good old interweb!

_________________

More Clowns

pbirks@btinternet.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:10:18 GMT

I think that you wouild have got decent odds against one of the solutions that is being touted (and bought) for the current banking crisis would be another "new" product. After all, wasn't it all those clever new products that got people into trouble in the first place?

Contingent Convertible Notes (Cocos) are the latest whizz-bang wheeze.

First, a bit of background. When a new product is invented, one of its major functions is for its genuine nature to be as hazy as possible. There is a good reason for this. A few years ago "hybrid" instruments were all the rage -- that was because the sellers could pretend to the buyers that they were effectively debt while simultaneously pretending to the rating agencies that they were effectively equity. For very sound reasons, these hybrids went out of favour (I'll come back to that).

But now we have Cocos, which are another form of hybrid, and which use exactly the same three-card-trick. Cocos are debt. But if a pre-defined trigger point is reached, they convert to equity. This effectively boosts the borrower's capital. They are, in other words, a "pre-packed" debt-for-equity swap -- thus saving those long and tortuous negotiations between debtors and creditors where the debtor says: "if you don't take this debt-for-equity deal, we will go bust", and the creditors say "bollocks, you are bluffing".

UBS, (yes, it's UBS again) structured Lloyds Bank's Cocos system, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. UBS head of financial institutions said that the products "provide greater certainty". Lloyds is going to issue £7bn of these Cocos. All seems very fair, does it not?

Well, yes and no. The point is, what ARE Cocos? Let's ask UBS this. Well, they would say, they are debt, but if a trigger point is reached, they become equity, and that's that. This is an interesting definition of "certainty", I think.

What I think I can guarante is that a number of investors who are restricted to debt rather than equity in their investment portfolios will be told that "these are debt". But, once again, the regulators (and the rating agencies) will be told that, really, they only have the exposure of equity, because if things go tits up, they automatically convert. Therefore they shouldn't be treated in the same way as "real" debt for capital purposes.

Real debt or not real debt? Ask UBS. Depending on who you are, you are likely to get a different answer. Or, perhaps, you will get the same, intrinsically fudged answer.

At the moment the Cocos are popular (the takeup at Lloyds was 86%, with 78% of those who would still have been receiving interest on their old products also accepting), but that's only because the alternative is a full debt-for-equity swap. In other words, they are being offered instead of equity, and half a loaf is better than none. How will they fare if they are offered in an open market, as a choice between "real" debt and real equity? How would the markets treat this investment -- as something which is "near-debt" or something which is "near equity"?

This is an interesting question, in that I suspect that Cocos will vascillate between both ends (although leaning towards the equity end). When risk appetites are high and credit spreads are low, the Cocos will move closer in price to debt. But when risk aversion is high and so are credit spreads, then they will be seen as closer to equity. UBS has got them off the ground because they are offering a beaten-up old car in exchange for a car that won't go at all. But when newer, brighter, and more reliable cars appear on the market, I can't see Cocos being top of anyone's investment list.

Why did the hybrids go out of favour? Two interlinked reasons. The "real" value of a product (e.g. a Future) is only known when the day of reckoning arrives. One of the neat tricks of the hybrids was that, so long as the day of reckoning never arrived, you could carry on pretending one thing to investors and another to the rating agencies. But when the day of reckoning DID arrive, the banks found it very hard to make their investors (who had, remember been told that the instruments were "effectively debt") take the equity bit of the hybrid offering. That in turn led the rating agencies (and the regulators) to say ... "hmm, these things tht you said were really equity and so shouldn't require you to boost your capital, don't look so much like equity any more. We are going to change the way we rate them to being very close to absolute debt". In a stroke this reduced the reason for institutions to issue them. It was, in other words, only their ambivalence, not their position in the debt/equity chain, that made them attractive.

The same, I posit, is going to happen with Cocos. Far from providing "certainty", as UBS claim, one lot of people (investors) will be told that there's about a 3% chance of the trigger being involked, while another (regulators, rating agencies), will say that the chance doesn't matter, because if the capital is needed because of a trigger, then the capital will be there (viz, 100%). When the shit hits the fan, you'll have the same problem as you had with hybrids.

Of course, the structurers of the instruments will already have taken their fee....

___________________

_______________

Hard way to make an easy living

pbirks@btinternet.com — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:49:41 GMT

Thin green line is All-in EV (actually this is slightly flawed and should be about $300 higher, because HEM has difficulty coping with pots where you go all-in pre-flop against a small stack and later go all-in against a big stack. When the final all-in occurs, it calculates your equity against both small stack and big stack, rather than calculating two separate equities. EG. I had AA vs QQ (big stack) and 44 (small stack). I raised, qq called, 44 went all-in, I mini-reraised. QQ calls. Flop comes J42. I go all-in, QQ calls. I end up winning on the hand, but HEM puts my "equity" at about 10%, because it thinks I only have four outs against the smaller stack).

Thick green line is actual winnings. A good example to you of how luck can play such a large part in short-term results -- and a big indication of how live players could run good for a year or so, without realizing that they have been lucky rather than good.

+++++++

Update: Ran okay yesterday, ran shit this morning. All getting a bit dispiriting, even though I know that, eventually, it will pass. Mind you, I found myself playing on a very lively $1-$2 table where I dropped $200 but could just have easily won $400. That said, I really shoould learn to adapt my playing style quickly when I spot that I am at a table with three not incompetent lags.

I misplayed one hand, but, when you are running good, it can look inspired.

I was UTG+1 with TT. UTG limped and I raised to 3x. This was (predictably) called in three spots and then (equally predictably) raised to 13x by the big blind (Fishandchips, an old UK adversary). UTG promptly calls. Now, when you are fairly sure that you are going to get at least two other calls behind you, you can risk putting in 12% of your stack before you see a card. So I did.

Two players call behind, making it a 52BB pot, with me sitting on about 86BB.

Flop came A73 rainbow.

Big blind checks, UTG checks. I bet 32BB.

Wrong or right?

Well, if everyone folds, it looks brilliant. I've got nice a leverage threat (54BB behind) and the flop makes it look as if I have some kind of made hand rather than a draw.

But if you get a flat call behind you, it doesn't look so good.

That's what I got, and I decided that discretion was the better part of valour against these guys. Even if opponent isn't playing a set cagily, I may walk into a stubborn sonofabith who calls me with A8.

In metagame terms the bet isn't so bad -- it will encourage people to call big bets on the flop with hands that I beat. But really I don't think that this was one of my finest hours. It was, if you like, an example of hour six weeks of relentless shit wears down your feeling for the game.

+++++++

I actually played three heads up sitngoes over the weekend, on the netbook while watching TV. It will take some time to get the hang of how opponents play (and to get the hang of the game myself!) but early impressions were that at baby levels ($10 buy in) the opposition wasn't too frightening. So far I've re-upped on the Moshman book, and just following some general principles looks good enough. I'm probably playing a bit looser than he recommends when I have position and a bit tighter than he recommends when I don't -- that's mainly because of my comfort zone.

All in all it was quite fun, but it's no way to make a living. Either you four-table at, say $20 and win 60% at least of the games you play, or you play fewer tables at much higher levels (with the concomitant improvement in the quality of your opponents).

Life and poker bankrolls are taking a hell of a hammering, with news that the rent from downstairs is going to be somewhat less over the next couple of months because of maintenance work being an added pain in the bum. Oh well, these things are sent to try us....

_________________

Further update Nov 24th. The nightmare continues.

This is meant to happen to other people, not to me. A couple of standard coolers tonight where opponents effectively made there mistake pre-flop (case 1) or on the turn (case 2), so I got stacked off in both. I think I hit three sets in 1000 hands and lost with all of them. Marvellous.

It's beginning to affect my sleep, and last night I kind of dreamt about it (except that I was playing live, and I confused an 8 card with an "18" card.... go figure).

I'll say one thing; my end-of-year graph is going to look like no other graph of mine from 2001 through to 2008. Lucky that I keep a super high bankroll...... But my confidence is taking a real hammering. It's so hard to keep yourself out of the famous Caro slough of despair, and so hard not to become a fatalistic calling station.

In that sense, I think that I did okay over this last session. But that didn't make it any less depressing. Am now running towards 4 losing weeks on the spin (unheard of), and two four-figure losses week on week (unheard of), a 20 buy-in downswing (unheard of) and so on and so on. I know that it will end, but I just wish that it would hurry up! Perhaps the beginning of December will be the sign.

I start each day in the right frame of mind. None of this "I'll just try not to lose". No becoming more passive, no becoming ultra-laggy. Just steady as she goes, with perhaps a few less of the "vclever-clever" plays and perhaps just a bit more ABC tight-aggressive. It makes no difference. I still get slaughtered. Sigh. Kill me now.

__________________________

Finance

pbirks@btinternet.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:19:15 GMT

Interesting to read the comments of new German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and to compare them with the statement earlier in the week by Ben Bernanke. While the latter had said that it was very hard to say what the fundamental price of an asset should be and therefore it was difficult to say that it was overvalued (this, btw, was a sentence before he said that assets were not currently overvalued -- leading one to ask "given his previous sentence, how can he know?") Schäuble said in Frankfurt yesterday that

"more likely today is a scenario in which excess liquidity globally creates a new asset market bubble".

So, Bernanke and US/UK policy on one side, Germany, France and, more interestingly, China's banking regulator Liu Ming-Kang, on the other.

Mr Liu last weekend attacked the Fed for keeping interest rates low and thus fuelling the dollar carry-trade. Yesterday Schäuble warned that

"if there is a sudden reversal in this business, markets would be threatened with enormous turbulence".

I think that much, possibly all, of the dollar's recent general weakness is because of carry-trades. The one exception is its exchange rate with commodity currencies (e.g. Norway, Australia, Canada) where those currencies are naturally benefiting from another arm of the asset bubble (commodities), as well as the carry trade. Note also that the UK, which also has very low interest rates, has not benefited against the dollar to the extent of the euro or more "speculative" exchange currencies.

All of this forex stuff is really a bit by-the-by. Governments scream and shout about exchange rates, but history has shown that the benefits and handicaps of stronger or weaker rates have a significant self-balancing effect -- not least to the extent that a stronger exchange rate holds down inflation and forces producers to up their efficiency, while a weaker exchange rate allows companies to say that "oh, the currency movements are increasing our profits anyway".

Of more interest (well, to me, at least) is the claim by Schäuble that a new asset bubble is being created (i.e., we aren't getting out of the previous problem, we are just shifting it somewhere else) and that we don't really know what is going to happen when disaster strikes -- merely that disaster will inevitably strike somewhere and that, when it does, in the manner of disasters, it will be very unpleasant.

It is this undeniable truth that Brown, Darling, Bernanke and Geithner seem determined not to see. And even Schäuble's motives are far from pure. This is really a German being pissed off at the Americans for keeping interest rates low, thus "harming" the eurozone, rather than an objective observer warning that the entire macro-economic policy is fucked. Trust me, if Germany were benefiting from the US "solution", he would be far less vociferous on the matter.

But at least Schäuble has come to the right conclusion, if for the wrong reasons. As I've been saying for ages, my feeling is that the solutions put forward by the US and the UK in the past year have just shifted the problem into (future) inflation. But Schäuble's comments gave me pause. Because all that I had really thought was that the US and UK solution obviously wasn't any more of a real answer than was Bush's response to the dotcom collapse of the early 2000s. And the only way that I could see this disaster unfolding (i.e., genuinely solving itself) was much higher inflation. However, there are other possibilities that I discounted, ignored, or perhaps wasn't even aware of (see "Black Swan") and perhaps I should allow for the chance that the bubble will burst in a very unpleasant way, but not in the way I had confidently predicted. Perhaps, after all, it will be the debtors that suffer rather than the savers.

In other words, I still think that inflation will be the net result of current government lunacy, but I should start looking around for alternative scenarios.

I've already been hedging my bets in a way by paying down my mortgage, but really this is more of a "I can't think of anything else that I want to do with my money" than a positive take on future inflation. I've got quite as much as I want allocated to equities, and my pension is now all in index-linked. Property is still fully/over valued (despite Bernanke's line that it's hard to say whether this is the case or not), so it's hard to see where else to go with cash that you want to "invest". As Mikey observed, with all that helicopter money floating around, some of which seems to have found its way into my pocket, the choice is either put it under the mattress or put it into assety-like things. Quite a few banks have been putting it under the mattress (although in the banking world this is known as reserve-strengthening) but enough investment managers have been putting it into assety-like things.

One thing seems very likely now -- the UK and US governments are going to keep interest rates very low for far longer than is prudent.

____________

BTW, am now in middle of worst downswing ever (in real terms) at minus $3k since high point. In comparative terms, it's the worst since October/November 2006. All getting a bit depressing... As usual, a run of v bad luck eventually leads to affecting the quality of your play. This isn't "tilt" (not in my sense of the word). It's just what separates us from the machines. And it's here that being good at your "C" game is so important. You know that you aren't playing at your best, but your third-best has to be better than other people's third-best, because they will go through the same shit eventually as well. But, jeez it can hurt.

_____________

Separated by a common language

pbirks@btinternet.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:18:39 GMT

Last week while I was on holiday and earlier this week I suffered a large number of "refused deliveries" of the newsletter. I kludged round it on Tuesday by turning the delivery to the bouncebacks from Blind Carbon Copy to Carbon Copy, and then sending the publication out in small batches. But I also notified IT to see if they could discover which dastardly spam filterer was generating false positives. (Incidentally, if any company tried to sell me software, I would test it by putting through an "ok" image/email and seeing if a false positive was generated -- the sales staff of these products are much better at showing how good it is at stoping stuff, but not so hot when it comes to showing you how good their product is at letting innocent stuff through).

Anyhoo, when I opened up Word 2007 this morning, things looked odd. To whit, the default text had reverted to Calibri, the paragraph spacing had returned to default, and a few other changes. Odd, I thought, but then carried on. Perhaps IT have been loking at my computer to see if any settings are causing the rejections.

It was only when I came to send out the newsletter that I realized the horror of my situation. I clicked the custom macro button on the toolbar and ... nothing. I opened up the macro box and ... nothing, no macros at all. I checked my settings - enable macro was on. I phoned IT. They denied having anything to do with it.

Luckily I found a three-year old Word document that had the most important code in it. I had a complete back-up on the home machine, apart from one small part that took me ages to fix.

But I was still puzzled. How had this happened?

I Googled away until I found the following, which happened to someone else:

• I opened Word 2007 to find all my custom keyboard shortcuts and macros had disappeared.

It appears to have happened after I changed the Primary Editing Language from English (UK) to English (US) and quit all Office programs (using the Language Settings button under Word Options).
•
I checked the Application Data\Microsoft\Templates folder and found there is no Normal.dotm file there. There is a file called Normal.dotm.old that, judging by the timestamp, was modified when I quit all Office programs.

I tried saving a copy of Normal.dotm.old as Normal.dotm. This did not restore the shortcuts or macros.

• Follow-up on this. I just conducted an experiment.
1. With no Normal.dotm in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates, I opened Word and created a new keyboard shortcut.
2. I quit Word, and as expected, a Normal.dotm appeared in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
3. I opened Word and used the keyboard shortcut. It worked.
4. I quit Word. Normal.dotm did not disappear from Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
5. I opened Word again and changed the Primary Editing Language back to English (UK).
6. I quit Word. Normal.dotm was still in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
7. I opened Word. Normal.dotm disappeared from Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
• I guess this explains it: changing the Primary Editing Language causes Normal.dotm to disappear. I guess I won't do that again

And, guess what,the previous day I had been doing some "tidying up" and, because I type on a US keyboard using mainly US spelling, I changed my "primary editing language" from English (UK) to English (US).

As far as Word 2007 is concerned, this is the same as changing the default language from Finnish to Serbo-Croat. The old normal.dotm is renamed and a new normal.dotm is created. So, obviously, when I opened up Word the following day, all shortcuts, all macros, all preferences, had been wiped.

Unlike the chap above, I eventually discovered that my "old" Normal.dotm still had all of my original macros. A bit of file renaming restored my position to that of an English (UK) primary editing language, but all shortcuts, customizations and macros intact. Only cost me an hour or 90 minutes. Microsoft is shit.

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About eight years ago I went to a lunchtime seminar on asbestosis, its various incarnations, symptoms (or, in the case of pleural plaques, lack thereof) and other matters medical. One of the research guys there (who had pissed off to an American institution because, basically, the institutions here just didn't have the funds needed) said that one of the major problems over the next decade or so would be the "magic bullet" cancer cures that were currently being developed, but which would impose incredible costs on the world's health services (or insurers).

Today the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence decided that one such drug -- Nexavar -- was far too expensive thank you very much, even though it is likely that it would extend the life of liver cancer sufferers significantly.

Liver cancer, of course, isn't "sexy". If it had been breast cancer, or prostate cancer, I reckon the drug would have been nodded through. But liver disease is as associated with drinking as much as lung disease is associated with smoking.

But the conflicts that this situation brings up (and it will be repeated again and again over the next 10 years) raise uncomfortable questions that people just don't want to ask. NICE seems to think that the drug developers should give away for nothing the drug that has cost them fortunes to develop. Or, if they don't give it away, at least charge no more than it costs to produce. "Research and Development" costs have no place in the NHS canon, and the fact that unless Bayer can make a lot of money on this drug then it can't afford to spend lots of money on researching future drugs that will help other cancer sufferers survive --- well, like I say, it's an issue that no-one seems to want to address.

But, well, there's another issue here. Life isn't fair. We seem to have an odd attitude to money. It's quite reasonable for money to be used to buy some things (things that "don't matter"?) but when it comes to stuff that can extend life, the concept of "nice if you can afford it" goes out of the window.

Except that it doesn't. If you or I could afford bi-monthly full physicals, an early stage of cancer would be far more likely to be detected than it is at the moment. And yet I neither see nor hear demands that such medical checks should be available on the NHS. But once you've GOT the disease, then capitalism goes out of the window. Capitalism applies to prevention, but not to cure.

Such a division strikes me as needlessly foolish, not least because of the old saying that prevention is better than cure.

And the NHS has never been "fair" anyway. The entire system is structured in such a fashion that money is distributed to the wrong people at the wrong time in an inefficient manner. Get a "lucky" illness in the right place, and your treatment will beat anything that the private sector has to offer. But suffer from a non-sexy disease (any mental health issue, for a start) and your chances improve dramatically the more money that you have.

So, for sure, say that everyone, rich or poor, should be entitled to a £3,000 a month medical treatement if they need it. But don't then procrastinate on why the same sort of money isn't available to help those who are unable to help themselves -- the mentally disturbed, the plain socially inadequate --- where the main line appears to be "well, if you are prepared to go private, there's The Priory..."

I think our NHS is, in the main, great. I wouldn't swap it for any other system, with the possible exception of France/Germany. It's hopelessly inefficient in many places, it's overburdened with targets and non-medical staff, but despite all that it's a bloody brilliant system. However, it was designed for a different era, and the fact that its precepts no longer function today (is infertility really something that merits NHS treatment? To be honest, I don't think so? And wouldn't it be better for people to embrace diversity than for cosmetic surgery to be provided for free?) is something that politicians and people within the NHS system don't want to look at. Someone, sopme day, will have to draw very uncomfortable boundaries.

The weird thing is, it's already been done (overdone, some might say) in the Dental service. A system where the "cosmetic" lines were drawn has resulted in a situation where the basic care that should be within the NHS has virtually vanished. It's now cheaper for me to actually buy most medication directly from the chemist than to get it from the same chemist on an NHS prescription. Go figure.

So, should that £3k a month be handed over to liver cancer sufferers, or should it be a case of "now, if you were richer..."? It's oh so easy to say "yes" (of course, it's easier to make the drugs company out to be the bad boy here -- that being the drugs company that developed the drug, would it?) but that money has to be diverted from somewhere (although I suppose we could increase QE....). So, I suggest diverting it from infertility treatment clinics. Oh yes, I can see how well that would go down.

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Asset valuation, 20% ROE

pbirks@btinternet.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:26:43 GMT

A new unwritten law of economics has occurred to me. If the chairman of the Federal Reserve says "it is inherently extraordinarily difficult to know whether an asset's price is in line with its fundamental value", then you can be fairly sure that assets are, in the main, overvalued.

Well, Ben Bernanke said that this week, so I think we can safely conclude that assets are overvalued and are heading for a fall.

This reminded me of the insane valuations in the dotcom era (remember? "New parameters", all that gumph) when, and this is no lie, I remember one investment manager saying that he preferred investing in stocks that were at all-time highs because that meant that there were no resistance points on the upside. Marvellous.

As the FT observed, "if Mr Bernanke has no idea what a bubble looks like, China reckons it does, suggesting this week that US policy is causing a speculative rise in asset prices".

Even the FT seems to me to make the mistake of assuming that we are now in a correction period, that the bubbles that were constructed over several decades and particularly in the early period of the Bush presidency are now in the process of slowly being unravelled over time.

An alternative view is that the final aspect of the bubble is now in place -- printing money. And an addition to this view is that one imbalance is still roaring ahead with the co-operation of both sides -- the huge trade balance deficit between the US and China. Neither of these can last forever and both must, eventually, end somehow -- either with tears for the creditors (i.e., savers and China) or for the debtors (i.e., past borrowers and the US/UK).

That there has been nothing learnt from the past decade's madness was evinced this morning by Oswald Gruebel, head of UBS, who said that the bank was aiming for 20% return on equity. Now, you can (and he will) dress this up in all kinds of smoke and mirrors about how it will and can be done. But the question remains, where does this monty come from? What wealth is actually created?

And that's where it gets a bit difficult. Because (and I assume that even Gruebel would admit this), the world economy is not going to grow at 20% a year. So, if you are going to generate 20% RoE there are only a few options open to you:

1) You manage it at the expense of other financial institutions.

Well, UBS has hardly been covered in glory in the past here. There's no reason to see why UBS should succeed instead of the other banks that didn't fuck it up last time round

2) You manage it at the expense of the general economy.

In other words, a small business grows 25%, and UBS takes 20% of it. This is the classic "sucking money out of the system" that will, eventually, lead to alternative, cheaper options.

3) You manage it by inventing profits

The usual answer and the technique used by banks in the past decade. Lend out money to people you shouldn't lend it to. Insure the default with a financial institution you shouldn't insure it with, and book the profit this year, worrying about the disappearance of your capital, your borrower and your insurer when it happens.

In other words, to promise 20% RoE is irresonsible in the extreme -- verging, I would posit, on the criminal -- because it cannot be genuinely achieved by a run-of-the-mill bank in an economy that is hardly growing at all and which over the next decade is unlikely to average more than 2% a year.

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"I'll take 98¢." "No, we'll only give you a dollar"

pbirks@btinternet.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:55:19 GMT

The report is out on the behaviour of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, led at the time by Timothy Geitner, when it came to discussing how much of a haircut Goldman Sachs, Soc Gen, Deutsche Bank and others should take on the CDS deals they had with AIG.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) concluded that the NY Fed only made "limited efforts" to negotiate discounts.

Apparently the French regulator would accept no discount at all unless AIG went bankrupt. Goldman Sachs took the same line. UBS said that it would take 98%, provided all the other counterparties did the same.

The problem, as Barofsky astutely observes, was that you can only get counterparties to take a haircut if the possible alternative is that they will get even less -- and that possibility only remains if bankruptcy is not ruled out. But the NY Fed had already committed to not letting AIG fail. Once that fact was publicly stated, the counterparties said "oh, good, then we'll take 100%, please".

AIG had been negotiating, with the "strength" of a threatened general default (i.e. Chapter 11, or even a fully fledged "going bust"), for haircuts in the region of 40%.

In essence this was a fine display of the massive difference between the private sector and the public sector and the attitudes intrinsic to each.

Of course, there's no reason for us on this side of the Atlantic to moan -- the US taxpayer effectively bailed out Europe to the tune of six or seven billion dollars. TYVM, guys. But if I were a US voter I'd be vaguely curious how people at the top of the US regulatory tree could be so hopeless when it comes to playing hardball in negotiations.

Bob Benmosche, still the Birks nomination for Time Man of the Year, seems to be showing the regulators what for, although even Benmoscge seems to be having his patience tried by Feinberg.

But Feinberg's line (as well as that of Darling and others in the UK) is less of a "this will get us out of the mess" and more of a "we need a symbolic sacrifice". It's a lot easier (or, rather, it was, until Benmosche arrived) to slap massive restrictions on payments than it is to get to grips with real solutions. As I've written before, the vast bonuses that banking executives and ( a very few) AIG executives (the ones at AIG Financial Products, plus the guys at the very top) pocketed were commissions on debt. In other words, they had to hand out $10m to make $500,000 in bonus on the loan. So, while the executive profited to the tune of half a million, someone "out there" who didn't repay the loan, benefited to the tune of $10m. Many of us are, in effect, still walking around with that cash in our pocket, as it trickled down to us via huge asset inflation.

But that doesn't make for comfortable headlines. So, blame the lender, not the borrower who failed to repay.

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Betimes

pbirks@btinternet.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:44:23 GMT

Well, stone me. I got my act together and was at the bus station by 9.15am for the 200 bus to Antibes. Here followed one of the unwritten rules of travel -- you never know which buses are going to be crowded without direct experience thereof. This bus was virtually empty compared with the 11.15am bus that I caught to Canes on Tuesday.

But it still took 90 minutes to get to Antibes. This was partly caused by an old favourite -- the broken-down bus. France's traffic system in the south is quite efficient, until a bus breaks down. This will block all known routes to other buses. But the police were on hand fairly quickly.

The police were also on hand quickly when a toytown van crashed into the car in front of it. Toytown vans (you know the type -- the size of a Fiat Panda, but in the shape of a van) are not good things to crash. The driver's head is so close to the windscreen that he couldn't stop his head hitting it.

There was no post yesterday because all I did was make another trek around Cap Ferrat -- easily one of my favourite walks. They are rebuilding the track, which I think will spoil it a bit, although it will make it easier. And you have to give the Nice authorities credit for stuff like this. It must cost a fair amount of money to maintain this path, but they know that doing so is good for business in the metagame sense.

Now, here's a poser. Shouldn't French guide books have place pronounciation names? After all, English guide books have them for Americans (e.g., Lester Square, Barkshire, usw..) For most people I guess that this isn't a problem, but I've just realized that many of my pronouciations are up the creek, simply because I have never heard anyone pronounce the names before (or, if I have, I haven't associated that place with the place in my mispronouncing head). I always saw Antibes as a corollary of litotes. I could just have easily have seen it as a corollary of inscribes or imbibes. It is, of course, none of these things. Its corollary is endives (i.e., Onteeebs). I daresay that all of you knew this and are immediately mocking my ignorance. But, hey, I've learnt something today; you haven't.

First impressions of the town were not good. The centre (Place General de Gaulle) looked very sad. However, things picked up in the walk down to the port.

I then decided to go to the Picasso Museum. Except that by now it was 11.35am, and the museum shuts from noon to 2pm. Hmm, I thought. I know. I'll walk round Cap d'Antibes.

This was a brave thing to try without a map. But what, I thought, could go wrong?

Well, actually, nothing did. I followed my nose and walked all the way to the southern tip of the cape. What I hadn't realized was how far it was to get to Hotel du Cap. And, when I finally got there, I was ready to get the bus back. However, luckily there was a map at the busstop. And, looking at this, I saw that the walk back up the other side was far more direct. It was still a long way (and the walk from Juan Les Pins back to the centre of Antibes was an unwelcome addition) and I reckon I covered six or seven miles. I was definitely getting weary by the time I got to the museum.

Which perhaps meant that I wasn't in the best frame of mind to appreciate it. The Picasso bit alone (on the top floor) makes it worthwhile, and there are two or three special pieces (the Miro, the Amano ((??) violins), but most of the rest seemed to consist of "good second-tier" artists mainly noted for local talent. One notable exception for me was Pierre Souages, of whom I had not previously heard. Here's a guy who is definitely out of the top drawer. I must seek out more of his stuff.

Having got off the bus in the middle of a one-way system, I now had the problem of finding where to get the bus back (without a map, as I said). I followed the one-way system back, but found myself at the railway station. Not sure how that happened, but by now I was getting seriously knackered, so I got the train back.

A far superior choice! Only EUR 3.90, 29 minutes, and a quick hop onto the tram southwards to Place Massena. I'd been slightly thrown by the destination of "Vintmille" put on the front of the train, but I asked a young chap if it went to Nice, and he said yes. As soon as I was on the train I realized that Vintmille was, of course, Ventimiglia.

While on the train I checked my emails on the Palm and discovered that I had a leak in the stopcock in the flat downstairs. A quick phone call back to the estate agent's, a go-ahead to bring in the plumbers on Monday, and the whole thing sorted and suited from a train travelling from Antibes to Nice. Modern technology impresses me sometimes. The GBP185 bill impressed me less but, so it goes.

Oh well, time to start packing. Will upload some pictures. I've just realized that there were a couple that I meant to compress for uploading but missed. I'll do a proper update from the proper computer in the next few days.

On Cap Ferrat. I thought I had straightened this picture out. Quite a few self-timed pix are slanted because I can't find a suitable flat ledge for the camera!

This is Port St-Jean's "old port". Presumably it just wasn't big enough for modern requirements, although one wonders whether the owners of the houses overlooking this port were pleased or unhappy at everything being moved to the other side of the small bit of the peninsula that creates a "mini-peninsula" of its own on the east side of Cap Ferrat.

The new port. Several restaurants run along the bottom tier, as well as shops selling boats.

Between the masts you can see Eze perché. I might try a bit of crop and zoom when I get back to bring it into even greater close-up. Note to self. Buy tripod, buy telephoto lens.

Place General de Gaulle, Antibes. As you can see, it clouded over again today, something for which I was grateful when I was a long way through the Cap d'Antibes walk! As an opening sight of Antibes, this is not particularly inspiring. Compare and contrast wth Place Massena and Place Garibaldi in Nice.

But, after walking down a couple of uninspiring shopping pedestrian precincts, I got here, and things picked up.

Lots of very nice produce. I succumbed to a rather large chunk of Jambon de Corse (Corsican Ham), since I enjoyed the Iberian ham that I bought in Sitges earlier this year. EUR 23 for just over half a kilo (EUR 38.90 a kilo), which isn't cheap, but isn't overpriced for this kind of stuff.

If I had been holidaying in Antibes, I would have bought this guy's fish. He caught it, displayed it. You bought it. He then filleted it, and gave it to you in a plastic bag. Now that's my definition of fresh. There was another small stall down by the port itself, where the guys had just brought it in from the boat. Criously, this stuff didn't look so appetizing.

The old ramparts (now mostly destroyed) from the inside and outside respectively.

Beware, French circus performers in town.

This time you can definitely see the snow-covered mountains in the background.

Entry to the old old town (there's a newer bit of old town on this side of the picture).

Inside the old town. Once again, surprisingly deserted.

A very pretty side-street that I found by mistake, but sure this is more Sussex than South of France?

Hotel du Cap, the inspiration for the hotel in F Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is The Night" and the thing that kept me going along what was at times a rather dispiriting walk. The east side of Cap d'Antibes is no Cap Ferrat and I was beginning to wonder why anyone (e.g., Graham Greene, the Beckhams) could prefer it to Cap Ferrat. By the time I got here, I was ready to catch the bus back. But the bus stop had a map that showed my walk back up the west side was much shorter than my walk down. So I decided to go for it.

Very knackered.

The west side of Cap d'Antibes is a different story. Lots of small beaces, and this lovely little fishing port, no longer used commercialy, obv.

A man alone with his sand.

Once you've seen one $15m+ villa, you've seen them all. But I think that this one stood out.

Am I alone in thinking that this is a weird reversal of design influence? Sure the tecniques used here are idential to those used to put up Planet Hollywod in Las Veas a couple of years ago? Indeed, isn't this just a copy of the Monte Carlo?

I then suddenly arrived in Juan Les Pins and saw about 70 people playing boules. I realized that I had been walking for two hours and had seen maybe a dozen people. For Cap d'Antibes was, yes, it was shut. At the start of November everyone fucks off and the commercial establishments leave a sign saying that they will be back on March 15/April 2 or whenever. Gone are the days when one wintered in the south of France and the summer was unbearably hot, so the rich went elsewhere. Air-conditioning put an end to all of that.

I walked a further mile or so on the main Juan-les-Pins/Antibes road, and very uninspiring it was. Commoditized apartment blocks that you really couldn't want to live in, even if the address did sound posh.

But eventually I was back in Antibes and I was nearing the Picasso museum. I needed a wee. And what should I see but this!

Followed, and this was like going back 30 years, by this!

C'est magnifique! Where's the guy with the beret, the bike and the onions, with a Gauloises? (Actually, I didn't see anyone smoking Gauloises or Disques Bleu. It's all Marlboro or Camel, now.)

And thence to the Picasso Museum.

the Miro

the Amano?

I should have taken more pictures on the way back -- the station, the train and also Nice Ville Gare SNCF. I also realized when on the tram (yes, I finally caught it!) that there was a load of stuff, even just half a mile north of here, that I haven't yet explored (I didn't know there was a KFC on Ave Jean Medicins, for instance!) But I had overdone it a bit. I think the calves will be a bt stiff in the morning.

Time to start packing. Back to work on the poker tomorrow evening after a week off :-) Next proper holiday likely to be next March. Either here, or Vegas, or Lanzarote. Let's see how much money I can make in December (if any!).

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