By Adanthar on October 4th, 2008 (more posts by author)

While everyone should check out Bond's new post about MTT grinding, I've never been the kind of guy that does very well playing an 8 hour a day - or 4 hour a day, for that matter - schedule. I wish I were, but I'm not. Nevertheless, once in a while (usually following long breaks) the unwillingness to put in hands lifts and I do spend a few hours in front of a laptop making the Sklansky dollar counter go up. I've been playing SNG's, my new daily grind in between Sundays, since the first of the month, with very good results as usual in those games. I don't think I'm playing perfect SNG poker, especially because Cake can be weird; if you put my decisions for each long individual sit and go into SNGWiz, it usually comes out with 8-10 "incorrect" decisions that turn out to be right once you adjust their ranges from the "on Stars and everywhere normal, he should be calling 100% of his hands" to the "but on Cake, he folds 80% of them" part of the slider...still leaving 1-3 hands per session that are marginal or slightly -EV. But that's nothing a few hundred donkaments' worth of rust removal won't fix. At any rate, even with the game's negative effects on motivation, it feels good to watch the green numbers go up.

Intrade is also going well. The mystery Obama shorter referred to in my last post is back and striking again for 50K worth of action at a time. Adding everything up reveals he's taken at least $150,000 of bets on McCain at odds up to 10 points above where the market was trending, which is even worse than it sounds because we're talking about shares; buying a share worth 25 points at 35 isn't just a 10% mispricing, it's more like 30%. My best guess is he's lost upwards of $25,000 - which will be far more than that if McCain actually wins - on merely buying these shares, not counting Intrade's vig. Moreover, he's still enabling monster arbitrage opportunities for everybody else with accounts on other books - consider this one last attempt to get people to trade on the site. (Hey, the more liquidity on those shares, the more everyone including myself profits against him every time he hits.)

Finally, while I'm here, I've heard a rumor - at this point, only a rumor - that the 60 Minutes piece is airing on the 26'th. This does fit what a couple of people have told me, however, so I think it's plausible and actually a go this time. The novelty's worn off a little bit for me by now, but I still really want to see how it turns out...and kinda hope Hamilton/Tom/Green all get nailed afterwards. Nobody likes the necessity of the police being involved here, but it *is* a necessity; the industry cannot afford the kind of black eye that the twin scandals back to back have given it, and getting the bad apples into court is the first step to resolving that. With the recession/depression/whatever upon us, if poker is going to be a competitor for the reduced entertainment dollar, it's simply got to be seen as a clean, fair game.