Tommy Angelo

Archive for March, 2009

When 3 = 370

Posted by: Tommy Angelo on March 28th, 2009

My friend Wayne told me that it’s important for a writer to be able to “kill his babies.” When he told me this, I knew exactly what he meant. And I was pleased, because when it comes to my babies, I am a brutal serial killer. Take the carcass below for example. It used to have four siblings, quintuplets they were. These clumps of text grew up together under the article title: “Data Minding” which I just sent in to BLUFF Magazine. What these cute little infants had in common was the theme of keeping records at poker. But collectively, they grew too big. There was not enough room for everyone, so someone had to die. Naturally I did what any ruthless son of a bitch would do, and I murdered the weakest one of the lot. They don’t call it the cutting room floor for nothing. It’s bloody down there. If you can stand to look at such a sight, here’s a dead baby:

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So far, I have been using the time unit called “a year” because everyone else does. But really, I have to contort my mind to fit it into that box. Just when exactly does this thing called “a year” start anyway? January first? Says who? Like I’m supposed to wake up on a winter’s day and just because some farmers who lived thousands of miles away and thousands of years ago figured out that celestial motions are patterned and predictable, I’m supposed to feel like today is the start of something? And that the numbers on my poker tally sheet for precisely the previous 365 days hold some special meaning?

Seems to me there’s a better way. If the objective is to use our collected data to “see how we did” over the span of 365 days in order to draw statistically viable, meaningful, and useful conclusions about past performance and future expectations, then yes, I do believe there is a better way. And here it is:

Instead of waiting a year for a year’s worth of data, try this. Tally your results from, say, January 1 to January 1, then tally your results from January 2 to January 2, then January 3 to January 3, and so on. Do that everyday.

Let’s look at what you have after three years. If you do your tallying the traditional way, you’ll end up with at least 3 numbers and at most 5 numbers for each year:

Your total amount won or lost. (1 number)

Your total hours played, or your total hands played, or both. (1 or 2 numbers)

Your rate of winning or losing, which could use the time unit “hour” or “100 hands.” You could do either, or both – for example, if you play multiple tables online, you might want to know your hourly rate, and also your “per 100 hands” rate. (1 or 2 numbers)

So after three years of keeping score, you’d have at least 9 and at most 15 numbers to show for it. That’s not much grist for the number mill. Hardly enough for data mining, more like data dipping. If you want to dig deep into numbers, you need lots of them, like, thousands of them. And doing it my way, that’s what you’ll have:

365 = the number of days in a year.

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365 x 2 = 730 = the number of days in two years.

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730 = the number of days in a three-year span that have at least 365 days after them. In other words, every three-year span has 730 years inside it.

3 = the minimum number of numbers per “year” that you use. (win/loss amount, amount played, win/loss rate.)

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5 = the maximum number of numbers per “year” that you use. (This applies to those who use both “hours” and “hands” as units for “amount played.”)

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730 x 3 = 2190 = the minimum # of #’s you’ll have after three years.

730 x 5 = 3650 = the maximum # of #’s you’ll have after three years.

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Now that’s what I call a deep mine.

12 Comments

Requesting Some Lingo Update Help

Posted by: Tommy Angelo on March 23rd, 2009

Sometimes my poker articles start with an idea, then comes some text, and somewhere along the way a title shows up. Other times I start with a title that I really like and then I come up with something to put underneath it. This post is about one of those. Here’s a title I came up with that has been waiting for an article:

He Beat Me With a Club

And now I’ve decided what the article will be about. It’ll be a lingo article. I do one of those every few years or so. This one will be about new words that have shown up in the poker lexicon since the 2003 poker explosion. Right now I’m collecting them. If you can think of some, please send them to me! You can either leave a reply here at my blog, or in this thread at DeucesCracked, or send me an email at tommy@tommyangelo.com. Thanks!

I have a list started already. Here are a few words from it:

Donkaments — I don’t know what this word means but I’ve heard it a lot.
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Stack

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Felt

— as a verb, means the same as Stack.

I’m looking forward to having some fun putting this article together. Here’s a replay from an old article of mine of a passage that was the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything. It’s from “Broken Down English.”

Play along with me here, and try to imagine you are a regular person. Pretend you have no idea what words like “fold” and “diamonds” mean to a poker player. Then one day you overhear this story being told:

“Some guy limped in with rags, suited up. I woke up with two cowboys, so I popped him. I’d been beating him up all night. He was stuck like a pig and tilting bad. So he came back at me. I put the cap on, of course. I hit my hand hard when a king flopped along with two clubs. Then I picked up a house on fourth street. And if that wasn’t good enough, he flushed up on the river and started pounding me!”

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4 Comments

Vacation High Light

Posted by: admin on March 16th, 2009

Pretty incredible how much I used to hate air travel and now it’s one of my best times. What a difference a bench Child's Play 2 dvd

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From Friday to Sunday I was in Las Vegas for a long-planned sibling+partners get together. We did wonderful things. Visiting. Eating. Shows (we saw LOVE and Blue Man Group). It would be an easy matter to write many words about the events and ideas and feelings of those three days. I could put up some pictures. I could recall on this page — as I have already done on my bench in the morning using my little hyper-detailed-reconstruction-while-putting-myself-in-the-scene mental memory gadget that I’ve developed — the finest details of the settings and events.

And I probably would. Except that something happened yesterday, at the end of the trip, that is still kind of sitting on top of everything like the huge flowing white sheet that covered half the audience during part of the LOVE show. The good news about the thing that happened is that it was really amazing in general and really wonderful and good for me in particular. The bad news is that by the very definition of the words “thought” and “experience,” the thing that happened cannot, and I mean that literally, cannot be described. It can, by definition, only be experienced. To even attempt to describe it reduces it to non-existence and non-reality. And that’s why it always sounds insane to some people when such attempts are made. So, because of the limited nature of ideas and words, here come some that know they are insane.

On the flight back from Vegas, Kay was asleep in the seat next to me and I decided to stay with my breathing for a long time. I do this whenever I fly. About 3/4 of my flights are alone, so I’ve gotten pretty good at meditating on the plane. The result is always the same: good. Good takes different forms. It changes as it happens. Good is better than not good, in other words, meditating is better than non meditating.

I’ve gotten used to residual good that follows me off the plane, even after my thinking mind wanders away and gets lost in the not-now. Good usually keeps wedging its way in there as a walk through the terminal thinking about what I’m doing and where I’m going and all that. Good usually uses my feet and my breathing, sometimes my vision, to scamper back up and sit on my thoughts.

And that’s what was going on again yesterday. I was walking alongside Kay, and we were in the middle of a little stretch when neither of us was talking, and I noticed to my left an especially beautiful woman walking toward me. She was everywhere impeccable and appealing, not just visually, but her walk and her demeanor too. A thought arose about the labels that my thoughts had assigned to her: attractive, appealing. I have been giving thoughts like these much thought these last few years, so it didn’t take long to tread this familiar ground. I understand the evolutionary forces behind the existence of and the determination of attractiveness. I know that I am an animal organism with a mind that sees and rates. I know what’s happening while this happens. And I do like looking at people I like to look at. It’s pleasing now in the same way that looking at any pleasing thing — such as The Wynn, or a horizon — is pleasing.

I looked at her, and I smiled inside. I looked at the next person, an obese person, and my smile was unchanged. I looked at the next people, an anxious couple walking very fast, and I breathed in their tenseness and breathed out my air and my smiling gut widened. I noticed all the people all at once all together, and they all died. I noticed the carpet, and it was living. The floor was as dead and as alive as the people. I was dead. I was good. I was moving, depending on where you stood, and I was still, and the carpet was moving, depending on if you happened to be a human or a wall. There were no divisions.

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5 Comments

That Bastard!

Posted by: Tommy Angelo on March 10th, 2009

He really got me good on this one. I was all-in without a paddle. I was up shit creek and drawing dead. However you put it, it wasn’t pretty.

I was playing $40-80 limit hold’em at Lucky Chances. This was around 2002. Alex was at the next table, playing no-limit. He spoke to me with a hand gesture and said, “Do you want to take a break on your next big blind?” I signaled back “yes.” A few hands later, he was standing behind me, ready to go. I was under-the-gun. I looked at my cards and raised. I don’t recall how the hand went after that except for the only thing that is pertinent to the story: at some point, I folded. Then I hopped up, and outside we went.

Walking away from the table, Alex asked, “What’d you have?”

I said, “Ace-queen.”

He looked at me kind of funny. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. And then I did some splaining. I don’t know what I said, but I can do a reenactment of the basic tone and content. I said something like, “I knew when the small blind called preflop that he had at least bla-bla-bla, and that when he checkraised the flop he either had bla-bla or bla-bla, so when the bla-of-bla came on the turn, it was a no-brainer to fold.”

I can assure you that whatever it was I said, it was all very sensible and rational. It was a perfect explanation for playing ace-queen exactly the way I did. Except for one thing… I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t have ace-queen. What I actually had was king-queen. I had lied. But not just any lie. When it comes to lying about what I had, I’m as good as they get. I can always come up with exactly the right two cards to send exactly whatever message I am trying to send, and that doesn’t matter if it’s at the end of a hand and I’m trying to get my opponents to either think I played better than I did or worse than I did, and it doesn’t matter if I’m just trying to save face, or maintain a solid image, and it doesn’t matter if I’m walking outside with my best friend. All lies are created equal as far as I’m concerned, and by that I mean equally well.

After my explanation, a couple minutes went by, and I remember it catching me off-guard when Alex asked, “So, what did you have on the last hand again?”

“Ace-queen!” I said. “If you think I played it bad, just tell me!”

“You really had ace-queen?”

This is the point in our conversations where neither one of us can hold our shit together. Anytime I am getting over on him, I always give it away before it gets too deep, with a smile, or an out of context comment. And that’s what Alex did here. He has a smirk on his face, and the question was definitely totally weird at this point. I look deeply into his vicious, conniving, dastardly face, and I figured it out.

“You bastard!” I said. “You saw my hand!”

He was doing nothing but laughing now. And then me too.

I went on. “You bent down and looked at my cards when I looked at them, and then, you asked me what I had, knowing full well that I might not come clean with having king-queen in that spot. You totally set me up! And then you forced me to tell the lie again! I guess I would feel bad right now about lying to you, except that you’re a fucking asshole you piece of shit!!”

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