Hey guys. I'm happy to say that tomorrow I leave for London! I am very excited and can't wait to get there already! I had a midterm last Thursday and another on Monday and since then I've just been taking it easy, which has been great. I'm definitely ready to leave though.

In my last blog entry I asked if anyone was interested in meeting up in London. I received several responses both on my blog comments and PMs, and I think I responded to everyone, but if not, read on. I'm going to try to organize lunch with CR members on Tuesday, Wednesday, or maybe both. If you're interested, PM me and include your email address, I'm going to send out a group email to try to coordinate things. I'm looking forward to meeting up with some of you!

In other news, my new computer arrived a few days ago. I ordered a Dell Studio XPS 16 based on a recommendation by RodeoBlue and a bit of research, and so far I couldn't be happier with it. It's a 16" laptop, weighs less than 7 pounds, and supports 1920x1200 resolution (enough to 6 table with no overlap), which is all I was looking for in this computer. I still have my massive XPS, which I use as a desktop basically, but this computer will be great for traveling and just playing outside of the "office" of my bedroom. For anyone looking into new computers, I'd definitely check this one out though, it's been great so far. I'm just hoping it doesn't start bluescreening every day or something, but so far so good!

After getting the computer I decided to purchase Holdem Manager for it (using Cardrunners' own great deal, obviously). I had held off because they didn't have an Omaha equivalent and I like the continuity, but it's due out soon so I figured I might as well. HEM seems really impressive, although admittedly I still don't fully know what I'm doing with everything. I've had 2 real issues so far, one is that I can't get a HUD to load on Stars, and the other is that when it processes my hands it moves my PLO hands to the processed folder as well. I had to dig them out today when I got PTO for this computer and retrieved them fine, but this would be a major annoyance if I had to do it regularly. If anyone can help me on these it'd be much appreciated.

So given that I purchased poker tracking software, I figured that I'd avoid being a complete lazy bum and play a little poker on the new computer. I did play a little bit of NLH and won $12k or something in 2 fairly short 25/50 NL sessions, but I'm not even sure if I could retrieve hands from HEM right now if I tried so I'll just stick to some good ol' PLO. The most noteworthy session I played was at 500/1k against Gus Hansen. I ran really hot at first and went ahead by about 300k before he flipped the doomswitch and started winning every pot. Gus won about 389k off me, although I only had a small piece of myself so my personal loss is much smaller.

Before I get to some hands, I want to address action sharing and tracking sites (namely Highstakes DB). Pretty much every player who's not an everyday regular sells off a bunch of action when they play nosebleed games. Although I hadn't done this before 2009, I realized it's a smart way to manage risk while still being able to play in good games. To play 500/1k with all my action, I would ideally have a net worth of about $10 million, maybe even more, as winrates aren't especially large given that even if there is a fish, the rest of the competition is made up of world class players. For example, say an unnamed fish sits at 500/1k HA in a 6 handed game and is a 10ptbb/100 loser in the game. That means that the net win of the other 5 players in the game is 10ptbb/100, or an average of 2ptbb/100. At 25/50 (especially PLO), this is still a great situation for me, even if I think the other players are all at least marginal winners, because I am often the best player in the game and thus winning much more than 2ptbb/100. At 500/1k, however, like I said, the other players are often world class players, like Phil Galfond, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and the Dang brothers. Also, a fish losing 10ptbb/100 in a lineup like this is a much better player than a fish losing 10ptbb/100 at lower stakes against weaker competition. So in a 6 handed game with 10ptbb/100 losing fish, the 2 Phils, durrrr, and Hac Dang, all 5 of us are clearly winning poker players, but our winrates are not going to be very large in this game. Even in PLO, where I think I can hang with these guys step for step, if I'm winning at an equal rate to each of them we're each winning 2ptbb/100 with a ton of variance. And in practice, the fish in this game is often just a fish relative to the competition who's losing quite a bit less than 10ptbb/100 in this game and may be a winning poker player in games that are a bit softer. With all the variance in PLO, the confidence interval for a reasonable hand sample might be something like {-4ptbb/100, 8ptbb/100}. So you can see how silly it is when a big fuss gets made about results over a few month period, even longer given the relatively low volume of hands that are played by nosebleed players.

That was pretty longwinded and hopefully made sense, but I wrote it because people post some dumb stuff on the internet and I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea, especially family members and friends who don't play poker. If you Google my name you can probably quickly find Highstakes DB results that have me losing about $1 million this year, although in reality I'm up a few hundred k. Tracking sites don't cover action sharing, so while HSDB has been quite accurate in tracking my play at 50/100+ in '09 (although it missed lots of hands in '08), it doesn't tell anywhere near the full story when it comes to my personal results. Another example is whitelime last year, there were some posts questioning his skill level and financial means because HSDB had him down $800k or something. Well obviously he didn't have 100% of himself, and he lost a max of 20 buyins and a min of 8 depending on whether he was playing 200/400 or 500/1k. Every poker player has downswings like these. My 10 buyin downswing to Gus is probably about my 5th worst downswing buyin-wise this year, and I'm still up a lot of money.

If you read all that, I hope it made sense and maybe you learned something. If not, at least I have a simple link to post the next time a "Brian Hastings going busto" thread pops up in NVG. This did get quite long though so I'll hold off on hands til next time. Thanks for reading.