Money Makes Everything Better

So of course I go on a mini SnG tear yesterday after posting and whee, all is well with the world, happy and shiny, perfectly balanced. Or, you know, something like that.

It's interesting looking back through my last 300 or so SnGs, which are a mixtures of ~$60s and ~$120s, nearly all turbos at Stars and Full Tilt. I'm fairly close to break even, landing a little on the plus side at +$800. Really small sample size, yada yada yada, but what struck me most is that I have far more 4th place finishes than any other, by a landslide.

Which I'm of two minds about. On the one hand, I should probably hone the aggressive stance I've been adopting when it's bubble time, and try to add a little more selectivity into the mix. I've been consciously trying to be more aggressive on the bubble, due to the sphincter tightening of the average player, but too often I abandon any attempt to read players at all, even when I have knowledge that should play into the decision. It's easy to get lost in the math and follow through with what should be a +EV push in theory, but in fact is -EV in practice, based on the accumulated info you and the other players have at your disposal.

On the other hand, I wonder if "correct" SnG play naturally leads to more 4th place finishes than anything else. I'm not trying to justify my play at all, just curious, as I imagine that 1st place finishes and 4th place finishes are pretty tightly linked, if you're playing "correctly". Yeah, you bubble a lot more in 4th than someone content to limp into third, but when you do hit the money, you do so with a good shot at 1st. You could probably analyze the results of winning players and come up with a fairly decent 1st to 4th place ratio, as far as what to shoot for.

Finally started yesterday in on painting the living room and dining room at the new place. I'm still chipping away at projects at the old house and have generally been in a funk of late, so it was good to get off my lazy ass and start working on the new place. I'm hoping to get a lot of indoor projects knocked out this fall/winter, then tackle the landscaping (mostly the backyard) in the spring.

We also had a recent addition to the Scurvy household. Behold:



We're now the proud parents of two slider turtles, Sid and Sammy. We ended up inheriting them from a co-worker of ScurvyWife who no longer wanted them, so while we didn't really plan on getting turtles, they're cool enough, and pretty low-maintenance, tooling around in their aquarium.

ScurvyRat is back to his normal wild self, shaking off his random sprained ankle. He managed to scare us a bit right after that, as his leg was mostly healed but he suddenly stopped eating, and all sorts of dire things start running through my head, as he's getting up there in rat years. I think it was just the antiobiotics and anti-inflammatory that they vet gave him, though, as he started eating like a little pig again once he was off those.

The latest rat drama is that he seems to have mites, and has been super scratchy of late. Last time this happened we took him to the vet who gave him shots of Ivomectrin once a week for three weeks, which knocked out the mites really well. I poked around a bit and discovered that Ivomectrin is non-prescription and used as a broad spectrum dewormer/bug zapper for all sorts of animals, and commonly sold in feed stores as horse dewormer. So we made a trip to the feed store a few weekends ago, bought a huge tube of horse dewormer, and have been feeding the rat a tiny amount once a week, a tiny dab the size of an uncooked grain of white rice. It seems to be doing the truck and he isn't running around neighing yet, so hopefully it'll clear things up. The whole thing has been cracking me up, as far as successfully infiltrating the feed store for our own nefarious rat purposes, as well as having a huge tube of horse dewormer sitting on the kitchen counter.