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.

Sailing the Seas of Malaise

Not exactly sure why, but much of the wind has been taken out of my poker sails of late. I'm still playing but it's pretty haphazard and of the Stabby McStabsalot variety. I chunk money into Full Tilt or Stars, play SnGs not supported by my roll, burn through a deposit or two, run up my balance a bit, donk it back, reload, run it back up, donk it back to pretty much smack dab break even overall, rinse, repeat.

To a large extent, the decision to play SnGs is responsible for the feeling of playing on auto-pilot, aimlessly drifting around. At a certain point, they sort of play themselves, especially with late game strategy and decisions of push/don't push. So while I get a certain vicarious thrill out of the swings of variance (including ten consecutive 4th place finishes at the $120 level, whee), it's more akin to playing blackjack, albeit with a slight edge over the house.

I suppose what I'm wrestling with most is finding my own personal happy place, where I play poker and enjoy it, and leave it at that. Or, more simply, follow through on my past threats of assuming the mantle of poker hobbyist, plain and simple. I've gotten locked into the mindset that there's no point in playing unless it's for meaningful stakes, but my head is nowhere near the place it needs to be to play for meaningful stakes.

Which brings us to the point where my convoluted head pipes up and says "Umm, dude, how 'bout you just play when you feel like playing and enjoy it? What the fuck are you babbling on about. This isn't hard." And then I tell my head to shut up and drink more coffee and fire up another SnG.

Will He Please Stop Talking About This Crap?

Just to be clear, I'm still hypothetically playing the online poker. Still can't win a coin-flip or a single freaking hand when I'm a 80-20 favorite but I am still, hypothetically, playing poker online.

Not to sound grumpy, but I still think that some people are missing the boat on what just happened with the UIGEA legislation. Yes, it primarily concerns itself with the financial side of US players depositing money into online gaming sites. Yes, it does nothing to criminalize the actual act of US citizens playing poker online. That is all very true.

But there's also an entirely separate section that devotes itself to addressing the promotion of online gaming in the US. If you promote online gaming sites (via hyperlinks, banner ads, email, text references or any combination thereof) or refer website visitors to online gaming sites, you can potentially be charged with aiding and abetting and sentenced to up to 5 years in federal prison. This is an entirely different issue than the one above. This has absolutely nothing to do with the legality of you playing poker online, and nothing to do with the legality/illegality of a site like Full Tilt accepting deposits from US players.

Now, again, as I've said many times, the odds of you getting thrown in the federal pokey because you talk about playing poker at Full Tilt are infitesimally small. You're more likely to get struck by a pallasite meteorite. This is not something that 99% of the poker bloggers out there need to worry about. I'm not trying to scare anyone, just pointing out that the UIGEA is multi-faceted, and that one of those facets deals with the promotion of online gambling.

Sorry to yammer on again about this, but I've gotten a ton of emails and comments that basically state the same thing, as far as pointing out that I'm over-reacting, that nothing has changed, that US players can still deposit and play, yada yada yada. For someone who lives in the US and simply plays poker online, yes, they can still do that. If you play poker online and also blog about it, things have slightly changed, as there's the infitesimally small chance that you might be targeted for promoting online gambling. If you play poker online, blog about it, and receive revenues from online gambling sites that are generated by your blog, things have changed a great deal. If you fall into that last category, your level of concern should be directly proportional to how much revenue you generate, ranging from barely concerned at all (if you only make beer money from ads on your blog) to pretty freaking concerned. That's all I'm trying to say.

You're Stuck With Me, Bitches

Just to clear one thing up, I still have no plans to complete shut the ol' blog down here. Granted, a goodly chunk of what I yammer on about is online gambling related, and I'll likely be doing little to none of that in the future, but I'm still planning on babbling here on a fairly regular basis.

Lost is off to a decent start, but the addition of the fair Juliet would likely have me saying that in and of itself, even if the first two episodes consisted of the Others and Losties having a knock-down drag-out crocheting battle to determine who can make the finest woolen caps. We've actually kicked a good bit of our tv habit lately, mainly watching Lost and catching up on old episodes of Scrubs and Monk. Exciting, crazy times in the Scurvy household, indeed.

Finally got around to buying Age of Empires III and am liking it, although my podunk graphics card is struggling to deal at times. I normally trend towards the turn based games, as the RTS games just enhance how old, dumb, and slow I've become, but I played the hell out of all the other AoE games so I thought I'd give this one a shot.

Interesting info floating around on 2+2 in regards to ETFs and happy-fun things like audits and the IRS. Lots of misinformation, too, so take it all with a grain of salt, but if you've been cashing out of Neteller of late, read up on "structuring" or "structured transactions". Again, I apologize for being the bringer of the gloom and/or the doom, but the fact that Neteller caps ETF withdrawals to your linked account at $5K might actually increase the chances of you getting audited.

The problem is that making multiple $5K withdrawals to your linked account gives the appearance that you're intentionally trying to avoid triggering bank requirements to report transactions of $10K or more to the IRS by withdrawing smaller sums. The supposed $10K threshold is misinformation in and of itself, as banks can report anything that they deem unusual or suspicious, even amounts under $10K, but the point remains the same. Lots of $5K withdrawals within a short timespan looks hinky, as the "normal" thing to do would be to withdraw $20K, instead of making four separate $5K withdrawals over the course of a week or two. So Neteller is basically unwittingly increasingly the chances that you might get audited by capping ETF withdrawals at $5K. Thanks a pantload, Neteller.

As long as you're paying taxes and accounting for everything, you're not breaking any laws and have nothing to worry about, as they're nothing illegal in and of itself by making multiple withdrawals as outlined above. Just yet another thing to worry about and yet another poke in the eye from the Frist stick.