You wonder what’s all this about? It’s exactly the process of getting a bad beat. You go in as a 68% favorite, you improve to 86% on the flop and on the river you are BAMBOOZLED!

I started playing some 9 handed sit and go’s on Full Tilt and I’m running pretty good at the moment, I’m $95 up after 5 days now, playing the $5 tournaments. And then you’re suddenly reminded of the fact that a bad beat is always just one card away. Look at it:

Threehanded, less than ten big blinds, pocket jacks. What you’re gonna do? Flop a set, build a party. Drawing dead on the turn, unbe-fuckin’-lievable. That’s poker. Some REAL cruelty next time.

Every poker player knows a bad beat is not the same as a cold deck situation. In a bad beat there’s always a donkey involved who played a hand bad and happened to be lucky in the end. In a cold deck situation, there’s not much both players could have done otherwise to avoid the situation they ended up with. I’ve got some good examples today.

I was playing some NLHE at Full Tilt and we were down to three players in sixhanded sit and go. This is what happened:

So after the flop I’m a huge favorite as you can deduct from the percentages of the calculator. My opponent flops his Aces, but that’s isn’t very dangerous at the first sight as I flop a set of eights.  Two cards will have to drop down in my disadvantage to lose the land. Yup… I had to blow off some steam at the spiderman slots for a moment after that hand. After a couple of hours I returned to playing poker, but I decided to play some Pot Limit Omaha at Everest Poker. But there I ended up with the following hand:

So this isn’t really a bad beat but we can call this a cold deck: this is a sick flop but there’s not much to do about it, it simply is the nuts against the second nuts. I flop Kings full of sixes while my opponent is lucky to hold the two remaning sixes in his hand. There’s a very small chance you won’t see all the chips in the middle in this kind of situations. More hands next time, Hold’em, Omaha, whatever: cruelty is everywhere!

Hi all, it’s been a while but that’s because I have to teach my students about all the cruelty in the world lately. But don’t worry, they’re having a good time. How different is that for me when sitting on the online poker table.

I played some tournaments on Pokerstars and I had some issues with pocket kings to say the least. Let’s watch the first hand:

So I make a very decent raise preflop and some guy calls with Q9 and hits two pair. Not much I can do there I guess, could easily have been AQ or the A high diamond draw. Another tournament:

So these are the situatons that are SO important in poker: most of your money is in the middle and you’re an almost 85% favorite to double up. Because the guy with KK has two different suits, he still has 10%. But they throw the freakin’ case King in front of me…

You hardly can’t have missed it, The Beatles Remastered boxsets were released a few weeks ago. I’m a true fan of the Fab Four, but don’t have the cash to buy both complete boxes (450€) so I decided to buy my favorite Beatles album remastered: Revolver.

The true fan will really notice a certain difference with the original albums. Paul’s bass especially sounds a lot sharper, the drums sound louder and you’ll better hear the different voices individually in the vocal harmonies. It was kinda time for some remasters, as the original transition from the analog recordings into the digital era dates from 1987.

Don’t confuse these remasters with earlier edits like the Love-project from two years ago fro example, as the music was remixed in this projects. The influence of modern technicians was limited this time, with little errors on the original tapes being maintained. The only intention this time was to make audible what was on the original tapes on a digital cd. If you want to find out how it worked out but don’t have enough money to buy the complete box, act like me and buy your favorite album. Or let me know what your favorite Beatles album is!

Something different today: I’ve got some hands from heads-up confrontations where I gave the bad beat instead of receiving it. Let’s have a look at the first one:

I’ve only ten big blinds left and I wake up with an Ace, so I shove trying to rob a precious blind. Of course my opponent got to have Aces exactly in that hand…But hey I catch two ducks and take the guy’s chips. During another game I was facing a player with the very creative name anusgrape. He thinks raising me all-in with Aces is a good move:

If you’ve such a lack of creativity as a poker player, it’s maybe just justice that I win the hand instead of cruelty .

Abdelbasset Ali Mohamed Al-Megrahi is the man who was condemned for the bomb attack on an American plane above Lockerbie in 1988. He was released a couple of weeks ago by Great-Britain and subsequently welcomed celebratory in Libia. Now that’s strange, but much stranger is the fact that the British government reacted much less disapproving to this happening than the United States for example.

Now it seems that this has to be perceived in a geopolitical way: interests on economical level influenced a decision on political (and ethical, think about the surviving relatives) level. Earlier on, the British minister of Justice, Jack Straw, wanted to exclude Al-Megrahi from an agreement between London and Tripoli about the exchange of British and Libian prisoners. But in the end, Straw gave in on this point because Libia refused otherwise to conclude a billion dollar deal with British Petroleum (BP). Shortly after Straw’s deicision, negotiations were restarted on this issue.

So it’s clear this deal was economically important to the UK, but indirectly, it also was on political level (again). Because by importing oil and gas from Libia, the UK would be less dependent from Russia, which creates a better negotiation position with this country on other issues and so on…

You’ll always have them at your table in a random homegame: amateurs who tell you they don’t like to play Aces. I can only say one thing to this kind of bullcrap: bring on those Aces, still the best hand preflop in NLHE!

Of course you’ll lose now and then with this hand, just like with every other hand. And sure it’s harsh when it happens to you two times in a row, just like it happened to me this week:

Yes this is harsh, and yes I would have preferred to win these hands instead of lose them, specifically because they were both played in the final phase of the tournament, but I’ll play them exactly the same again, anytime, anywhere.

If you think spies only act in Ian Fleming’s novels or are tapping telephones from innocent civilians in (former) communist countries, you’re wrong (again). A trial was started recently against the French energy company EDF, which is being charged for spying on Greenpeace.

EDF (Electricité de France) is one of the biggest exploiters of nuclear power plants in the world, as it is also the owner of British Energy. During the hearings of some witnesses in the case, it already became clear that EDF, which is a government undertaking, paid private detectives to infiltrate in environment movements all over Europe. An IT expert from the detective agency has admitted hacking computer systems of Greenpeace. The head of the firm nevertheless, who has also been charged and happens to be a former agent of the French secret service, denies he commanded the entire hacking operation and declares that the computer expert was acting on his own initiative. As such, EDF declares to be victim of the detective agency and registers a civil plaintiff.

As the director of Greenpeace France already stated, the fact that his organisation is being treated like terrorists because they dare to question nuclear energy shows just how frightened the nuclear industry is of transparency and a democratic debate. To be continued.

Last time I showed you some poker cruelty, it was kind of a bad beat with pocket sailboats. Now I had this hand again in a 45 handed tournament ($10 buy-in), but this time it REALLY was a suck out I had to face.

Here’s the hand:

This really is a flop from heaven: I flop my set again and it’s really disguised. This moron decides to go all-in on this flop with a massive overbet and I insta call as I have him crushed like hell: I am a 93% percent favorite in this situation! I know, this retard still has a small chance to outdraw me when the board AND his pair pairs, but what are the chances? About 7%…

It’s generally presumed that the colonial era is history nowadays. Yes, the formerly great colonial powers like Great-Britain and France don’t have any governments installed anymore in third world countries in Africa and South-America. But there is no reason to worry: we can still rob them from their valuable commodities, but let’s not call it colonialism anymore. We have neat gold mining companys now and they have their own social responsibilities and stuff.

There’s for example the well-known gold mining multinational, of which I can’t remember the exact name right now, which acquired the power over a huge plant site in Peru in a complete nonviolent way. Because violence is very colonialistic, they just bribed some Peruvian judges and in the end the entire Peruvian government. Subsequently, they polluted the entire region. But hey, the presence of the gold mine means a boost for the local economy!Too bad that the greater part of the employees is coming from outside the region and the fast urbanization brought along prostitution, criminality and outrage. And the inflow of foreign capital from well-paid expatriates caused a growth in land prices. However, the situation improved a little after a great portion of media attention.

Maybe that’s because they shifted their focus from South-America to Africa. Ghana for example. A friend of mine is conducting some research there at the moment and the similarities with Peru are countless. For example the  communities of Teberebie and Iduapriem, which are seriously struck by the gold mining activities. People are literally forced to cede their land by soldiers (how do you mean colonialism?). Of course they are promised to receive other land but of course that isn’t the case. And concerning the pollution:

The picture on the left shows the polluted river which the local population needs for their daily activities, the picture on the right shows its health consequences.

In another community, that of Adisakrom, people live along the Soubry river. This river is partly closed the river by a dam, with the one side serving as a dump for the chemical waste of The Big Mining Company and the other side is for the sustenance of the local people. However, the water level has grown enormously thanks to the dam, which is why crocodiles and, I must quote, ‘other crazy reptiles’, can’t catch any fish anymore. Consequence: they enter land.

And what did The Company have to say at this? The old story: the local people take advantage of the mining, they have no reason to complain. With the consequence of big strikes which took place recently, because Ghanaian emplyees earn about 700$ a month for a job as senior officer, while the average expatriate earns about  $20,000 for doing a comparable job. And don’t think that it are only private companies who are involved: organisations who are connected to insitutions like the World Bank are also investing in such huge mining projects. One can wonder if it isn’t more suitable for such organisations to invest in an improved democracy at large scale and concerning the mining territory in specific, instead of projects in the private area. Colonialism isn’t dead, they are just trying to legalise it.

 “All my life I kept trying to go up in society. Where everything higher up was legal. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?”

(M.C.)