As I pointed out before, there’s a huge difference between these two phenoms in poker. I switched from the sit and go’s to the microstakes cashgames the other day, and what I experienced over there is exactly what you can call a cold deck. Let’s have a look:

You see, I flop a flush but my opponent flops a higher flush. This is called ‘flush over flush’. We can’t do much about it: the stakes are not high enough and the stacks not deep enough to get away from such a hand. Other situations that are known as cold decks occur when it’s dealt KK vs AA preflop or when two players flop a ’set over set’.

No, this isn’t about the Floyd-album, but about real walls. Wasn’t it only last year that we commemorated the fall of the Berlin Wall? Every person that’s a little older than 18 years will forever remember the pictures of that concrete structure with all the graffiti on it, either from seeing it in real life or from pictures and TV. It was generally assumed that walls like that are history now, belonging to other times where we tried to separate people by artificial structures like the Berlin Wall. But have a look at this picture:

This isn’t an historical picture, people are still building this wall in Israel. This is the wall that is being built all around the Westbank to ‘protect’ Israel from terrorist attacks. Israel has been condemned for building this wall by the International Court of Justice. But this doesn’t have ANY effect on the attitude of Israel towards the surrounding countries: they want ANOTHER WALL now, across the border with Egypt. Reason: they want to stop the influx of immigrants, mainly christian immigrants.

So after keeping out the Palestinians, they’ll concentrate on christians now. Kinda strange, no? After all, Israel does only exist because of all the jewish immigrants who arrived illegally over there and started to settle in Palestine. To not mention the boundaries of their territorry they established illegally in 1968. Curious how the US will react this time, they are kinda christian.

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.