Quick Hitts

There’s a new episode of the Quick Hitts Podcast available for your listening pleasure.  Get it while it’s hot and fresh.

It’s titled – Bullies Always Win, because, well, they just do.  We see it around us every day – Banking Bullies, Stock Broker Bullies, Insurance Bullies, Lawyer Bullies and especially Government Bullies.  They may be hated, but they don’t care – they’re wealthy and smug and happy to be bullies.

Feel free to use this post to comment on the show, which you can find here.

Lately I’ve been doing spectacularly lousy at poker.  My bankroll was down to 20% of what I started with.  I was paying $2.00 Sit-n-Gos, and I was losing them more often than not.  I was getting disgusted and bored and tired of the whole thing.

Full Tilt announced Matrix Tournaments, which give you four sit-n-gos for the price of one, with appropriately reduced payouts.  You also accumulate points that go to an extra bonus, but the bonus reduces the tournament payout  even more.  I tried one and thought it pretty much sucked.

I got a call from a friend saying he was making beaucoup bucks playing Super Turbo SnGs on Full Tilt.  I’ve never liked turbo tournaments – they seemed more like roulette than poker.   Super Turbos not only provide rapidly increasing blinds (they go up every three minutes) but also start everyone off with a mere 300 chips instead of the usual 1500, so everyone starts seriously short-stacked.

But he was excited about them.  He’s a much better player than I am, and I trust his judgment, so I signed into one, not expecting much.  I won.  I played a few more, and was hooked.  These are speedy, brutal, and a buttload of fun.  I’ve made it to the money 55% of the time.   I’ve played several hours over the past weekend and my bankroll has gone from 20% to 80%.  More importantly, poker is fun again. 

I wouldn’t recommend these games for beginners, but for players with a good tournament end game they are a gold mine.

The standard strategy in regular SnGs is to wait patiently until you’re down to five or six players before getting aggressive.  In these games that usually happens within the first ten hands.   Half the table will shove with any pair, ace-anything, and often king-anything.  There are a lot of coin flips and suckouts.  And lots of money to be made by a skilled player who has the patience to carefully pick his spots, then attack hard.

Since nearly every hand results in a shoving match, toss away anything that isn’t shove-worthy, or likely to be shove-worthy post flop.  Forget subtle, tricky plays.  And since you’re going to end up shoving nearly every hand, consider starting with a shove pre-flop. 

In early play shove with Ace-Face, Aces, Kings, and maybe Queens.  Toss just about everything else.

Limping is out of the question.  Try it early and you’ll burn through your chips too quickly.  Later on it’s still a losing play since most hands require a shove either pre-flop or post flop.  Those fun drawing hands, like 9-8 suited, are worthless in this contest.  You don’t have time to nurse a draw to the river.

Stay out of multi-way pots with anything less than aces or kings.  You want heads up with premium starting cards.  Just two or three of these hands can put you in the money.

Patience is the key, but you can’t wait too long.  The rapidly escalating blinds mean you’ll have to double up pretty quickly to stay in the game.  Get to a thousand chips and you can sit back and watch the mooks take each other out with low pairs and hands like K-3s.  (“But they were sooooooted!”)  It’s not uncommon to see three and four way all-in pots, which clears the table rapidly. 

You will be the victim of some brutal suck outs, but suckouts go both ways, and will save you as often as they kill you, especially if you’re limiting your shoving to premium hands.  

The action is fast.  Most SnGs take about an hour.  These are over in 15-20 minutes, which means if you’re a winning player you can win three times as much in the same amount of time. 

I know lots of folks like to play with four or six or eight tables.  Two at a time is plenty for me, especially for these puppies.  I folded a hand against five other players at one table, then played a hand at the other table.  When I looked back at the first table I was in the money!   Then the same thing happened on the second table.  Sweet! 

The games are not very clearly marked.  The only thing that distinguishes them other Turbo SnGs on Full Tilt are the odd buy-in amounts.  Look under Sit-n-Go, single table, for buy-ins of $3.50, $7, $14, $28, $70 and $160 (plus the buy in fees). 

I was surprised at how much I liked these, and you may be too.  Give them a try.  And if you don’t have an account at Full Tilt, click on the ad to open one.  You’ll not only get the 100% sign up bonus, I’ll make a few bucks as well. 

US Players Welcome!

There’s an e-mail floating around warning people to vote on the correct day. Since a huge turnout is expected, it says, Republican’s should vote on Tuesday and Democrats and Independents should vote on Wednesday.

I’m guessing there are fuming lefties who see this as part of a vast conspiracy to screw people out of their votes. Not me. I consider it a rather amusing IQ test.

John McCain helped pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a gift to the RIAA at the expense of his constituents.  He wasn’t alone – the act passed unanimously. 

Now he’s getting to enjoy the fruits of his labor.  YouTube has been yanking his videos as soon as someone makes a copyright complaint, as required by the law he helped pass.  He thinks they should be giving political ads more careful scrutiny before pulling them.  YouTube responded with a very polite, three page letter that pretty much said, very politely, “Get Bent, Sparky.” 

Karma’s a bitch, baby. 

First, check out this e-bay feedback page. Note the stuff this guy is selling.  The oldest feedback available there dates to Nov 22, 2006. 

Pretty impressive, right?  Guess where he got it all that fine stuff.  Your luggage. 

As reported on Gadling, this guy, paid from your tax dollars to keep you safe, had no problem ripping off traveler’s expensive items and selling them on e-bay.  If it was electronic, it became his. His best catch was a $47,000 camera.  And he did it at least 260 times.  Imagine if the TSA wasn’t secure. 

The TSA has said they’ll “look into it.” How reassuring.

Ain’t you glad the TSA is protecting you from bad guys? 

Finally, a story about a good cop, although to be good he has to break the law. 

Sheriff Thomas Dart said he’ll no longer evict tenants whose landlords are not paying their bills.  He and his deputies are expected to evict people who are unaware of their landlords situation.  These people are evicted without warning, and their stuff is dumped on the street.  The sherrif, whose jurisdiction includes all of Chicago, has said “Enough.”  He’s asking for legislation to protect people in this situation, but in  the meantime, isn’t doing  the bank’s bidding.  “On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work
for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just
not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.” Thanks, officer, for actually protecting and serving.

The bankers, who usually ignore their legal obligations to identify the tennits, are furious with him, calling him a vigilantie and saying he’s practicing martial law.  Perhaps they should take a few bucks from petty cash and buy a dictionary. 

Maryland cops are now putting the names of peaceful activists on terrorist lists.

This follows on the heels of five paramilitary strikes against protesters just before the Republican National Convention.  Groups with no history of violence were violently raided by SWAT teams, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and terrorized by police thugs.  The cops then stole their political literature, cell phones, computers, cameras, personal diaries, and household items like paint, rope, and roofing nails.  In a two of the raids they arrested a couple of people after terrorizing everyone else, but in most cases they just left them shaken and angry.

What was even more appalling than the behavior of these thugs was the behavior of the media.  This should have been a national story, but it was pretty much ignored.  I guess the media bigwigs are either enthralled with the police state, or so used to it they no longer consider it news.

You can read some of the local coverage here. There is also a story about it on Salon.

Thomas E. Hutchins, thug responsible for putting peaceful protesters on the terrorist watch list, defends his actions, saying it was a defense against violence and “fringe people.”

Names put on these lists tend to migrate to other lists and are virtually impossible to have removed.  It took Ted Kennedy, one of the best known and most influential politicians in the country, eight months to get his name off the no-fly list.  How likely is it that anyone else can get their names removed?

These large databases are becoming increasingly common.  Big Brother loves them, and the general public doesn’t care.

Since we can’t get rid of these lists, I have a suggestion for any liberty lovers with access to them.  Please, whenever you have a chance to do it without getting caught, enter the names and personal information of the politicians and police chiefs who think they’re a great idea.  Start with Thomas E. Hutchins.  Then add the names of cops who participate on raids like the ones on the RNC protesters, and those involved with the War on Some Drugs. Put them on lists of terrorists, sex offenders, the no-fly list, “deadbeat” dad lists, and anything else you have access to.  Let them experience the joy of being in these databases, and the impossibility of getting out.  If enough people do this, over time the lists will become as useless as the thugs who rely on them.