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August 30, 2020
No pandemic numbers to update, but let’s talk about something relevant in my last 24 hours… my involvement in the World Series of Poker, which was going really well, until… suddenly… it wasn’t.
Unfortunately, that is the nature of the game, and there’s actually something relatable to the world in general, especially these days.
In tournament poker, unlike cash games, you play until you have all the chips (and win) …or you bust out with nothing. Often, in tournament poker, you’re put in a position where it’s blatantly obvious what you should do, but plain old (good or bad, depending who you are in the story) luck will have something to say about it.
Even in the most extreme and obvious cases… and here’s the math on one of the most extreme examples… things can (and do) go wrong.
Let’s say it’s just you and me battling against each other in a hand. You have a pair of Aces, the best possible starting hand. I have a 2 and a 7 of different suits, which is generally the worst starting hand. For some misguided reason, I think you’re trying to bluff me with whatever you did to kick-off the hand, so I go All-In on you, meaning I bet everything I have… not because my cards are any good, but because I think you don’t have anything that good, and as per what I wrote yesterday, this is a game of money played with cards, not the other way around. As long as you think I have something better than you, you should throw away the hand.
But instead, this scenario is a dream for you. Someone pushing All-In, while you have pocket Aces. You call instantly, and are even further delighted to see my awful cards. Here’s the math: After running 5 board (common) cards, you should win 88% of the time. I, through sheer luck, will win 12% of the time… having hit 2 pairs or 3 of a kind or who knows.
And that’s the thing… one out of eight times in that dream scenario, you will lose. And it will feel like someone sledgehammered you in the gut… and if you visit the hotel bar at any poker tournament, you will see an ever-increasing group of gut-sledgehammered people wandering in to drown … [Continue Reading]
August 29, 2020
No AB or BC numbers today (or tomorrow)… so, like waiting for that final “river” card in poker, we wait to see how the hand plays out on Monday.
Indeed, poker is on my mind because I’ve spent the better part of today (and will continue into the night) trying to advance a bit further in the World Series of Poker Main Event. It’s all online this year, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
The biggest advantage of course is being able to sit at home, comfortably, and scream at the computer and throw your mouse at the wall in frustration when appropriate to do so. I haven’t done the latter, but plenty of the former… certainly something you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) do in a real cardroom.
If you’re only familiar with the game of poker from what you’ve seen on TV, you might have a bit of a misguided notion… but here’s the deal: Poker is not a game of cards which you play with money. Rather… it’s a game of money which you play with cards. It’s a subtle distinction, but it makes a huge difference.
Watching on TV, you’d think most hands are people throwing their money into the pot and hoping for the best as the cards get dealt. Certainly, that does happen… perhaps one out of ten times. The other nine times, all the poker playing takes place before any cards are seen… or just a few. It’s 80% luck, 15% mind games and 5% math.
Everyone knows the math, and the 80% luck aspect can be rolled out of the equation… other than it serves to level the playing field to the extent “good” amateurs like me can go toe-to-toe with the pros for a while, but eventually they’ll get caught by that intangible 15% of mind games. There’s a reason that, after 5,000 people have entered a tournament, you always wind-up with a lot of familiar names in the top 500… the guys who can stare at you from across the table; stare into your soul and make you think exactly what they want.
To some extent, not having that be a part of it… helps a bit. Nobody can tell what’s going through my mind while it’s counting down, waiting for me to do something. For … [Continue Reading]
August 28, 2020
To be honest, not great numbers today, if you’re looking at new cases… as we head into the weekend, today’s new-case counts are the highest ever, here in B.C… and in Alberta as well. The only positive thing about that, one would hope, is that it serves as a wake-up call. We’re presently heading in the wrong, direction… albeit slowly. And now is the time to address it. We can at least appreciate the transparency with which we’re handed this information. That’s not the case everywhere.
The U.S. election is 67 days away, and Donald Trump needs to make sure things look as good as possible during that time. All other issues aside, his continued waffling and ineffectiveness with respect to managing the pandemic (the U.S. response is now ranked 2nd-worse on the planet, only slightly better than the U.K.) has made him look awful, no matter what he says. His insistence that things are going well, and it’ll soon be over and all that… most people are wising-up that this is far from the truth.
He’s taken two significant steps in trying to put lipstick on this particular pig. One is that the testing data no longer goes directly to the CDC. It goes to the White House, where it’s compiled, curated and released to the public. The other is his strategy of testing less… because, you know, the less you test, the less positive results you get… and the better it looks. Duh.
The combination of those two things has led to a significant decline in positive test results.
If you average the number of positive tests in the U.S. (and Canada, in [brackets], whose population is about 1/9th the size), starting a month ago, the 4 subsequent weeks were:
56,061 [395]
55,197 [382]
47,356 [377]
42,872 [425]
Wow – those are some great American numbers… look at that downward trend, even as Canada, at best, stays flat… or goes up a bit. Let’s hope some aide doesn’t jokingly suggest to The President to cut testing altogether… because what’s better than zero positives!
Of course, when reality checks in, things look a little different. Here are the daily deaths averages for those same time periods:
1,053 [5]
1,095 [7]
998 [6]
… [Continue Reading]
August 27, 2020
In school, you could always tell who was left-handed. It was all the students whose left hand had an accumulated smear of blue ink running down the left edge of their hand; you know, the edge closest to the paper. When you’re doing cursive writing and dragging your hand across the page, that’s what happens. One of the many perks of being left-handed.
Needless to say, my handwriting was awful, and the resulting pages of in-class effort often resembled, as one teacher once told me, “a sloppy dog’s breakfast.” I’ve never met any left-handed people with good handwriting. For the most part, I switched to printing in ALL CAPS, something that seems to be pretty common these days, but I was doing that decades ago, when it was barely tolerated. Teachers would question it.
“Why do you write like this?”
“So you can read it.”
My dad would’ve been left-handed, had he been allowed. He was forced to sit on his left hand while learning to write, though he hit left with tennis and kicked left with soccer. He’s the one who taught me all-caps printing thing.
Back in elementary school, while I wasn’t forced to write with my right, there was little accommodation otherwise. For example, every single baseball glove owned by the school was for right-handed people. Catch with your left, throw with your right.
I throw very well with my left. I can’t throw at all with my right… the result being, I was always the goof who’d catch the ball, and attempt to quickly remove the glove, the ball from it, and then throw it. It’s ridiculous. I spent all my time on the field praying the ball wouldn’t get hit my way, because every time I had to make a play, chances were it’d be a botched mess.
But among all of those failed, miserable, laughable screw-ups trying to field a ball, there shines this particular moment (and apologies to those who don’t know how baseball works, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it):
There was this player… Michael Finch… truly a great ball player in comparison to the rest of us. He was an actual Little-League star; we were a bunch of hacks. And every time MF came to the plate, he’d swing on the first pitch and … [Continue Reading]
August 26, 2020
As a kid, I rode my bike all over the place… and when I was riding around the streets of Kerrisdale, I’d usually go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken on West Blvd. near 45th. I wouldn’t go in… I’d just coast by slowly and inhale the heavenly fumes emanating from within. Rumour has it that they used to (still do?) pipe out the smells to attract people. Whether it was on purpose or not, who knows… either way, it works very well.
The history of that entire chain is interesting. Everyone knows it was Colonel Harland Sanders who created the whole thing, but what most people don’t realize is that The Colonel was 62 years old when he launched that first franchise. He died at age 90, so that last 28 years of his life was quite the wild ride. Not that it wasn’t before that; on top of the usual assortment of early-century jobs (farmhand, dishwasher, painter, blacksmith-assistant, many trainyard jobs), Sanders became a lawyer… and the future of fried chicken as we know it might have been quite different, had his legal career not come to a crashing halt… and that’s a good way to put it. Sanders got into a serious disagreement with his own client… in a courtroom… which led to an actual courtroom brawl. That destroyed Sanders’ reputation, and he ended up moving back home with his mother. Back to work… labourer, life-insurance salesman, ferry-boat operator, lamp manufacturer, tire salesman, service-station manager, hotel operator.
It was in that hotel that he perfected his secret recipe, and from there, as they say, the rest is history.
Managing the entire massive enterprise was too much for Sanders, so he sold the whole thing a few years later, but held on to the Ambassador role we all know so well. He also hung on to all of the Canadian rights, moved to Mississauga, and collected franchise, royalty and appearance fees for the rest of his life.
In the early 90s, Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC. If was of course known as that colloquially, long before that. But they made it official. And the reason they really did that was to remove the word “Fried” from the prominence in the name. That was when “Fried” went from being yummy… … [Continue Reading]