Wednesday 12 January 2011

Taking a Break - Adventures in e-Commerce

I hadn't even realized this but I've been taking a break from playing. There isn't much poker content here but if you want to read about a day in the life of a website installation noob this is for you. I didn't really intend to not play, but I've been working on getting my wife's online store up and running for the past few days and really haven't put any hands in. I do have a bit of Photoshop and HTML / CSS coding experience but I just don't see how anyone that's not charging an outrageous fee -- and by outrageous I mean completely reasonable considering the amount of work -- could be bothered to make a site from scratch with all the cheap templates out there and the infinite possibilities of php includes.
So they obviously pick a nice template that runs on the open source Prestashop engine. By the way, I have  zero experience when it comes to setting up e-commerce. The engine is still fairly buggy in my opinion and working in the back office is not at all intuitive nevermind the structure making me say "huh?" more than enough times and the fact that my template of course uses undocumented workarounds for things as simple as changing the logo. Thankfully it's as simple as jumping over to the template site's live chat and having them think I'm a moron to get this figured out. By the time I'm done, I'm fairly sure they are going to be running close to 0EV on selling me this.



My current project is shipping. Their "stable" version does not have product specific shipping. lolwut? Yeah the engine will pick shipping rates for you based on weight or price ranges. Oh but product specific pricing is in version 1.4 beta! Download beta --> update --> template implosion --> delete --> re-install --> try again --> implosion. Note that each step here takes a good 30 minutes due to FTP moving like 5k files. So what to do? Workaround! I figure I can set a "weight" as shipping price indicator rather than actual weight. 1 kg = $1, 2kg = $2, 3kg =$3. Easy game.

FTP... ranges... things that make you shake your head in disbelief... maybe there is some poker content in there. That said, I am thoroughly enjoying it and having an "a ha!" moment for every few hours of hair pulling frustration makes me happy.

Poker

I've been messing around with some shortstacker maths trying to get inside their heads. I know I know. Why would I ever want to get inside their heads. Well in case Stars does something crazy like not change the structure and I in turn do something crazy like stay there, I want to know what makes these guys tick.

It's become abundantly apparent to me that good shortstackers' shove ranges are extremely tight some of the time while having ATC some of the time. My goal is to figure out when is when based on opener's range, calling range, dead money and shorty's stack size. It's starting to make a lot of sense to me and while they all vehemently deny playing off a hand chart, I think for the most part you could easily play off of a situation chart. Granted there are more situations than most people would realize and something as simple as having 5bb more in your stack can cut your shove range in half or more for some of them.

1 comment:

  1. Is it a possibility that you are overemphasizing the ability of shortstackers? Is it a possibility that they might actually be costing you more in the form of tilt than in actual $$ lost to them? (as in, you focus so much on the shortstackers that you lose focus on hand reading of more fully stacked players during those hands?)

    Of course, you might be playing mostly full ring these days, I can see where a shortstacker can cause you more issues there. At the 100NL 6max tables, I just haven't experienced that much issue with pounding on the shortstackers. THere's a good vid by QTip at dragthebar that specifically deals with them that I found helpful.

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