Saturday 27 August 2011

HEM1 Multi-Table Ratio

There was a request on the forums this week to figure out winrates and hourly based on multi-table ratio in HEM. This has been sorely missed in HEM1 but is being included in HEM2. If you're like me and think that despite HEM2 still being in Beta mode and wanting to cut them some slack, you're going to wait it out until PT4 arives because so far HEM2 is a massive resource hog and "looks like a 15 year old girls MySpace page," here's a MTR Extraction excel sheet I made to tie you over.


Just go to your sessions tab, filter for HU, 6max, FR by number of players. I think it's important to filter just by one stake because your winrate is going to drop at higher stakes obviously and you just want to find your optimal number of tables. Once you have your results, right click them and save as Sessions.csv. Open that up in Excel and copy everything. Paste it into the MTR Extraction sheet in the cell indicated. Adjust the 3 variables to your filtered game and you should have your results. The % of hands required is there to push out the outliers such as the few 1-3 tabling sessions I had that totaled 43 hands and +/- 170 bb/100 etc. Top graph is winrate by tables, bottom is hourly by tables. As is, the MTR sheet will support ~500 sessions so you'll have to adjust some formulas if you need more than that. It's not formated to look nice at all, but it does the job.

I got in a little early for the HEM2 beta testing just before the public beta release came out and tried it out for a few days before giving up in frustration with the constant crashing and huge amount of lag I was experiencing. I thought it was just my dinosaur of a PC giving me issues, but apparently people with more up to date systems are experiencing the same thing. That and it kind of seems like they've loaded it full of gimmicks that are more fun to look at than actually being helpful.

I do remember pre-ordering PT3 and being very disappointed and managed to whine enough about the HUD fail to get my money back after 5 months of "commercial" release before switching to HEM, and PT3 eventually turned into a decent product. I really don't want to go through that again with HEM2 so I'm going to wait to see if PT4 is decent. If it's not, I'm just going to be happy with HEM1 for the next year until one of them gets their stuff together.

Thursday 18 August 2011

Ron Paul

I obviously wasn't the only one that noticed the overt concerted effort by the media to stifle Ron Paul after the Ames Straw Poll (Last Post). When did we switch from terms like "journalism" and "free press" to "mainstream media" anyways? However much the latter like to portray themselves as the former, they appear to have become quite divergent professions. I can only hope that a lot of Paul's stances on fiscal issues are starting to make a lot of sense to voters, if not only because a lot of his predictions are quickly coming to pass.



Quite similar to the 2006 UIGEA to 2011 Black Friday time period, it seems as though even some of the smartest people around are quite happy to stick their heads in the sand even though from a logical, rational, captain hindsight saw this coming a long ways a way type of world view where you remove your invincibility goggles, it is abundantly clear that the status quo is unsustainable. I don't know if it's ideological apathy or just plain laziness (the term blissful ignorance comes to mind), but too many people are happy to carry on business as usual in a dysfunctional system that will inevitably crush them by design as long as the system isn't in active free fall around them. Those that can see it plain as day and try to warn us only to be frustrated beyond belief as if trying to explain the concept of gravity to people who think the world is flat are ridiculed as Chicken Little's.

If I had to pigeon hole myself into one socio-economic mindset, I'd have to go with consequentialist libertarian -- the notion that having liberty leads to results like prosperity, efficiency and peace. This is why I identify so much with his platform. If you're an American reading this blog (or an international reader looking for solid, ie. "radical" sustainable policies), definitely check out Paul's campaign website and his stance on a number of important issues.

A small sampling of his platform, most of which I agree with:

  • Repeal ObamaCare and end its unconstitutional mandate that all Americans must carry only government-approved health insurance or answer to the IRS.
  • Stop the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from interfering with Americans’ knowledge of and access to dietary supplements and alternative treatments.
  • Vetoing any unbalanced budget Congress sends to his desk.
  • Avoid long and expensive land wars that bankrupt our country by using constitutional means to capture or kill terrorist leaders who helped attack the U.S. and continue to plot further attacks.
  • Guarantee our intelligence community’s efforts are directed toward legitimate threats and not spying on innocent Americans through unconstitutional power grabs like the Patriot Act.
  • Follow the Constitution by asking Congress to declare war before one is waged.
  • Stop taking money from the middle class and the poor to give to rich dictators through foreign aid.
  • Ron Paul believes no nation can remain free when the state has greater influence over the knowledge and values transmitted to children than the family does. Returning control of education to parents and teachers on the local level is the centerpiece of Ron Paul’s education agenda.
  • Fighting to fully audit (and then end) the Federal Reserve System, which has enabled the over 95% reduction of what our dollar can buy and continues to create money out of thin air to finance future debt.
  • Opposing all unfunded mandates and unnecessary regulations on small businesses and entrepreneurs.
There are a number of other issues that he addresses at length and can be found all over Youtube such as ending the ineffective war on drug and the cause and effect of moral hazard. The media has coined Paul's lectures and statements as rambling in the little coverage they have had of him. I read that as this guy thinks about concepts in well thought out logical and correlating terms rather than what fits well into a 3 second soundbite. You're bound to become a bit wordy when you're explaining the concept of gravity for the 17th time to people who refuse to accept that the entire theory they've developed to explain why they don't go flying off into space is flawed.

Sunday 14 August 2011

LOL Straw Polls

POKER

Long time no blog. I've been figuring out a few things here and there, a few steps forward and a couple back. Steadily making some progress but I think I still have a ton of work to get back to where I was at the beginning of the year. I've been exporting some of my HEM reports to Excel and conditionally formatting them to see what stands out in certain situations compared to others with some fairly good (if not obvious results).

POLITICS

Now I'm not an American citizen, but considering that the Canadian media covers the US presidential campaigns more than our own elections, the degree to which our economy rides on hoping the elephant sleeping beside us doesn't roll the wrong way, and my proximity to the border, I think I am allowed to have an opinion. Plus it's my blog =) Here's some foreign perspective. And I have to warn you that it's fairly narrowly focused and blatantly so because the entire process, from my perspective, is a complete sham on par with having potripper call you down with 9 high and knowing plain as day that you've been superused. You can't have a real democratic presidential campaign until this problem is seen for what it is and fixed.

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I continue to be baffled by the complete media blackout of Ron Paul's campaign. Quite reminiscent of '07/'08. If all you watched was the news -- from any 3 letter source -- you'd think this was the Bachman / Pawlenty / Palin show and everyone else was already an also-ran.

When you consider that Paul receives by far the most campaign contributions from members of the military of any party, doesn't have a lobbyist in sight, and has the most Constitutionally consistent voting record of anybody and is thus considered to be a radical  fringe candidate, it tells you just how far off base and out of touch the GOP -- and Congress as a whole -- has become.

So why won't the mainstream media touch this radical politician with a ten foot pole? I mean, that's what they live for. Radical, fringe, shocking, stand out from the crowd = ratings. That's why they headline cats playing with iPads instead of the ho-hum everyday people dying in Africa. There is something very, very wrong in the US when the media is making a concerted, counter-intuitive effort to guide the course of democracy by propelling 2nd and 3rd tier candidates into the spotlight and stuffing 1st tier candidates (if not the outright front runner) into an also-ran pigeon hole.

Case in point. Results as % of votes cast. Top 3 is a numerical count.
(scroll right for averages and top 3 finishes and scroll down for charts):



Standard article following the latest results:
  • "Bachman won today's straw poll, narrowly edging out Paul" [ 3 more paragraphs about Bachman ].
  • [ 2 paragraphs about Pawlenty].
  • [ 2 paragraphs about the rest of the field - excluding Paul ].
  • [ 2 paragraphs filler to end the article ].

 Seriously? Paul crushed 3rd place Pawlenty by 2:1 and was only 1% off a win and all he gets is an participatory mention in one sentence of Bachman's 3 paragraphs?

This should be the consistent top tier Paul and Romney / up and coming Bachman show with a side of Sarah Who? The people who are actually listening to the speeches and looking at platforms have given fairly clear indication of which ones they like. But I would be very shocked if you took a random public poll which resulted in Paul and Romney being the clear favourites the way their head-and-shoulders above average straw poll results would indicate.

There's something obviously very scary about Ron Paul to a lot of powerful people. Maybe it's time to find out what considering the state of the status quo broken government.