Month: January 2010

Okay, so no, it didn’t really.  But it should have.

Brick had these glasses on tonight in an attempt to appear intelligent and sophisticated.  Fail and fail.

Home now.  I tweeted that I was looking for recommendations for Paul’s Drunkass Food and Stephanie responded, West Coast Burger at Huey’s.  Damn good recommendation.

I still have more pics to post, just have to find time.

Today is the first day of the semester for the U of M law school, and the first semester where classes have been held in the new Downtown building.

I don’t have time to do it in my lunch break today, but sometime this week I’ll try to post a list of good places to eat lunch that are within a couple of blocks walk from the school.  In the meantime, if you’re looking for one recommendation to get you started, here it is:  Bardog Tavern on Monroe.

If you live in Uptown and have thought about getting more involved in the community, this Thursday, January 14 is a good chance to do it.  They’ll meet at Alcenia’s on North Main at 6 PM.

If you go, by all means, go hungry.  Excellent food.

She’s the only bartender at the Downtown Saucer who’s allowed to park her transportation inside.  See below:

Just found this out on Twitter.  Follow them at @cafeeclectic to keep up with the latest news on their opening.

In October-November I played a lot of No-Limit Hold’em on PokerStars at the 10 cent small blind/25 cent big blind level.  I frequently found myself at tables with a player named “yahai” from Hua Zhou, China who struck me as having some rather unusual playing habits.

First of all, there was the stack he brought to the table.  You can buy into most online no-limit hold’em tables for anywhere between 20 and 100 times the big blind.  I almost always buy in for the max, which would be $25 at a .10/.25 table, and most good players do.  The reason for that is, if you find yourself at the table with bad players, you want to set yourself up to take as much of their money as possible once you get them involved in a hand.  “yahai,” however, always bought in for the minimum – 20 times the big blind, or $5.

Secondly, good poker players in no-limit games usually size their bets in relation to the size of the big blind pre-flop, and in relation to the size of the pot post-flop.  This is done to give information (or disinformation at times, since poker is a game of deception) about how much you like your hand.  “yahai” didn’t do that, though.  He’d either fold (which he did about 98% of the time) or he’d go all-in with his $5 stack, forcing his opponents to make an expensive decision.  If he won and doubled his stack, he’d immediately leave the table.  If he folded and lost money due to being in the blinds, he’d rebuy to bring his stack back up to the $5 starting point.

It was annoying to play with him because he didn’t seem to have a clue how to play proper poker – just fold or all-in.  He was smart enough to only go all-in with premium hands.  In most positions on the table he’d go all-in with only AA, KK, QQ, JJ or AK, the best starting hands in hold’em.  On the dealer button or in the blinds, if no one had raised yet, he’d loosen up his requirements to about any two cards J or higher, and A-10 as well, and A-x where the cards were suited, and go all-in.

It seemed like he was wasting his time.  With his strategy, his all-ins only seemed to get action from other players about once an hour, and I figured the $5 he’d win in those situations would evaporate due to him getting hit by the 10 cent and 25 cent blinds that had gone around so many times.  “How is this guy making any money?”  I thought.

“And furthermore,” I wondered, “there are dozens of tables at the 10 cent/25 cent level on PokerStars.  How is it that ‘yahai’ and I end up at the same table so often?”  I went to the PokerStars lobby one day when he was online, and did a player search for him.  I figured he might be multi-tabling, playing more than one table at a time.

Was I ever right.  He was multi-tabling TWENTY-FOUR TABLES AT ONCE.

Now things were starting to make sense.  I decided to do an experiment.  I got on a .10/.25 table and played for an hour.  I played my normal strategy, but for the purposes of this experiment I was not mainly concerned with how much I won or lost, but how many VIP Player Points (VPPs) I got.  You earn VPPs for every hand you’re dealt into, based on how much PokerStars rakes out of each pot as their fee for hosting the game.  At the .10/.25 level, you don’t earn much.  I earned about 4 VPPs for that hour.

For “yahai,” though, those piddling points add up.  Let’s say that he multi-tables an average of 20 tables per time.  Research I did about him online (because there was a lot of discussion about this guy) indicated that he plays online about 10 hours per day.  That means he’s earning 40 VPPs per table per day, times 20 tables – that’s 800 VPPs per day.  Let’s further suppose that he works a normal “work week” grinding the poker tables, which would be about 22 days per month.  That means he earns approximately 17,600 VPPs per month.  I actually think that number is conservative, because I think he plays more than 10 hours/day and more than 22 days/month.

At 17,600 VPPs/month, he’d qualify for PokerStars’ PlatinumStar VIP level, which requires a minimum of 10,000 VPPs earned per month.  What does that get him?  Well, a lot, actually.  Higher-level VIPs can trade in their points for cash bonuses.  A PlatinumStar VIP, for example, can trade in 50,000 points for $650 cash.

But wait.  When you buy these bonuses, you’re not trading in VIP Player Points (VPPs), but rather Frequent Player Points (FPPs).  PlatinumStar VIPs earn 2.5 FPPs for each VPP.  So, the 17,600 VPPs “yahai” earns each month translate to 44,000 FPPs.  That means, about once a month, “yahai” is able to get a bonus of $650 cash from PokerStars.

That’s not all.  By June of this year, “yahai” will have earned enough VPPs to reach the next level – Supernova, for which you have to earn a minimum of 100,000 points in a year.  Then he’ll earn 3.5 FPPs for each VPP earned.  So his 17,600 VPPs per month will equate to 61,600 FPPs.  Furthermore, he’ll get a better deal on a bonus – $1500 for 100,000 VPPs.  At the rate he plays, he’ll be able to cash in his points for that $1500 bonus about every 7 or 8 weeks.

So, “yahai” can be a completely break-even poker player on the tables, and still earn $650 a month or more.  In the US, that’s really not that much, but in China, $650-1500 a month should place him squarely in the middle class.  “yahai” isn’t some ignorant donkey who doesn’t know how to play poker and doesn’t care to learn – he’s a businessman, taking advantage of a favorable economic situation.

Recently I’ve seen a lot more players like him, with names like “yazhou,” “chinlee,” and “zhaobao,” all from China, all at the .10/.25 levels, all employing the same $5 stack shove-or-fold strategy.  Why are Chinese players flooding the low-stakes no-limit hold’em market all of the sudden?  I had no idea until I came across this article, which provided some insight.  There were many, many Chinese players making a living at World of Warcraft until recently.  They’d play the game for hours and even days at a time, earning “gold,” the currency of the realm in WoW.  They’d then sell their “gold” on eBay for real money, thus making a profit at the massive multiplayer online game.  The Chinese government, however, banned this practice last year, causing the players to find a new venue to make money – poker.  As I understand it, it’s not just PokerStars that has been invaded, but all the major poker sites.

What to do if you get tired of finding these shove-or-fold short stackers at your poker table?  My advice would be to take a break from no-limit and play fixed limit for a while.  My experience is that you can play about 8 levels higher in fixed limit – so if you’re playing 10 cent/25 cent blinds in no-limit, you can play $1/$2 fixed limit pretty comfortably.  In fixed limit, you can’t use bet sizing to give information/disinformation about your hand, so you have to play proper poker.  Plus, you tend to earn more VPPs in fixed limit games, getting you to the next VIP level faster – and getting you access to some of the bonuses that “yahai” and his friends enjoy.

Another option would be to play no-limit hold’em Sit’n’Go tournaments.  If you’re playing .10/.25 cash games, you should be comfortable at the $6.50-$13 buy-in range for SnGs.  There are players like “yahai” in these tournaments but they almost never finish in the money.  They either get blinded off, or they get too aggressive and more experienced players take advantage of them.

I hope that sheds some light into why all these Chinese players have invaded the low-limit poker games.  For months I was privately cussing “yahai” and his buddies, but now that I see what they’re doing, I kind of respect them.  They’ve found a relatively low-risk way to avoid being prisoners of the corporate world.

This blog entry is sure to get a lot of traffic from search engines, as people frequently search for “yahai” trying to figure out who he is.  If it’s your first time to read this blog, welcome, and if you found this post helpful, I have a tip jar at Buy-Paul-a-Beer.net where you’re welcome to leave a little somethin’ to help build my bankroll. 

I just got home, and it’s 1:54 AM Saturday night.  Or actually, Sunday morning.  Which means it’s the start of a new week.  Which means I can post a new “Brick” quote.

Interesting fact about Brick before we proceed:  If she drinks a Red Bull when she first gets to work, she doesn’t complain about how tired she is for the rest of her shift, but it makes her pee for like five times an hour.

She doubted her nickname tonight, by the way.  “Sometimes I think you call me Brick because I’m dumb as a brick,” Brick told me.

“No, that’s not true,” I replied.  “My friend Clay nicknamed you Brick because you’re built like a brick house.”

She seemed like she wanted proof.  “I’ve been staring at your ass all night,” I told her.  “You have black underwear on.”  That convinced her I was telling the truth, and everything was fine after that.

And now, on with the quote.

Tuesday night we were at the Saucer playing trivia and two of the stars of this blog, Brick and the Nuh-Uh Girl, found themselves in the same place.

The two of them got to talking, and Brick learned that the Nuh-Uh Girl is Jewish.  So they got to talking about Hanukkah, and Brick asked, “That goes on for twelve days, right?”

Twelve Bricks a-thinking… eleven bums a-bumming… ten Brittneys texting… nine pigeons crapping… eight Scratchys scratching… oh hell I’m too drunk to come up with another seven days.  I’m going to heat up a Jimmy Dean sausage biscuit that I bought at Walgreens today, then crash.  If I feel like breakfast food in the morning I may change things up and try the Silly Goose $7 brunch buffet.

‘Tis the week of Hanukkah, good cheer we are bringing… this holiday we celebrate by dancing and singing… gather ’round together, the Brick-a we’ll do… then join in a song that our forefathers knew…

Too rdunk to walk the 30 feet to bed… the living room floor is looking like a seriously good option right now.  More posts in the morning if not ridiculously hung over.

Here’s a pic of the Nuh-Uh Girl eating.  Bicycle Bobby and I were at the bar when she came in.  “I wonder how long before she orders food,” we asked each other.  Not long later, a salmon plate came out.

Since I’m a pro wrestling fan, I figured I’d post a link to YouTube video of a classic match I’d heard about when I was a kid, but never got to see until 27 years later.

February 1983, St. Louis, MO:  NWA World Champion “Nature Boy” Ric Flair defends the title against Bruiser Brody in a best-two-of-three-falls, one hour time limit.  Considered one of the classic world title defenses of the 1980s.  Because of YouTube’s 10-minute limit on uploaded video, it’s broken into six parts.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

The fine folks at Calhoun’s Sports Bar, in the South Main district at GE Patterson and Mulberry, e-mailed to say that they will have the Tigers vs. Southern Miss game on their TVs tonight.  It’s at 7 PM, broadcast on CSS.  They will also have all the NFL playoff games on their 10 TVs.

Still at home playing poker… played a couple of hours of Omaha Hi/Lo, now back to fixed limit Hold’em.  Down a little today, thanks to an expensive hand where I flopped a straight, but the board paired on the river to turn my opponent’s set of 10s into a full house.  At least I’m earning lots of frequent player points.  Will probably be out later tonight, although with the low predicted to be around 10, I doubt I will venture too far from home.