Leaving Small Ponds

This is an ego post, written quickly at the behest of a friend. Sorry.

For almost a year now, the only exceptional aspect to my ultimate career - the thing that made me stand out most - was the fact I was a junior, and eligible to compete in junior events (Youth Nationals, Junior Worlds). So, I've done all that, had my Worlds campaign where I matched up better than I had expected against most but still pretty middle-of-the-road-y, but my time in the junior's spotlight has passed.

Intermediate Male Syndrome, or IMS, is a disorder that I would say effects 20-30% of male ultimate players. It occurs when the big leaps and bounds forward in terms of playing ability (both fitness and skills) become less and less frequent and progress is plateau'd. Where once small efforts - the occasional run, doing a set of one hundred throws once a week - made a big difference, now even large exertions result in minimal noticeable gain. Obviously, there is a high temptation to, once this plateau is reached, basically just say 'fuck it' and be content with being average: IMS comes into the picture where players who have reached this wall have disproportionally large egos and misconceptions about their ability.

Why is this an issue for me? I'm leaving the small pond, and now the choice is mine as to whether I bust my nut and improve, or putter about on my present course.

Sometimes I Wish I Had An iPhone

Or at least a smartphone with internet connectivity so I could update this blog on the fly.

I have had at least 4 good ideas for posts on the bus travelling places or out at parties discussing ultimate, but they escape me at present.

Oh well. I've been injured; expect regularish updates once I start Opens season training/speculation.

Friskee I miss you so...

At 12 weeks post surgery if I have been doing my rehabilitation properly I am able to start running in straight lines (circles is too much). I've been doing one legged squats, lunges, some weird bridge thing on my back with waist off the ground and just holding that on one leg, wall sits, some hamstring stuff and plenty of stretching. Unfortunately I was meant to do that 4-5 times a week but I think I've only been up to 3. This could mean its a while till I start running again.

I also went on my first cardio session since Fakulti pre-nationals last training session at Rozelle with crippling hill sprints. I was just doing laps around a grass field on a bike at a pretty hard level. Afterwards, my legs hurt, chest was burning, felt a little sick and head hurt (not enough water I guess), in short it sucked, but it was nice to know that its at least an option for me now.

Tuesday night was Friskee, our 17 man roster cut down to having only 3 players on our team who are on the roster actaully arriving at the start of the game. Myself and Nobles sister Cat picked up for the first few poitns till we had enough to play savage with only 1 pick up. Played 3 points, had two pulls (thanks max!) and 1 assist from a stupid throw to hammer in the endzone. Admittedly I thought they would have no bid since they were all facing the wrong way and off balance, but that said it was still a fairly bladey forehand into a crowd of people. Hammer managed to catch that one uncontested.

Fun game was against special sauce, tiger turned up had a bung knee. I could empathise a little. Pottsy turned up, his blade count was at least 2. Interestingly I did learn places where blades actually aren't a bad choice in that they're easy to throw and fly quickly in a way that hammers and scoobers dont. Also saw him doing weird chicken wing pulls.
Interesting.

Friskee will also be welcoming Mark and Loren who are back from their adventures overseas! Hooray!

Self Improvment

I think someone who thinks about their game, what they liked, what they didn't like and discusses it with their friends and thinks about it is someone who will obviously bring a strong mental game to the field. It's pretty annoying for me to see the dumb athletes, people I see with amazing skills and speed, but they like like lost space cadets, clogging the lane, making dumb throwing choices ruining set plays.

So with that in mind, I know Tiger and I used to have a lot of bitch/discussion sessions about how we as individuals and as a team played as we had those long drives back from ELS hall back to the beaches.

However, this post is less about Frisbee and more about me being pissed off at losing 10% of my miniscule online bankroll and getting stacked 3x in 20 minutes. (Stacked means to lose your entire chipstack). No I'm not upset about losing the $5 or whatever it worked out to be, but in the same way you didn't lose money after you lost League, it still can feel pretty shitty to get mopped on the floor by a team you know you should have been beating. I am a winning Online player, which is good since I play poker and don't lose money, but variance still hits me and here's 2 hands that affected me a lot when I played, the second one I got annoyed at and made me play poorly for a few hands. But here is my discussion of these hands.

The hero (me) is a1214.

***** Hand History for Game 7517978927 *****
$5 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Friday, November 07, 07:51:25 ET 2008
Table Table 126376 (Real Money)
Seat 8 is the button
Total number of players : 10

a1214 posts small blind [$0.02 USD].
kentuha777 posts big blind [$0.04 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to a1214 [ 9d 9s ]
Maler81888 calls [$0.04 USD]
yeaah11 raises [$0.24 USD]
DaObnoxious1 folds
Fless555 folds
andry00 folds
DaObnoxious1: :)) looooooooool
a1214 calls [$0.22 USD]
kentuha777 folds
Maler81888 calls [$0.20 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Ks, 6h, 9c ]
a1214 checks
Maler81888 checks
yeaah11 checks
** Dealing Turn ** [ Qc ]
a1214 bets [$0.36 USD]
Maler81888 calls [$0.36 USD]
yeaah11 raises [$2.17 USD]
a1214 is all-In [$1.36 USD]
Maler81888 folds
** Dealing River ** [ 9h ]
yeaah11 shows [ Th, Jh ]a straight Nine to King.
a1214 shows [ 9d, 9s ]four of a kind, Nines.
yeaah11 wins $0.45 USD from the side pot 1 with a straight, Nine to King.
a1214 wins $4.34 USD from the main pot with four of a kind, Nines.

First thoughts about this hand were making me laugh for that terrible bad beat on the guy on the river who played, but beyond that there is a little more behind the hand. (I have removed the stack sizes from both hands since I was showing to a friend but in all cases I was short stacked around $2 when the rest of other players were $2-$7. The guys I got in tangles with were typically $3.

The first raise from yeah11 I took personally as a blind steal, but I hadn't played many hands from him but I didn't know what sort of range of hands he was playing, so I guessed that he was strong. So if he was strong, why did I call with 9's? Pocket pairs gain their value from hitting well disguised sets in the flop. When calling a preflop raise with pocket pairs (even as low as 2) a lot of the time you will be an underdog HOWEVER the value comes from implied odds. You will hit a set (3 of a kind where you hold a pocket pair as opposed to trips where you have only 1 of the card with the pair on the board) or quads about 11% of the time. Clearly if I am calling 16 cents into a pot of like 34 cents I'm only getting around 2.1:1 on my money which is a bad call, BUT the implied odds of me taking his entire stack are what matters. How do you calculate implied odds? Simply I made a call of 16 cents, with the intention of winning his entire stack if I hit. Simple way to check if the persons stack is 15x the amount you are calling, in the long run you will make money from this play. (You will lose 9/10 times but the 1 you do will you will win 15x your investment which is a netgain of 5x your call)

On the flop, I was out of position so I had to act first. I was pretty sure the 9 giving me a set put me way ahead, and he did raise preflop so I was hoping he would continuation bet on the flop or hit the king and raise. There very few straight possibilities, no straight chances and I was going to bet against he didn't have a set over my set (trip kings against my trip 9s) so I checked. Maybe I should have raised but unless he was an idiot he wouldn't have called a raise with a gutshot straight.

Turn card comes a queen giving him the gutshot straight and best hand. I raise the pot, I'm happy with this raise, one person calls, and my villian raises all in. I snap called. In retrospect I should have thought maybe one little bit longer about what he could have, another set? two pair? straight? But I didn't. So this call turns out was a bad one if I put him on a straight. Why? Well I had to call $1.36 to win a pot of $2.98 which is only 1:2:2 on my money and since I was only about a 20% favourite to win (board could pair = 9 outs + the other 9 = 10 outs = 20% to win aprox) I would have needed to be getting 5:1 on money to make this a good call.

I should have folded that. Either way, I rivered a 9 and beat him down. My bad. Analysis? I was happy until the turn in how I played. However the chances of someone having a straight over a set everytime that happens means I would be ahead in most situations, just unlucky here.

The following is what I said to my other possibly more serious other poker playing friend(min buy in buying into a table for less than the table maximum to reduce risk, but it also means you have the potential to win less):

I GUESS THATS WHY YOU NEVER MIN BUY IN LOLOLOL RIVERED HIM

3 hands later I had to send him this message:

LOL OWNED :( LOST ALL THE MONEY I AHD ANYWAY:(

Dealt to a1214 [ As Ac ]
a1214 raises [$0.12 USD]
kentuha777 folds
Maler81888 calls [$0.12 USD]
pserg777 folds
DaObnoxious1 calls [$0.12 USD]
Fless555 calls [$0.12 USD]
andry00 folds
shirl1989 folds
** Dealing Flop ** [ 3s, 4c, 6h ]
a1214 bets [$0.39 USD]
Maler81888 folds
DaObnoxious1 calls [$0.39 USD]
Fless555 folds
** Dealing Turn ** [ 2s ]
a1214 bets [$1.26 USD]
DaObnoxious1 is all-In [$2.71 USD]
a1214 calls [$1.45 USD]
** Dealing River ** [ Js ]
a1214 shows [ As, Ac ]a pair of Aces.
DaObnoxious1 shows [ 5h, Ad ]a straight Two to Six.
DaObnoxious1 wins $6.41 USD from the main pot with a straight, Two to Six.

Hero is me a1214 and villian is DaObnoxious1.
This wasn't so bad. I got a little unlucky here, but bad play exposed me to this bad luck that I shouldn't have done. Looks like I had aces in early position, my first raise of 12cents is only 2 big blinds, I should have raised at least 16 cents. Ace's is a great hand heads up, but loses a lot of its value against multiple people. Using pokerstove (a hand analysis program) I can see that against a5o and 2 random hadns aces is only a 65% to win.

On the flop I bet 3/4 of the pot. I'm happy with this raise, it makes 2 people fold and I get one caller. Knowing his hand now, from his behalf that was a bad call hes getting like 2.2:1 on his money on an open straight which is about 24% to win by the river, 16%ish on the next card, meaning he needed 4:1 at least on his money to make that a good call in the long run assuming I wouldn't bet on the turn. HOWEVER to his credit, he was getting amazing implied odds. His chance to hit is only 4:1 but if he does hit he will probably get a lot of money (in thise case my entire stack). I bet out on the turn, and he went all in. I looked at the board thought I was safe then he went all in. This is probably where I made my mistake and shoudl have folded. I remember reading an article that basically said never go broke with 1 pair.

I went broke with one pair.

New age coaching? Be THE better player

I was reading an article on self confidence and the author had an interesting little coaching tale.

He spoke about people needing to be comfortable with themselves and their abilities, but people often cant tap those abilities or importantly don't realise what they're capable of doing, and hence never gain the confidence of being able to or even attempting to reach their potential.

He recalled a story, he was in his college basketball team, he wasn't the best player in the team, in retrospect he thinks that although he thought he was the worst on the team, in reality he was not. But that would change.

One day, the coach tried a new idea what sounded like one of what Piers called in 2007 at the juniors camp an 'experimental' phase. They were having a practice game and the coach said to them "Each of you I am going to assign you another player on the team and you have to play the way you think that they would play," Naturally the game was chaos.

The main character of the story however was assinged to play like the best player in the team. With that task on board he thought, hey fuck it I'm not that good but this is just a practice so I don't care.

Needless to say he shredded that game and the coach told him later, if all he had to do was to tell him to pretend hes the best player on the team, that he will do that every single game. What changed? His skills certainly didn't improve over that session, but his confidence in his own game and HOW he used what he had, had changed.

....

So how does this link back to team dynamics and ideas? I think it was an interesting concept telling your team to play like others on the team. First of all you need to have played a lot with those people and be pretty familiar with their playing styles. So you would need to be a very tight knit team. Secondly, it is also in a way a team building exercise and an individual

So the first thing I imagined, hey what happened if I got asked to play like someone on my team. Phil White maybe? Well for starters I'd have to be an awesome precision point hucker, extremely fit with a sick read on that disc and ball crushing ups, as well as being ruggedly handsome. But then I started to think more about HOW the person plays rather than what skills they have. More about the choices they make, the people they throw to, the times they cut, the times they jump, break, throw, cut and even lead others. I think this was the coach's aim, to get people to really think about their team mates and how they can form stronger as a team.

So obviously you aren't going to be able to copy somones raw physical ability, but thers other things you could really emulate. Can this be applied to improving peoples weaknesses?

No names mentioned but there is two players on friskee, if I was to act like them, I imagine in this exercise a lot of people would become caracitures of eachother to really emphasise their gripes (or appreciation) of certain players.

Two people come to mind that I think could benefit from this.

Player one: "Oh look a perfectly good huck, I have the throw to get within 30cm of my runner. My runner has a huge lead, and on top of that can sky the other guy if it comes down to it. I'd better not take this throw."
Player two: "Oh man looks someones trying to cut deep I KNOW this is a good throw. Breakforce huck? that could be hard FUCK IT. HUUUUUUCK BABY"
"..."
"sorry guys, my bad."

I reckon both players could definetly benefit from this experience.

But could teams actaully benefit from a mess around game like this?
Maybe. But it'd be hard.