It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post. I’ve been back in Sydney during that time and just been living my regular non-poker life. I’ve played a bit of online poker, with the APT Manila bounty event a couple of weeks ago where Tony G and I each had a $320 package on our heads.
Best performing Team PartyPoker player
It was a $6 buyin event that got about 90 runners, so there was a bunch of extra money in the tournament. I didn’t go particularly well but at least was the best performing team Partypoker player :P. Also, I made a deep run, finishing about 30th, in the 300k guaranteed last Sunday (Monday in Australia).
The ANZPT Gold Coast is starting later this week and then the Victorian Championships at Crown are in a couple weeks time, so there’s a fair bit of tournament poker still to play in Australia. In September I’m off to London for the WPT, World Open, WSOPE and EPT. The schedule in London in September is definitely one of the most exciting of the year, maybe even the most? So, I’m really looking forward to that.
Looking at optimal strategies for the penalty taker and goalie
I’ve been reading Soccernomics by Stefan Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski for the last week and I thoroughly recommend it. There’s a lot of stuff in there that can be easily applied to poker. The one chapter I found particularly interesting was on penalty kicks and looking at optimal strategies for the penalty taker and goalie.
Without summarising it too much, the authors explain how Franck Ribery intuitively uses nearly the optimal strategy for the direction he shoots his penalties. I think it’s fair to say that intuitively grasping probabilities and then making the right play in the heat of battle is one feature of a good poker player.
That’s all for now, I’ll write up some blogs with my progress in the upcoming events.
