How would you play it?

Posted on 20100512 by Lalor

Played at the Tankerville int he 888 Poker League on Tuesday and bubbled for the points. The final hand I was involved in has left me contemplating my decision making. I’ll set the scene.

The tournament was broken down to two remaining tables of eight. I had made some good hands and lost some big hands. I was on a good run presently and had about 18k in chips with the blinds at 1k and 2k. Two new players had come to the table on my right with about 20k each. Chris was under the gun and folded, Brendan folded after him. The first new guy raised it to 4k and the second new guy to my immediate right folded. I look down at two off the button, playing it cautiously as I have not seen this player in a hand as yet, I decide to call. Everyone else folds and we go heads up to the flop.

The flop comes 4 6 K rainbow. My opponent makes a meek continuation bet of 4k, I smooth call with a little trepidation about the King. A Jack on the turn gives me second pair, I am pretty sure I have this guy beat as I don’t think he has a King with the way he bet out on the flop, putting me at about 80% to win the hand. He continues with his betting and pushes all-in to which I call instantly. He shows which now puts me in the drivers seat needing to dodge one of the three remaining Tens with him as an 20:1 underdog.

Needless to say, he hit his three-outer Ten on the river and knocked me out of the tournament.

In hindsight, I should have possibly tested the waters earlier and taken control of the hand pre-flop with either a re-raise to 10 or 12k or pushed it all in pre-flop. But my passive play was influenced by the fact I had never played against this opponent before and he had me out chipped. Taking that into consideration, I think the call was the easy option, but the correct option was at least a re-raise pre-flop.

How would you play it?

Round 4 Win

Posted on 20100503 by Lalor

I took down round 4 of the Siomos Palace Home Tournament, which had eight runners. It was a bit of an up and down night hitting quad sevens in the second hand of the night with 73c in big blind, and then losing most of my chips a couple of levels later. Despite this, I never hit the felt and gradually built my stack to reasonable size when I played a crucial hand against two other all-ins. Continue reading →

An Obituary printed in the London Times

Posted on 20091120 by Lalor

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn’t always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

MBR Infected USB Hard Drive

Posted on 20091023 by Lalor

A short while ago I found my USB HDD was detected as being infected with a virus by McAfee. I surmised that it was the USB HDD as it the virus alert only ever appeared when it was connected to the Laptop running McAfee. AVG Free didn’t detect the virus. Now it was quite interesting behaviour as the infected application would come up as a random file on the C drive and sometimes a more innocuous file name. For example: ‘C:\…\jqs.exe’ (a Java 6 executable) and also ‘**\WMIPRVSE.EXE’. These files weren’t actually infected and cleaning the file(s) infected via the McAfee console did nothing and the virus alert kept coming.

The Trojan that was detected was a ‘StealthMBR!mbr’ virus. So by the very nature of its name it appeared the Master Boot Record was infected. A quick Google search showed that the MBR could be repaired using the Recovery Console from XP installation disk ad the FIXMBR command.

I backed up the files on the HDD (175 GB! A scan on the backed up files showed no viruses) and then proceeded to repair the MBR. Quite simple and quick. you just boot up a system with the XP installation disk and hit R for the Recovery Console. You will need the administrator password of the system you are on in order to run the RC. I used DISKPART to detect the device name of the USB HDD; just make sure you don’t delete any partition or you will lose your existing data!

So with everything I needed, I ran FIXMBR \DEVICE\HARDDISK1 on the infected drive and then Y and enter to proceed with the repair. Half a nanosecond later the MBR was repaired (I ran it a second time just to be sure) and I then tested on the Laptop with McAfee. So far so good – no alerts and no data loss.

Recovery Console Information

Chinese Email Forms

Posted on 20090714 by Lalor

There does not seem to be a definitive answer to correctly present Chinese language emails that are generated from online forms. I found this out whilst creating an online enquiry form for a Chinese site.The Chinese characters would appear in the my inboxes as garbled characters rather than the true Chinese characters they should be. UTF-8 should be used for Charsets both in the HTML document and the PHP Email Class. This allowed the body of the email message to display correctly but the subject was a different matter.

After scouring php.net for a while as well as google I stumbled upon some code that allowed the subject to be displayed correctly: $esubject = “=?big5?Q?”.$subject.”?=”;

big5 is the charset I wanted the subject to be displayed in

Q is the Content-Transfer-Encoding, in this case quoted-printable

$subject is my subject variable