In a lovely little profile of James Taylor in the New Yorker, he is quoted as saying, about his wife Kim:
If I went online and tried to find the perfect mate—and I think that that is probably an excellent use of the internet—I couldn’t have done it better. That’s such a smart way to do it, by the way. I think that a couples therapist and a computer geek should form a company and shepherd people through it. For so long, there’s been this terrible process where we find a mate through our worst instincts and our reiteration of all our family mistakes. We always become one parent and marry the other one.
That sounds like a fabulous little insight to me, though I think that it is also true that some people do it the other way around, and find a mate who is nothing like their parents, so that they don’t end up like one of them. Who can say who is making the greater mistake?
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I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s great poem, “This be the Verse”, and even though it has appeared on this blog before, I shall reproduce it again:
This be the Verse—Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Posted by Amit Varma on 16 April, 2011 in
Arts and entertainment |
Small thoughts
This is the 31st installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, which resumes this week. It was published on April 14.
Today’s column begins with a fashion update: A ribbed, silk green gown from Vivienne Westwood’s spring/summer 2010 collection has been selected as Fashion Museum’s Dress of the Year. Androgyny has become the latest trend on the catwalks. In India, The Times of India, who should know, informs us that “yellows are in.” And oh, have you heard about Anna Hazare? He’s quite the flavour of the month.
Yes, that’s right, I’m an Anna Hazare cynic. I understand that like Yuvraj Singh, he’s in the zone right now. I get it that he stands for the battle against corruption, one of India’s gravest problems. But I’m amused that most people supporting him haven’t read and understood the draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill, which Hazare has been fighting for. I’m appalled that they don’t understand that this bill does nothing to fight the root causes of corruption, and may instead add to the problem. And yes, I’d be astounded if they care about this bill or the man two weeks from now, when the fashion would have changed, yellows would be out, and purples would be, like, so in.
That corruption is one of the biggest problems India faces is a banal truism. But where we go wrong in thinking about it is that we treat it like a disease, when it is really a symptom. Corruption arises from power. When people have power over our lives, they will misuse it: that is inherent in human nature. When you need 165 licenses to open a hotel in India, including “a special licence for the vegetable weighing scale in the kitchen and one for each of the bathroom scales put in guest rooms”, there is a recipe for corruption right there. When every government servant you encounter while doing some routine work, from a driver to a peon, can delay you or derail you, corruption is inevitable.
Corruption is inevitable in India because the government has too much power. If a hotelier did not need 165 licenses—and there is no reason why he should need any—that would be 165 bribes less to pay. (I’m assuming one bribe per license, which is honestly quite optimistic.) If our mai-baap sarkars did not have control over so many elements of our lives, there would be less scope for chai-paani. In practically every area of our lives, there is government interference or oversight, either overt or covert. And, to repeat that old cliche one more time because it is both pithy and true, power corrupts. That’s just human nature.
So what is the solution to corruption then? Since the problem lies with power, you need to tackle that first. You need to, first of all, question the many ways in which the government controls our lives. Completely dismantling the license-and-inspector raj is one way to do. Scrapping every ministry that has no reason to exist, at both the central and state level, would be another. (We’d be left with just three or four of them.) Governments should exist to implement law and order, to protect our rights, and to provide basic services—nothing else. The more we move towards this ideal, the closer we come to rooting out corruption.
Obviously these specific goals are high-hanging fruit. Those in power will never willingly give up any piece of it. But an equal part of the problem is our default attitude that our government exists to rule us and not serve us. This must change. Equally, we seem to believe that the solution to bad government is more government. This is exactly the opposite of the truth, and broadly the mistake that Anna Hazare is making.
The Lokpal Bill does not tackle any of the root causes of corruption. Instead, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta puts it in his wonderful critique, the bill amounts to “an unparalleled concentration of power in one institution that will literally be able to summon any institution and command any kind of police, judicial and investigative power.” In other words, in a situation where the problem is power, we create an entity that has even more power and, what is more, has appointed officials instead of elected ones. As Shuddhabrata Sengupta writes, this is not “the deepening, but ... the profound erosion of democracy.”
I’m not as skeptical of Hazare as my friend Manu Joseph is—I think Gaurav Sabnis’s view is more balanced. I’m sure the man is well-intentioned, and has achieved much in the past. But he is fighting for the wrong thing here. You do not cure a diabetic man by feeding him sweets; equally, you cannot root our corruption by creating more centres of power.
I must admit, though, that Vivienne Westwood makes some funky dresses.
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I’m always amused to see how a worthy cause acts like Red Bull to our chatteratti. From the meaningless, feel-good candlelight vigils after 26/11, to countless self-righteous online petitions about this and that, to support for Anna Hazare, the new middle-class icon. (Who woulda thunk?) Why, I even heard about a movement on Twitter that was trying to get everyone to fast for one day in solidarity with Hazare. One day! How far we have come: from “fast unto death” to “fast until midnight.” This is progress, India.
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Speaking of androgyny being in fashion, it strikes me that most foreigners, when they hear his name, must think Anna Hazare is a woman. I would so love to see a desi Lady Gaga clone on MTV soon, calling herself Anna Hazare. She’d have to be really thin, of course, because not only is that fashionable, she’s been fasting. I have the title of her first single already “Would you like to be my lokpal, baybeh?” I can see her in my mind’s eye, and lemme tell you, it’s corrupting me.
Posted by Amit Varma on 16 April, 2011 in
Essays and Op-Eds |
Freedom |
India |
News |
Politics |
Viewfinder
This is the third installment of Pocket Quads, my bi-monthly column on poker for Cardplayer India. It appears in the issue dated March-April 2011.
Poker is a beautiful game, but one poignant truth about it is that the vast majority of poker players are losers: in the long run, they put more money on the table than they pick up. The element of luck in the game ensures that they have a few winning sessions, and many memorable hands, that serve as oxygen to their hopes of becoming poker sharks. But in the end, just a few people end up profitable. What do all these losing players have in common that separate them from long-term success? In this column, I’ll tackle a few common leaks that I’ve observed in local cash games (and have tried hard to eliminate in my own play).
1. Losing players play too many hands.
There seems to be a common misconception among poker players that the game is about winning as many hands as you can. It is not. It is about winning as much money as possible. In a recent Cardplayer column, Dusty Schmidt cited a study by Kyle Siler of Cornell University, which analysed 27 million hands played online and found that “the more hands you win, the more money you’re likely to lose.” Losing players typically enter many pots, win many small hands, and lose a few really big ones. This is the exact opposite of the formula to poker profitability.
Television is partly to blame for this. Televised poker gives edited versions of long poker sessions, or tournament final tables with relatively high blind structures, and to the casual viewer, there is action every hand, and any two cards (’ATC’) are playable. Thus, we have players in my local game who call 10x BB raises with 79o or 36s, with no grasp of the situational nuances that prompt top players to play them once in a while. Occasionally, they’ll flop two pair or a straight and bust aces with them, which will make them feel like Rambo, so they’ll try it again and again. But with two random cards, you will flop two pair or better once in 34 hands. (And even then you may be behind.) In the long run, such holdings are simply not profitable.
2. Losing players don’t know how to fold.
Besides not folding enough preflop (see previous point), losing players also don’t fold enough after the flop. If they see a flush draw, they will chase it to the end, regardless of whether the pot odds offered to them are profitable or not. If they play suited connectors (say, TJs), they will overplay their hand if they hit top pair, which misses the point of playing suited connectors. There is an old poker jungle saying, “Never go broke on one pair.” They will do exactly that, especially if that pair is pocket aces or kings. They will fall in love with their hand, and will indulge in wishful thinking about what their opponent might be up to.
This is why flopping a set is the most profitable situation in poker against your average donk. If he has hit top pair, he will simply refuse to put you on a set. The thought of winning that pot is too precious to him to accept the possibility of someone having a better hand. He. Will. Not. Fold.
3. Losing players ignore the math.
You’ve reached the turn, are chasing a flush, and are offered 2 to 1 odds to play on. Do you do so? You’ve raised to 1200 in a 100-200 game with TJs, a short stack has gone all-in for 3200, you are sure he has AKs, and there’s no one else in the hand: do you call him? You’ve missed your straight draw at the river but a third heart has hit the board, you think there is a one-third chance that your opponent may fold to a bluff bet of 75% of the pot, should you make it? Every decision we face in a poker game is a mathematical one at its core, once we account for our reads and the psychology of the game. Losing players ignore the math, and go by their feelings, their intuition or their ‘judgement’. It works for them a few times—but in the long run, they cannot win if they ignore the numbers.
4. Losing players don’t build big pots with their monster hands. (And vice versa.)
It is a fundamental axiom in poker that you must build big pots when you have a big hand, and keep the pot as small as possible when you have a marginal hand. Too many players, I have seen, will flop a monster (say, trips or a set), and will check the flop, and check the turn, and perhaps value bet the river and moan when they don’t get paid off. This is crazy.
When you have a monster hand, you need to calculate how to get as much of your opponents’ stacks in the middle as possible. Start building the pot right away. Make them pay for their draws (even if they’re drawing dead, they may not know it). Monsters don’t come around often and you need to maximise them.
Sometimes, of course, slow-playing works, especially if you’re up against a compulsive c-better who will certainly bet if checked to. But in general, betting your monsters is a good idea. Don’t take it too far, though, such as I did once when my pocket aces turned into quad aces on the flop, and I c-bet because I surmised that a check from a compulsive c-better like me (as I was at the time) would seem suspicious. Everyone folded.
5. Losing players make too many moves.
There are few things more satisfying than a successful bluff at the river to win a large pot, or a check-raise at the turn with a gutshot draw to make two pair fold. But, carried away by youth and the dopamine rushes that characterise gambling addiction, many players make way too many moves. They may not build monster pots when they have huge hands, but they sure make small pots huge in their urge to steal them with tricky plays. They make ill-timed squeeze plays, throw out large bluffs on the river without first telling a plausible story about their hand on preceding streets, and lose more money on stone cold bluffs, for pots that were tiny till they pumped it up, than they win with pocket aces.
This does not mean, of course, that you make no plays at all. If you sense weakness, it is your duty as a poker player to exploit it. But it’s easy to stretch this too far. One young man in my local game plays every pot, always bluffs if checked to, and once called himself the “Tom Dwan of Lokhandwala”. He drops, on average, five buy-ins per session. Dwan would cringe if he saw this guy invoke his name. To be a successful loose-aggressive player, it is not enough to be loose and aggressive—you also have to be successful. If you do not have the incredible psychological and situational skills of a Dwan or Ivey, it is better to keep it tight, and keep it simple.
6. Losing players let the game get to their emotions.
They lose a big pot, and they steam. They play perfect poker for five hours, get a bad beat in the sixth, go on tilt and give away their stacks away in the next ten minutes. They get tired and play hands they wouldn’t otherwise have played. They take the game personally, and let their ego drive them into wrong decisions.
These are all traps I’ve fallen into myself. (Indeed, at some phase or the other, I’ve committed all the mistakes I speak of in this column. Who hasn’t?) And I have come to realise that more than technical ability or mathematical skill or psychological acuity, poker is a game of character. It demands great discipline, patience and self-control. If you have these qualities, the rest will come.
Click here for the earlier installments of Pocket Quads.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 April, 2011 in
Essays and Op-Eds |
Poker |
Pocket Quads |
Sport
... when life sucks, but you can’t afford to die:
As families across China begin today’s annual “Qing Ming”, or Tomb-sweeping, festival, there has been a growing chorus of complaint about the price of cemetery plots, some of which now exceed cost of luxury apartments in square foot terms.
[...]
“I cannot afford to buy a house while I’m alive and now cannot afford to buy a grave for when I’m dead,” commented one user on the portal dayoo.com hosting a discussion of the subject, while another added bitterly, “So now we cannot sleep peacefully even after we die?”
Yes, I know, we do it best here in India: it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
(Link via Marginal Revolution.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 April, 2011 in
Miscellaneous |
News
Kumar Sangakkara, in a statement released to announce his stepping down from the Sri Lankan captaincy, has said:
I would like to announce that after careful consideration I have concluded that it is in the best long-term interests of the team that I step down now as national captain so that a new leader can be properly groomed for the 2015 World Cup in Australia. [...] I will be 37 by the next World Cup and I cannot therefore be sure of my place in the team. It is better that Sri Lanka is led now by a player who will be at the peak of their career during that tournament.
The thought seems noble, but I’m struck by two things here:
1] The implication that the World Cup is the biggest thing there is in cricket, the only aim of any cricketing nation, and takes precedence over all other cricketing goals.
2] The notion that it takes four full years to groom a captain. If Sangakkara was to give up the captaincy in, say, 2013, wouldn’t two years be enough? Why not? What’s the optimum time a new captain would need to build his team or himself become comfortable in the job?
I can understand that the poor chap must be fatigued: the captaincy of any international cricket side must be immensely draining. That would surely be a good enough reason to state for quitting—though this certainly seems more statesmanlike.
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 April, 2011 in
Sport
Reuters reports:
New diets for cows and sheep could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, research funded by the Department for environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) shows.
Feeding the animals maize silage, naked oats and higher sugar grasses could reduce the amount of methane they produce, the study by Reading University and the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences showed.
Agriculture accounts for around nine per cent of all British greenhouse gas emissions. Most of this comes from sheep, cows and goats.
I can just about imagine a cow reading this and going, “Naked oats? Mmmm!” and setting off a pleased fart. Also, I would guess that Gujju cows have historically emitted less methane, since they’ve always like sugar in their grass. I wonder if news channel reporters could also be force-fed naked oats and sugar grass.
Yeah, I know this isn’t an astonishingly substantive post, but India Uncut has resumed, so how can I not do a cow post? ;)
(Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113.)
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Aside: What a badly written news article. Just see the first two paras. Jeez…
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 April, 2011 in
Old memes |
Cows
My buddy Deepak Shenoy has a Yahoo! column up today that expresses a complaint I’ve had about many Indian sports journalists for a while now: they are innumerate, and draw conclusions on the basis of inadequate data. The example Deepak provides is the following fact, trumped “on Twitter, TV and ... the internet when Mahela Jayawardene scored his hundred” in the World Cup final, as if it had great statistical or predictive significance:
“No century-scorer has ever been on the losing side of a World Cup final.”
As Deepak points out, there have been only five World Cup finals before this in which a batsman scored a century. Just five. There is no way that is a sample size large enough to draw a meaningful conclusion from.
Cricket journalism is littered with such conclusions, though, using stats with unjustifiable authority. Consider the following widespread belief among cricket lovers:
South Africa are chokers.
I heard this a lot after they crashed out of this World Cup, but what’s the basis for this, really? Cricinfo’s Statsguru reveals that out of 27 ODI tournament finals, they have won 16. On the bigger stage, though, at the World Cup, they have lost at the knock-out stage five times.
Now, much as 0 out of 5 seems revealing, that’s still way too small a sample size to draw conclusions—especially when those five times stretch across generations. When we say South Africa are chokers, are we talking about Kepler Wessels’s squad in 1992, Hansie Cronje’s side in 1999, or Graeme Smith’s boys this year? Is there a new science of Sports Genetics that explains how such qualities can be passed on across generations?
Through the World Cup, reporters fed old narratives or built new ones on the basis of such nonsense data. For example, MS Dhoni got savaged for promoting Yusuf Pathan up the batting order, where it seems he was a proven failure—on the basis of 11 ODIs (out of a total of 51), in which he batted between 3 and 5. More importantly, Pathan batted at 3 or 4 in just two games in this World Cup, and failed in both—but two is not a remotely meaningful number.
In such cases, I’d always defer to the captain and team management’s judgement, who are closer to the action and the players, rather than the ranting of reporters who couldn’t tell the difference between an arm-ball and a doosra, but feel the need to criticize from their perch on high, using numbers with all the finesse of monkeys using calculators.
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The judgments the media arrives at, you will note, are passed in hindsight, after the outcome is known. MS Dhoni got applause for leading us to the T20 World Cup, but would have been slammed for his decision to bring on Joginder Sharma for that last over in the final had Misbah-ul-Haq played one shot slightly differently. All our experts criticized him for picking Ashish Nehra over R Ashwin in the recent semi-final, and praised him afterwards for his prescience. Had Dhoni gotten a bad decision or an unplayable ball in the final, and India had lost, he would have been chastised for promoting himself up the order—but we won, so hey, it’s a masterstroke.
One of the lessons I’ve learnt as a poker player—and it applies generally to life as well—is that the quality of your decisions should not be judged by their outcomes. In the short term, too many variables determine the outcome of any action, beyond just the action itself. The quality of a player’s captaincy, for example, can only be judged over a long period of time—and even then, the other variables at play make that very difficult. For example, the question of whether Dhoni or Saurav Ganguly were greater captains than Tiger Pataudi or Sunil Gavaskar are difficult ones precisely because the latter two led lousy teams in difficult times, and they couldn’t possibly have gotten the results Dhoni and Ganguly (and also Dravid, for that matter) did. So our evaluation of their captaincy cannot be based on results alone, and there is a subjective element to it.
In my subjective opinion, Dhoni is the best captain we’ve ever had—but my basis for this opinion is not just his results, but the manner in which he goes about his job. He had the cojones to promote himself up the order in the final and take the responsibility upon himself in that ultra-high-pressure situation. Even if he’d been out for a duck, and India had lost, he’d still have my eternal respect for that.
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 April, 2011 in
India |
Journalism |
Media |
Sport
“Private therapeutic performance with a psychologist’s presence.”
If Poonam Pandey does manage to ‘perform’ for the Indian World Cup squad, imagine how pissed Praveen Kumar and Rohit Sharma will be.
Posted by Amit Varma on 05 April, 2011 in
News |
Sport |
WTF
The WTF statement of the day comes from Philip D’Souza of the Shiv Sena:
We’re going to protect the daughters of Goa, irrespective of caste, creed, colour and political affiliation.
That last bit is just magnificent. And what exactly is this gentleman from the Shiv Sena trying to protect the daughters of Goa from? Bipasha Basu. Insane.
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Q. If D’Souza was in West Bengal, who would he be protecting?
Ans. The daughters of Guha.
Posted by Amit Varma on 05 April, 2011 in
Arts and entertainment |
India |
News |
WTF
Two bits of good news for long-suffering India Uncut readers:
1] Yahoo! Opinions, the section of columns at Yahoo! edited by me, has resumed operation.
2] India Uncut is also now going to wake up from slumber and become regular again. I know I’ve promised this before and gone right back to sleep, so this time it’s not too credible, but hell, give me a chance. For around four of the six-plus years this blog has been in existence, I wrote an average of five posts a day, so I certainly am capable of getting that momentum going.
But how can I write more posts if I don’t finish this one?
Posted by Amit Varma on 05 April, 2011 in
Personal
