What The Poker Books Don’t Tell You

Last week I was playing a deep stack no limit hold ’em freeroll. Freerolls are the only hold ’em tournaments I play now; technically this is not gambling because the legal definition of a wager requires that both or all parties concerned must be able to lose as well as win. If you are given a free entry to a tournament or anything, you can either win or not win, but cannot lose. With that qualification in mind, I played this tournament, and had bad cards for the most part. Then I was dealt pocket kings: clubs and spades. Normally with kings I will raise big pre-flop; here I should probably have whacked it all in, but as I said, it was a deep stack tournament, and I thought “Chip and a chair”.

The flop came diamond, diamond, diamond headed by the queen; apart from the same headed by the ace, it is difficult to imagine a worse flop for two black kings, but I bet into it anyway. There was a caller, and the third player in the hand raised. What would you do? I figured I was probably beat, maybe the guy was playing suited connectors, but the other player had called in front of him. I thought he was probably drawing to the nut flush but for all I knew he could have hit the flush as well. The guy who raised might have had a set; clearly there were many possibilities, but discretion being the better part of valour and with the bad hands I was getting, I sighed and folded.

The two played out the hand, no more diamonds came, and as I suspected, the first player had the bare ace of diamonds. And the raiser? He had Q-2 off-suit, the deuce being a diamond. What kind of moron calls a raise or even the small blind with Q-2 off-suit and then raises a 3 diamond board? In this case, the same moron who won the pot with a pair of queens.

The poker books don’t tell you about these kinds of players; this is another reason you can never beat the moron. I’ve heard it said that at higher stakes the play is very different. On occasion I’ve played higher stakes, and I can tell you that by and large, it ain’t. The only thing I do know is that if I had whacked it all in following the moron’s raise, he would have called, and I would have found myself facing either the nut flush or a set.

Is Rape Truly A Fate Worse Than Death?

On the evening of November 7, 1974, a small woman was attacked in a dark room at her London home. Her attacker was a lot bigger than her, he was also desperate, having minutes before bludgeoned another woman to death. As he gripped her throat intending to choke the life out of her, she grabbed that vital part of a man’s anatomy that always hurts when so gripped, and squeezed hard.

Later, Countess Lucan was able to escape from the clutches of her murderous estranged husband, and tell her tale. The woman he had battered to death with a lead pipe was the children’s nanny Sandra Rivett, but Miss Rivett had not been his intended victim; that had been the Countess.

The following day on the other side of the Atlantic, a young woman found herself in an even less enviable situation, because had he succeeded, her attacker would probably have raped and tortured her to death before disposing of her body in a ditch or woodland somewhere. The 18 year old Carol DaRonch was duped by serial killer Ted Bundy who was posing as a police officer. When she realised he was not what he said he was, she fought like a tigress, and managed to escape from his clutches, throwing herself out of the car.

Like non-sexual predators, rapists tend to target those who are less formidable than themselves, be they smaller women, drunk women, women who have been incapacitated by the administration of some noxious substance...Although undoubtedly adrenalin gave them strength, both Countess Lucan and Carol DaRonch were lucky to be able to overpower in the first case, and flee from in the second, a physically more powerful assailant.

This begs the question, why apparently do so many victims of date rape and more generally acquaintance rape throw in the towel without so much as scratching their assailants’ faces? There are broadly speaking two answers to this uncomfortable question. The first is that rape is not the fate worse than death we are constantly being led to believe it is. The other is that this epidemic, this “rape culture” of Western society, exists only in the tiny minds of demented feminists and their dupes.

The shrill insistence that the majority of rapes are committed “by someone the victim knows” and that the vast majority go unreported is supported only by anecdotal evidence of the most unreliable, indeed the most untrustworthy, kind. This is all the more evident when one considers the hub of Western rape culture is purportedly the American campus, whose female denizens are by definition the most intelligent, the most educated, and often the most privileged of women.

Alas, neither formidable intellect nor the most comprehensive, expensive education guarantees the individual concerned will exhibit a shred of common sense, or that when groups of such individuals congregate that somehow they will reach a reasonable consensus. Indeed, the exact opposite is guaranteed; their dogmatism and at times sheer idiocy reinforces each others’ delusions - the well-documented phenomenon of the madness of crowds.

The conclusions we must draw from this are that rape is not the vastly under-reported crime the rad-fems would have us believe it is, and that contrary to their facile assertions, the conviction rate for rape is not unrealistically low, rather this is largely a reflection of the propensity of a certain type of (mostly young) woman to cry rape for all manner of reasons, as I have documented elsewhere.