Weekend (23 May) - Texas Hold'em

Weekend (23 May) - Texas Hold'em

It was a weekend of numbers. I considered naming this post "Happy takes a Dump" due to the sudden reluctance of buyers to spend any gold on the Auction House this weekend. Friday's "take" set a new low and Saturday didn't start off very well, either. Still, Philly wasn't shy about spending Happy's money, what with the revolving door of new gear needing enchants and gems, but those modest expenditures (after all, Philly can craft her own gems) still took a bite out of what little cash was coming in. JB's high profit flasks and a windfall by selling two high end herb bags saved Sunday from an otherwise poor take as well. The spell power flasks that JB makes via her Alchemy profession are excruciatingly expensive to make, but careful buying of materials and selective selling make it Happy's most profitable product at the moment. The Fiery Weapon enchant is one of those feast or famine items. The enchant is very cheap to make, although only a relatively few enchanters have the recipe. There is no consistent demand for the enchant - but when someone wants it, they generally want it RIGHT NOW; otherwise, it languishes on the AH with no interest. The "RIGHT NOW" aspect is where the gold can be made, setting a high price and betting a customer will not be able to wait for a cheaper price. That means Happy holds his stock off the AH when silly enchanters get into a bidding war and drop the price down to what is nominally still profitable, but far less than what is possible. Happy has sold the enchants for as low as 40 gold, to a high of 72g.

I also got into a debate with myself over gear scores (hey, if I can have two accounts and multiple toons I'm certainly capable of debating myself - I'm just never sure who won). Gear score is a statistic developed by the site Web-Heroes. It takes a lot of data about a character's gear (ilevel, gems, enchants, etc), crunches some numbers, and then comes up with a score that can be compared to other characters and also used to get a sense of what level of dungeon/raid that character is geared for. The heaviest weight in the score is the ilevel of the gear. The scoring makes no effort to assess whether that gear is the right gear, or how good or bad the character is as a player. Used correctly, it can help assess a character's progression, and can be an aid in determining whether a character is adequately geared for a dungeon/raid. In PUG raids it can be abused, refusing to allow good players into a raid only because of some perceived flaw in their gear. It is also used to deny players from being accepted into guilds that insist on a certain minimum gear score.

However, none of the above was what got me talking to myself. What confused me was a forum thread that started with the question: "What would my gear score be if I was decked out in all ilevel 232 gear?" Taking into account that entire gear sets all at the same exact level is, from a practical perspective, both nearly impossible and unwanted, since there is a high likelihood that the player would have to refuse gear better than i232 to achieve it. But I think the idea was to get a feel for whether someone who's ilevel average hovered around i232 was good enough for, say, ICC10.

The general answer was that an ilevel gear set that averaged around i232 would result in a gear score of around 4500-5000. This stunned me. Wild's "average" ilevel of his gear is well into the i250+ area. Wild has only one i232 piece of gear; the rest are i245 or better, mostly better with 9 i264 pieces out of 17 total pieces. Wild's gear score is 3111.

The more I read the more confused I got. I checked the gear scores of a few friends who I knew were among the best decked out raiders in the two guilds - raiders who have downed the final boss in ICC10. You don't get any better gear than that short of hard mode ICC. None of them had gear scores beyond the 3000's.

The answer to the riddle was a simple one once I found it, as is the case with most riddles. There is an addon that players use in game to calculate gear scores on themselves and anyone else they want to. I made an assumption that the in game gear score addon was based on the same algorithm used by the wow-heroes site. It isn't. In fact, the in game addon gear scores are in general nearly twice as high as the wow-heroes number. So, Wild's 3k plus WHGS (wow-heroes gear score) equates to something like 6k on the in game addon. Mystery solved.

Then there was Saturday night, when I was doing a different kind of number crunching and gaming - Texas Hold'em poker. Our cul-de-sac, and other friends around the neighborhood, get together to play cards on a very irregular basis. If we're lucky (ie, when we're not broke) we play about once a month. There's no schedule, and it's usually pretty last minute, and half the time not enough folks show up. It was a very chilly Saturday evening and we had a good turnout with seven players. Chilly evenings are important because we play in a garage in which we refuse to close the door in order to allow the cigar smoke to escape. Plus, the colder it is the more beer we drink. Chilly is good. ;-)

I won't go into all the rules other than to say it's based on regular poker rules, and that a "hand" is based on two down cards for each player and five community cards which each player uses to build the best possible five card hand.

We have two blinds of 2 and 4 dollars, and a bet limit of 10 dollars, fairly high stakes when you figure the buy in is 60 dollars. For me that's a good bit of money to lose, which is why we don't play that often, and why I often go home early or just hang around and chat (it doesn't take long to lose that 60 dollars). The first night I was invited to play more than a year ago I walked away over $300 richer. I've been paying it back and then some ever since. Playing cards with friends is fun, but rarely profitable.

We usually play from around 7pm to around midnight, or when the number of players falls below four. The longer the weeks between games, the higher I can set my own stake, so I brought $100 on Saturday (we haven't played in about three months).

On a bad night I'm usually home by 10pm, so the Mrs feared to ask what happened when I came home shortly after 10pm. Even for me, losing a $100 that quick would mean both extremely bad luck and even worse play. When I started this post, I didn't know if I would be in the Mrs doghouse or taking her out for a Sunday breakfast - fortunately, it was the latter. The card game finished early because three players burned up their stakes early and, down to four, with two holding very small piles of chips, they opted to get out while they still had some cash to lose. I won the pot on the night, winning $182 of other people's money. Of course, I'm sure I'll spend the next few Texas Hold'em nights losing it all back.

Philly got herself a surprising first kill on Sunday; more about that in the next post.