Harrier's Blog - Mixed Games & Mixed Drinks

As a little bar update, I would like to point out that my new method of using a wooden mallet on my store-bought packages of crushed ice works really well. The lumps get broken up quite nicely without any problematic damage to the packaging, and I get plenty of decently sized flakes right from the get go with little hassle.

The only downsides are that you tend to get quite a bit of "snow" (tiny ice flakes, almost like powder) when you get to the very bottom of the package, though that's not a big issue, and that the bag tends to spill after the first few servings of ice. The reason for that is that those packages are filled to the brim, so it's very difficult to close them up again without having some flakes get past the sealing clip if you only take enough ice for a glass or two. Sometimes an opening will remain even after using those clips, and you may drop a lot of ice if you're not careful when you take it out again - that happened to me the first time.

Maybe I could try getting some tupperware container for the first few handfuls, until the bag is empty enough to be properly sealed. Getting a container for the full 2kg package should be difficult, though.

More drinks and glassware are on their way, so at least when it comes to mixed drinks, we should be all set for the summer. Hopefully poker and the rest will follow suit.

We keep a couple of plastic containers around to keep ice in.
The ones we use come from the store with potato salad in them.

The problem is that that the freezing cold makes the plastic of the lids sufficiently brittle that they only last a few months.

Far longer than the original bags though.

About this time of year I start making ice and saving it in these containers.
After a few days, there's enough stored up to last through a deck party, and plenty for day-to-day use.

I didn't do this at all last year. Gee, I wonder why?

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
About this time of year I start making ice and saving it in these containers.
After a few days, there's enough stored up to last through a deck party, and plenty for day-to-day use.

Before I got started with the mixed drinks and all, I only used one of those classic ice cube trays in the freezer for whenever I needed any ice. I still use it for all those drinks that are better served with cubed ice, but in most cases, I'm using those bags of crushed ice now. It's more versatile and easier to keep in larger quantities.

How do you make your ice? Do you also use those trays or something similar, or do you maybe have one of those ice making machines?

Some Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Finally some decent results in the Badugi tonight. We finished 10th with three (minimal) bounties for total returns of $10.42. Maybe I could have achieved more if I had taken more risks, but after such a long losing streak, I decided to play it a little safer than I maybe would have otherwise. Still not my finest play for sure, but it's nice to finally see some results again.

Courchevel mincashed too. It was looking quite good for a while, but I hit a bad streak not too long before ITM. I was lucky to make it past the bubble after those nasty runouts during that time.

Nothing great yet, but it's something, and a bit of a confidence booster already. Let's keep up the pace and get back to where we belong.

Originally posted by Harrier88
How do you make your ice? Do you also use those trays or something similar, or do you maybe have one of those ice making machines?

Just the trays.
Mrs Vorpal would love to have a refrigerator that had an ice maker and chilled water dispenser, but they're hugely expensive, and not used enough to warrant the cost IMHO.

There´s always light at the end of the tunnel but I´m so happy to see that you´re getting out of that bad streak. ♠_love:

Originally posted by Primrose6789
There´s always light at the end of the tunnel but I´m so happy to see that you´re getting out of that bad streak. ♠_love:

Well, we're not out of there yet, not by a long shot, but we took a step in the right direction last night. I hope I can keep the momentum going.

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
Mrs Vorpal would love to have a refrigerator that had an ice maker and chilled water dispenser, but they're hugely expensive, and not used enough to warrant the cost IMHO.

Same here. I've looked at many different methods to make ice in the past, and those ice makers sounded fantastic, but as you said, they are very expensive and not really justified for the amount of ice that I need - even now that I'm mixing all those drinks. Those machines may be great for commercial use, but I don't see a lot of ways how they could be worth it in a home setting, unless you host a lot of big parties or something.

For my use, those 2kg bags of crushed ice in combination with the occasional ice cubes from my trays really seem like the ideal solution, now that I have found a good way to re-crush those flakes to the size I want.

Another mixed drink of sorts, and another lesson to be learned: You need to be careful with the amounts on your recipes.

Also, I should maybe save my recipes right away when I found something I like. I found a copycat recipe for some Starbucks-style Caramel Frappuccino a few weeks ago, but now had to search a bit to find the one I wanted again. And as I mentioned, the amounts were way off. The recipe I found said it yields two servings, and that seemed fine with me - one or two glasses would have been good. In the end, I was stuck with about four glasses, twice the amount I intended. I guess I should have paid more attention, but I'm not too good with imperial cups, and you never know how much froth you get with those blended drinks.

Another lesson was that the setting with the two lines on my retro-blender seems to be the slow setting, while the one with only one line, counter-intuitively, must be the quick setting. So, considering the unexpectedly high amounts of liquid I was using, you can imagine that I made quite a mess in the kitchen.

Luckily, the drink was a hit, so we had no problem dealing with it quickly while chilling in our backyard.

Here's what's in it - adjusted to half of the original amounts, so that it will hopefully now fill only two of those 200 ml glasses:

1 shot of espresso
3/8 cup (110 ml) whole milk
1/4 cup (70 ml) caramel sauce (or syrup)
1/2 cup (140 ml) crushed ice

Put it in a blender, pour the blended mixture into glasses and top with whipped cream. Normally, you'd also drizzle some extra caramel sauce on top of the whipped cream, but I couldn't, because with those amounts, I had to use up an entire unopened bottle of caramel sauce just for the ingredients.

Maybe I was supposed to serve it in true American fashion in some massive tumblers and the amounts would have been correct for two servings, but for those two nice little 200 ml glasses, the above amounts should do fine now.

Not looking forward to the clean-up, though I at least got rid of the bigger mess I made earlier already.

Yumm! Looks delicious and tempting :f_love:;)

We keep on keeping on... I took some more risks in the Badugi this time, and it got me a $3.50 bounty. Unfortunately I didn't cash, I ran into a pretty nasty cooler down the line. I had a suspicion that my hand might not be good enough, but I think a fold just would have been too weak, and as it turned out, it was super close anyway, the kicker had to decide. Still, that bounty was almost enough to break even, so not a terrible result.

Courchevel went really well this time, with an 8th place finish for $14.71, right on the bubble to the 7-handed final table, but I was super short at that point anyway. I didn't play a lot of Courchevel this year, but for what it's worth, this cash was enough to turn an overall profit so far.

I have saved a bunch of hands for discussion, but this will have to wait for another day, because there will be some big firefighting drill tomorrow and I need to be up a lot earlier than usual.

Originally posted by Harrier88
I have saved a bunch of hands for discussion, but this will have to wait for another day, because there will be some big firefighting drill tomorrow and I need to be up a lot earlier than usual.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who own smartphones, and Harrier88. Unfortunately, the former group is in the clear majority, so they will have prior knowledge of, say, a big firefighting drill being postponed by a week, and it can be easy to forget that people in the latter group, namely Harrier88, will not know about this.

So yes, I put a wrecking ball to my sleeping schedule for nothing last night, but I luckily happened to run into someone who could explain what had happened. While I did catch a few extra hours of sleep after returning back home, I still wasn't in the best shape all day, and the humid heat certainly didn't help. I tried playing the Courchevel, but quickly realized I wasn't able to play my best, did not rebuy after my early exit, and skipped the Badugi too. Tomorrow, we should be back to full strength again, at least as much as the weather permits, which does not seem to show any signs of changing.

This left room for other questions today, like...

Can Harrier Backgammon?

As I said, I was making some small progress, but I repeatedly ran into situations where I kept making the same kinds of mistakes, and didn't really understand the logic behind the better moves either after looking up the optimal solutions. So I looked up some strategy articles and quickly realized that despite believing that I had a somewhat decent grasp of the game before, there is a lot more to backgammon strategy than I imagined. Looks like in many areas, I was still at the stage of "unconscious incompetence".

One thing I was lacking, I believe, was a holistic approach to the overall strategy. I knew about the different parts, the running game (simply outpacing your opponent), the holding game (cutting off your opponents moves by blocking up points on the board), priming (blocking off an entire consecutive part of the board to keep some of your opponent's checkers trapped), blitzing (putting pressure on your opponent by continuing to capture their checkers) and the back game (occupying points in your opponent's home board to pick off lone checkers after inconvenient dice rolls from your opponent). I also largely knew what I had to do to pull off any of those individual strategies, but when should you go for what? Much like in poker, the answer usually appears to be "it depends".

Backgammon is essentially a race to the finish. If you are ahead in a race, you just need to bring it home. If you are behind in a race, you must find a way to get ahead, and then bring it home. In this game, this means that if you are ahead, keep running - no point in setting up blocks if they slow you down, you're just wasting your own advantage. If you are behind, DO set up those blocks and primes, and try to pick off some lone checkers - no point in trying to race, you are behind and you must do something about it to gain the advantage. And if everything has failed, there is still the back game as a last resort, giving you an option to turn the table on your opponent at the last minute.

Having gained a better understanding of this, I have found it easier to identify what game situation calls for what kind of approach, and the proposed optimal solutions make more sense to me now. To practice this better, I have resorted to playing one point matches that don't involve the doubling cube at all, only checker play. I did not really keep track of my results, I was basically just competing to get the best possible rating for my play, and I'm doing much better with that in this version. I'm now getting at least an "intermediate" rating pretty consistently, sometimes "advanced", and even in my worst games, I don't usually slip past "casual player" anymore.

Going for those 7 point matches right away was a little ambitious in retrospect, seems like a good idea to try to get those basic things right first.

It didn't look like a good session tonight... first I got a little carried away in the Courchevel again, where I wasted two bullets - I need to pick my spots a little more carefully there, I believe. Badugi was off to a shaky start too, but all's well that ends well: We picked up not only some good stacks, but also a nice string of bounties and ended up finishing 4th for $22.16. Together with the $16.38 I picked up through bounties, this makes $38.54 in total returns.

I may have given some of my opponents too much credit on the final table at times, where I briefly even took over the chip lead. This might have costs me a better run, possibly all the way up to 1st place - or maybe I ended up narrowly dodging bullets that way and it allowed me to secure some extra ladders. Whatever it was, I don't think this is the time to nitpick for mistakes, I'm glad to finally have a genuinely good result in the bag again.

Originally posted by Harrier88
I may have given some of my opponents too much credit on the final table at times, where I briefly even took over the chip lead. This might have costs me a better run, possibly all the way up to 1st place - or maybe I ended up narrowly dodging bullets that way and it allowed me to secure some extra ladders. Whatever it was, I don't think this is the time to nitpick for mistakes, I'm glad to finally have a genuinely good result in the bag again.

ICM looms large on the FT.
Lots of different things to do as chip leader:
 Let the shorties fight amongst themselves
 Open raise wide
 3Bet more
(not all in the same hand of course )

I don't know if this is the right thing to do, but I have taken to opening wide, and calling tight when in the FT and better than average stack.

Another final table in the Badugi tonight, finishing 7th for $16.73 including bounties. We still need about $40 more to be in profit in this game this year.

I continue to make mistakes in the Courchevel, and while there may be some potential in this game, it wasn't really one of my top picks anyway. The purpose of re-introducing it to the grind for the time being was mostly to help me get back on track, because I didn't feel confident in any of the other games. Now that we are slowly starting to get things going again, I'm beginning to think that this game may have served its purpose and that it's time to move on to something else.

The question is "move on to what?", and the options aren't any better than they used to be, of course. It's a shame the $1.10 8-Game isn't worth it anymore with its now trivial prize pool, that one would have been a sure pick otherwise. One game I have considered is 2-7 Single Draw, where I have a pretty terrible track record so far, returning only $5.10 on my $49.50 investment over 15 games. That was when I played it last year for a short time, trying to see whether I could adapt my Badugi strategies to this format, but I had no success with that and never really developed a feel for this game. Maybe it could be worth a revisit if I read up on it again and stay ready to pull the ripcord in case it still doesn't work out.

I will be pretty busy in the next few weeks, which is mostly a good thing. My sports schedule is almost fully back on again and there are even some job opportunities. After a terrible start into 2021, not just poker-wise, it is great to see that things are showing signs of getting back on track, on and off the felt. Despite my increasingly busy schedule and a plethora of other appointments in the upcoming weeks, which even include a courtroom appearance, I should still have plenty of time for poker on most evenings. Not tomorrow, however, and this may or may not be a time to take a look at those afternoon tournaments I once mentioned.

Tonight makes three Badugi final tables in a row, with the best result yet: $48.35 including bounties for a 3rd place finish.

I mentioned in my last post that we needed around $40 to be in profit in Badugi overall this year again, and this is exactly what has happened, we're out of the red. I certainly didn't expect that it would go this fast.

As great as that is, there is still a lot more work to be done. We don't just want to avoid losses, we want to turn a nice profit, and that's exactly what we are going to do next. Most importantly, let's stay cool - even in this hot early summer weather. Swings can be brutal, as I have clearly seen, and I need to be mentally prepared once the next one strikes. The confidence is mostly back now, and I intend to keep it that way, come what may.

Well done

Four in a row tonight?

Nah, didn't happen, but a 2nd tier cash and a good bounty still put us into profit. I also noticed that the $1.10 8-Game seems to be back to its old $250 guarantee, so I can be back to playing that one too. No success in it tonight, with two wasted buy-ins, but the Badugi cash was good enough to pay for both games, even though it's now only a break-evenish finish.

I would still like to give NL 2-7 Single Draw the odd try some time, after having read up a bit on it today. Chances are, I won't get to it for a while, since many of the next few days will be quite busy and exhausting for me, but I'll try to stay on it.

I stocked up my home bar a bit recently, so let's have another mixed drink.

This one would use some cranberry juice, which seems to be oddly hard to get in my parts, so I got some nectar instead. I don't even like cranberries, but you can use it for several drinks, so I keep some of that nectar at home now.

Today's drink is the Cosmopolitan, and it uses the following ingredients:

- 40 ml vodka citron
- 30 ml cranberry juice
- 15 ml triple sec (Cointreau is preferred)
- 15 ml lime juice

If you don't have vodka citron, maybe you can use regular vodka instead, but I'd recommend adjusting the amounts in that case. And as I said, I used cranberry nectar instead of juice.

Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, then strain it into a chilled martini glass. Ideally, you would garnish it with a lemon twist too.

I'd love to comment about the taste, but I didn't try it, since this cocktail was for someone else, while I was sipping another drink. It smelled pretty nice, though, and I don't expect it would my kinda drink anyway. Still, it's pretty popular, so I thought it would be a nice thing to add to my repertoire.

A former girlfriend used to really like a drink with cranberry juice and Southern Comfort -- a Scarlett O'Hara maybe?
I can't actually remember (NARF) and I'm too lazy to look it up.

In our stores, all of the cranberry "juices" are blends of one form or another as far as I know.
I love cranberry sauce with poultry, but not a fan of just drinking the stuff without some alcohol in it.

Even with alcohol, the flavour of the cranberry is so strong in overwhelms whatever else is in there.

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
A former girlfriend used to really like a drink with cranberry juice and Southern Comfort -- a Scarlett O'Hara maybe?
I can't actually remember (NARF) and I'm too lazy to look it up.

I was not familiar with that one, but yes, it appears that there is a mixed drink called Scarlett O'Hara which includes cranberry juice, Southern Comfort and lime juice.

I happen to have some SoCo at home, so I will probably serve that one up some time. Nice find!