Day 2 didn’t go that great, I never really got anything going and I busted out a couple dozen short of the money. The website said I placed 103, the monitors at the tournament said 94 players remained, the actual placement is not that relevant, except that it was out of the money, but kind of close. I made some marginal plays, but I don’t regret them. When you don’t get cards, you have to start making plays and some times people will call you so you need to get lucky.

The first big pot I got into crippled me. I’d been feeling kind of short for a while, but I wasn’t really super short yet. I had AKJ3 in mid position, so I open raise. The blinds are about 600-1200 and I have about 15k in chip, so I raised to about 4k. The player behind me has a lot of chips and has been playing loose called and we see a flop of Q85. I put my stack in and he thinks for a long while and says things like “I have a bad hand” which makes me think I’m ahead, but probably not by much. He finally calls and turns over A735 for one pair and the same low draw. We make a low, so at least I get half 1/4th back. This leaves me with about 8k in chips.

From there I wait out for a while and then find it folded to me when I’m on the button. I have 4322 so try to make a button steal raise by raising to 4k. The same player calls me and we see a flop of QT7 all black. He checks, I check, and the turn is a suited K, he bets enough to put me all in and I fold. He claims he flopped a big hand and wanted me to bet.

Now with no chips and no hands, I just wait. at my lowest point, I have 3100 chips and the blinds are 600-1200. When it’s my big blind, UTG limps, small blind limps and I have QQ94, so I shove it in. Amazingly, it holds scoops 3 ways so I triple up. I bleed some more and sometime later at 800-1600 with about 4.5k in chips I get A832 and raise UTG all in and double up. But I continue to not get hands for a while longer. Eventually I find AsJs9s3c and I open raise for the pot in mid position with half my stack, big blind pushes all in and I call to see I actually have a pretty good lead on his KJT9, but he hits and I’m done.

Overall, I definitely felt like I had an edge over the field. But I had a pretty long run without cards on Day 2. I got lucky just to last that long on Day 2. Even on day 1 my cards weren’t that great. I think I saw AAxx only twice the whole tournament, and never AA2 or AA3. Overall, other people played a bit too weak passive, especially preflop. Every time that it was 3-bets preflop and there was a showdown, the 3-bettor had AAxx. The structure was nice, I felt like all through Day 1, there were plenty of chips and we could play deep stack poker.

I could’ve attempted to farm into the money, but we were still kinda far from it and I was short stacked the whole day. Also I tend to avoid farming because typical tournament payouts are so top heavy that you really want to get to the final table if at all possible, so I made a conscious decision to loosen up and try and make some steals, it just didn’t work out that well.

So I played some side games while I waited for Dave. There’s a new game they are spreading called Big-O. It’s just like pot limit omaha 8/b except you get five cards instead of four. Because I consider myself a very good plo8 player, I played this for a while. The players at this game are pretty bad, so I made back some money to defray the cost of the tournament.

Overall a good trip. I’m happy with how I played, if not the results.

I played in the $1500 Pot Limit Omaha 8 or better WSOP today. Event #41. It’s a 3 day event, I survived day 1 with a slightly below average stack. About 170 players remain, 82 places pay, payouts range from $240k for first to $3k for 82nd.

I’m in pretty good shape. Some key hands.

In one of the early rounds, several players limp, so I limp in late position with Ad Kd 5d 4c. We see a flop of Ac 3d 7d. Player right in front of me bets most of the pot, I call, small blind calls. turn is an offsuit K, giving me nut flush draw, open ended straight draw, top two pair, 3rd nut low. Now it’s checked to me, so I bet the pot, and the small blinds raises me and we get all in. He turns over J332 for just a small set and I have a huge number of outs to scoop him, but he dodges them all and takes half.

After the dinner break, I’m getting a bunch of good hands, I run my stack up from 8k to over 14k, then this hand happens. At 200-400 blinds, I have Ac Th 9h 2s and it’s folded to me on the button. I raise the pot to 1400, then the small blind reraises the pot. It’s about 1/3 of my stack. I should probably fold, but I call. The flop is K64, he bets out the pot and I fold. He later claims he had AA2x

Near the end of level 7 I think, several players limp into a hand. I am somewhat short stacked and have KJ63 in the big blind and check. flop is K85, two diamonds and it gets checked around. The turn is an offsuit J and the small blind checks, so I bet the pot with my top two pair. Button calls and small blind calls. The river is an offsuit 2, and now the small blind bets out the pot. I somewhat grudgingly call all in. Happily, the button also calls. small blind has just A3 for nut low and button has AK53 for nut low and two worse pair than me. So I get half of a 3 way all in pot, to bring my stack back up to just under average.

Near the end of level 9, I win a decent sized pot when me and a guy get all in on an K75 board and he has AA29 and I have AA5x but I make trips to scoop.

All in all, I’m playing well, but I’ll probably be loosening up to start to make more progress and accumulate more chips. I definitely feel like I’m in the top 1/3 of the players at my tables.

A few years ago a lot of software people got very excited about so called NoSQL databases. It started I think with the papers introducing the Google File System(GFS), BigTable and their use of MapReduce(which like PageRank turns out to be based on decades old principles, just applied in a new way). Since then many different distributed databases have come along including Hadoop, Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Voldemort, and many others. Typically the NoSQL dbs trade off ACID compliance, 100% availability, and/or a SQL interface in return for being distributed and much higher performance or lower cost. I bought into it and thought it was a great idea. Now I’ve sort of changed my mind.

NoSQL is not a bad idea, but it fills a pretty small niche. A much smaller niche than I thought before. If you are considering a NoSQL implementation, you should probably satisfy several of the following conditions:

• willing to develop in house expertise in NoSQL storage, monitoring, backups, analysis, tuning
• large dataset
• A lot of unstructured data
• no schema design

Willing to develop in house expertise:

This is the big one in my mind. I don’t know many people who love SQL, but it’s a very mature, very well understood standard. You can find expertise at all levels, whether you need a tutorial to write your first SELECT, or you need to a DBA and storage expert to figure out why your query on a multiterabyte Oracle DB takes 5ms instead of 1ms.

Large Dataset:

MySQL can handle millions of rows easily and hundreds of gigabytes per table. Oracle can scale even better, and that is without using any sharding or partitioning. Of course Oracle is more expensive, but you get piece of mind and support. For NoSQL to make sense, you need to have a dataset of billions of rows, or multiple terabytes of data. NoSQL dbs are mostly distributed object dbs with carefully designed to partition data among nodes and handle node failures. So if you’re running on a single host, you’re almost certainly better off going with a traditional SQL db.

Unstructured data:

One common reason to use a NoSQL db is to avoid  storing text or xml BLOBs in a database. This is an excellent use for NoSQL. One of the great values of a SQL database is that you can get good average response times because your data is structured. A SQL db querying an indexed integer field is a lot more predictable than trying to store and query both integers and 10MB text objects together. SQL databases are traditionally not good at handling BLOBs. Also because people usually require highest availability on SQL databases, people think that putting large unstructured data into a NoSQL db with cheap distributed hardware is a money saver. Of course even with NoSQL, you’ll still need a monitoring, administration, backup and high availability plan of some sort, but in theory it shouldn’t be as expensive as the  ”this SQL db must have 100% uptime” plan.

no schema design:

Many NoSQL databases are simple key-value structure or key-object. This is fine for many types of applications. But building extra layers on top of this to handle object relationships or mappings is time consuming. Some NoSQL databases have columns or fields and definable indices, allowing fast lookups. They tout flexible schema as a great design feature. OK, but SQL dbs are even better at that.

I still think NoSQL dbs are cool and useful, just not for everything