So typical

So Villa don't win, but Arsenal don't either.

Float 17.59

Villa v Wigan

It's been a while since I've done anything towards the betting challenge I'm doing with Alex. I'm putting a fiver on Villa to beat Wigan tomorrow. I'm getting so pissed off with Aston Villa winning all the time and I want some financial compensation if they continue to do so.

Villa to beat Wigan at 1.72

Bank of Federer

I've opened an account with that trusty Bank of Federer; all Roger has to do is win the Aussie Open. No sweat for the big man. Well, maybe a bit more sweat than a few years ago but I still think he'll do it.

Murray's physique

***Warning - I can't be bothered to proof-read this so excuse any mistakes***

Everyone has started blogging again which makes for more interesting reading than just aimlessly surfing the web, so thanks to everyone who's updated! Rather than me commenting on every individual blog it's easier for me to put it on here instead - keep it up!

I want to touch on an issue that Daz raised in his latest post, which is the much-talked-about physique of Andy Murray. Ever since he did his bicep pose at Wimbledon, the media has been obsessed with his 'muscle-bound' body and even more so now that he's on a winning streak and favourite to win the Aussie Open. I have a number of points to make about this.

1. There are sportsmen out there with much better physiques than that
I'm not saying that Murray doesn't look in good shape at the moment. Yes he has a six-pack and a bit of muscle, looking very athletic all round. However, it is by no means special. I remember when the media used to worship the body of Nadal and that used to piss me off. But God, he deserves it so much more than Murray. I have so much respect for Nadal simply because he resists the urge to have a hit on the practice courts with his shirt off. For him, the sight of Murray doing this must be so annoying considering that Rafa's physique is probably a hundred times better. I also want to point out that Murray's physique looks very much like.... well, a tennis player's. I'm sure most of the other players on tour look like that, and if it's specifically the muscle which impresses the media then why don't they worship someone else? Countless sportsmen are more muscly (and leaner). Any number of rugby players. Sure, Murray's good form on the court means he deserves some space in the papers. But can we please have photos of the action, rather than of him striking idiotic poses with no shirt on.

2. Murray's marketing campaign
Why is there suddenly all this positive hype about Murray? Five minutes ago he was a really unpopular, stroppy, spoilt brat who publicly said he didn't want England to win the World Cup (even though it was the LTA that funded his development). How come the media now absolutely loves him? Well apparently he was SO unpopular at one point that people were starting to not even turn up to watch him play, and it dawned on the Murray camp that they needed to do something about his image. They embarked on an expensive publicty makeover which started off with getting rid of that moronic hair he once had. Then they taught him how to come across as less sulky and less of a tosser in interviews. It wouldn't surprise me if they told him to do a few arm curls and then strike a pose at Wimbledon to send the tabloids crazy.

3. When is the press going to turn?
It happens to every British sportsman at some point. The press big you up all the way, say you're going to be the best in the world and all that. Then comes the realisation that you're not, so it starts bashing you instead. For God's sake, this can't happen soon enough to Murray.

4. However...
I just want to say that I actually respect Murray for his successes on the court, and if he wins a Slam, good for him. I just sincerely hope he doesn't because I can't stomach this media hype as it is, let alone if he actually goes all the way.

5. The public perception of muscle
I could write a book on this. There's a boundary between being 'muscly' and 'too big' that, once crossed, leaves 90% of people thinking you look disgusting. Andy Murray's obviously struck the right chord with this one with the media whirlwind he's caused. However... he's just not really that muscly at all - am I the only one who thinks this? As I said above, there are many other sportsmen far more worthy of accolades for their physiques, but they will never get it just because they're not Britain's next hot tennis prospect.

5. Finally
What would the media do if Murray retired from tennis tomorrow and announced he was becoming a professional bodybuilder?

Urge to blog

Today I have a sudden urge to blog, which is unexplainable because I don't really have anything to blog about. Nevertheless I will do my best to churn out an entry, though its quality will probably be questionable.

So, what can I say. I did the night shift yesterday and actually slept quite well when I got in shortly after 6 this morning. Woke up just before 12 and somehow I feel quite good. When there is no disruption or anything like that, the night shift is a total doss. Quite literally there is nothing to do. One of the night shift regulars brings in some DVDs and plays them on the projector in the main briefing room. I had one of my buddies from work doing the shift as well, so it was a pretty good night. It's tempting to do lots of nights. The upside would be that work would be a lot more relaxed, the downside would be that I might turn into a zombie and keep very unnatural hours. I don't think it'll be very likely that I'll do too many nights, though I might chuck a few more in here and there.

Gambling. I was on a good upswing in poker these last couple of weeks but a few days ago hit a rough patch and it's more or less taken me back to square one. Gotta keep plugging away on that one. Yesterday I had a bad run of cards and in my frustrated mental state put some stupid bets on the football. I quickly realised they were stupid though and traded out for minimal losses. Overall, I'm up on the year so far on the gambling front.

Quiz machines. I stumbled across some articles on the internet the other day about how it's possible to be a 'professional' quiz machine player. You know, those machines that you see in pubs. I've tried to get the boys interested in this and it seems to have worked to an extent. My original plan was to fleece the machine at the tennis club but it would appear that it has been programmed not to pay out (legalities of this are debatable). Nonetheless my goal of somehow rinsing pub quiz machines is one I'd quite like to achieve somehow. More on that to come hopefully. (I've already started a small database of the difficult questions thrown up on the tennis club machine, which was a lot!)

This will do from the time being. Alex, Daz, Lawrence, and to anyone else who hasn't updated their blog lately - GET ON IT!

Aston Villa, your days are numbered

Aston Villa fans should enjoy each remaining day they're left in fourth place because their stay in that position surely can't last much longer! Villa are on red-hot form at the moment and yes they're playing well and all that. HOWEVER... (that's a big however).... even the most die-hard Villa fan must conceed that the team has really been riding its luck lately. So so many late goals. I've seen the consensus on Match of the Day that their late goals can all be explained by their young fast players outrunning the knackered defenders of the other teams. But hang on, don't all the good teams have very fast players? Come on MOTD, don't feed us that bullshit. If pace was all it came down to, then the top clubs would be scoring 10 goals in the final five minutes of every match. Just acknowledge that Villa have been bloody lucky lately.

How many times do they show clips of Ashley Young running down the pitch towards the end of a match and say, "see here, this is why Villa get so many late goals". Shut up! By the same theory they could show countless clips of Ronaldo or Torres or Nasri etc and say the same thing!

Just to finish up.... Martin O'Neill after every Villa game says "we know better than anyone that the season's only half way through, we're down to earth blah blah blah". What a complete berk. Every time Villa score a goal he celebrates like he's just won the world cup, and his team celebrate like idiots as well.

Ok, rant over

Fantasy football

I've taken a couple of gambles and gone for an über-attacking lineup in my fantasy team this week. Come on guys.

Kirkland
A Cole
Traore
Paintsil
Bosingwa
Gerrard
Nasri
Denilson
Zaki
Anelka (c)
Van Persie

Angry Whopper

I've just read about a new burger they have at Burger King - the Angry Whopper. It sounds very hot and spicy, thus why it's so angry. A funny bit of their marketing campaign is that if you install the Angry Whopper application on Facebook and remove ten friends, you get emailed a voucher for a free Angry Whopper! Not only this, but the people you removed as friends will get emails from Burger King telling them that you de-friended them, plus that you did it to get a burger.

I like this idea a lot!

I knew Toronto was cold but....

Just checked the weather in Toronto for this week. From Wednesday onwards the hottest it gets is -12°C and the coldest is -25°C!! It makes me realise what a bunch of pansies we are in Britain. If the temperature dips below 0 for a couple of days like it did last week, the whole country starts complaining about it and the news won't shut up about it. I seriously think that Brits need to toughen up.

The cold snap also created some delays at Heathrow. There was some icy fog on Saturday afternoon and air traffic control increased the time between letting each plane land. This meant that there were loads of planes in the sky around the airport being told to just circle about up there for a bit. This is a classic example of when a third runway would be useful.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Arsenal pt 2

Arsenal closed in on the top by 2 points today! Hopefully my earlier post will have some kind of paranormal influence on the team and guide them to 12 straight victories.

Thought I'd post the league table from the time of my last post, just for comparison reasons in case something remarkable happens over the next few weeks.

Liverpool........... Played 20...... Points 45
Chelsea.............. Played 20....... Points 42
Man Utd............ Played 18....... Points 38
Aston Villa......... Played 20...... Points 38
Arsenal.............. Played 20....... Points 35

Arsenal

Shortly about to go to work but fancied doing a quick blog. Just been having a look at Arsenal's upcoming fixtures. Their next twelve Premiership games are all 'winnable' if Arsenal can play consistently well and don't get any more injuries. If they manage to win all twelve, or win at least ten and draw the other two, they'll definitely be in with a shout for the title. Obviously this won't happen because consistency isn't really something associated with the Gunners, but I thought I'd blog it nontheless. However, it's worth noting that they did go on a similar run in the 1997/8 season to come out of nowhere and win the League. I can live in hope anyway.

Next 12 games...

Bolton (h)
Hull (a)
Everton (a)
West Ham (h)
Spurs (a)
Sunderland (h)
Fulham (h)
West Brom (a)
Blackburn (h)
Newcastle (a)
Man City (h)
Wigan (a)

Going to Toronto

I've booked a trip to Toronto with Gareth for the beginning of next month on the next leg of my round-the-world quest. Should be even colder than it is here at the moment, hopefully with plenty of 'proper' snow. Obviously I'm excited about visiting Canada for the the first time (for those of you who don't know, I'm 25% Canadian and very proud of it haha)!

The plan originally was to go to Cape Town but Gareth had to wait over the weekend to see if he could get the necessary leave on Monday. Unfortunately the flights had gone up in price by the time I checked them again on Monday, so we decided on Toronto seeing as the flights were less than half the price.

That's all for now.

Online poker

Yesterday's back of Phil Taylor got me off to a winning start for 2009, so long may that continue!

I've been reading The Gambler's blog and there is some interesting discussion on there of how online poker is bent. I thought I'd write a little about this as this is something I've thought about quite a lot in the past.

When I first opened online poker accounts when I was 18, the chance that it could be rigged and/or the other people at the tables are cheating was an obvious concern for me. I researched it a little bit and found out what the methods these cheats would be using were. Here they are:

If the actual site itself is dodgy
- There are many accusations flying around out there that "blah blah blah poker site is fixed, look at the cards they've dealt me!" I must confess that at one point I firmly believed that some sites were dodgy, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is no reason for a poker site to fix the cards. It doesn't get them any extra cash so there is no point. Some people say that they can deal big hands to a few people so that more money gets into the pot, so the site takes away more rake, but this is a crazy theory. Firstly, the amount of rake this would generate would be so, so negligible (I'm talking cents at the low limits). Secondly, this would only be occurring on a very small number of hands - the 'dodgy' cards don't come up all the time. In fact, most peoples gripes only seem to concern hands they themselves have been involved in - so it's more likely that it was them playing badly that lost them the hand, or simply an 'unlucky' card but I hate bringing the concept of luck into it.

If you are playing with cheats
This is a more likely scenario. However, if you are an online poker cheat and are making serious money by cheating people, this would take a fantastic amount of skill. On top of that, you will definitely get caught sooner or later.

How do you cheat at an online site? Probably the most frequent way people would try to do it is to sit at a table with a few of their mates, tell each other their cards and then wait for the innocent victim to play the hand as well. They can then just re-raise each other and force the innocent victim out of the pot, thereby stealing any money he had already put in. Now, it doesn't take a genius to recognise the pitfalls of this strategy. Firstly, you'll be making so little money and having to split it between your whole team. Secondly, after a few hands of doing exactly the same thing it will become very obvious to the victim what is happening and he/she will leave. Thirdly, you actually have to get dealt good cards, then play them appropriately, then hope that the victim doesn't have good cards as well, and then hope that your cards actually hold up when the board is dealt. In other words, you are still at the mercy of the deck. Just one big pot that the cheat loses could set him back hundreds or even thousands of hands of work. Finally, the reputable online poker sites are very good at spotting cheats and this pattern of behaviour I've described above is very obvious to spot for their software.

The other way of cheating has only been reported a few times in the history of online poker, and that is the case of a 'superuser', aka a player who can see the cards dealt to his opponents. This has occurred where an employee of the poker site has somehow smuggled out a piece of the software used to develop the site. This piece of software showed all the cards dealt to all the players face-up, and the purpose of it was to check that the site was paying the money to the correct winner. Obviously the person who uses this software in genuine online games will make a LOT of money, but I've only read about a couple of instances of this and in both cases the person has been caught and jailed.

Conclusion
The online poker player should be aware of the fact that yes, people could be cheating. But these cheaters are probably going to be losing rather than gaining money because they aren't actually going to know what they're doing properly, which actually makes them good people to have at the table. You should be more worried about playing good players. I also doubt there are many cheats at the low-limit tables because there's simply not enough money to be made. As for the higher limits, there are thousands of professional online poker players who have made millions of dollars from it. I've read articles by some of those players and they acknowledge that someone has probably tried to cheat against them before, but they're not worried about it happening on a large scale. There are also thousands more online pros who are happy to grind out reasonable money at the low/medium stakes. So yes, there can be cheats at online poker, but I don't think it's anything to worry about at all.

Taylor v Barneveld

I've backed Phil to win the World Championship tonight with a 25GBP bet... come on The Power