We have paint and carpet!

The carpet has been installed at the new house and the painters are almost done. The only white walls left in the house are in closets - everything else has been painted a different color. Now that the carpet is down, it will be easier to work at the house because we can take the kids with us. We didn't want the kids playing in the house due to the bare floors and tack strips.

Remaining tasks: bathroom countertops, tile, vinyl, and appliances. We're planning on moving in July, although we haven't set a date yet.

- schneid

House is progressing...

The granite countertops were installed at our new house. The painters are in there right now, and I'm waiting to receive one more estimate before getting the carpet and flooring done. When it's complete, we can move in. But we're not sure if we want to leave the old house empty when we're trying to sell it. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

- schneid

Lots of work to do on new house

We have a lot of work to arrange on the new house when I return from my trip. Within the next few weeks, we hope to finish the carpet, tile floors, paint, countertops, bathroom counters, and refinish the wood floors, not to mention general cleaning and landscaping. We're going to be pretty busy and our current house is still for sale.

- schneid

Trip Report

I've almost finished a long two weeks of traveling. I plan to write a few posts on the details of the trips, but here's a quick summary.

I've been participating as a member of the appraisal team in a CMMI Level 2 appraisal of an organization in Tellabs. This is a very intensive process which, not including prework, has lasted 10 working days at 3 sites - Naperville, Dallas, and Petaluma. We started each day at 8:30 and almost always finished around 6:30.

In addition, my mom took us to Las Vegas for four days in the middle of the appraisal to celebrate her 60th birthday. The appraisal was coincidentally scheduled around my vacation. So, here is my travel/work schedule from the last two weeks. Monday and Tuesday in Naperville, went to Dallas Tuesday night, Wednesday in Dallas, went home Wednesday night, left for Las Vegas on Thursday. I was supposed to come home to see my kids on Sunday, but our flight was cancelled. If I went home on Monday, I would have missed my flight to San Francisco on Monday afternoon, so I flew directly from LV to SF. I arrived in SF on Monday, and came home on the red eye on Friday night, arriving at my front door at 7:00 AM on Saturday. At 11:45 on Sunday morning, a limo brought me to O'Hare to return to Petaluma. I continued to work on the appraisal in Petaluma until Wednesday, then took a red eye back to Chicago. Whew. I'm taking Thursday and Friday off.

When we were in Las Vegas, that was the first time that my wife and I had left our kids with anyone for more than one night. My mother-in-law flew in from Florida to watch our kids. Including the first half of my Petaluma visit, I was gone for 9 days which is by far the longest I've ever been away from my kids. I really missed them.

We had a fantastic time in Las Vegas and were fortunate to stay at Bellagio and saw Cirque de Soleil and Danny Gans, and had dinner at Circo. Thanks Mom! I also played some poker, saw lots of poker pros in Vegas, shook hands with Phil Ivey. Hung out with Rodney and Rebecca in Mill Valley, played poker in Petaluma, had dinner at The Girl and the Fig and hung out with Rodney in Sonoma, had dinner with the appraisal team in Bodega Bay, visited my cousin Mimi and her husband David in San Francisco.

These will probably be the only details I'll add: the poker pros that I saw playing at the Bellagio were: Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman, Chip Reese, David Sklansky, David Gray, Johnny Chan, Eli Elezra, Scott Fischman, Minh Ly, and Eskimo Clark. I'm sure there were others that I didn't recognize.

I was only in Dallas for 18 hours and I can't even remember it now.

- schneid

Working on the New House

We've been busy cleaning up the new house. We removed all the carpet and pad. We are washing all the walls and ceilings, which is very tedious. We had the furnace and A/C serviced and the humidifier replaced.

My dad arrived yesterday to help us out, in particular with getting estimates from contractors on a lot of the work to be done - painting, carpeting, countertops, vinyl floors, and refinishing the wood floors.

Some of the work that we will probably do ourselves includes repairing drywall, replacing the light fixtures and installing cabinets in the laundry room.

Greg T. and I are going to finish the basement when the other work is done. The plumbing is roughed in for a full bath, but we need to get a plumber due to city code. I'd like to have a bar, rec room, bedroom, bathroom, and storage room.

You know, it's a real pain having two houses. We need to spend all our spare time at the new house, but things still need to get done at our current house, like moving the lawn, cleaning, etc. And you have bills for both houses too!

Hopefully we are on track for moving in June.

- schneid

Buying a House Before Selling Your House

Here are some lessons learned about buying a house before selling your current home. I'll try to add more information as things happen, since we only just closed on the bridge loan today and haven't closed on the new house yet.

We obtained a bridge loan, which allows you to purchase a new home before selling your current home. It doesn't allow you to just sell your current home at your leisure. You need to put your current home on the market quickly after your offer is accepted on the new house.

The bridge loan pays off the mortgage on your current home. It is an interest-only loan, and the monthly payment is a similar amount to our current mortgage + taxes monthly payment. When we sell the current house, the proceeds (equity) from that house will be used to pay off the bridge loan in whole, and we get any leftover money. If we weren't going to use that money for home improvements on the new house, then there might be tax implications for the capital gain, because the price of our new house was much less than the sale price of our current house. When we signed the bridge loan, we also receive a check (which is basically some of our equity) that is used as the down payment on the new house. Starting in May (a month after closing on the new house), we will have a monthly mortgage payment on the new house and a monthly payment for the bridge loan; therefore, it's prudent to get our home sold quickly.

- schneid

We Are Moving!

In case you didn't already know it, I left GE Healthcare and returned to working at Tellabs in November, 2005. It's without a doubt the best (and easiest) decision I ever made. Except for marrying my wife, of course. And having kids. So it's the third best decision that I ever made. The drive from our current home to Naperville is 65-75 minutes each way, and I've never cared much for a long commute. I would much prefer to spend the time with my family or even pouring lemon juice on my paper cuts. But I digress...

Based on our criteria of nearness to work, great schools, and reasonably affordable houses, we narrowed down our search to Batavia and Geneva. Naperville is out because most of it is not affordable, and the traffic is ridiculous where it is affordable. Oswego (where we used to live) is too far, Aurora and North Aurora have poor schools, etc. etc. So we found a house in North Aurora. But wait, you said North Aurora had poor schools. Well, there is a small pocket of North Aurora, 75 houses to be exact, that butts up against Batavia and is in the Batavia school district. The houses on the opposite side of our own street are in the North Aurora school district (Schneider Elementary School, to be specific). My friend Greg T. lives three houses over and has about 12 kids and a pony (or is it a Great Dane?), so it will be fun for our families to get to know each other. They built their house and really like the neighborhood.

We actually signed the contract on the new house before putting our current house on the market. We obtained a bridge loan and were prepared to move quickly in case something good came up. Well, something good came up. For the first time in three months, a home was available in our preferred neighborhood, and it was listed about $30,000 under market price. In fact, we bought it for $60,000 less than a house we had looked a week before. So the answer to our question of "Should we buy a cheap house or a nice house?" was "Both!". There were three offers on the house within three days of going on the market, and we just barely won with our offer over the asking price, no contingency, and closing by the end of the month. We take possession on March 27, and our own house just went on the market. We hope to close on our new house in a couple of months and complete our move to the new house in early June when the school year ends.

I can't even begin to list all the great features of our new house. OK, I'll try. It's in a great location next to a country club, a large wooded cemetary, Marmion Academy, and the Fox River. So it's not in the middle of a sea of houses like our current house. There are two parks within two blocks. We live about 1/4 mile from the Prairie Path, which also rans almost right by my office, so I could ride my bike to work. It's a 15 minute drive from my office.

We are 5 minutes from downtown Batavia, 10 minutes from downtown Geneva, 7 minutes from I-88 (the house is north of Butterfield and just east of IL-25 if you want to see it on a map), 20 minutes from the Fox Valley mall, 10 minutes from the grocery store, and only 10 minutes from my weekly poker game. Heck, I can host the game myself now that I live near the other guys.

Our lot is 180 feet long, so we have a huge back yard. The house has a pretty large front porch, a large paver patio, and two swingsets, one of which is big and has a tornado slide. There is a three-car garage, and in the house, running the entire length of that garage, a huge 20x7 laundry room with an exterior door. The family room is pretty big and the kitchen is decent. The kids' bedrooms are large and both have walk-in closets. The master bedroom is a huge T-shape, 20x14 and 15x9, with a tray ceiling in the master and a cathedral ceiling in the sitting room. The master bath is large and has a separate tub and shower, actually a separate room for the shower and the toilet, a dressing table, plus a 8x11 walk-in closet.

The basement is huge and very open, since the stairs and mechanicals are next to walls. We plan to finish it with (approximately) a 13x10 bedroom, 12x10 full bathroom, a large storage area, and a 30x25 (maybe 35x25) rec room.

The previous owners have dogs, rabbits, and birds, so we're going to remove every bit of carpeting from the house and replace it, as well as repainting everything, and getting some of the floors redone before we move in. That's going to take some time. I will drop off a box or two most mornings on my way to work, so when we finish the actual move, we will just have movers take care of all the furniture.

We're very excited and can't wait to get in there and start working.

- schneid

Vow to Write More Personal Stuff

This does seem like a pretty convenient way to keep up to date with friends and family. I'm going to be spending a lot less time in the car and thus there will be fewer spontaneous calls from me.

So for those of you who don't give a damn about poker, please check in occasionally and I promise to post what's going on in the life of the Schneider family.

- schneid

Short-handed

I love playing short-handed. I'll play three tables short-handed because four is too many to handle. The action is a lot faster, you are playing a lot more hands, and the decisions are much less automatic than when you are playing at a full table. Inevitably, I’ll win quite a bit on two of the tables, and lose on the other. The loss is usually due to the fact that someone calls down a bluff or two, and then they just keep hanging in there with a small pair and call me down. That’s trouble since the key to short-handed hold’em is aggressiveness.

I played three 6-player max tables of $1-$2 limit hold’em the other night for about an hour, buying in for $50 on each. On Table A, I lost about $40. At Table B, there were several players seated, but they were usually out of the game, which was almost always heads up. The guy I was playing would fold more than 50% of the time if I raised preflop! This is a heads-up dream! He clearly had full-table standards for the hands that we could play, so I raised almost every single time. If he called, then I would play cautiously depending on the flop. He actually started playing smarter in the short time that we played together. I won about $30 at that table.

Table C was the best. A player called down my bluff with middle pair, then the deck starting hitting me hard. Players were calling down my monster hands with crap. I kept saying “man I’m lucky” and showing fabulous cards when there was no showdown. On one hand, I had KK and the flop came AKK. It was checked to me and I checked. My opponent then immediately bet the turn and I raised. He called, and called my river bet too, with a medium pair. My “luck” allowed me to steal a pot a few hands later. I had T4s and limped in. The flop came AKQ. I had an inside straight draw. Checked to me, I checked. The turn was a deuce. My opponent bet, and I suspected that they had a K or Q. I called. The river was another deuce. No flush was possible. My opponent bet, and I raised. He hesitated a long time, chatted “3 2s?”, and folded. I typed “sorry” as if to apologize for getting lucky. He typed “haha”. It was awesome, we had a nice camaraderie going, with everyone in awe about how lucky I was. Shortly after that, with a different opponent (I forget the cards, but they are irrelevant), the flop was checked around and I bet the turn with nothing, no pair, no draw. My opponent raised, and I bluff re-raised him, which I can honestly say I’ve done about three times in my entire life. And he folded. Man, that felt awesome! I won $70 with a $50 buy-in in less than an hour. Yes, I did get lucky, but I felt that I played it well too.

I really like having three or four people at the table. This is nice because you don’t feel obligated to play or raise every single hand, like when it’s heads up, so you can actually limp or fold preflop with your poor hands.

An interesting phenomena has occurred on PartyPoker in the last year – the players have improved quite a bit. There are still plenty of fish, but many of the players have improved. They know that they should bluff when three suited cards flop, and if you ever check and they are the last player, they almost always bet. But I’ve been able to use that to my advantage to call down with mediocre hands when they can’t stop firing in bets, thinking they will win with their bluff. And you can use it with big hands too, letting them bet it for you, then raising on the turn or river. Of course, the good players have used this very strategy against me, and then I need to adjust.

- schneid

Learn How to Calculate Pot Odds

If you think you are serious about poker and you don't know how to calculate odds, then you are a fish. Plain and simple. Look in the mirror and practice your fishy face.

Here is a simple analogy. Suppose someone wants to bet with you on coin flips. If he offered to pay you $1 whenever it's heads, and you pay $1 whenever it's tails, you would accept because that is a fair bet. Why is it a fair bet? Because there is a 50% chance of coming up heads, also known as odds of 1:1. This means that whatever amount he is willing to pay for heads, you should be willing to pay an equal amount (or less, but who would accept that) for tails (= 1:1).

Now suppose he wanted to flip two coins. You win if they are both heads and lose otherwise. You can see that you lose when one coin is heads and the other is tails, or both are tails. What are the odds and what is an appropriate bet? Well, there are two ways that the coins can come up heads and tails: the first coin is heads and the second coin is tails, or the first coin is tails and the second coin is heads. There is one way that they can both come up tails. And there is one way that both can come up heads. This means that he has 3 ways to win and you have 1. This is odds of 3:1 against you winning. In order for the bet to be fair, for every $1 you must put up, he should pay $3.

How does this apply to poker? When you call a bet, you are paying the amount of the bet in order to win the whole pot. So if someone bets $5 and there is now $25 in the pot, then you are paying $5 to win $25. The pot is laying you $25 to $5 which is odds of 25:5 or 5:1. This means that as long as the odds against you winning are 5:1 or better (lower), this is a fair bet, and you should call the bet.

Of course, most of the time you will lose, but it doesn't matter in the long run. Suppose you take the above bet 6 times. Odds are that you will pay $5 and lose 5 out of 6 times. One time you will win $25. So you lose a total of $25 (5*$5) the five times that you lose and win $25 one time - you have broken even.

Now that you know how to calculate the odds that the pot is laying, you still need to know the odds of making your hand to determine if it's a fair bet. The general assumption here is that you don't think you have the best hand and are drawing to the best hand, such as when you have a flush draw or a straight draw, or just overcards. When you think you already have the best hand, such as top pair, you should bet or raise in order to prevent your opponents from having the proper odds to chase their draws. So how do you calculate the odds against making your hand? It's simple - it's the number of cards that don't help you vs. the number of cards that help you. It's easiest when there isn't another potential draw. For example, you have Ts9d and the flop comes Jc8d2h. You have an open-ended straight draw. How many cards will help you? The four 7s and the four Qs will make you a nut straight. A T or 9 will give you a pair, but it will also put a possible straight on the board and both are underpairs, so I wouldn't count those as outs (cards that will help you). Therefore, with the 7s and Qs, you have 8 outs. How many cards don't help you then? Well, we've seen 5 (2 in your hand and 3 on the flop), so there are 47 left in the deck. OK, technically, they are not all in the deck, some are in other players' hands, burned cards, etc., but if you can't see a card, then it doesn't really exist. Look up Schrodinger's Cat if you don't believe me. Anyway, there are 47 cards left and 8 help you, which means that 39 don't help you. Thus the odds against you making your hand are 39:8 which is very close to 5:1 (it's actuall;y 4.875:1). Approximations are close enough for these decisions unless you suck as approximations. Since you are 5:1 against making your hand, then you are getting the correct price from the pot as long as it's paying you 5:1 or more on your bet. If there's $30 in the pot and the bet is $5, then you can call because the pot is paying you 6:1 to hit your 5:1 shot. If you miss on the turn, then you MUST recalculate because in limit poker, the turn bet is bigger, and you might no longer have the correct odds for your draw.

Is this hard to do? It takes some learning but becomes automatic after awhile. And you can't call yourself a decent poker player unless you can calculate odds. This is one reason why online poker is easier, because the pot always has the $ amount right next to it. It's harder to determine how much money is in the pot in a live game when there's three different colors of chips in the pot. But you eventually get good at doing that too.

Outs are cards that will improve your hand. You really want these outs to improve your hand to the best hand. Here's an example in hold'em: you have JTo (this means jack and ten "offsuit". JTs is jack-ten suited). You are heads-up and the flop comes Ah8c9d. Your opponent bets and you feel confident that he has an ace. This means that catching a J or T won't help you. But you have a nice straight draw. Any 7 or Q will give you the nut straight. There is no flush draw (right now) because the board has 3 different suits. There are four 7s and four Qs left, so you have 8 "outs". This means that 8 cards will help you and all remaining cards will hurt you. How many remaining cards are there? You subtract from 52 all the cards that are known. There are 3 on the flop and 2 in your hand, and if you are confident enough, you can count the ace in your opponent's hand. That means 6 cards are known, leaving 52-6 = 46 cards unknown. Of the 46, 8 will help which means 38 will hurt. The odds against making your hand on the next card are 38:8 = 4.75:1 (estimating is ok, and by the way, this is always the odds of making an open-ended straight draw in hold'em). So if your opponent bets $3 and the pot is now $10, the pot is laying you 10:3 = 3.33:1 to make your hand. That's not enough and you should fold. You need to get 4.75:1 or better from the pot.

Suppose we are playing the above hand but the flop is Ah8c9h, and there are four players in the pot. Now there is a flush draw, and someone might have it since there are a lot of players. That means some of your outs won't help you. You can't count all the 7s and Qs because the 7h and the Qh will make someone a flush. Now you have 6 "clean" outs = 40:6 = 6.66:1.

No, I didn't get into implied odds, reverse implied odds, or even implied tilt odds yet. More on those later.

You can also apply odds to calling bets on the river. Suppose it's heads-up and there is $90 in the pot. Your opponent bets $10. You can only beat a bluff - maybe you have a pair of 3s or maybe even just Ace high. But the pot is offering you 9:1. This means that if you just catch your opponent bluffing in this same situation 1 time for every 9 times that you are wrong, you will break even. Basically it means that if there is a 10% chance that your opponent is bluffing, you should call. And there is almost always at least a 10% chance that your opponent is bluffing. You need to call in these situations, especially in limit poker, unless you know the opponent is very tight and therefore has you beat, or doesn't bluff.

In big bet poker, you can sometimes bluff out an expert opponent on the river with a small bet rather than a big bet. Suppose that on the river, there is a possible flush, and you make a pot-sized bluff. That actually looks like a bluff. If you really had a flush, most players would bet the amount that you think your opponent would call, since you expect to win, and that would not be a pot-sized bet, but more like 1/4 or 1/3 of the pot. The a bluff of 1/3 or 1/4 of the pot can be more scary to your opponent IF he is an expert and IF he thinks you are a good player too.

Conversely, if you are playing against morons and are holding the nuts, you might want to bet hugely because they are stupid enough to call.

- schneid