DECEMBER

Q1 REPORT

At the end of December Bellmason Books completed its first quarter as a publisher, and with only one title currently in our catalogue the sales results are very surprising. When I first uploaded The Quanta-B Tales to Amazon I was worried that I wouldn’t sell a single copy, but I am pleased to announce that I have sold a single copy. Added to the three hardback books sold at the launch this makes four copies of the book sold, which averages out to 1.3 books per month.

There is some less good news however, as the initial set up costs of the company, marketing fees and the rather extravagant launch party came to about £2,000. Adding in the £19 of profit from sales this means that Bellmason Books make a loss this quarter of just £1,981.

With no share holders or board members to worry about, and even fewer customers, this isn’t actually as much of a problem for the company as it is for Luke Bellmason personally. Nevertheless, I think I can confidently predict that next quarter will be much better if we can stay on course to make no money and lose no money.

If you would like to download a copy of The Quanta-B Tales and leave a review on Amazon this would help a lot!

I am planning to expand our catalogue in 2026, and already have one author who is willing to publish their work with us. Add to that a book of logic puzzles I’ve been working on and I’m sure sales will pick up significantly before the end of Q4 in September 26.

GAMES

Wreckfest

I downloaded this game, which had been on my wish list for a while, when it was on sale in December. I was immediately transported back to 1995 and a game I used to play a lot; Demolition Derby. I remember loving that game and playing it for hours, even though there wasn't much more to do than drive in circles and ram other cars.

Wreckfest has very similar in gameplay, but somehow it didn't grab me in the same way. There are various games modes from all out demolition derby to folk races in old bangers. Some of the tracks are interesting and most of the environment is destructible. The game was developed by a Scandinavian company which explains the folk racing element, and the driving and damage physics are great.

After I'd played bit of the single-player campaign I jumped into the online mode to give that a go. The races there were much wilder and your car could get wrecked, or rendered undrivable, within the first few seconds, but you can't really complain because that's the whole point of the game.

The problem with all of this though is that GTA Online exists. Like so many games that I've played over the years, everything in this game is available in GTA, though it's not quite as well implemented as everything in Wreckfest is, there's just not quite enough to draw me away from GTA.

Poker

In the early part of the month I found a video on YouTube of a course that Johns Hopkins ran on poker. I think it might possibly have been recommended to me because I’d watched some Balatro videos. The course was comprised of a nine lecture series and over of a couple of weeks I watched the whole thing. It really got me hooked on the idea of running a home poker tournament with some friends and relatives.

The first thing I did was go and look out the poker set that I knew I had somewhere in my games collection. This had been a present from someone who had obviously bought it at a garage at five minutes to ten on Christmas Eve. The chips were really cheap and there weren’t enough of them for a nine player tournament, so I went to eBay and had a look at what I could find on there.

There were some really nice chips and poker sets, but because I’m a sucker for bright colours and interesting designs the ones that caught my eye were 14g Monte Carlo. These looked to me like proper casino chips and that was really what I was trying to recreate I think.

I have a bit of a chequered history with poker tournaments, with some really good experiences and some really bad. My last game was at a charity event where I went out early to a highly improbable straight flush, which just happened to be played a friend of the organisers. Prior to this I’d had some good fortune at a friend’s new years poker game, which I won two years running (they stopped inviting me after that).

My best ever experience though was winning a $500 tournament in Las Vegas in 2006. I had drifted around the various casinos for a couple of days playing cash games, which let you drop in and out, until someone told me about a tournament that was happening at the Paris casino (the one with the Eiffel Tower in front of it).

Up to that point the sum total of my poker experience had been from playing the T.J. Cloutier World Class poker game on my computer. The game had some great features, specifically for learning to play in tournaments. The main one was having T.J. in your ear the whole time you were playing, giving you advice like ‘even in a short handed game in late position, I wouldn’t go in with that,’ or ‘limp in with aces and you’ll never go broke to them.’ What the game was actually teaching me was ‘range’, which I gather is a new advances in the game. In fact the more I watched the Johns Hopkins lectures the more I discovered that the game of poker had changed considerably since 2006.

Most players now use range to assess the hands that other players might have, and also take into consideration things like pot odds. Online play has also had a huge impact on the game as players can have screens open on their computers with a list of odds for whatever cards their opponents might be expected to draw (called ‘outs’), so that the standard of the average player is now far higher. Being slightly better than everybody else at the poker table is sometimes enough to win a tournament, or at least make back your initial stake, but now the average you have to beat is much higher.

I also learned from watching the videos and reading the comments that the boom in the popularity of poker, and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, was in 2002 after a movie called Rounders came out. Since then the game has gone off the boil a little bit, and I wonder whether the advances in analytics and player aids has had the effect of weeding out the bad players early, raising the standard of players that you’re like to meet that much more.

My game would also be on New Year’s Day, because what else could people have to do on January the 1st? It might also be the perfect opportunity to win some of the money back that you spent on Christmas, from some of the people you spent it on.

***Results***

I was surprisingly difficult to find anyone interested in taking part in this event. I didn't find anyone to play with until Christmas Day when I sat down with my cousins, and their kids. After dinner I proceeded to teach the kids the basics by dealing them all one card each and giving them one chip. Asking them to bet if they thought they had the highest card brought some interesting results. When I added a second card to the equation, they started to get the idea.

One of my cousins regularly plays online poker, so he was the one I was most afraid of! On the day I managed to get five people together, all friends and relatives, and was good enough to come in third place and win back my original stake.