Poker
pontiff | February 17, 2009I like poker and I like quantum computing and lo and behold here is a paper with both:arXiv: 0902.2196Title: Quantized PokerAuthors: Steven A. Bleiler
Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore's Law…
stcynic | October 27, 2006Some say it could. The Las Vegas Sun reports that conservative scholar Charles Murray is warning the Republican party about the political damage the bill is going to do to them:
That's the prognosis of poker-playing scholar Charles Murray, who warned in a recent newspaper opinion piece of the political damage Republicans may face from the nation's poker-playing masses this fall. An estimated 8 million Americans gamble online.
"We are talking about a lot of people ... who are angry enough to vote on the basis of this one issue, and they blame Republicans," said Murray, a scholar at the…
stcynic | October 23, 2006I just finished reading The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King, by Michael Craig. If you have any interest in poker at all, I highly recommend that you get this book. I devoured it in about 24 hours and enjoyed every moment of it. Having read many of the gossipy reports about this series of games over the last few years, I was happy to get the real story in a great deal more detail than I'd gotten before. It's the story of a remarkable series of poker games that took place between a billionaire banker named Andy Beal and a collection of the best poker players in the world.
One of the…
stcynic | October 15, 2006I've been doing a bit of research, spurred by this article by Allyn Jaffrey Shulman, on the legal status of online poker. And I've found that most of what Shulman says is spot on. She points to a Federal court ruling in the case of In re Mastercard International, the full text of which can be found here. But first, let's look at what the new Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act actually says. It says that banks and financial transaction companies can no longer accept electronic transfers, credit cards, etc. that are involved in "unlawful Internet gambling." And how does it define "…
stcynic | October 10, 2006Allyn Jaffrey Shulman, writing in Card Player, has a very optimistic take on the new gambling bill from the poker industry's perspective. It's perhaps a bit too optimistic, but it does suggest another possible basis for a court challenge. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold:
Even though the Attorney General's office has publicly taken the position that the 1961 Wire Act forbids online poker, in 10 years they have not put their money where their mouth is. Why? The judiciary (that is, the interpreting body) has already held that the 1961 Wire Act doesn't speak to poker. It only applies to…
stcynic | October 4, 2006So last night I'm playing in a satellite at Poker Stars, trying to win a seat in their Sunday Million tournament (which I did, by the way, but I unregistered and took the tournament cash instead because I'll be out of town on Sunday). It's a rebuy tournament and I'm at the table with this guy whose brilliant strategy is to go all in virtually every hand and then rebuy when he loses. He must have rebought at least 20 times during the rebuy period (the first 30 minutes). He finally won a hand and doubled up just before the end of the rebuy period and was sitting at about 4500 chips.
After a 5…
stcynic | October 4, 2006Things have been crazy the last couple days in the online gaming world. The response from various companies ranges from "maybe we can survive this" to "man the lifeboats". Party Poker has announced that if the president signs the bill (which is inevitable, and will likely happen in the next day or two), they will suspend all accounts of American players. Since over 80% of their business comes from Americans, this is a huge hit to them. Others look likely to follow suit. Poker Stars has made no decision yet that I am aware of. Full Tilt Poker, on the other hand, has made public noises that…
stcynic | September 28, 2006So ESPN finally aired the final table of the World Series of Poker main event last night and I have to say that Jamie Gold is the most irritating person to win it since Hellmuth. Unlike Gold, however, Hellmuth is a really good poker player. No matter who wins the championship, there's a fair amount of luck involved, but holy crap - when they said Jamie Gold had a horseshoe up his butt during the tournament, they weren't kidding. The guy was hitting gutshot straights and runner runner flushes, winning hand after hand where he was a 3-1 or 4-1 underdog going in. And to make it doubly annoying,…
stcynic | September 15, 2006This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.
And it's pretty funny. The guy who won the main event this year, Jamie Gold, is making quite an ass of himself in the aftermath of his win. Paul Phillips links to this interview with him where he seems to think that he invented a whole new way of playing poker. Paul writes:
I love it how every time someone wins a big tournament he thinks he's invented a dozen new poker tricks. Limping with a big hand on the button? It's unheard of! Playing more than 5% of your hands? Groundbreaking! Telling the truth about your hand while it's in progress?…
stcynic | September 14, 2006I didn't realize that Michael Binger, who recently finished 3rd in the WSOP main event and won $4.1 million, is a PhD physicist. Seed Magazine did, however, and they've got an interview with him online. Very cool. I know that Sean Carroll, cosmologist from the University of Chicago, plays poker as well.
stcynic | September 11, 2006Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli appear to have solved the mystery of where the extra $2 million in chips during the World Series of Poker main event came from. The answer is: incompetence. They pinpoint it down to a single break on day 7, when the $5000 chips were colored up into $25,000 chips. Instead of exchanging one stack of $25K chips for a rack of $5K chips (500k for 500k), they gave 2 stacks of $25K chips, or $1 million, per rack of $5K chips. That was a big advantage to the bigger stacks at that point. The incompetence is pretty much unforgivable on the part of Harrah's.
stcynic | August 17, 2006This is kind of interesting. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the lawsuit filed against the World Poker Tour by 7 of the top poker players in the world, and about Daniel Negreanu's negative reaction to that lawsuit. I had no idea it had turned into a major war of words between Negreanu and Greg Raymer, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (and an attorney himself) until I saw this article about it. In comments in the chatbox on Poker Stars, Raymer said that Negreanu was either "stupid" or a "sock puppet for the WPT" and he hammered Negreanu for offering an unqualified opinion on the matter.…
stcynic | August 11, 2006Warning: this post contains the ultimate spoiler for this event
The WSOP main event is over and, not surprisingly, Jamie Gold won it. Well, that would have been a surprise at the beginning of the tournament, but not over the last few days. Gold seized the lead several days ago and never let it go, continually building his chip stack until he came to the final table with over 30% of all the chips in play. Throughout the tournament he was being coached by his friend Johnny Chan. And if you're gonna have a friend helping you with your poker game, you'd be hard pressed to find a better teacher…
stcynic | August 11, 2006Michael Craig, author of The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King, a book about the series of games between "the corporation" (a collection of the top pro poker players) and Andy Beal, is fast becoming an indispensible voice in the poker world. On his blog, he posts this article about some of the problems going on at the World Series of Poker and how incompetently it is being run by Harrah's. It makes me sad because in 2001 and 2002, a lot of us waged a public battle with Becky Binion Behnen, some from close up and some with only our words, over many of the same issues and we hoped that…
stcynic | August 9, 2006Warning: This post contains spoilers
The final table of the WSOP main event is now set. The only American pro left in the field is Allen Cunningham, who is now second in chips with nearly 18 million in chips. Jamie Gold continues to lead, with nearly 26 million, or about 30% of all the chips in the tournament. This should be a really interesting final table. Cunningham is not a household name like a lot of other pros. He doesn't really promote himself the way most of them do, and his quiet and reserved nature means the cameras don't exactly follow him around. But make no mistake, this guy can…
stcynic | August 8, 2006Warning: this post contains spoilers
Monday was a very short day, only 5 hours, as they played down from 45 to 27 players. The three pros left on Sunday are still in it, but weakened a bit relative to the field. Jeffrey Lisandro is in 9th place with 3.75 million. Allen Cunningham is in 13th place with 2.65 million. Prahlad Friedman is in 16th with 1.85 million. The average chip stack is 3 million. Jamie Gold continues to dominate the field, ending with 13 million in chips. No one else is above 8 million. Gold really used his big stack to push the table around all day on Monday, reraising time…
stcynic | August 7, 2006Warning: this post contains spoilers
Day 5 saw some big names come and go. Annie Duke busted out in 88th place. She lost a huge hand with pocket kings and that crippled her. She managed to stick around another couple hours after that, but couldn't catch a hand. Jeffrey Lisandro is still in the top 10 with over 3 million in chips. Prahlad Friedman is right in the middle of the pack with about 1.6 million. Allen Cunningham is hanging in there at 1.3 million. And Humberto Brenes is squeaking along with 600K. All the rest are either online qualifiers or European players. The chip leader, Jamie…
stcynic | August 6, 2006Warning: This post contains spoilers. Do not click on it if that will bother you.
Well, the main event is down to the final 135 players, predictably containing few big names. Daniel Negreanu managed to finish in the top 300 or so after some wild swings. On day 3, he was one of the early chip leaders. Yesterday, he was down to 20K in chips twice and battled back both times. At one point he was all in twice in a row and chopped both pots, which tells you he was really playing on the edge to survivie as long as he did. And defending champion Joseph Hachem outlasted over 97% of the field and…
stcynic | August 3, 2006Minor spoilers to be found here. The event is far from over, but I do mention some of the players who are still alive and some chip counts. Read at your own peril
The split field days are done at the WSOP main event and today is a day off for all the players. On Friday, all of the players remaining will begin play at noon, all together for the first time. There are somewhere between 1200 and 1300 players left, a bit below the goal of starting tomorrow with 1400 players. Now is when the real tournament begins. 873 players will cash out, so at this point the players will be focused on making…
stcynic | August 2, 2006Harrah's has announced the official figures for the World Series of Poker main event:
8773 entries for a total prize pool of $82.5 million. First prize will be a record $12 million, with the top 12 players all guaranteed at least $1 million. That should make it the richest competition of any kind ever. It's so big that if you just had a tournament with the players over and above last year's players, it would be the third largest poker tournament ever held.