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Well, quit playing as my only source of income, at least. This Washington Post article about Steven Silverman (zugwat) is one of the best insights into the young poker player’s mind I’ve read.

He’s like a much better version of me in that he didn’t really like what he was doing (although he made a whole lot more money at it than I ever could’ve hoped for). He also has a really good grasp on reality for a 22 year old, which a lot of teenage poker millionaires are lacking. Quotes like this make me think he’s going to be pretty successful wherever he ends up.

“When poker’s the only thing in your life, your happiness is totally dependent on whether you’re winning or losing,” Silverman says, “which is basically out of your control.”

And don’t let the “OMG we need more hits!” title fool you. This kid ain’t broke.

I always like to point out that I knew who Nate Silver from fivethirtyeight.com was way back when.

Mostly because he’s pretty famous now and makes awesome posts like this one about the WSOP main event

My favorite part is the last paragraph

The point is, though, that of the 6,500 people who entered the tournament, I’d guess that as many as half of them really do think deep down that they’re the best (or one of the best) poker players in the world. Of course, only one (or a few) of them can be right. But the rest are liable to take the wrong sorts of opportunities against the wrong sorts of opponents.

I told you I’d get a post up with all of the links from the past couple weeks sooner or later.

And remember, don’t get too close to Gooch if he has a big bottle of champagne in his hands, even if you are a very attractive Belgian blonde.

Could social gaming run afoul of gambling laws? (VentureBeat)
I hate to wish misfortune on any industry, but if lawmakers coming down on these companies who are clearly doing nothing wrong does something to help remove the ridiculous laws that make it harder for me and others to play poker, then I’m all for it.

Han Solo, P.I. is one Pitch Perfect Mashup (Gizmodo)
Someone remade the Magnum P.I. intro with shots from Star Wars.  These videos…Jesus.
First look at the new intro

And now check out the two intros side-by-side to really appreciate how awesome it is

Ferris Bueller House Up For Sale (Luxist)
If you want the house that Cameron lived in, with glass garage included, you can have it now for about $2.3 million.

You Want to See Explosive, NBA Fans? (Deadspin)
The fans of Greek team Olympiakos (Josh Childress’s current team) were a little unhappy about losing to big rival Panathinaikos.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a proper gambling institution (no Casey, a Cincinnati riverboat doesn’t count) and I’m getting antsy.  I know there are a handful in Prague though, so hopefully I can win back the costs of my trip in a last day binge there.

So, to get myself mentally prepared for that, here is a list of the best games of chance (no poker) to play in the casino.

1. Craps
The most fun game by far.  No matter happens, you’re either really excited and celebrating your winnings with a group of people, or all depressed and drinking together.  Unless you have that one guy who keeps betting “Don’t Come.”  Everyone hates that guy, so don’t try to make up some fractional percentage of advantage by being the loser who no one wants to celebrate with.

2. Blackjack
No, you can’t count cards, so stop trying.  Luckily, that doesn’t even matter because Blackjack is ridiculously fun without it.  The best part about it is that, at least in my experience, it’s the game where you are most likely to end up playing with someone who is betting WAY higher than you are.  When that happens you can always make friends.

3. Pai Gow
A dumbed down version of the much more awesome Chinese poker, this game is super addictive.  You get 7 cards to make a 5-card hand and a 2-card hand, with you either winning losing or pushing your bet.  Super fun, and a remarkable amount of strategy.

4. Video Poker
This game is only fun because you can actually make money on certain machines.  I’m pretty sure they are getting fewer and farther between, but there are machines out there that pay out at slightly greater than 100% if you bet the max.  You better have a hell of a bankroll though.

5. Every other table card game
Carribean Stud, Let It Ride, Baccarat, blah blah blah.  These games aren’t bad but really the only reason to play them is if you’re broke and they’re the lowest limits there or because all of your lame friends are burnt out on the games above.

6. Slots
Congratulations, you’ve just decided to play a game where you don’t get to celebrate with anyone and now don’t even get to pull a lever, you push a button.  Meh’s all around.

7. Big Wheel
Only up this high because at least it looks like the wheel from Price is Right.  If you yourself got to actually spin the wheel (can’t we make this happen Vegas?) then it would jump up to #4 definitely, and maybe #3 depending on level of alcohol consumed beforehand.

8. Roulette
Ugh.  If you’re going to play roulette, just go down to the bar and play keno.  This game offers nothing except a bunch of people who think they’ve figured the game out because there’s that board above the table showing what numbers have hit last.  Shut up, everyone’s thought that.  The people playing the other awesomer just realized how stupid they were being and didn’t waste time at a wheel with a ball.

These are the latest FIFA rankings of international squads.  Where’s Mexico?  Bwahahahaha.

I started the day with a quick readthrough of some documents from a local startup I’m working on some marketing stuff for, and then met with the group for about 3 hours.  This may be the most productive I’ve been (in a “doing something that actually benefits people” way) that I’ve been in a week.

Now I’m back to being bored and reading the internets.  I guess I’ll take some time tonight to finish up the backend of a website I’m working on for the pro bono consulting project at Georgia Tech, but it’s at the point that I only have to do one more little thing but I know it’s going to take like 3 hours of trial and error to fully test, and I don’t want to commit that much time right now.

But, you know who’s having a worse day? Anurag Dikshit.

No, I didn’t just make that name up, he’s the guy who wrote the software that ran PartyPoker.  And, apparently, he also pissed off the US Government to the tune of $300 million.   Ooops.

PartyGaming Founder to Forfeit $300M in Web Gambling Case (Digital Media Wire)

I’ve decided to sign up for the international practicum class next semester.  That basically means we meet once a week for 3 hours, and then spend Spring Break in either Prague or Costa Rica helping on a consulting project.  I’m choosing Prague.

In the end, it’s estimated to cost an extra $2500 for everything.  However, we don’t have to start “working” til Monday so a lot of people fly out the Wednesday before, just skipping Thursday classes and have an extra 4 days to hang around in Europe.  So, I’m estimating I’ll need ~$3000 total.

And, since I don’t have any significant income or huge swaths of available credit I want to dip in to, I’m going to start pokering it up again to make the money.  I’ve got about $300 online currently, with another $300 in bonuses waiting for me to play them out so we’ll say $600.

All I have to do is double that, then triple it.  Expect updates.

I was linked to a very good blog detailing one part-time poker player’s experiences in this years WSOP.  If you’ve got the time and like poker, I would recommend going back and reading through the entire thing.  It has some good stories about busting Phil Hellmuth, bubbling out of tournaments, and just trying to survive a month in Vegas without going insane.

Anyway, the point of bringing this up today was that he’s made it through to day 3 of the main event and recently wrote something a little different than he normally does.

The entry is called “Why play poker, especially tournaments?”

Link to the full post.

Poker itself is highly debatable, but the case against poker tournaments is trivially easy to make. They are extraordinarily stressful (it’s like having your testicles squeezed in a slowly tightening vice for a week), exhausting, time-consuming, and only marginally profitable at best. At least 80% of the time you’ll put in a lot of hard work for absolutely no return. You spend hour after hour with a bunch of mostly sleazy characters whose idea of love is hookers, whose idea of culture is sports betting, whose only goal is to take as many of your chips as quickly and efficiently as possible. Repeated exposure ruins one’s attention span, messes with your dopamine balance, and makes conventional work pretty much unthinkable.

Sounds about right.

There really isn’t a better feeling than suddenly understanding something that has bothered you for a while.  I recently figured two things out that have been plaguing me for about a month and a year respectively.  Sure, I haven’t been actively contemplating them for that long, but they’ve been there, holding me back from doing things I wanted to.  Both of them are very nerdy and code-oriented, so feel free to remain cooler than me by not reading on.

First: Creating W/L records based on nothing but a results table.  For instance, let’s say I have a a table with just 5 columns: a key, a home team, an away team, and each team’s score.  It took my a while, and it really wasn’t so much an epiphany as hammering it out through a bunch of tests, but I can get a full win/loss record now, which is all I wanted.

Second: Cycling through a large database table at given intervals to pull out statistics over set blocks of information.  If that makes no sense, let me try to confuse you further:

The whole purpose of this was to use a large PokerTracker database to look at how preflop stats varied over a small portion of hands.  A lot of people feel that after 10k hands, your stats are basically your stats and can be used to find leaks.  I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but what if it’s really that after 2500 hands, you are 99% likely to be at your stats if you play a low variance style (say 18 vpip, 14 pfr), but it takes 20k hands for a higher variance one (28 vpip 22 pfr)?  Again, if those abbreviations mean nothing to you, congratulations, you’re a better person than me.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was look at 50 hand intervals, 100 hand intervals, and maybe 250 and 500 hand intervals over a database of a consistent winning player for, say, 50,000 hands.  This would take forever if I had to change the values of the hands to look each time, so I knew I would have to script it.  Of course, I know very little scripting (even though I am still getting the hang of Python).

However, as I’ve been doing more php recently with the MLS project I’ve been working on, I realized how I can do this intervals problem.  I won’t bore you with the exact code, but basically it just involves using a for loop, incrementing 2 numbers which are my the end caps interval by a certain amount each time, and pushing the results from each query into an array.  Then I can display that array and/or copy it to an excel table.  Of course, this requires me to put the database on a webserver since I only know so much, but that’s entirely possible.

Now, there are 3 kinds of people in the world.  One kind who will never understand this and/or don’t care.  We’ll call them, say 98%.  The people who can understand this and think it’s pretty cool.  We’ll say that consists of Aaron and maybe a handful other people, 1.1%.  Of course, it should be noted here that Aaron and I spent lunch the other day talking about how to integrate a USB scan gun into our warehouse management database, so we’re more than a little lame.  And finally, there are the 0.9% of people who this makes perfect sense to, and they knew it all along, and they’re unimpressed.

What sucks is that it’s that last group of people who I try to impress when I do things like this.  I don’t care about the other people, they couldn’t tell what I do apart from what the real experts do.  I want to do something that impresses the people who know what I’m talking about, and I think that’s why so many of my stat/database projects never make it past the “me working on them” step.  I just don’t want to put anything out there that those people won’t like or get something out of.  I guess whenever I finally make something I’m happy with it’ll be good, but it bothers me that my fear of these things is keeping me from working on stuff and releasing it to feedback.

Whatever though, the MLS page is definitely coming.  I’m writing queries and building tables right now, so count on it.  Suck or not, it will exist.

That was long.

In an effort to do something interesting I’m going to be trying to learn some web programming stuff.  I know some php and a decent bit of MySQL thanks to those awesome school projects I had to do, but I’d like to learn more.  I’m especially interested in the stuff like being able to upload files to websites, and create “comments” sections for different things.  Expect to see some sample pages you can mess around on in the next few weeks.

I’m also reading up on CSS, which is apparently pretty easy if you have any other experience programming and using HTML.  From what I can gather, you basically create classes with certain attributes and then assign certain text to whatever class it should be.  The last thing I’m trying to learn is Ajax which seems to have some pretty cool aspects that I’ll talk about later if I can actually pull them off.  Stuff like dragging and dropping icons on a website like you can in Windows.

Completely unrelated (I’m trying to kill time before Sopranos), I played a Razz tournament yesterday and it sucked my soul.  I wish I could play just limit Razz without having to play a tournament or 4 other games on a HORSE table.

Also, I may be moving to LA soon.  Details to come on that tomorrow.  (See what I did there, suspense).

So, election results are in. Democrats took both houses of Congress, which is no huge surprise. Me updating twice within the same month is though. So be happy.

My favorite part of yesterday is that 1/2 of the people responsible for pushing internet gambling legislation are no longer a part of Congress. Bill Frist resigned his seat thinking that he was going to make a run at the Presidency. Well, he’s not really to high among the contenders according to Tradesports right now, but he’s out of office so eff him.

Also, Rep. Jim Leach went down in Iowa’s 2nd district, which was a decent surprise.  He had been running close in the polls with Loebsack, but I don’t think many people actually expected him to lose.  It was also nice to see such a close race (decided by less than 6000 votes) have more than its final margin come from Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa.  I can only hope that the students there were as upset at the poker ban as anyone, and it changed a few votes or brought a few more out that could’ve won it for Leach.

The final two douchebags are still around.  Sen. Jon Kyl beat Jim Pederson pretty handily by about 100k votes out in Arizona.  However, it was nice to see Pederson close well at the end of the campaign, and hopefully some of that came from the poker money pouring in at ActBlue.

Finally, Rep. Bob Goodlatte won handily in Virginia’s 6th district race, and wasn’t even challenged by a Democrat.  Oh well, what are you gonna do?  Hopefully he at least gets the stick out of his ass about the whole thing.  Also, a note to other states, Virginia’s website for election results is awesome.  It’s easy to understand, and you can find all interesting breakdowns of the data very quickly.  Be more like Virginia.