Shabbir's Diary

Full Tilt Poker's new "Rush" Poker

If you haven't tried it out yet, Full Tilt Poker's new "Rush Poker" is pretty cool.  For people not familiar with Internet poker, it's way faster than live poker.  At a live poker table you can see 20-25 hands per hour, and you can only play one table at a time.  Online you can see 60-75 hands per hours, and you can play multiple tables at once.

This broad difference has led many experienced poker pros to wonder aloud at the way the online players can put in the equivalent of an old road gambler's lifetime worth of poker hands and tournaments in just a few years.

So just when you thought it was fast enough, along comes Full Tilt with Rush Poker, basically a pool full of poker players who are thrown together on a hand by hand basis in a mix.  I made a little video of me playing $.10/$.25 Pot Limit Omaha Hi so you can see.

There are some pros and cons of this format of poker:

Pro: You can get a lot of hands in.  My Pot Limit Omaha game was running at about 160-170 hands per hour.  That's a lot of experience to get in an even shorter amount of time.

Pro: There's almost no way to profile players effectively.  Even if you know a player's history, you don't know how they've been playing during this session.  Many a player's tendencies swing during a session depending on their luck and the beats they've taken.  This appears to be about playing ABC poker.

Pro: The rakeback on this is probably enormous.

Pro: It's great for learning a new game, as I am.   (Pot Limit Omaha)   When I'm learning a new game I'm playing a very restricted set of hands, and waiting to catch one of those so I can play it can take a long time.

Con: The games are pretty tight, with a lot of hands folded around to the button.  You may only make money if you run into an opponent that doesn't know the game very well.

Do you have a bunch of old wireless routers sitting around?

Over the years most people who've run a home wireless network have run through a number of routers.  These devices sell for very cheap and are often replaced when they start working poorly.  I've got 3 or 4 of them sitting in my basement in what most people call my own personal e-waste dump.  (I prefer to think of it as my inventory of equipment that is awaiting its second life.)

After clearing some space on our back patio deck this weekend, and remembering how bad/non-existent the wifi reception there is, it occurred to me that one of the old routers I had in the basement might work as a repeater with newer software. 

That newer software would come from the DD-WRT open source project.  The DD-WRT community has produced Linux-based wireless router software that's better than most everything you get with your router when you buy it, even allowing it to do things never supported by the original product.

One of those examples is creating a "Repeating Bridge", which extends the range of your wireless network seamlessly across a larger physical space than any single router could cover.

I picked a Belkin router that was listed in their supported routers page, and started following the instructions.  After about an hour I had the new software running.  In another hour I had the new router configured as a repeater, and went to a spot in the basement where Wifi reception is typically terrible and used a Wifi site monitor program to see the improvement in signal when I plugged in the repeater in the basement.  It seamlessly passed my traffic onto the main router, which sent it on out to the Internet.

Before you go doing this yourself, let me assure you that it's a little challenging and if you do it wrong you can brick the router, which means you'll literally have to throw it away.  But if you read the directions first and follow them carefully you should have no trouble. 

Why I'm giving my favorite gloves away

These are my favorite gloves. Sarah knitted them, and they're fingerless/thumbless, so you actually can do useful things with your hands. I'm giving them away (with Sarah's permission) to La Casa de las Madres so they can be gifted to a woman in their shelter system who has lost everything in order to save her life by fleeing domestic violence.

I'm collecting hats, gloves, and scarves to donate to La Casa de las Madres this week and taking them over Saturday morning. Since it just got cold in SF, you probably dug out all this winter gear. I'm guessing you found an extra hat, or gloves or a scarf. DEADLINE IS THIS FRIDAY.

Email me and tell me I can give it to the women in the shelter system that this nonprofit runs.  I'll come get it from your house or work and drop it off at La Casa's office Saturday morning. Or if you can't find anything, go give $25 to them so they can buy these items as holiday gifts.  (mark your donation in honor of "gratitude", as an appreciation of how fortunate you are, and to help them see which ones came from my donation requests)

Holiday gift bags for victims of domestic violence in San Francisco

This holiday season I ask you to be thankful for what you have, and give a little kindness to those who are surviving domestic violence.

I recently reached out to La Casa de las Madres, a San Francisco domestic violence nonprofit that provides intervention and prevention services to women and their children.  All their services are free and confidential, which is shocking when you consider that California cut all domestic violence funding for shelter services this year, right before restoring all but $4 million through an emergency bill.

"What do you need?", I asked their outreach coordinator Walesa Kanarek.

"We are in particular need of hats, gloves, scarves, and writing Journals.  These are items that will create gift bags for our clients in need.  These are clients in need of holiday cheer who are currently in shelter, transitioning out shelter, and clients receiving ongoing services.  You can either focus on one item or create gift bags of all 4 items.  We have a target of 150 gift bags, and have commitments so far only for 35 of them.

We could also use nice tote bags (like clean Trader Joe's bags) or small backpacks to give them these items in.

We need these items in our office by the 12th in order to get them ready for our clients for the holidays."

This is a tough year for everyone, so I'm asking you to help in one of a couple of ways.

If you live in San Francisco and want to contribute one or more hats, gloves, scarves, tote bags, backpacks, or blank writing journals in your possession now, please let me know immediately.  It needs to be at my house by Friday December 11th at noon.  I'll make an exception and come to you if you can collect enough for 5 gift bags worth.

If you do not live in San Francisco please help by making a gift online to La Casa de las Madres.  Please place "grateful" in the "In Honor Of" field so we can track how much we give together.  A gift of $35-$50 should cover a nice gift bag for someone who probably is having a much worse holiday than you are.

Phil Ivey on ESPN

I suppose its awesome to be the best poker player in the world, a fact agreed upon by all the other top players in the game.  It's also good to have an enormous income stream from an online poker site that makes it easy to ignore the money at stake.