This is not a man with a blog.
At my coach's urging, I have been playing heads up battles against University of Alberta poker bot, Sparbot. It's the dumbest of their algorithms, playing a heads up hold'em game that's perfectly balanced without taking into account any opponent tendencies. I'm playing it with it's configurable parameter set to "passive".When I say "balanced", I mean…
One of my friends on Facebook asked this, and the answer is yes. Let's use Google Insights for search as a culture zeitgeist measurement. Google's data only goes back to 2004, which postdates most of Anne Rice's Lestat novels. Vampire popularity appears to have declined steadily from 2004 through 2007. In 2008 the rush to…
I’m sure that since the transition, President Obama’s team has been thinking about nominees for the Supreme Court. A democratic president means that some of the justices that weren’t comfortable with an imbalance on the court could finally get to retire. And now we have one. I don’t know if they’ve considered it, and I…
About one minute ago, I turned 42 on Facebook. Not really, I use a "fake birthday" with all online services, since many parts of the financial world use your birthday as an identifier, but my birthday is in May, so close enough. Thank you. I wrote a long post about how the world has turned…
Combinatorics is the mathematical technique of enumerating and analyzing combinations of objects. If you've ever had a pair of pocket Aces preflop and had an opponent bet his whole stack against you, you did a form of this analysis in your head. Presumably your reasoning went something like this:"I have the best hand. Any two…
So for my Internet poker practice I’ve been almost exclusively playing heads up limit Texas Hold’em lately. I don’t claim to be particularly good at it yet. I’ve written before about my efforts to beat sparbot, an AI that plays a perfectly balanced game theory variant of Hold’em, but playing a real people online is…
After seeing Louis CK do the bit above, Roo was riding in the car with me and Moishe. Moishe said something entirely unimportant and Roo pointed out that Louis CK was right, kids often don't talk about anything important. "No no, I insisted, Moishe's different, and often insightful." Roo just nodded her head like, "You're…
First of all, go read my friend Aaron Pressman's thoughts on the final BSG episode. Below are contained spoilers. ……….Keep going………. I really loved the final episode with the exception of the angel-cameraderie of Boltar and Capirica Six at the end. Tricia Helfer's dialogue sounded forced, and that's probably because it was unlike any of…
So after booking a big win playing live poker in 2007, I looked forward to making even more money by moving up stakes in 2008. I didn’t really move up in stakes, and played live for the first half of the year until through a combination of losing at the tables and the need to…
My ongoing heads up battle against Sparbot, the Univ. of Alberta poker model Though it doesn’t happen very often in a cash games, heads up poker (just you and one opponent) is the gauntlet you have to master to win any poker tournament. It’s actually a good exercise for the rest of your poker career…