My first 5,000 hand experiment

By Shabbir | July 15, 2009 |

So to recap, as I work on improving my Limit Texas Hold'em game, I concocted an experiment with my coach.  I used my calculations of each possible preflop hand against tables containing one to nine opponents each.  I then built a very solid preflop strategy, taking into account position and opponents, and set out to…

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Are vampires more popular now than before?

By Shabbir | May 8, 2009

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…

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Strategies and tactics of heads up poker

By Shabbir | March 7, 2009 |

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…

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LinkedIn vs Leadership Profiles

By Shabbir | March 4, 2009 |

You know what’s fascinating?  Leadership Profiles have been around a long time in print form, and now on the web, but they’re hopelessly going to be out of date.  With an independent party trying to collect data, like this profile of one of my colleague Scott LaGanga, it will never be as accurate as his…

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Poker Strategy – Pot Odds, Hand Strength, and other topics

By Shabbir | November 21, 2008

IntroductionI’ve been playing poker since I was a kid, when my family played 5 card draw in between highly competitive games of Uno.  (Cheating was a strategy, and mirrors were employed once to great effect.)  However I’ve really only been studying poker since 2005.  I’m at that level where if a handful of casual friends…

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Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp

By Shabbir | November 11, 2008 |

Attention friends, especially Matt's friend, Lem who will be in Vegas December 5th: There's talk of a tournament-focused trip to Vegas to reprise the Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp from this summer, the weekend of December 5th thru Tuesday December 9.  Most of us have not cleared it with our spouses. If it comes together, we'd…

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How to reach Shabbir

By Shabbir | March 26, 2008

Someone commented that they wanted to e-mail me but there was no entry on my blog about how to do that.  So here’s some guidance in order of my preference: Write me by e-mail: I much prefer to be approached by e-mail. You can send e-mail to shabbir -at- safdar.net.  You will be prompted to…

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Clay Shirky’s long-awaited book, “Here Comes Everybody”

By Shabbir | March 4, 2008 |

Pretty much everyone who’s ever heard Clay Shirky perfectly analyze an online trend has said to themselves, "Damn, I’m gonna go buy that guy’s book!"  Until  now, no such book existed.  Your wait is over. At the Supernova 2007 conference, organizer Kevin Werbach asked Clay Shirky to provoke the audience.  In a brief nine minutes,…

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