Breaking Poker News

US Government freezes bank accounts of online poker sites, halts payouts. Read more here.

Bottom line is the US Justice Department believes poker is a game of chance. The great State of California believes it is a game of skill. Where you come down on that issue tells you if it is gambling or not.

I will say that even though I think when played properly, Poker can be a game of skill, it can also have the corrosive effect of any addiction. So in that sense, it is at least very similar to gambling. However, the websites involved are large and have money, so this may be the final showdown on skill vs. chance. Even so, it will take years for this decision to play out in the courts.

Another poker thought

When I play poker online, I play tournaments, and not cash games. The big difference is that it is not "real money". Sure, your entry fee is real money, but each individual hand is just played for chips, and the value of those chips increases as people drop out. If you are curious, I can say more about that concept another time.

This means that you can be much more aggressive in the early hands, because the chips aren't worth as much. While you don't want to be reckless, and get put out, as long as you are playing properly, the early results are not crucial.

So "proper play" would be a tight aggressive style. Tight being that you are not in on every hand, but just on hands with a good chance to win (any pair, any suited connector, any two cards ten or higher) and you decline to enter the pot on anything else. Aggressive then means that when you are in a pot, you control the betting. If you hit the flop (say you pair one of your face cards, or wind up with four cards to your flush) then you allow no "free cards". If the bet checks around to you, you are betting at least two big blinds, so that everyone sees they have to pay to play a hand you are in. If you only do this with a premium holding on the deal, the other players (if they are properly observant) will learn you only play good cards, and they will get out of your way.

Today I was in tournament where I was short stacked when we got down to eight players from the original ten. I commented on my status at the short stack, and several other players agreed it was too early to matter. I had been playing tight aggressive, and I wasn't getting the cards. Then all of a sudden, I was. And by the time we got to five players left I had the tall stack. I wound up finishing second, and getting a nice share of the prize money.

The point is, if you have a plan, and stick to it, good things usually happen. You are playing cards, and you never know how they will fall, but most times, tight aggressive beats any loose or passive player.

Poker tournament update

I like to play online poker. Mostly Hold 'em, and pretty much just Sit and Go tournaments. That means a group of ten players pay an entry fee, and the top three people split the fee. So the bottom seven lose everything.

The psychology of the middle game is pretty straight forward. Once you are down to about five people, everyone tightens up, because no one wants to go out there, and just miss finishing in the money. So when everyone is playing conservatively is the best time to get aggressive.

Today, this worked out great. We were down to five, one player was way out front, around $12k, I was second at $2,500 and the other three were under $2k. I was the dealer, the tall stack was Under the Gun (the first seat after the blinds). The blinds were 320/640 and the tall stack folded. The guy between us folded, so now it is to me, in a perfect opportunity to steal the blinds. I had nothing, I think 10, 7 off suit. But I pushed all in, and the blinds folded to me, conceding the 960 chips in the middle of the table. Everyone who understood poker at all knew that was a pure steal.

So the very next hand, now tall stack in on the big blind, the guy between us folds again, I push again. The dealer and the small blind fold, so now we are back to the tall stack. I have $3,500 now, but it is easy for him to call me with his $12k. Plus, he knows I just stole the blinds, so he probably figures I am doing it again. So he calls me, but this time I had a hand, and I turn over a pair of 10's. We draw out and I win, so now I have $7k and he is down to $8,500.

I fold everything while he clears out the other three, and now we are head to head. I am around $8k and he is back up to $12k. On the first hand of head to head, I get dealt a pair of Aces, so I push all in again, he calls, I win, and now I am up $16k to $4k.

It was the mid-game aggression that set me up to win the tournament.

American Idol

I very much enjoyed the last season of Idol. They let the contestants play their own instruments for the first time and it made it more fun. This year, I didn't get into it at all. I honestly didn't watch a single episode.

But not watching it doesn't mean you can evade the hype machine. So I am among the millions of people who are aware of the Adam Lambert Phenomenon. I picked up a copy of Entertainment Weekly in a waiting room somewhere, and he was on the cover.

And so, shockingly, the voters didn't pick him. They picked the clean-cut All American kid instead.

Since I love being late to the trend, after this was all over, I looked up Mr. Lambert on YouTube. So watch this clip.



I can only echo what someone wrote about him in Rolling Stone. This is Lady Stardust in the 21st century. The surprise is not that he didn't win, the surprise is the American Idol audience put him through as far as they did.

Facebook is Magic

I am sure you have heard Arthur C Clarke's famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I recently signed up for Facebook, and received a powerful demonstration of this principle at work.

When you first sign up, it asks you for an email address. I gave it my Gmail account, and so it went into my address book and found eveyone I had ever sent an email to who used that email address for their Facebook account. Then it prompted me with a list of about 50 people I might want to add as friends. So I choose from this list, then went on with the sign up. I told it were I worked and where I graduated from school, and it gave me another round of recommendations for friends I might want to add.

Then the magic part happened. It seems like it looked at all the people I wanted wanted to add, and looked at all their friends, to search for friends they had in common. Then it started kicking out recommendations from that list. This is where I started to see the names of people I hadn't thought about in 20 years. For example, I was in a band in High School. Of the four other guys in that band, I had only stayed in contact with one of them. A week after I joined Facebook I was back in contact with two more, and they each know how to reach the fourth one. And so we are seriously discussing getting the band back together for a one time reunion show.

This is very interesting to me. Sometimes I feel as though I have worked hard to distance myself from my past, but then Facebook works to bridge the gap I built. There is a sort of almost artificial nostalgia to seeing photographs of yourself and your friends from decades past. It is almost an instinctual reaction to be attracted to the beautiful youths shown in the photos, and it is charming to see yourself among them. But at the same time, not all of the memories from that time are particularly happy. Sometimes you get friend requests from people, and you take a long while deciding what to do.

I am not as good about expressing these mixed feelings as I would like to be, so I am linking to an article by Lissa Soep at NPR called “Facebook And The Over-30 Crowd. If you would like to read more about this, her article is a great place to start.

How I keep up with the Global Financial Crisis – Part 1

So, the borderline economic emergency we were facing in the fall is now a full-blown Global Financial Crisis (GFC). You might ask, “how can I stay informed during a GFC? The people on TV seem more confused about it than I am, so they really are no help at all.”

What works for me is podcasts. I have three that I follow now that do a great job of explaining the GFC in an understandable way. The first one I will cover is The Wall Street Journal This Morning.

This is a daily, one hour news show based on business and financial news. It is put together by the good people at the Wall Street Journal, so you know going in it will be pretty conservative. This show really resonates with my and it has become an essential part of my daily routine. In my area, it is broadcast on the radio, but the show wraps up just before I get in the car each day. So instead, I download the podcast and listen to it that way. One cool thing is, by about the time I am halfway to work, their timechecks pretty much sync up with real time, so you lose the feeling that you are listening to a recording and it starts to feel real-time.

Another interesting thing about this show is the way I am right in their target demographic. As you get older, you start to notice that people stop aiming the full force of their marketing at people like you, and start hunting for younger people, you like things that don't really interest you. Not so with The Wall Street Journal This Morning.

There is a long list of little things this show does that help me bond to it. First, the music. It is all music I recognize, mostly from the 80's. Their theme music is Golden Earring, “When the Bullet Hits the Bone.” You may not think you know this song, but when the show starts up, you will recognize it. Coming in and out of commercials, you hear Devo, the Cranberries, Van Halen, all kinds of songs that you know. Second, the show's host, Gordon Deal, is extremely likeable, and pretty much like me. If you look at my older posts here, you will see I am completely self absorbed and view everything through the lens of my own experience. Mr. Deal is a man about my age, with a daughter about my daughter's age. He uses Firefox, is on Twitter, loves the NBA, and is in many ways a down to earth, regular guy. If we must have a GFC, this is the kind of person I want to get my news from.

So go to Itunes and give it a try. I am to the point now where my day doesn't start off right if I don't get to begin it with Gordon and Gina.

Five and a half months!

Wow! That's a pretty long time.

It is fair to say that I have been doing other things. Mainly, I was writing here as an outlet for my frustration and anxiety leading up to the election. When that turned out the way I had hoped, I didn't need that outlet as much.

Then I gave in to the Siren's call of Facebook, and it sucked up all my free time. But I have noticed that I have things I want to say or share, and Facebook isn't the right place for it. So I am back, and this time I am probably back for good.

Just for good measure, here is a left over picture.