Tag Archives: poker

Update

Weekend of awesome

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Done so many wonderful things this weekend with wonderful people at the 10th annual coast party Damian hosts. A few brief highlights (in no particular order):

Spent time talking, singing, dancing and hanging out with some of the loveliest people in the world (the whole wide world)
Drove a Porsche
Ran 12 miles
Tried ‘rock’ fish (Huss, a white fish)
Threw actual rocks at other rocks
Contributed to the construction of a giant sand village (chief Architect: Nicky. Chief Engineer: Pob)
Got bowled out in one ball in a game of beach cricket, sulked
Swum in indoor and outdoor pools
BBQ-ed
DJ-ed for 3 hours
Danced for 3-4 hours
Told many embarrassing story about ‘Banana Oops’ Damian
Got styled as Bowie (check out my current FB profile pic)
Acted out all the moves to ‘I’m on a boat’
Ate fresh apples off a tree
Lost a sprint race
Won a push-up challenge
Failed to ignite a grass-filled moat/trench defence at midnight on Saturday
Learned how to play an exceedingly complex board game designed to halt the rise of Cthulu (Arkham Horror, I think)
Was impressed by Serena’s mad poetry skills.
Failed to play any poker due to an inadvertently early bedtime
Failed to go to bed till morning due to an advertently late bedtime
Referenced FoTC at every possible occasion
Tried to take some good pictures with my recently acquired Nikon D-80 (need to work out depth of field).
Discovered I actually like marmite. Never thought I did.

Amazing weekend. Massive props to all involved. Big up yourselves.

Personal

Gambling for alien research

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Having just received an emarketing blast from SETI requesting funding for their research efforts, and also been playing too much on-line poker, and also reading some Phillip K Dick novels, and also been waking up too early due to jetlag, the following, slightly loopy idea occurred to me…

SETI should set up an online poker system in which people wager either computer cycles or money against the possibility of winning space related freebies. The ‘money’ bit could be done in partnership with a major online poker company (PokerStars, PartyPoker), and wouldn’t cost them anything as they could offer to transfer winnings (minus buy-in) to SETI instead of the user. The space-freebies could consiste of some kind of alien cred league table or information, for example essays by Carl Sagan, appropriate Sci-Fi… all distributed digitally. The computer cycle bit could tie into their @home software and it could tell you how much ‘time’ you owe to SETI each time you log in to either the poker application or SETI@home.

For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, SETI is all about discovering intelligent life on planets other than Earth…

Anyway, brain clearly addled. Toodles.

Gaming

Playing the averages

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I went to the Grosvenor Victoria, a casino on the Edgeware Road, with James on Saturday. It was an interesting thing but I think I’m done with live poker for a little while.

Reasons being:

1) I don’t have the bankroll to play the averages. It may be a winnable game in the long term, especially as so many of the players don’t seem to really know what they’re doing, but you need to pay the rakes (an extortionate £3 per half hour for the 50p-£1 table of £25 NL holdem) and cope with what happens when the cards don’t come in. Which they didn’t at all on Saturday.

2) Poker’s fundamentally not that social a game. You’re trying to edge out your fellow players and part of that involves giving very little away about who you are and what you’re doing. I like the social aspect of the game played with friends and this neutered some of the fun for me.

3) I still haven’t worked out how to play cash game poker. It’s a very different beast to tournament poker which I vaguely understand after reading the Harrington books and 200 odd tournaments on Pokerstars, not to mention the odd live appearance at the (soon to be defunct?) Gutshot.

4) I don’t like the absence of women from the game. It’s somehow understandable from online poker (I guess you notice less), but the fact that the only women in the Vic were waitresses, cashiers, dealers and masseuses lent a slightly unnatural air to the evening for me.

Still, it was an interesting experience and definitely distracted me from the awfulness of Indy.

Gaming, Internet, Technology

Mobile broadband causing problems for Poker (or vice versa)

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I’ve seen a couple of mentions of online poker sites being blocked by mobile broadband providers… But I wonder why this is happening, if, indeed it is at all.

Cheating poker jockeys would find the appeal of cheap (as low as £10 per month) mobile broadband very strong – they could have multiple IP addresses at a single location and, well, cheat to their hearts’ content. Well, cheat until the algorithms/monitors looking for anomalous behaviour caught them out. But y’know, they could cheat.

So it’d have to be the poker sites blocking access to people from mobile broadband connections rather than the other way around, given that, if anything, online poker would provide an incentive for people to sign up to mobile broadband.

For the record, I love poker, don’t have a USB mobile broadband dongle, and wouldn’t cheat at online poker even if I knew how. Cheaters are wrong. But was just wondering about it, inundated as I seem to have been with mobile broadband adverts lately.