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Since it’s that obvious anyway.

Arguably the greatest three weeks in sports are upon us with the 2010 March madness bracket tournament tipping off. And of course Bodog will have everything a basketball bettor could ever need.

Yes, it’s that time of year when even the most amateur sports fan becomes an expert in basketball with the men’s NCAA tournament here. From the play-in game through the 2010 NCAA Final Four in Indianapolis, Bodog will have it all covered with basketball news, odds, contests and more.

That’s right, the road to the Final Four runs through Bodog and you won’t find any gaming site with as many basketball betting options on the NCAA tournament than those guys. They’ve been doing this for 15 years and they should already know what bettors want when it comes to the Big Dance. From odds to news to brackets, you’ll find it all at Bodog.

This year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament appears to be one of the most wide-open tourneys in recent year, and that could be good news for those basketball bettors. While the North Carolina Tar Heels were huge favorites going into last year’s Big Dance and came home with the title, the Heels are not even in the field this year.

The Kansas Jayhawks, the Kentucky Wildcats, the Syracuse Orange and the Duke Blue Devils are your four No.1 seeds in the bracket this year, but none of those four could be considered a lock Final Four team.

Last year’s tournament was very chalk, as for the first time since seeding began, all 12 teams seeded No.3 or better made it to the Sweet 16, and three No.1 seeds reached the Elite Eight for the third straight year.

There are probably about 20 or so teams that have a real shot at…

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The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has an interesting new piece in the February 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, a review of Spanish writer Diego Rasskin-Gutman’s Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence of the Human Mind. Much of the article concerns the book, but toward the end Kasparov makes a couple of interesting references to poker — comparing it to chess and talking about both games in the context of advancing research in the field of artificial intelligence — that I thought I’d share here.

Kasparov begins by recounting how back in 1985 — after he had defeated Anatoly Karpov and become World Chess Champion at age 22 — he took on 32 chess-playing computers in a much publicized event in Hamburg and beat them all. Then he talks about the later 1997 match that he lost to IBM’s Deep Blue and some of the reactions that event caused, both within the chess world and in the culture at large.

While many outside of chess took Deep Blue’s triumph as “as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer,” Kasparov explains how the top chess players mostly took it in stride, and were in fact surprised it had taken that long for computers to catch up. And, in fact, among the artificial intelligence community — “the AI crowd,” as Kasparov calls them — there was some dismay that Deep Blue, while able to defeat a human at chess, still didn’t really seem to demonstrate human “intelligence.”

“Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition,” writes Kasparov, “they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.” In other words, for some Deep Blue’s win represented more of a programming triumph than a particularly significant advance in the development of AI.

Today pretty much any home PC has the computing capacity to run a chess program “that will crush most grandmasters.” Even so, chess remains much too complex of a game to be “solved” once and for all argues Kasparov, citing Rasskin-Gutman’s book in a couple of places to support his point. He then moves into a longer discussion of the book, which sounds appealing for those interested in chess and/or discussions of how the human mind works.

I’m not going to summarize that entire discussion here (check it out yourself, if you’re interested), but I did want to share what Kasparov says at the end of the review when he goes back to this issue of chess perhaps not being the best game for “the AI crowd” to focus their efforts.

“Poker is now everywhere,” writes Kasparov, “as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper.” Indeed, there was a time — around the early 1970s — when it looked like chess would experience a “boom” not unlike the one poker has enjoyed this past decade, although it didn’t quite pan out. I wrote a little about that a couple of years ago in a post called “The Failed Ambassador” that was occasioned by the death of Bobby Fischer.

Getting back to the subject of artificial intelligence, Kasparov continues: “But while chess is a 100 percent information game — both players are aware of all the data all the time — and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.”

As such, suggests Kasparov, poker is perhaps a much better game on which to focus AI research. He refers to the efforts of Jonathan Schaeffer, leader of the University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) that has been developing poker-playing programs “Polaris” and “Polaris 2.0” that have taken on top pros like Phil Laak, Ali Eslami, and the Stoxpoker guys over the last couple of years. I actually had the chance a while back to interview Schaeffer (following that first match with Laak and Eslami), who told me he believed “one of these days — within 5 to 10 years — two-person, limit Hold’em will be solved.”

My sense is that Kasparov isn’t quite as confident as Schaeffer regarding the possibility of “solving” even this relatively less complex variation of poker, though he does recognize how Schaeffer’s “digital players are performing better and better against strong humans — with obvious implications for online gambling sites.”

The question remains, of course, as to whether or not these poker-playing computers are actually thinking “like humans” or not — that is, when Polaris 2.0 defeated the Stoxpoker guys back in the summer of 2008, to what extent did that victory represent a real advance in the creation of artificial intelligence as opposed to a mere triumph in “programming” (as Kasparov characterizes his defeat to Deep Blue)?

In any event, much as he reacted to the work of the chess programmers as having exciting implications for his game, Kasparov seems enthused about the work of Schaeffer and his colleagues at the University of Alberta, too. Referring again to poker’s growing popularity, Kasparov notes how there is a “current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker.”

These chess pros are smart guys. They see there’s more money to be made playing poker than chess these days. But some — like Kasparov — also see poker as offering other benefits, too, such as the opportunity to test ourselves in “partial information” situations in which we much learn to adapt, to weigh risk and reward, and to act accordingly.

In other words, besides being a game ripe for the study of artificial intelligence, poker can help us develop our actual intelligence, too.

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For online poker sites to give back, that is. Lots of bonus programs and other incentives being doled out here at year’s end, it seems.

Been playing more on Full Tilt Poker than usual, mainly because of that bonus they offered me over there this month. Am still only having limited time to play, so I’ll probably only end up earning about half of the hundy they’re giving me in ten-dollar increments as I slowly accumulate those Full Tilt Points.

I continue to play primarily the $25 buy-in pot-limit Omaha games, usually six-handed, and usually only one or two tables at a time. Meaning I can only earn FTPs at a relatively slow clip.

I generally like the new lobby Full Tilt rolled out a few months back, although sometimes when looking for a game I find all of the little codes a bit headachy. Just a matter of getting used to them, I suppose. I have now and then unintentionally pulled up tables that feature certain variations on my desired game — e.g., the “cap” games, the “ante” games, the “deep stack” games. And every now and then I’ll even sit down at them before realizing my mistake. (It really doesn’t take much to confuse my jingle-brain.)

I have now and then purposely played the “cap” games — at my level, those games are capped at $10, meaning no player can put more than that in the middle on a single hand. Kind of pushes most of the play to the first two streets, as that limit tends to get reached with a raise and reraise on the flop. Basically requires everyone to play a short-stacker’s strategy, and I’ve found one often comes across one or two players at each table who are mainly just looking to gamble it up.

The “deep stack” games are the opposite, requiring at least 50 big blinds ($12.50) for the buy-in. One can also buy in for as much as $50 in these at the $0.10/$0.25 tables, so, really, if I’m a PLO25 player (as I am these days), I should be scooting back down a level rather than play these. Meanwhile, the “ante” games require everyone to kick in an extra nickel on top of the $0.10/$0.25 blinds, sweetening the pot a little more before that first action.

Otherwise, I’m strictly a PokerStars player. I do still have some cabbage over on Bodog, but only call that one up every once in a while as their poker room traffic is usually fairly low. PokerStars, meanwhile, always has a ton of tables going, and the site remains my personal fave for other reasons as well (the interface, support, etc.).

Speaking of bonuses, I got an email yesterday from PokerStars passing along their plans to change and add to their rewards system. Once again they are lowering the requirements to reach Silver Star, making it necessary only to accumulate 750 VPPs in a month to get there. That’s down from the current 1,200, and way down from the 2,000 it was when the VIP program was first introduced back in 2006. (I don’t believe they are lowering the requirements for the other levels: e.g., still 3,000 VPPs to get to Gold, 7,500 for Platinum, etc.)

Another new feature will be something called the “VIP Stellar Rewards” program which essentially gives extra cash for playing.

To clarify, FPPs are “Frequent Player Points,” and one earns those according to how much rake is collected. FPPs can be used to purchase various items or cash, or used to enter tourneys. VPPs, or “VIP Player Points,” are earned the same way, but cannot be redeemed — they are just to gauge where you are status-wise. However, if you move up a level, you can earn FPPs more quickly (e.g., Silver Stars get 1.5 FPP for every 1 VPP). Make sense? If not, you can read more here.

Anyhow, this “VIP Stellar Rewards” thing basically gives players extra cash on top of all the other benefits of the VIP program. Starting on January 1, 2010, everyone begins a new yearly balance of VPPs. Once you reach 750 VPPs total, you can spend just one FPP and pick up ten bucks. Then, when you get to 1,500, you get another $10. And so forth according to the schedule (see the table at left). As a recreational player, I’ve earned a little over 13,000 VPPs this year. If I earn the same number next year, I’ll pick up an additional $150.

I might be encouraged, though, to pick up the pace a little — indeed, there were a couple of months in there during which I earned 2,500-3,000 VPPs or so, so I know I can probably easy pick up more.

Definitely like the way Stars is gearing these programs toward the small-timers, giving them a little bit here and there to keep ’em playing. Seems like a smart strategy. It’s always nice to be constantly getting something back while playing, meaning that even a break even session is technically going to be a small winner.

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Bodog Poker is celebrating the arrival of the holiday season with a special promotion titled ”12 Days of Poker” and awarding players a variety of prizes and items, including 52” Tv’s, laptop and desktop computers, cash, and seats at a $100K guaranteed tournament.

Bodog’s special  holiday promotion begins on December 16th, and will run through December 27th with 2 Big Prizes will awarded daily. To take part in this promo, Bodog customers simply need to seat at the poker tables and start accumulating Bodog Poker Points. Players can earn additional points and entries by playing the higher stakes game. For every 25 Bodog Poker Points you earn, your name will be entered once (1) in a daily prize drawing.

On the first day, there will be a draw for 10 Seats at a $100K guaranteed event and a 52″ Sony Bravia TV. On the second day, Bodog Poker’s got a Sony PlayStation 3 and 5 seats to a $100K guaranteed event. Other prizes include a Samsung 55″ LED-LCD TV (December 25th), a Sony VAIO Desktop Computer (December 23rd), a Sony VAIO Laptop (December 21st), and a Canon PowerShot Camera (December 20th).

The more you play on Bodog’s tables, the more chances you’ll have to win one of the prizes awarded during the 12 Days of Poker. For more information, please visit Bodog.com.

Discuss this article in our forum

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Get a great start to this December by playing for a quarter of a million dollars in the newest and biggest guaranteed tournament from Everest Poker. This poker tournament will be held on the first Sunday of every month, with the next one taking place this December 6th.

The $250,000 Guaranteed will kick off at 19:00 GMT and there are a few ways to get in on this monthly poker tournament at Everest. Buy in directly for $336+$24 (or a Step 5 Token) daily satellites start at only $9+1.

You can also take part in the Winterfest promotions at Everest Poker, where you could win your share of the $250,000 prize pool for $0. Just knock out any Team Everest player and you will get your buy-in back. Plus, they are now adding $45,000 to the weekly guarantee schedule.

Here is the list of Winterfest events at EverestPoker.com:

• Daily Winterfest Tournaments
• $25,000 Summit Points Store Giveaway
• Winterfest Cash Game Races
• Team Everest Winterfest Knockout
• Qualify for the $250K Guaranteed for $0!

Discuss this article in our forum

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